Masterplan for Singapore 2050 as part of Singapore Design Week 09 by WOHA. Fascinating alternate-scapes. (via designboom)
Starting at the End: 12 New Cities Built From Scratch
12 urban centres that offer a radical alternative to the traditional model of urban development – they are brand new, fully-working cities from the first day they open for business.
High-speed car ramp proposal by Tiago Barros + Jorge Pereira: An alternative and LOL solution to the contested space between cars and cyclists / pedestrians. (via designboom)
‘Why change the route of pedestrians and cyclists?’. Their proposal was a high-speed car ramp which enables pedestrians and cyclists to freely cross under the segunda circular highway in Lisbon. Instead, the path for cars is altered by a ramp which acts as a bridge for vehicles. Drivers are expected to accelerate on a ramp, burning more gas. Barros and pereira’s design is meant to provide a long lasting event which will occur at every moment in which a car goes by. The ramp would provide entertainment, along with a new tourist attraction, acting as a means of redeveloping the area.
How Might We Visualize Data in More Effective and Inspiring Ways? Now that’s one infographic! (via GOOD)
How the moving walkway nearly overtook the Metro
Intriguing insight on the ambitious predecessor of the dumbed down travellator.
(via Instapaper)
inky:
The Big Picture: North Korea (repost)
The highways in North Korea are huge and carless. Planes could land there. You can even see kids playing in the middle of the road. Security is a major problem because children and old people are not used to seeing cars, so they cross over the roads at any time, without watching out for oncoming traffic. The only cars you can see sometimes on highways are military ones, and most of them are stopped by the side of road, broken down. Or you can also see brand new Mercedes cars belonging to the North Korean officials passing by at very high speeds.
Against all principles and sensibilities of new urbanism. North Korea presents such strange yet intriguing landscape seemingly (as seen from previous photo journals) of things grossly out of proportion.
Top 100 Urban Thinkers
Planetizen’s 2009 reader’s poll on the top 100 urban thinkers. Can’t say I agree or not with the list, as ashamedly I’ve only read a fraction of it. I’d go with Jane Jacobs any time though.
"But when Atta was told he would lead a mission to destroy America’s tallest and most famous modernist high-rise complex—the apotheosis of the building type he dreamed of razing in Aleppo—he may have felt the hand of divine providence at work."
- Slate Magazine on Mohamed Atta as a student of urban planning and his Master’s thesis on the Islamic-Oriental City. Excellent insight. (via @ArchitectureMNP)
"Also, appropriately enough, clean urbanism can be seen as being pleasantly complemented by dirty realism. It is the systematic marginalization of shit, literally, into the hidden pockets of the city, out of view, that maintain a clean front – from buried sewer mains to sex- and drug-trades, to offshoring. One could almost argue that our urban environments are not necessarily any cleaner just better managed and with more crap out of sight. If fact, it is likely that our cities are dirtier, if calculated in aggregate with waste that has been dispersed, traded, or sunk."
- InfraNet Lab reacts to MONU’s (Magazine on Urbanism) ‘Clean Urbanism’ (Issue #11). And where can I lay my hands on MONU?
An Illustrated Trip to the Farmers’ Market by Mr. Tony Lunchbreath: Redesign Your Farmers’ Market finalist, GOOD’s call for entries on design solutions that would help food grown by local farmers to be more effectively delivered and distributed to urban residents. Nice illustrations.
I am less intrigued by the design of this ‘turtleshell’ Meiosis Backpack by Davidi Gilad than its colour scheme, sort of like an urban camouflage, reflecting the increasing greys and blues of our cityscapes. / designboom
