Provided

The Organization of Urban and Regional Studies group poses in Brooklyn Bridge Park during a recent field trip to Brooklyn.

A group of undergraduate urban and regional studies (URS) majors in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning (AAP) took a weekend field trip to Brooklyn in mid-March, led by the student group Organization of Urban and Regional Studies.

“One of the themes of the trip was the extraordinary change that Brooklyn has undergone in the last 75 years,” said associate professor Thomas J. Campanella, M.L.A. ’91. The borough, he said, has gone “from industrial crucible to post-industrial basket case with rampant crime and unemployment, to poster child for today’s hipster-driven creative economy.”

Campanella, a fourth-generation Brooklynite, is writing a book about his native borough and drew on his research for the tour.

Starting with an overview from AAP NYC director and Brooklyn resident Robert W. Balder ’89, the group took the East River Ferry to Williamsburg to view the fast-changing waterfront and new infill development along the shore, including SHoP Architects’ reworking of the Domino Sugar refinery site.

The following day, Campanella led a five-mile walking tour that began at the Fulton Street site of Brooklyn’s first super-tall (over 300-meter) skyscraper, and continued with visits to Fort Greene Park; the New York City Housing Authority’s Ingersoll and Farragut projects; DUMBO; Cadman Park Plaza (designed in the 1930s by Department of City and Regional Planning founder and former AAP Dean Gilmore D. Clarke); Brooklyn Heights; the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and Brooklyn Heights Promenade; the Riverside Model Tenements; Fulton Ferry Landing and Jean Nouvel Jane’s Carousel pavilion.

In Brooklyn Bridge Park, master planned in 2005 by noted landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh ’73, the group gathered for a photo at the Deborah Kass “OY/YO” sculpture. The rest of the day was spent at the New York City Transit Museum.

On Sunday morning, the group met at the Brooklyn Museum for the final day of the exhibition “Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland.”

Hadar Sachs ’17 appreciated learning about the city outside of the classroom, “with peers who love to talk planning any time, any day,” she said. “Special to these trips is the opportunity to contextualize our classwork.”

Patti Witten is a staff writer for the College of Architecture, Art and Planning.