Meet Your Neighbors: ‘People-Centered Architecture’ and pedestrian-centered railroad infrastructure

There is art in architecture. There’s also human psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology. Long-time architect and neighbor Milton Shinberg writes about how they intersect in his new book: People-Centered Architecture: Design, Practice, Education.

“‘People-Centered,'” Shinberg says, “means leveraging fresh insights from science about how real people interact with architecture to inform and transform design thinking, making it more empathetic, wiser, more beautiful, healthier, more humane, and easier as well.”

His book also discusses designing environments around ancient human traits and capabilities, which Shinberg says is one of the highly relevant subjects and issues that are not mainstream in practice, “but should be.”

Shinberg tells Forest Hills Connection that he wrote the book for architects and for “‘The Coalition of the Curious,’ non-architects intrigued by architecture and how it’s designed.”

Speaking of the art of architecture, Shinberg is a watercolorist and a photographer. He also describes himself as a “C+ piano player.”

Milton Shinberg with some of his watercolors during the Forest Hills Art Walk in 2016.

Learn more about People-Centered Architecture at miltonshinberg.com. The book is available at Politics and Prose.

A promotional image from the PBS documentary “From Rails to Trails”

Peter Harnik is not a Forest Hills/Van Ness local, but he’s had local impact. He and other activists sought for 20 years to claim upper Beach Drive for walkers, runners, bikers and people using other active modes of transportation.

That’s not all Harnik did with his time. In 2021, he published a book – From Rails to Trails: The Making of America’s Active Transportation Network – about efforts around the country to turn abandoned railroad tracks into trails. The Capital Crescent Trail is one such rail-trail. And now there’s a documentary based on his book.

Harnik writes:

An hour-long documentary, “From Rails to Trails,” is coming to PBS this month, and it tells the whole story – from the beginnings of the railroad industry through the creation of more than 2,000 rail-trails (and counting) around the country.

The film resoundingly answers the question, “Was it easy to create this trail?” The answer may surprise you.

The documentary, narrated by actor Edward Norton, can be viewed at any time on the PBS app or at pbs.org/show/from-rails-to-trails. It’s also being broadcast on WETA World (several airtimes, starting tonight at 8 p.m.), WETA Metro (October 18th at 8 p.m.) and on WHUT (October 21st at 5 p.m. and October 26th at 11 a.m.).