Friday, September 18, 2015

The Scarecrow's Lament: If New Albany only had a brain ...


There are times when it's very difficult to read articles like this one, and view scenes like a refurbished street in Antwerp (above), knowing that automobiles continue to be the sole determining factor of everything we do.

But that's okay. We'll just keep pushing on.

A Before-and-After Photo Archive of the World's Best Street Designs: It’s a walkable feast, by Feargus O'Sullivan (City Lab)

As a remarkable new photo archive of urban transformations shows, making city streets more user-friendly doesn’t have to be that complicated. The archive put together by Brazilian urban design collective Urb-i houses a collection of more than 350 before-and-after shots showing city blocks across the world that have been transformed by pro-pedestrian makeovers.

Browsing through the crowd-sourced images (culled mostly from Google Street View), the redesigns often seem pretty straightforward. Cities narrow or eliminate car lanes, put in cycle tracks, maybe lay down a light rail line if money permits. Then they expand sidewalk space and put in some extra greenery to make the place more welcoming, enticing strollers back into a formerly arid, polluted space.

Come to think of it, Scarecrow's Lament would be a good name for a pub.

1 comment:

ecology warrior said...

Click your heels Susie, there's no place like NA