readings: on soft infrastructure and streets

Two pieces on Cityofsound: 

A presentation on soft infrastructure at the Lift 09 conference. 

The street as platform - a brilliant essay on streets and technology.

The way the street feels may soon be defined by what cannot be seen with the naked eye.

Imagine film of a normal street right now, a relatively busy crossroads at 9AM taken from a vantage point high above the street, looking down at an angle as if from a CCTV camera. We can see several buildings, a dozen cars, and quite a few people, pavements dotted with street furniture.

Freeze the frame, and scrub the film backwards and forwards a little, observing the physical activity on the street. But what can’t we see? 

readings: the 21st century street

Archdaily:

In June 2008, Transportation Alternatives launched the competition 21st Century Street. Participants to the competition redesigned the intersection between 9th Street and 4th Avenue in Brooklyn, to allow more space for pedestrians, cyclists and public transports.

See the winning entries. 

ice climbing in dead malls

Imagine that the collapse of the global financial sector and the resulting dramatic decrease in consumer spending have caused scores of retail chain stores to declare bankruptcy. Malls everywhere are shuttered: a constellation of abandoned cathedrals to capitalism stitched across the American landscape.

And then imagine, as but one adaptive re-use, they are turned into ice-climbing clubhouses. Where people once gorged thousands of calories in one serving, people now burn those same calories in the Food Court. Where once the multi-carded and the debt-ridden found comfort in materialism, they may experience the same adrenalin rush from the prospect of multiple compound fracture, if not death. Where once they hopped from store to store in a zombie-like delirium, there, in a kind of Waldian introspection midway up a simulated glacier (a frozen New England lake geologically reconfigured?), they are now considering a fundamental alteration of their lifestyles, a change for the better.

Pruned

gas station, rt 66

Along the mother road - Brand Avenue

big box and infrastructure reuse

The problem of retail vacancies on this scale is so new that it hasn’t really been studied yet. Perhaps the only authority on the subject of empty big box stores is Oberlin College professor and artist Julia Christensen. She has spent the last seven years traveling around the country seeking out and documenting cases of communities reclaiming abandoned big boxes and putting them to a socially productive use–for instance, as museums, libraries, rec centers, and schools. She wrote about it all in her recently published book Big Box Reuse (MIT Press). A few days ago, we got her thoughts on how towns and cities can make beneficial use of these vacant structures and turn a hole in the local fabric into a community asset.

Infrastructurist

from suburbs to towns and back

People that live in suburbs are the most satisfied with the place they live of all Americans. Out of all Americans, most rank small towns over suburbs as ideal places to live, and yet folks actually in small towns report disillusionment.

The Pew Research Center

the future of infrastructure

The public building boom of the 1960s and ’70s—which was mainly a vast expansion of highways—devastated many communities and drove down their property values. Since then, homeowners have defended their back yards like medieval barons defending their castles, effectively mobilizing to question, forestall, and generally thwart the construction of new infrastructural systems that would theoretically benefit everyone. To think that opposition to vast new projects will evaporate at a time when home values are in free fall is ludicrous.

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