City Interface

Drachten is a shared space town.

Several towns and city areas in Europe are experimenting with the de-regulation of urban spaces, mostly by eliminating traffic signs and other street elements.

The urban planners behind this concept, argue that the tradition of placing signage and obstacles which dictate rules of proper traffic behavior are promoting instead a constant state of frustration and rebellion in its residents.

So the formula is to do away with it all: eliminate the sidewalks and the street signs and just have a “shared space” for both vehicular, pedestrian traffic and let the citizens figure it out in the real-time chaos.

Here is a video explaining it.

What is gained by this approach is a sense of a past and more humane urbanity, an almost medieval one, where the buzz of traffic and socializing on the roads was at the center of a settlement’s progress. The other quality that is improved is the relationship that citizens will have to each other - as people need to mind others a lot more when negotiating their transit, they will become kinder to each other as well.

This second idea might be somewhat naïve however, or might only work in places where people live relatively stress-free and vernacular lives. Any other large place that thrives on constant chaos is likely to keep many of its residents irritated or rude to each other.

This is a good idea for smaller urban concentrations, or even small areas of a city (e.g. historic downtown centers). There are plenty of cities that use the notion of shared space in their historic centers, like Santiago de Compostela and Bologna.

Links:
“Der Spiegel: European Cities do Away with Traffic Signs”
Shared Space - An EU Project
Photos of Drachten’s Shared Space

This post is self-promotional in nature, but it’s related to the topic of cities and how we use them today:

I launched MetropoliPhone over the weekend, a mobile site which collects subway maps from different cities worldwide.

The maps collected come usually from the many different metropolitan transport authority sites from each city. Since it is usually cumbersome to get a hold of good subway maps quickly on a mobile device, this website tries to compile for convenience of citizens in need of this information.

For the launch, the list of subway maps for cities include: Atlanta, Barcelona, Berlin, Boston, Caracas, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Mexico City, Montréal, New York, Paris, Philadelphia, Rome, San Francisco, Vienna, Washington DC, Tokyo and Toronto.

Soon there will also be some maps of bus lines too as well as more subway maps from other cities.

It’s optimized for iPhone’s Safari browser but it should load in most of the mobile devices that access the web.

A first look at Toronto streets.

I’ve been meaning to post these for a while. On late March I was invited to Toronto to speak and it was my first time there. I had some free time the first day so went out doing some reconnaissance of Torontonian street life.

Toronto has a pretty healthy urban fabric: the streets cater to pedestrians more than cars (the way it should be). Apparently this area where the hotel is located is now under an accelerated gentrification process: the effect is a neighborhood that mixes art galleries studios with a sense of urban ‘hip’ frontier. Plenty of new galleries, restaurants, stores as well as signs of intense street life.

The solar park meters are plastered with DIY promotional materials and stickers. Deli stores exhibit their flowers and plants selections in micro-gardens that embellish the street with some green (like the ones in NYC, except these felt more lush and present on the sidewalk, without disturbing traffic either). Urban furniture highlights included some nicely designed bus-stops and these clever phone booths that had weatherproof cases for yellow and white pages.

Other interesting findings included an actively used street car network, an old shcool exposed electrical power line infrastructure made of wood poles and a redundant presence of consolidated recycling bins for different types of materials.

The plaza was the beginning of the city in latin america.

It represented the foundation of the city as conducted by spanish colonization practices under the Laws of Indies. The laws stipulated for example, to locate around the perimeter of the plaza those buildings that represented the institutions of new power and culture.

The church would usually be on the east side, the city hall or colonial political authority building on the north, the judiciary court house on the west. Not every latin american city sticked to that rule over time, but most did follow the patterns of settlement compiled by the the crown of Philip II.

A grid would be traced from the margins of said plaza, with the ability to be extended ad infinitum. The colonizer which founded the city would have the rights to the best lots near the plaza (the south flank, for example) and those blocks in the vicinity would be distributed amongst the rest of the crew founding the new settlement.

Walk into a 1920s LES experience

A different take at the concept of boutique hotel, the Blue Moon hotel in Lower East Side Manhattan takes you back to 1920s New York, minus the overcrowded and poverty traits characteristic of life in those days.

Recreating the signs of the times in the hospitality industry has always been a successful tactic for attracting tourists. After all, there’s probably a sizable market of historic tourism out there, or what they also call cultural or heritage tourism.

But what is striking about this particular hotel, is the urban context it lives on today and that is attempting to recreate from yesteryear: the slum life of old new york is now romanticized, neatly curated and conveniently marketable in the gentrification of downtown.

Read an article about the time travel experience here.

Billboard & retail store hybrid in Zurich

A clever example of how advertising and architecture can work seamlessly. From a distance the structure looks like a tall billboard, and as you get closer the indications of it being an architectural space become more apparent. The fact that the building is also made of recylced containers makes a good case for sustainable design.

See the photos. Visit Freitag site.

Google placemark sculpture in Berlin

A simple art installation by artist Aram Bartholl highlights the online information layer of urban spaces.

The play on physically visualizing Google maps search might seem wacky but behind the intention there’s the reality of blurring boundaries. As more citizens get used to reading and navigating real-time representations of urban space, these iconic symbols of information loci might just become all too familiar and preferred forms of interacting with the street.

Km. O marker in Puerta del Sol, Madrid

The plaque denotes the origin of all roads in Spain and the measurement of its distances. This locus is not only on the capital city but also at the very center of it, in front of the City Council and one of Madrid’s major public spaces, La Puerta del Sol.

Trash Disposal in Musée Rodin

See-through bags in Paris parks are used instead of the usual trash can. After a series of attacks that happened during the 90s in which explosives with nails were dropped into trash cans, the see-through trash bags could have been more widely introduced as an urban safety measure.

See large photo