Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘2.1 – walking’ Category

Read Full Post »

(photo: flickr) This month, everybody talks about suburbs (and about the prominent feature of suburbs, cars): some posts on RSR website (here, here and here), the last edition of the forum Ecoparc: So, it’s the right moment to talk about this subject, and to propose a strategy to align autorities and developers’ interests. 1 – [...]

Read Full Post »

“From ancient times, what made a city a city was how it functioned, not how it looked. And this is especially true today, for we have not built a single old-style downtown from raw dirt in seventy-five years.” (Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, Chapter 2) This is how Joel Garreau described [...]

Read Full Post »

Two kind of space exist: The highway, regulated by signs, and the public realm, regulated by social rules. But lots of public realms are designed as highways. source: shared space

Read Full Post »

On september 10, another crowdsourcing session has taken place in Lausanne. This time, the theme was “consuming”: shops, energy, water, wastes. Here is a list of the wishes that came out during the session: – Small independent shops rather than big chain suburban supermarkets (Most of people had few hopes that this would have been [...]

Read Full Post »

(source video: OLA Métamorphose) The city of Lausanne is promoting a serie of crowdsourcing sessions for the new eco-district of Pontaise-Blecherette. Last Tuesday I was in the first of them, called “Grow Up”, and heard lots of interesting ideas. First of all, people wanted a small-scale district: small roads that will help random meetings, small [...]

Read Full Post »

This image (Geneva, square Pradier, via Microsoft Virtual Earth) shows how to create a calm square and give privacy to a block without using fences or corner buildings. The four external building act as a screen and separate the square from the through traffic of the surrounding roads. Access to the backside of the external [...]

Read Full Post »

If we think, like Le Corbusier, that human nature is bad, social interactions can only lead us away from the Truth, thus shall be discouraged. A “bad human nature city” will have freeways with no sidewalk, windows on nature, shopping centers with security guards preventing unwanted behaviours… If we think, like Jane Jacobs, that human [...]

Read Full Post »

(image: wikipedia) In 1956, when Brasilia was conceived, cars were the transportation system of the future. “Adapter la Ville à la Voiture” (adapt the city to cars) was the reigning philosophy in those years, and as Brasilia wanted to symbolize the most avanced face of Brazil, all the city was planned around cars. Two big [...]

Read Full Post »

Look at the google map above here. Don’t you see something different? Yes, it’s true: something has changed. The “walk until …” direction has turned into something more precise and more similar to the driving instructions.  More things are still to be implemented, but, just like Walkscore some days ago, this is the sign of [...]

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.