June 2012
59 posts
Matchmaking Abandoned Properties With Ideas for Reuse →
theatlanticcities.com
The Atlantic Cities magazine highlights a new website, [Im]possible Living, which aims to connect abandoned properties with the ideas and capacities for transforming them back into usable spaces. The site was started by Daniela Galvani and Andrea Sesta, and though it currently logs mostly properties in Italy, the founders hope it will become a global resource for reuse projects. Article by Nate Berg.
The Problem with Transit →
metropolismag.com
Last Thursday afternoon Pardo guided a tour, designed in partnership with the BMW Guggenheim Lab Team member Charles Montgomery, to begin investigating just this—how the experience of riding public transportation feels, and why it feels the way it does. And though the experiment was just a cursory glance at the psychology of the transit experience, the results added fuel to what Pardo has been telling planners for a long time—that it’s not enough for public transportation to be efficient. It needs to be enjoyable. It needs to be fun. It needs to be better than the alternative.
Public transportation needs to be sexy.
“A bicycle is faster and cheaper, public transportation is greener, but people won’t generally change their point of view or their behavior because they’re given interesting facts. If you look at the car ads, they don’t give you tons of information. They just show you a car and someone comfortable driving it. Period. So we should get more persuasive in the strategies that we use to promote sustainable transportation,” says Pardo.
“The idea is not to “take away people’s yards,” or any other choice. The idea is to provide more choices, in how to get around and what to do outdoors, and especially, more healthy choices. You might still live in your current suburban house, if you want, but find that you can now walk to a small town center nearby that has a bus or streetcar stop, a little park, and a market. As a result you can get a quart of milk without burning up a quart of gasoline. Along the way, you might see a neighbor, exchange some news, or bring the kids for a nice walk. And you might not just be improving your life: you could be saving it.”
—The Grave Health Risks of Unwalkable Communities.
“Future generations will look back on our car-dominated sedentary isolated society, & ask “Who could have designed such a deadly system?”
—Richard Florida (via urbanrelationsinfo)
“The real intelligence of cities lies is in the almost miraculous, unstable, spontaneous order of city life. The social relationships between people generate the functional intelligence of cities. Imperfect, conflicting, disastrous at times, always open to improvement. Technology only facilitates certain processes, and the logic of collective life will defeat any attempt to implement systems that exceed the required level of sophistication.”
—The intelligence of a city is on the streets
(via humanscalecities)
