LimeWire founder Mark Gorton has recently announced to launch an application for open source urbanism, inspired by the peer-to-peer principle. Gorton’s goal is to stimulate “crowdsourced development, freely-accessible data libraries, and web forums, as well as actual open source software with which city planners can map transportation designs to people’s needs”, aiming to open up the city planning process to a wider audience and shine light on decision-making processes.
Open Cities: New Media’s Role in Shaping Urban Policy was a two-day conference, produced by Next American City and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, that united new media and urban policy’s top thinkers and practitioners. Through a series of panel discussions, presentations and networking opportunities, this conference will discuss new media’s strategies for dealing with a variety of challenges — such as how to build an engaged urban citizenry, best utilize municipal data and develop cost-saving technologies or networks to improve cities. For more about the conference, click here.
Now is a moment that argues for enterprise at the heart of collective, local urban action. This is not about being soppy or seditious – but simply sensible business practice. But it is about doing, not studying; commissioning action, not a feasibility study; choreography, not simply invention. It involves a degree of serendipity. And in urban development, it issues a fatwa on geographers and sociologists obsessing with dicing people in to creative and non-creative classes.
What should we call it?
It’s not exactly “American Idol” but we could start with “Venture Urbanism” – and find something sexier a bit later.
Over the past two decades, first hundreds and then thousands of San Franciscans have chosen to bicycle as a common means of transportation. This has generated a fair amount of heat and noise, whether during the monthly Critical Mass rides (17 years old and still going strong) or during the episodic controversies over bike lanes, parking, Octavia Boulevard planning and other bike-oriented changes. But what gets less notice is the way the simple choice to bicycle by ever more San Francisco residents is gradually reshaping a sense of public space and a sense of a shared city.
John Thackara, who is director of Doors of Perception, gave a very interesting talk at the Lift 09 Conference yesterday, about the role of design in finding solutions to the ecological crisis. After inviting us to avoid terms such as “future” or “sustainable” as they maintain a certain distance to the problem we face, he shows a rich set of projects he participated in.
Import Export Architecten designed a new type of ‘small scale’ urban camping. The mobile UC can be implanted in any city centre that likes to experiment with this new type of camping. UC is a place where adventurous city wanderers can stay overnight, meet other campers and find a safe shelter with basic designed practical facilities.
Here’s what Paris did right in setting up a city bike share program: versatile, sexy bikes and enough of them (1 for every 200 residents). The Vélib bike-share program is about to hit its 2-year anniversary and it is going strong, with more than 20,000 bikes (used for an estimated 26 million trips each year) and almost 1,500 stations. The program has even been extended into the Parisian suburbs. Compare that to Gothenburg’s GreenStreet bike share system, with less than 60 bikes scattered across the city, a program which no one seems to know about, much less use. But wait – as with many things, there’s an upside and a downside to Vélib’s success as well as Greenstreet’s slow start.
For our Design a Livable Street project, we asked GOOD readers to take a picture of a poorly planned street and photoshop it into shape. Our judges, Aaron Naparstek from Streetsblog and the designer Carly Clark, looked over the submissions and were “extremely impressed with the quality.” They picked a first place entry and four runners up.
San Francisco’s newest public space is outlined with planters made of thick paper tubes. Granite slabs turned on their side provide seating. The “ground cover” is asphalt topped by paint the color of weary sand.
