streets
The street of an old town
Greenfill
The stoop is a space of spectatorship
Exuberant diversity in a city's streets
Equipped to handle strangers
The city's most vital organs
Working with Brian Eno on design principles for streets
Drawing pictures of cities
Off the Grid...and Back Again?
An Article by Geoff BoeingMy article “Off the Grid… and Back Again? The Recent Evolution of American Street Network Planning and Design” has been published by the Journal of the American Planning Association and won the 2020 Stough-Johansson Springer Award for best paper. It identifies recent nationwide trends in American street network design, measuring how urban planners abandoned the grid and embraced sprawl over the 20th century, but since 2000 these trends have rebounded, shifting back toward historical design patterns.
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A World Where Things Only Almost Meet
Recall that great line from Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose
How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths.
Only, here, it’s some lonely postal worker—or a geography Ph.D. driven mad by student debt—out mapping the frayed edges of the world, wearily noting every new dead-end and cul-de-sac in a gridded notebook, diagramming loops, sketching labyrinths and mazes, driving empty streets all day on a quest for something undefinable, some answer to why the world’s patterns have gone so wrong. A self-diverging world, where things only almost meet.
Buttresses
Buttresses, Ruskin writes, are structures against pressure: a cathedral’s walls want to fall outward, for example, pushed aside by the relentless weight of the roof. But this gravitational pressure can be stabilized by an exoskeleton: a sequence of buttresses that will prevent those walls from collapsing outward.
However, Ruskin points out, there is a similar kind of pressure from the waves of the sea. Think of the curved hull of a ship, he writes, which is internally buttressed against the “crushing force” of the ocean around it. It is a kind of inside-out cathedral.
The Gosling Effect
I’m sure we’ll see the rise and widespread use of authoritarian AI analytics, fed a constant stream of images and audio recordings, finding crimes that never happened in the blur of a street scene or hearing things were never said in a citywide wiretap—call it the Gosling Effect—resulting in people going to prison for the evidential equivalent of faces that were never really there.
Auditory Hallucinations from Offworld Megafarms
"The combination of a worldwide shift to GM crops and rising global temperatures led to a series of global disasters, destroying many natural resources and causing a permanent environmental imbalance. Earth’s leaders make the choice to outsource all food production to off-world corporately owned farm planets, known as ‘flatlands’." — Luke Sanger on the album Onyx Pyramid
The music, Sanger writes, is a kind of fictional soundtrack for a landscape of offworld megafarms, where a human skeleton crew has been reporting “auditory hallucinations” amplified by the effects of an artificial atmosphere. Audio scifi.