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The Motorist Won: Envisioning a vehicle-centric UK with Archinect Generative Futures finalist Kyle Branchesi

2024-02-13T19:32:00-05:00

Designer Kyle Branchesi has shared images from his latest creative experimentation with generative AI tools, a visual commentary touching on the debate over pedestrianism and motor vehicles happening currently within the UK.

For 'The Motorist Won,' Branchesi imagined a far-off dystopia plagued by vehicle traffic where historic streets and all visible landmarks are besieged by the hum of engines and blur of lights, making cities like London or Edinburgh the all-too-unfortunate casualties of what PM Rishi Sunak says is a "war" against cars.

The Motorist Won by Kyle Branchesi

Branchesi describes: "Amidst a political landscape where the 'war on motorists' is wielded as a populist tool, this series captures a future where this rhetoric has prevailed. The transformation of UK landmarks like Stonehenge into vast vehicular realms underscores the absurdity and danger of prioritizing short-term political gains over sustainable urban planning. These images mirror the contentious debates in the ...

Rowan Moore on how Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo plans to use the 2024 Olympics as the catalyst for a greener ‘City of Lights’

2024-01-02T13:46:00-05:00

She wants to make it a paradise of low pollution and healthy living, as friendly to pedestrians and bicycles as can be, with new developments planned to promote community life. This is a long-term endeavour, going back to Hidalgo’s predecessor Bertrand Delanoë, who was mayor from 2001 to 2014, but the Olympics have been enlisted to give it a boost. In the face of what Rabadan calls “a lot of political resistance”, the Olympics “gave us the opportunity to accelerate the transformation we need”.

Surveying the broadscale urban greening and pedestrianization program of 2023 ULI Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development laureate Mayor Anne Hidalgo, Rowan Moore declares the slate of changes “absolutely right” for Parisians while admitting that her “rhetoric has a way of outrunning reality.”

The Guardian critic also reversed his colleague Oliver Wainright’s praise of the ‘15-minute city’ concept developed by Hidalgo’s advisor Carlos Moreno, which he sees as “overhyped” and “a bit vapid.” The Opening Ceremony will feature with a 6-kilometer-long parade down the cleaned-up river Seine. Dominique Perrault’s 51-hectare athletes’ village in Saint-Denis, which serves to further showcase many of the methods and 2050 benchmarks championed by Hidalgo, will be turned over to the city for its stewardship and eventually reuse beginning March 1st.

Asphalt Art Initiative expands pedestrian safety program to these 25 North American Cities

2023-11-14T15:53:00-05:00

Another round of funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies' Asphalt Art Initiative has been announced in an effort to improve the pedestrian safety of 25 different cities in North America.

Grants of up to $25,000 were awarded also in Mexico and Canada for the first time in the program’s history. This fourth round will bring the total number of cities impacted by the program to 90. The initiative says they chose from a field of 200 applicants, and that each selected project will be installed by the end of 2024.

Mexico City, San Francisco, Calgary, and Portland are among the larger metros of the group, which also includes smaller American cities like Stamford, Connecticut, and Anderson, South Carolina.

A 2021 Asphalt Art Initiative installation in Pittsburgh, PA. Lead artists: Tim Englehardt and Randi Stewart. Image: Sean Carroll

The latest grantees, divided into three respective categories, are:

"Improve a challenging intersection using curb extensions and other tools"

United States: An...

Carlo Ratti wants to remake New York into a ‘Playground City’

2023-05-15T17:09:00-04:00

Carlo Ratti and Harvard's Economics department chair Edward Glaeser recently detailed their vision of New York as a “Playground City” in an interactive opinion feature for the New York Times. The six-point plan calls for a number of radical solutions — including the widespread (but not windowless) conversion of “deep core” office buildings favored in comments by Mayor Eric Adams — and apparently has parallels to life in 17th- and 18th-century London.

“In a Playground City,” they describe, “mixed-use neighborhoods that tie life, labor and leisure together generate what the New York urbanist Jane Jacobs calls the 'sidewalk ballet,' a productive and playful dynamic in which a diversity of different users come and go at all hours.”

The plan centers on increased social interaction and a revival of street life, fueled by small businesses, green space, and recreation. They say we must “view the city as a for-profit real estate development company wholly owned by a nonprofit poverty-allevi...

PAU proposes multi-modal plan for Manhattan streets

2020-07-09T14:41:00-04:00

The Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU) has unveiled a plan envisioning how Manhattan's streets might transform to minimize auto dependency while embracing the widespread availability of dedicated bus and bicycle lanes as well as more generous pedestrian infrastructure.

The so-called "Not Your Car" (NYC) proposal envisions a future where private automobile use is drastically reduced in order to create urban fabric "focused on reappropriating public space back to people without the inequities and predation caused by the omnipresence of private cars."

A view of how city streets might change to accommodate new modes of traffic.

The scheme, developed under the leadership of PAU founder Vishaan Chakrabarti with support from Buro Happold, proposes to more or less get rid of on-street parking and private automobile traffic on most city streets, replacing this land-intensive arrangement with new pedestrian and public transit modes. Sidewalks would expand in width, street lanes forme...

Milan to retrofit 22 miles of urban streets for post-COVID pedestrian use

2020-04-21T12:53:00-04:00

[22 miles] of streets will be transformed over the summer, with a rapid, experimental citywide expansion of cycling and walking space to protect residents as Covid-19 restrictions are lifted. The Strade Aperte plan [...] includes low-cost temporary cycle lanes, new and widened pavements, [20mph] speed limits, and pedestrian and cyclist priority streets.

Janette Sadik-Khan, the former transportation commissioner for New York City, is helping Milan and Bogota formulate post-COVID-19 urban realm improvements.

Sadik-Khan tells The Guardian, “The Milan plan is so important is because it lays out a good playbook for how you can reset your cities now. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take a fresh look at your streets and make sure that they are set to achieve the outcomes that we want to achieve: not just moving cars as fast as possible from point A to point B, but making it possible for everyone to get around safely.”

In the US, Oakland and other cities are also experimenting with street pedestrianization efforts in response to the COVID-19 crisis.

Allison Arieff on the upsides of the new, car-free cities

2020-04-08T20:13:00-04:00

We can see our cities for the first time without the choking traffic, dirty air and honking horns that have so often made them intolerable. Throughout the world, the coronavirus has forced extreme changes in our behavior in just days. And we’re already seeing the impact of those changes: On Monday, for example, Los Angeles had the cleanest air of any major city in the world.

In today's NYT Opinion piece, Allison Arieff attempts to look at the benefits of the global social distancing experiment, from the cleaner city air through unprecedented street access for pedestrians and cyclists to potentially lasting design interventions in the public urban space.

"Covid-19 presents a wholly different challenge," Arieff writes, "how to think about bringing people together while also needing to keep them apart."

Don't miss out on latest developments with Archinect's continuously updated COVID-19 Guide for Architects & Designers.

Architecture critic Mark Lamster proposes a new pedestrian memorial park for Dallas

2020-01-29T13:16:00-05:00

In a recent column for The Dallas Morning News, architecture critic Mark Lamster proposes a new pedestrian-oriented vision for the district surrounding Dealey Plaza, where President John F. Kennedy was murdered, and where the Dallas authorities are currently planning a new municipal memorial for the victims of racial violence. The memorial will be set in Martyrs Park, a grassy, triangular knoll surrounded on all sides by highway infrastructure and roads.

"Make no mistake: The geography of Dallas is a geography of race," Lamster writes, highlighting that historically speaking, "systematic discrimination forced African Americans into the least desirable spaces of the city—areas prone to flooding, near industry, caught on the wrong side of train tracks and highways, and always ripe for appropriation if and when the need arose" and that the same logic is currently at play with regards to the location of the proposed Martyrs Park memorial.

Satellite view of Dealey Plaza and Martyrs Park ...

San Francisco to redesign Market Street for pedestrians and buses

2019-10-16T18:50:00-04:00

Following in the footsteps of New York City, Indianapolis, Portland, and others, San Francisco's Market Street will soon be redesigned for use by buses, pedestrians, and cyclists.

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency board of directors has unanimously approved the so-called Better Market Street Project, a plan that will expand existing bus-only lanes, add new fully protected bicycle lanes, and create pedestrian safety improvements to the thoroughfare. The measure would also largely ban use of the street by private automobiles along the street, including ride-hailing services, Curbed reports.

Diagram showing where cars will be allowed to cross Market Street. Image courtesy of Better Market Street.

The $604 million initiative would transform Market Street between the Embarcadero, at the foot of the city's downtown, and Octavia Boulevard on the western edge of the city center, where the Mission, SOMA, and Civic Center areas meet.

The move comes as New York City's bus lan...

Minneapolis bans new drive-through facilities

2019-08-10T07:00:00-04:00

Research has shown that areas around fast-food restaurants are especially dangerous for pedestrians because drive-throughs require more driveways, which introduce potential points of conflict. Plus, drivers tend to be distracted just before they have ordered their food — and in the moments when they start driving away with it. A Florida study found that each fast-food restaurant in a low-income block added an average of 0.69 pedestrian crashes every four years.

Streetsblog reports that as part of an ambitious comprehensive plan update, Minneapolis has outlawed the creation of new drive-through facilities within the municipality.

The forward-looking Minneapolis 2040 plan will also do away with parking requirements and single-family zoning across the city.

Oslo's city center goes (almost) car-free

2019-07-11T07:30:00-04:00

[Oslo] has just phased out the last on-street parking spaces in the city centre, giving an edge to transit, pedestrians and cyclists without banning cars. The initiative included incentives for cyclists such as new bike lanes, including better lighting and snow removal, along with subsidies for electric bikes and cargo cycles. Council also expanded transit services and lowered fares.

London, Berlin, Paris, Toronto, and an increasing number of cities are aiming to reduce traffic congestion, polluted air, and valuable urban space occupied by parked cars through policy changes that promote walkability, pedestrian- and cyclist-friendly (and in certain cases, car-light or even car-free) city centers, and an overall improved quality of life.

Oslo became a closely monitored model of a hybrid approach: after the proposal of a complete ban of cars in the capital's center was met with fierce opposition from business owners, who feared decreased commerce, the city decided to close off only certain streets to motor traffic but replace the more than 700 downtown parking spots with bike lanes, greenery, and pedestrian-oriented infrastructure.

"Cities, like Oslo, have been built for cars for several decades, and it’s about time we change it," Hanne Marcussen, Oslo’s vice mayor of urban development, told Fast Company. “I think it is important that we all think about what kind o...

Architecture critic Mark Lamster on the manipulative design of CVS Pharmacy stores

2018-07-12T15:21:00-04:00

[T]hough in practice CVS is context agnostic: A CVS looks like a CVS no matter where it is. It is a structure without character or distinction, and to walk along such a building is an unpleasant experience that degrades pedestrian life, the civic space and all the other properties around it.

Architecture critic Mark Lamster of The Dallas Morning News gives his two cents on why CVS Pharmacy, America's largest pharmacy chain, should rethink the “manipulative designs” of their retail stores, describing it as a case of “urban malpractice by chain retailers”.

“As a CVS customer, I would like to see the company do a better job of embracing the city on which it depends [...],” Lamster writes in the piece. “In areas where there is a growing pedestrianism, where the city is discovering a new walkability, it needs to rethink its designs.”

When walkability goes up, so do home prices

2016-08-25T09:56:00-04:00

Los Angeles, where homes sell for a median price of $475,000, has an overall Walk Score of 66.3. Each additional walkability point adds an average of $3,948, or a 0.83% bump, to the sale price. [...] Pedestrian access adds the most proportional value to homes in cities such as Atlanta, where the overall score is 48.4 and revitalization efforts are starting to open up more community gathering hubs. A single-point upgrade to an Atlanta home’s Walk Score boosts the sale price 1.69% on average.

More on the relationship between pedestrianism and the market: