MOSS CROSS / A cross made from Moss was created for The Urban Physic Garden. A temporary community project built and designed by artists, designers and architects to promote nature and its power to heal. Moss contains healing properties and was often used to treat wounds during world war II, it has an anti-bacterial quality in that it is very acidic and may have been responsible for saving thousands of lives during the war. Because of its ability to retain water, dry sphagnum moss makes an excellent sponge. Sphagnum wound dressings can be 3–4 times as aborbent as cotton equivalents. The plant can be used as an antiseptic, and medicines made with this are used to treat skin conditions.
Text and images by Anna Garforth
America is fast becoming a pop-up nation. From sea to shining sea, her cities have been swept up in the frenzy for temporary architecture: Brooklyn vendors sell their wares in artfully arranged shipping containers; Dallas’s Build a Better Block group champions DIY painted bicycle routes and pop-up small businesses; architects in San Francisco are repurposing metered parking spaces into miniature parks; residents in Oakland, California rallied to create an entire pop-up neighborhood. The phenomenon has even climbed its way from grassroots origins to the agendas of local authorities: D.C.’s office of planning sprouted a Temporary Urbanism Initiative, while New York’s transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan is implementing what she calls “Jane Jacobs’s revenge on Robert Moses” with her fast-acting interventions favoring pedestrians and cyclists. The temporary, so it seems, is overtaking the permanent. But how permanent is our current fascination for the temporary?
Ascher - Los Nuevos Principios Del Urbanismo
/via periferiadomestica /src: Café de las ciudades
Ascher - Los Nuevos Principios Del Urbanismo_
- Elaborar y dirigir proyectos en un contexto incierto - De la planificación urbana a la gestión estratégica urbana.
- Dar prioridad a los objetivos frente a los medios - De reglas de la exigencia a las reglas del resultado.
- Integrar los nuevos modelos de resultado - De la especialización espacial a la complejidad de la ciudad de redes.
- Adaptar las ciudades a las diferentes necesidades - De los equipamientos colectivos a equipamientos y servicios individualizados.
- Concebir los lugares en función de los nuevos usos sociales - De los espacios simples a los espacios múltiples.
- Actuar en una sociedad muy diferenciada - Del interés general sustancial al interés general procedimental.
- Readaptar la misión de los poderes públicos - De la administración a la regulación.
- Responder a la variedad de gustos y demandas - De una arquitectura funcional a un diseño urbano atractivo.
- Promover una nueva calidad urbana - De las funciones simples al urbanismo multisensorial.
- Adaptar la democracia a la tercera revolución urbana - Del gobierno de las ciudades a la gobernancia.
En conclusión, para resumir y calificar este inicia su camino, al menos en el mundo occidental, decir que es:
- un urbanismo de dispositivos: no se trata tanto de diseñar planes como de establecer dispositivos que los elaboren, los discutan, los negocien y los hagan avanzar;
- un urbanismo reflexivo: el análisis no precede a la regla y al proyecto, sino que está presente permanentemente. El conocimiento y la información se usan antes, durante y después de la acción. Recíprocamente, el proyecto se convierte plenamente en instrumento de conocimiento y negociación;
- un urbanismo precavido que da lugar a controversias y que se procura los medios para tener en cuenta las exigencias del desarrollo sostenible;
- un urbanismo participativo: la concepción y la realización de proyectos son el resultado de la intervención de actores con ideas distintas y de la combinación ideas;
- un urbanismo flexible, de consenso, de efecto en sintonía con las dinámicas de la sociedad;
- un urbanismo heterogéneo, compuesto de elementos híbridos, de soluciones múltiples, de redundancias, de diferencias;
- un urbanismo estilísticamente abierto que, al separar diseño urbano de las ideologías político-culturales y urbanísticas, deja terreno para elecciones formales y estéticas;
- un urbanismo multisensorial que enriquece la urbanidad de un lugar. Dicho con otras palabras, el neo urbanismo es un plan particularmente ambicioso que necesita más conocimientos, más experiencias y más democracia.
Fuente Café de las ciudades
The Spontaneous City
This book presents the concept of the Spontaneous City as an alternative direction of design thinking and urban planning opposed to traditional rigid city planning. The era of large-scale urban planning is over.
Urban Pioneers: Berlin Experience with Temporary Urbanism
I posted a review of The temporary city. In english this time. Great book!
“Why Don’t Real Estate Developers Just Ask Us What We Want?
Emily Badger. March 8, 2012
It’s not all that difficult to identify what kinds of new development a neighborhood needs. There’s no pharmacy, no grocer, no gas station for miles? These are pretty obvious missing pieces in a community. It’s much trickier, though, to identify what the people who live therewant. A bagel shop? A vintage store? A vegan farm-to-table karaoke bar?
Real estate developers typically handle this question by not asking it at all. If you’ve got a hole in your neighborhood, a street frontage of a certain size on the vacant ground floor of a certain kind of building, you’re probably getting a Starbucks. That’s the safe bet that can shoulder the highest rent, regardless of whether or not it’s also the business that locals really want.
And so the vegan farm-to-table karaoke bar never comes to pass, and the people who’ve been coveting one must continue daydreaming. Technology, though, could potentially bridge this disconnect between what communities want and what developers are willing to give them, returning neighborhoods to something similar to that earlier time when building owners stood in front of empty storefronts and asked people, “what do you want to see here?”
Hardly anyone literally does this anymore. But the Internet can.
“Real estate development a long time ago was done by a family, or a person who generally had some sense of being in the community,” says Dan Miller, a developer with WestMill Capital in Washington, D.C. “They built something that they wanted, that they cared about, that they tended to own for a long time. It wasn’t always corporate development.”
He and WestMill unveiled a web tool in December aimed at helping neighborhoods that want local businesses instead of national replicas to communicate that to the people who might make such places possible. The site, Popularise, is currently asking what potential customers want to see inside a property WestMill owns, a 4,250-square foot building on Washington’s eclectic H Street Northeast, that had previously been an underutilized convenience store.”
Via: The Atlantic
Image: Popularise.com
A video presentation of the book The Temporary City.
The video is aimed to raise an awareness of Temporary Urbanism as a phenomenon that has to be taken into account in future Urban planning.
Melbourne laneways. Every space matters
Melbourne is recognized as one of the most livable cities for its quality of life, specially for its vibrant cultural life and the high quality of its public spaces and streets. I was visiting this city a few weeks ago and one of the things I wanted to explore were the streets of the city centre. An article discovered a before the trip, Off the Grid, Exploring the Sydney Laneway , put me on the trail of how the model street life promotion in Melbourne was the inspiration for what is now making Sydney. And laneways appeared to be a core part of this strategy.
Get to know the POPUPHOOD a new urban initiative and small business incubator for breathing new life into the city’s retail sector. It is revitalizing Oakland, block by block. This is a good initiative to make a neighborhood more pleasant and livable within a short time…..more
(Source: dftstreets)
Open Source Cities: Block by Block: Cities Tackle Big Problems With Small-Scale Solutions
By JESSIE FELLER, Regional Plan Association
The world’s biggest cities are discovering that it sometimes makes sense to go small.
Urban centers from New York to Sao Paulo to Singapore are grappling with big challenges, including climate change, population growth and fiscal constraints….
(Source: rpa.org)
Burning Man 2011 Time Lapse
From dust to dust, this time lapse covers over 5 weeks including the preparation of the event, from before the trash fence erection and after basically everyone except for DPW trickles out. Other than a few occasional pauses, the main event goest by at a rate of 3 hours every second.
“Filmed at the 2011 event in late August and early September from a perch on a nearby hilltop, the video offers a wide-angle look at the temporary city’s construction and demolition. It tracks the development of Burning Man for nearly a month leading up to the week-long event, and more than a week after as it steadily grows in size and activity, then quickly dissipates and the desert landscape of northwest Nevada fades back in.”
How to start book sharing in public space? Cool way to reuse obsolete phone booths…
The Future of the Unplanned City - airoots.org
… City users / city makers
Out of the agents that energise and produce the natural city, the post industrial artisan, the local contractor and the hardware dealer, are key characters. The local contractor is at once businessman, community player and a possible political figure. He knows the nuts and bolts of his constantly forming environment like no one else. We see him as part of the larger story of urban based class struggle that David Harvey talks about. According to Harvey, the city is no more the site where the factory exists but is – in lieu of the factory – itself the agency of production and also the product itself. It consists of the alienated worker in the planned discourse and the relatively less alienated figure – a bit like a post-industrial artisan – the contractor, his team of workers and network of collaborators. (We are aware this is a huge departure of the narrative presented but feel that this trajectory of thought is worth following as well.)
