Public Space Rethought

Siri Agrell wrote a piece for the Globe and Mail which toured various cities around the world. It featured what human scale living could be like in an urban context. The piece is called "Rethinking public space - one day at a time".

One of the featured cities is New York

If there is a reigning Queen of Pop-Up, it is Janette Sadik-Khan, the New York city transportation commissioner. In 2009, Ms. Sadik-Khan famously closed Times Square to traffic, transforming it into a pedestrian mall by simply throwing down some pylons and offering a smattering of lawn chairs. [...] She performs most of her transformations without capital funds from the city, scrounging up cash and resources and avoiding actually asking permission.

Vancouver city councillor Andrea Reimer on similar experiments in the west coast city observes,

"I don't see a future where any street is only used for one thing. We need our roads for movement during the week, but on the weekends, we need them for recreation," Ms. Reimer said. "By trying things out, it really just makes people rethink public space."

The activities in the piece remind me of the cities in the fictional universe created by Samuel Delany in such novels as Triton and Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. Also a documentary film covers some of the same ground (especially the focus on alternatives to car culture). See: The Human Scale.

And so for day 1114
31.12.2009