Archive for Public Space
October 21, 2011 · Filed under Authenticity, Creative Cities, Density, Diversity, Grassroots, Great Streets, Public Space
In Japan, ‘public’ is more of a mental construct than a physical presence” and the concept of ‘privacy’ has never taken hold. The closest native Japanese approximation of private-public may be uchi (family, clan, group)-soto (that which is not uchi) where uchi extends the Western ‘private’ to ‘other private’ plus ‘public’. A history and present of close quarters, paper-thin walls and sliding doors that open onto the street evoke the permeation of daily life into public space. Memory and current practice/conception regard whole neighbourhoods as ‘home’, with parks as multifunctional common yards.
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Popularity: 1% [?]
September 13, 2011 · Filed under Architecture, Crime, Pedestrians, Public Life, Public Space, Social Networks
In designing and constructing environments in which people live and work, architects and planners are necessarily involved in influencing human behaviour. While Sommer (1969, p.3) asserted that the architect “in his training and practice, learns to look at buildings without people in them,” it is clear that from, for example, Howard’s Garden Cities of To-morrow (1902), through Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine and La Ville radieuse, to the Smithsons’ ‘Streets in the sky’, there has been a long-standing thread of recognition that the way people live their lives is directly linked to the designed environments in which they live.
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Popularity: 1% [?]
June 13, 2010 · Filed under Creative Cities, Public Space, Revitalization
In May last year, as he was strolling down a sidestreet in the heart of Paris’s Latin Quarter, Alexandre de Nuñez spotted a sign on the front of a building near the white dome of the Panthéon. “For rent,” it said, with one provision: “For bookshop.”
Officially inaugurated this week by mayor Bertrand Delanoë, the Franco-Argentinian’s cosy new El Salon del Libro is one of a cluster of librairies opening in the city’s historic district of erudition, where students mill around the Sorbonne and lecturers recline in the Luxembourg gardens.
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Popularity: 67% [?]
May 29, 2010 · Filed under Active Transportation, Children, Families, Public Life, Public Space
Mel Antonen and his 3-year-old son, Emmett, were walking in Lincoln Park on Capitol Hill one morning when a chocolate Labrador puppy named Wilson jumped at the toddler and wouldn’t go away — even after Antonen lifted his boy out of the dog’s reach, yelling at the owner, “Get him off! Get him off!”
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Popularity: 77% [?]
March 16, 2010 · Filed under Active Transportation, Cycling, Great Streets, Pedestrians, Public Space, Street Furniture, Urban Design
New York’s ambitious experiment that closed parts of Broadway to vehicles last spring will become permanent, city officials said on Thursday, even though it fell short of achieving its chief objective: improving traffic flow.
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Popularity: 58% [?]
February 12, 2010 · Filed under Creative Cities, Diversity, Planning, Public Space, Revitalization, Urban Design
Lower Manhattan, specifically Greenwich South, which is bordered by the Financial District, the World Trade Center site, Battery Park, and Battery Park City. This urban plan to reinvigorate the neighborhood is based on five overarching principles to improve connectivity and resident and business retention. From this plan emerged a 10-team charrette to develop specific building strategies and a list of action items to jump-start redevelopment.
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Popularity: 47% [?]
February 12, 2010 · Filed under Beauty, Grassroots, Highways, Landscape, Nature, Parks, Public Space, Urban Actions
A few weeks ago in San Francisco, a number of urban farmers opened a gate in a chain-link fence at Laguna Street, between Oak and Fell Streets, and entered an overgrown lot that has been unused for nearly two decades. The farmers brought with them steaming piles of mulch, which they cast over the edge of the ramps formerly used by cars to enter and exit the elevated Central Freeway spur above Octavia Street, arranging the soil in rows for planting vegetables and filler crops.
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Popularity: 50% [?]
February 5, 2010 · Filed under Architecture, Beauty, Public Art, Public Space, Safety, Street Furniture
Walking through parts of New York can feel like walking through a tunnel. The city’s ubiquitous sidewalk sheds — typically blue scaffolding holding up green plywood to protect pedestrians from construction overhead — corral people into cramped, dark spaces wherever development or building repairs are underway. There are about 6,000 of these sheds throughout the city.
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Popularity: 42% [?]
February 4, 2010 · Filed under Authenticity, Diversity, Public Life, Public Space, Safety, Urban Actions
Urban regeneration has seen entire districts pass into the hands of private companies – and their security guards.
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Popularity: 25% [?]
February 4, 2010 · Filed under Artificial Landscapes, Landscape, Multi-Level Urbanism, Parks, Pedestrians, Public Life, Public Space
If you’ve ever been to Cleveland, you know the downtown area is a forbidding, pedestrian desert. The main public space, Public Square, is no better–it’s a wind-scarred, 10-acre expanse flanked by skyscrapers. But that could all change, thanks to a series of brilliant redesigns proposed by James Corner Field Operations, the firm best known as the landscape designers who did much of the heavy lifting for New York’s superb High Line Park.
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Popularity: 37% [?]
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