Vendor Power!
Center for Urban Pedagogy
Urban Omnibus
Showing posts with label streets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label streets. Show all posts
11 June 2009
22 March 2009
Taming Times Square
Bloomberg announces plans to make portions of broadway at Times Square more pedestrian friendly by closing off the traffic and installing new public spaces.
related website
What is it that makes a public space "friendlier"? And what sort of models are out there comparable to the likes of Times Square? What is the experience of Times Square...what are the infrastructures, systems...schedules? And what is the user experience without the cars?
related articles.
Times
01 December 2008
Traces of Transportation
A web of electric bus lines in downtown San Francisco.
Traces of mobility woven above the streetscape. Visual reminders of paths, networks and vital infrastructures. Like the determined paths of subways and skytrains, the bus lines become determined, not limitless like the urban grid it floats upon. Visual cues alert travelers of crossing the path of a moving object...follow the line to find the next stop.
How can these visual cues disclose path type (color, shape, coded). How can they inform schedule, time table or final destinations? What other functions can this web bring to the city?
30 November 2008
A City Drip System
urban sewer grates along the streets of San Francisco color coded with drops of altering primary colored paints.
Graffiti artists or City employee? Physical demarcations noting status of rainwater catchment system?
What are the physical or virtual notifications of the efficiencies of a network?
29 November 2008
Street Signs
Pedestrian street signs...
know where you are - without needing to be in a car.
Street corners have the street names stamped into the concrete, allowing for the pedestrian (already simi-conscious of what is before them) to be a little bit more aware of their location
San Francisco, California
19 August 2008
our concrete grid
Image and Article taken from Inhabitat - http://www.inhabitat.com
Anyone who’s taken a barefooted tryst across a paved parking lot knows that blacktop can reach sweltering temperatures when exposed to the summer sun. Now researchers at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute have found a way to use to employ the heat-soaking properties of asphalt as an energy source by inserting heat exchangers a few centimeters below its surface. The development may pave the way for an inexpensive source for electricity and hot water that re-imagines our existing auto infrastructure as a massive conduit for solar-thermal energy.
URL to article: http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/
23 July 2008
The value of Streets
Photo: Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times
In Philadelphia, the streets are being mined for the valuable metal of manhole covers and grates. Thieves can get 5 - 50$ at salvage/recycling yards leaving the streets unsafe and "uncovered".
Value and the streetscape. What do we take for granted as valuable? What is unnoticed in the urban landscape. New York City just realized their trees created a value of $122 million.
Is value in the eye of the beholder? or dependent upon a communities supply and demand? When does a share consensus in value leave things undervalued?
How can the city be valued?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
