“Our beds are empty two-thirds of the time.
Our living rooms are empty seven-eighths of the time.
Our office buildings are empty one-half of the time.
It’s time we gave this some thought.”
— R. Buckminster Fuller
That quote is 40 years old, but I continue to be amazed by the extent to which we haven’t begun to address the problem Fuller highlighted. There’s a staggering glut of empty space around the country right now, unused space that’s not doing anyone much good. That in itself isn’t new; what is unprecedented is our ability to visualize that data in an entirely new ways.
Last week, a group called the Urban Repair Squad painted sound-effect words—”Thunk!” “Oof” and the like—along Toronto’s Harbord Street where potholes and other perils threaten cyclists. They’re calling the project “Pothole Onomatopoeia.”
Advanced community design models are emerging to provide some of the greatest opportunities for reducing fossil fuel use, climate-disrupting emissions and traffic congestion, while also offering affordable, high-quality lifestyles.
Envision living in a community that offers an abundance of local shopping, services and entertainment. The community is focused on a mobility center well connected to the region with transit and vanpools. The need to drive to work and other destinations is minimized. When you do drive, it is in an electric vehicle charged at your house or a fast charge station located in the mobility center park-and-ride.
Mumbai’s muddled streets are too packed to walk through, so India’s commercial capital has come up with a solution. Uplift the masses—not in some fuzzy metaphysical way, but on “skywalks” made of steel.
CityLAB, an urban design think tank at the University of California, Los Angeles, took on the challenge of design-inspired infrastructure earlier this year with the creation of WPA 2.0: Working Public Architecture. [3] Inspired by the Works Projects Administration of the 1930s — the largest and most effective of the agencies created by the Roosevelt administration — WPA 2.0 has so far included a global design competition, a multidisciplinary symposium and (coming in February) a web exhibition.
One of Hong Kong’s smartest residential areas is called Mid-levels, and is served by an unusual form of transport: the longest outdoor covered escalator system in the world. The Central-Mid-levels system consists of twenty escalators and three moving walkways - and it runs in one direction in the morning, and another in the afternoon.
A finalist in the WPA 2.0 competition sponsored by UCLA Citylab, Nicholas de Monchaux and collaborators have provided a case study showing the impacts of the “spaces between places,” spaces owned by the city but unused and still maintained. Monchaux’s group, using geospatial analysis identify thousands of these publicly owned, abandoned spaces and quantify their transition into a network of urban greens.
It’s clear in retrospect that the fracture-critical structures of the 1950s and ’60s reflected the larger culture — this was when John Kenneth Galbraith famously critiqued the United States as a nation of private affluence and public squalor. In an era when America could have afforded the best infrastructure in the world, we began instead to channel wealth into private hands and to impoverish the public realm.
Our world is now riddled with what C. West Churchman referred to as “wicked problems”: issues like climate change, healthcare, and education that are difficult to address because of their complex interdependencies and changing requirements.
Our day-to-day lives are also full of small problems and basic tasks that are becoming increasingly difficult to manage due to frequency and volume. For example, as healthcare moves towards a more consumer-oriented model, people will be asked to electronically track every aspect of their health. Add this to the complexities of managing a Netflix queue or digital photo library, or keeping computer software up to date, and you begin to get the picture. And these are just the simple tasks. We need new strategies for engaging with these complexities.
Mike Davis and I met on a summer day in San Diego. He graciously drove his truck and showed me his collection of “interesting sites” he planned for us to see in the area. As we were visiting those places, we talked about variety of subjects.
His selection of the sites was nothing less than socio-cultural paintings in action plus a rough sketch of complex connections drawn by him.
