Designer Thor ter Kulve turns city fixtures into instant playgrounds.
Today urban areas — ranging from Times Square to a small town in India — cover perhaps 3 to 5% of global land. But Seto and her co-authors calculate that between now and 2030, urban areas will expand by more than 463,000 sq. mi. (1.2 million sq. km). That’s equal to 20,000 U.S. football fields being paved over every day for the first few decades of this century. By then, a little less than 10% of the planet’s land cover could be urban. “There’s going to be a huge impact on biodiversity hotspots and on carbon emissions in those urban areas,” says Seto.
The bulk of that great urban expansion will be in Asia — where more than 75% of the increase in urban cover is projected to occur — and in Africa, where urban land cover will be 590% above the 2000 level of 16,000 sq. mi.
The People’s Spot in Andersonville is all finished. The parklet on Clark Street in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood will allow people to sit on built in benches and enjoy plantings all around them.
It’s great to finally see a Chicago community coming together to fund an urbanism initiative like this one. Besides major projects like Millennium Park, I find that Chicago is behind in the placemaking movement of pedestrian spaces.
An interesting take on bike culture in America and the conflicts between drivers and cyclists:
Creating a New Normal
So why are cyclists so hated? Blame social-identity theory. Cyclists can be dismissed as a sub-subculture, one far removed from an American mainstream defined by cars and drivers. To a driver, a cyclist is an unpredictable outsider, someone implicitly less worthy of respect — or for that matter, of space on the road. And if one biker blows a red light, that’s evidence that all these outsiders are careless, whereas a lawbreaking driver isn’t held up as proof that all drivers are thoughtless…”People tend to look at the out group and overgeneralize them,” says Ian Walker, a professor of traffic psychology at the University of Bath in Britain, “while you tend to underplay the differences within your own group.”
With most American cities designed around the automobile, I believe that people’s mindsets are framed to create a close relationship between the idea of “the road” and “the car”. As a result, some drivers perceive cyclists as interlopers into a space whose original purpose was to serve the automobile.
What are your thoughts?
(Source: TIME)
Officially launched in May 2010, NYC °CoolRoofs alters the flat roofs of New York City from black and gray to white, with a goal to paint 6 million square feet of the city’s roofs. The goal is simple: use white paint to reflect the solar rays and to reduce the amount of heat that black roofs capture.
Favela as a Sustainable Model
Sustainable principles already exist in Rio’s favelas, but they are so organic that they go unnoticed. Pedestrian friendly roads, use of bicycles and collective transportation, local commerce, organic architecture, and fundamentally, values such as solidarity and a sense of collectivity that are so natural in the favelas that we call them communities.
This film by Catalytic Communities premiered at the Rio+20 conference.
Now, THIS is what I’m talking about! This article pretty much encapsulates everything I believe about how the relationship dynamics between design and social change should be.
The rise of ‘parklets’ - tiny seating areas for restless urbanites
A hundred-year-old street market in Bangalore was demolished in the dead of night last month. The colourful stalls of vendors spilling out onto the streets were illegal encroachments, but how much history and local colour is lost by enforcing the law now after so many years of peaceful coexistence?
A compelling article that raises the question: should we preserve historical and cultural spaces that have comprised a part of a city’s “character” despite its illegal formation and informal economy, or are city governments right in demolishing such settlements that encroach on public space?
