In this series from The Wheeler Centre, David Nichols explores the concept of liveability in Hong Kong, Tel Aviv, Dublin, Hebden Bridge, Almere, New York and Baltimore.
Instead of the standard measures of liveability such as stability, crime, health, culture, environment, education and infrastructure, David wonders if the way people treat their animals and the proximity to tofu and coffee would be more reliable measures.
East Village, New York City - photo by me.
I have spent the afternoon looking at the blog of Neil Freeman - an artist and urban planner who lives and works in New York City.
I was particularly taken with the collection of images in Traces of New York City (2004-2007) which record a year’s worth of walking and cycling journeys.
I like the idea of a personal movement map as a way of chronicling a year. It would also be interesting to show frequency of trips - thicker lines representing multiple trips.
Magic Highway USA - 1958
This Disney animation is a futuristic, utopian vision of personalised transportation based on a network of super-speed, transcontinental motor ways. Some of the predictions are spot on, especially those imagining how the highway will shape future urban form:
The shape of our cities will change as highway transportation decentralises our population centres into vast urban areas. With the advent of wider, faster expressways, the commuter’s radius will be extended many miles.
Along with some fanciful technology for highway building and automated travel, future transport options will supposedly leave more time for leisure and family time. What the animation fails to predict is congestion and induced car traffic on highways that negate these time-saving technologies. Also not foreseen are the numerous health implications of door-to-door inactive transportation, noise and air pollution, and green house gas emissions.
The promising vision of highways connecting the world has been replaced by a dystopian reality. The narrator is right in summarising that “the highway will continue to play a vital role in the progress of civilisation.” But I doubt many would agree that highways have become “our magic carpet to new hopes, new dreams, and a better way of life for the future.”
The full episode, hosted by Walt, can be seen here.
This post is an attempt to draw together some random links on petrol stations and some thoughts about their place in the landscape.
Along with freeways and overpasses, petrol stations are an inevitable part of auto-culture. They generally don’t add anything to the landscape - at best a necessary stopping place, at worst an eyesore.
Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations from 1962 has gone some way to romanticising the highway gasoline stations in the United States - conjuring images of open roads and opportunities.
Small highway petrol stations are less common these days as large fuel companies corner the market with the mega stop. The local petrol station is more likely to be boarded up and abandoned.
French photographer Eric Tabuchi captures the current state of the small petrol station in Twentysix Abandoned Gasoline Stations. “Tabuchi’s work captures abandoned, rusting, toxic-leaking architectural ruins that blight the landscape and roadscapes of France.”
Although Tabusci’s work could fall into the ‘ruin porn’ category it serves to show the remnants of car culture on the environment.
There was an article in The Age recently about disused petrol stations around Victoria. “Some sites have been left abandoned for more than a decade, creating an eyesore, impacting on local amenity and posing long-term health threats with fuel contamination of the site and groundwater.” The article states that remediation typically costs anywhere from $500,000 to more than $1 million for each site and multinational oil companies such as Shell, Exxon Mobil, BP and Caltex, will only take responsibility for sites they operated at the time petrol is believed to have leaked from below-ground fuel tanks, not sites independently owned but selling fuel from the major companies. This makes re-use of the land an expensive exercise and increases the chances of these sites being permanent scars on the landscape.
One example of re-appropriation of a former petrol station comes from the UK. A group of young artists turned an abandoned petrol station in north London into a hand built cinema, the Cineroleum, using found and donated materials.
With no mention of site decontamination however, you have to assume the former petrol station was safe for redevelopment. I don’t think an abandoned petrol station site on a rural Victorian road would be the ideal setting for a pop-up cinema but the Cineroleum project does open up the possibilities for their re-use.
As the critic Lewis Mumford wrote half a century ago, “The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is the right to destroy the city.” Yet we continue to produce parking lots, in cities as well as in suburbs, in the same way we consume all those billions of plastic bottles of water and disposable diapers.
From NYT article and photo collection.
I am reading about strategic design as a method for approaching the complex systemic problems facing cities. The Helsinki Deign Lab has produced a downloadable book on strategic design which is “is about applying some of the principles of traditional design to “big picture” systemic challenges like health care, education, and climate change.”
As a non-designer, not all of the concepts are familiar to me but I can see the value in tackling planning problems from a design perspective. The old planning disciplines and knowledge silos that go with them have clearly not been successful in delivering key services to cities.
One such area is transport planning which has long been the domain of traffic engineers and traffic demand modelling. The old strategies of predicting traffic levels and providing adequate road space has failed to manage the complex travel needs of people in urban areas. To provide a multi-modal transport network to serve everyone seems to me like a design problem. New directions in transport planning combine road networks, demand-responsive parking strategies, and public transport network planning to deliver an overall mobility management system.
How quickly six months floats past when you are neck deep in a full-time masters! The lack of blog posts doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about, writing about all things transport. I recently spent 2 weeks in New York and Montreal looking at cycling infrastructure, bike share schemes and studying gender inclusive cities. I will post more on this trip soon.
I also had an article about the future of Melbourne as a bike city published in Treadlie Magazine Issue #4. Below is a teaser. If you want more head out and grab a copy.
Some sensible words from Montreal…
“We’re all the same people. We’ve got to learn to behave the same, whether we’re on a bike, on foot or in a car.”
