Trend Watch, October 2016

Print-it-yourself street furniture

Print-it-yourself street furniture

Inspired by WikiHouse, an open-source, easy-to-assemble home, Better Block has launched WikiBlock, an open-data hub with a library of print-on-demand placemaking tools.

Users can download free plans and assembly manuals for a collection of 29 objects including stages, kiosks, planters, benches and tables.

Builders bring the PDF and sheets of plywood to a makerspace and use a CNC router to cut out the pieces, which usually pop into place with a few smacks from a rubber mallet – no need for screws, nails or glue.

Read more at City Lab.

How to design a city for women

How to design a city for women:

City Lab tracks efforts in Vienna, Austria, to improve women’s experience of living in the city since the nineties – backing each proposal with a social study.

Urban planners have been melding ‘gender mainstreaming’ and city design in Vienna for more than two decades now, and City Lab says they have it down to something of a science.

Before a project gets underway, data is collected to determine how different groups of people use public space and the rationale for the new development.

For example, following a study of children in parks, which found that girls disappeared from the space after age nine, the city redesigned two of its parks.

They added footpaths for better accessibility and volleyball and badminton courts for a wider variety of activities.

Landscaping was also used to subdivide large, open areas into semi-enclosed pockets of park space.

Almost immediately, city officials noticed a change. Different groups of people, girls and boys, began to use the parks without any one group overrunning the other.

Photo: Franziska Ullmann.

Jane Jacobs, placemaking pioneer

The great imbalance:

The Project for Public Spaces (PPS) brings us the transcript of a speech from placemaking pioneer Jane Jacobs, who addresses a so-called “great imbalance” in the economics of funding the public realm.

Jacobs’ writing and activism changed the way many people understand city planning and economics, says PPS, and gave ordinary people the license they needed to trust their own experiences and insights.

Though she delivered the speech 1964, PPS says an embarrassment of riches for designing and building things and a dearth of support for managing, running and adjusting things, remains intact, and is pertinent to placemaking today.

Image: An Illustrated Guide to Jane Jacobs by James Gulliver Hancock.

Glowing-Bike-1

Glowing blue bike lane:

Poland has unveiled a new bike path that glows bright blue at night.

The lane is illuminated by phosphor, a synthetic material charged by sunlight.

Inhabitat says the path near Lidzbark Warminski can emit light for around 10 hours. It is intended to improve the safety of cyclists by night.

Photo: TPA Instytut Badan Technicznych.


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Trend Watch, September 2016

The science of happy cities: Happy City, a Canadian organisation, makes the case for retrofitting cities for happiness and argues that streets, parks, shopping centres, housing estates – most urban infrastructure – can be designed to make people feel happier, behave better and be kinder. Their first tip: people are nicer to each other when they walk more slowly. “If we give a damn about human wellbeing in cities, we need to study the emotional effects of spaces and systems,” says Charles Montgomery. “We need to use evidence to help fix the horrific mistakes we’ve made over the last century.” Read more at The Guardian. Photo by Elizabeth Villalta on Unsplash. Books loose on the rail: Two Melbourne friends inspired by a UK idea of leaving novels on public transport for …

  • 14 sep 2016
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Trend Watch, August 2016

smart pavement: Melbourne design agency Büro North is proposing in-ground traffic lights to safeguard pedestrians glued to their smartphones. Architecture & Design reports that the firm developed the idea following reports of accidents involving players of the augmented reality game Pokémon Go (see our White Paper on Pokémon, augmented reality and cities). Read the full story and watch the video, here. Photo: Büro North. #GetSunflowered: David Bullpitt documents beautiful urban interventions with the planting of sunflower fields in prime renewal areas in the La Trobe Valley, Victoria. In Architecture AU he writes, “the Get Sunflowered project by RMIT University’s Office of Urban Transformations Research (OUTR) offers an un-ashamedly happy intervention.” The project received an Award of Excellence in this year’s Victorian AILA awards. See the latest via the #getsunflowered Facebook feed, or visit the website for …

  • 23 aug 2016
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Trend Watch, July 2016

Floating Piers: More than one million people are reported to have walked on water at Lake Iseo in northern Italy, courtesy of two miles of fabric walkways called the Floating Piers. The project was conceived by Christo and his late wife Jeanne-Claude in 1970. Realised almost 50 years later, it cost around $22 million, funded by Christo himself. From June 18 to July 3 in 2016, the lake was reimagined with 100,000 square meters of shimmering yellow fabric, carried by a modular dock system of 220,000 high-density polyethylene cubes floating on the water. Wired describes its construction here, and Christo’s story, notes and drawings here. Photo: The Floating Piers at the island of San Paolo, Italy by NewtonCourt, Wikimedia Commons. Secrets of bent trees: The Daily Mail reports that bent trees all over the United States have baffled …

  • 5 jul 2016
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