Urbanffffinds 030

It's baaaack.

And the Winner is...

"As a way of improving safety and bridging the gap between the city core and the bulging periphery, the city has launched a Defense of Modern Ruins program, stringing together blighted sights that range from industrial sights to downtrodden art-déco buildings to bureaucratic baroque whales. The program includes low-rent housing schemes, urban wilderness tours and itinerant party circuits."

Congratulations to H.B., whose entry in the Blogedanken contest recieved almost a full 50% of the public vote.

Many thanks to all of the participants for making this a fun impromptu blog-event. Note to the winner: shoot me an email and your copy of Hyperborder will be in the mail.

Blogedanken Public Poll

Here are my favorite entries from each of the six Blogedanken participants who submitted full responses. Take a quick read-through, pick the one you think is the most interesting, and vote in the public poll at the bottom of the post. One-two-three, and by April 10th we'll have a winner! That person will then recieve a copy of Hyperborder, courtesy of PA Press.

Patrixbanx
(Portland, Maine, USA)
It sure would be nice to have a suburban commuter rail network in southern Maine. It would be even nicer if the commuter rail stations weren’t sited in the middle of vast parking lots, especially closer to the urban core. So why not allow development to cluster around those stops, like say Morrill’s Corner? And by development, I mean dense development. We’ll need to reform our zoning to encourage such growth, of course – not just by creating incentives for density but by creating disincentives for sprawl as well. Oh, and remember – this is Maine, a land that get’s pretty damn cold over the course of our long winters, and global warming hasn’t turned us into South Carolina just yet. Yet I hear tell of other cities even further north that are colder and get more snow than us, yet still manage to have a vibrant street life even in depressing old February. We gots to have that. I don’t know how exactly but if we’re going to discourage driving so we can have more walkable and transit oriented neighborhoods, we might as well make the streets of Portland a pleasant place to be in the depths of winter – bike and pedestrian friendly snow clearance, warm transit shelters, fun festivals, whatever it takes.

Medea
(Medellin, Colombia)
24 hour public transportation makes shifts easier to stagger, so bus drivers are not competing with each other in hazardous maneuvers. Every bus and taxi driver will receive mandatory drivers ed and courses on politeness and good manners. If they are rude or customers complain, their punishment won´t be a fine, but they´ll have to do public service hours cleaning the riverbanks.

M.B.
(Mexico City, DF, Mexico)
As a way of improving safety and bridging the gap between the city core and the bulging periphery, the city has launched a Defense of Modern Ruins program, stringing together blighted sights that range from industrial sights to downtrodden art-déco buildings to bureaucratic baroque whales. The program includes low-rent housing schemes, urban wilderness tours and itinerant party circuits.

T H Rive
(Victoria, BC, Canada)
Wireless capable crosswalks.
Edit: *apologies for the absolute shortness of mine. explanation: The crosswalk I was requesting was the ones that go green on ALL sides so that diagonal crossing is validated. It's quicker. The wireless part was more outdoor, cafe oriented Etc green wireless spaces. The result of the mixup?>> Wireless Crosswalks. Still a good idea. (4/1/08 5:38 PM)

Dan Lorentz
(Lexington, Kentucky, USA)
Organize a strong city-wide neighborhood group to promote mixed-use planning that supports street-level vitality, and make the first priority of that group the reweaving of the city's street web to create more corners for mixed-use development.

Petersigrist
(Cambridge, England, UK)
Hovering leisure boats with transparent roofs and floors, which hover about twenty feet in the air and provide lifts around town above underwater gardens with glass walls at street level as well as terraces, balconies, shops, and restaurants that open onto the streets and river



Remember: vote or die! (Hah. Always wanted to use that in context).

Urbanffffinds 023

Apologies for the tardiness of this week's Urbanffffinds. Unfortunately, this blogger has been busy with the planning and execution of a funeral over the past several days. Regular posting will hopefully resume soon.

Urbanffffinds 022

Don't Touch The Art

In case you haven't heard, tourists are ruining Machu Picchu. The famous Incan sanctuary left over from that civilization's headier days, is starting to show signs of wear and tear after a tenfold increase in tourist numbers since 1990. In case you're wondering, that adds up to almost a million visitors traipsing across the fragile site every year. Meanwhile, in San Antonio, 2.5 million visitors a year are beginning to cause problems for another famous ruin, the Alamo. Many wandering hands have grazed the walls, and the moisture and oil from this contact is beginning to wear the structure down.

I am utterly fascinated by the fact that so many of us find ruins so compelling that, in our desire to take part in them and their history, we willingly take part in their gradual destruction. I'll admit off the bat to being one of the dreaded "touchers" in art museums...I'll walk right up to a painting and brush my finger along a particularly juicy-looking brushstroke -- after scoping out the room to check for guards, of course. I know that this makes me a terrible, horrible, no-good very bad person, but I'm making the confession to say this: I don't have a thing for touching ruined buildings, but I get it.

Consciously, the desire to touch a building like the Alamo is most likely the result of something along the lines of "Maybe Davy Crockett touched this very wall." But subconsciously, I wonder if the need to touch a historic building, or a painting, or any kind of artwork, comes from that most famous aspect of human nature: the desire to leave our mark on the world. With signs around telling us not to touch or be careful near a crumbling building, our instincts kick in, and we perform an act of counter-creative graffiti in a tiny effort to take part in recreating the world for future generations. We are not fascinated with Davy Crockett's history as an isolated idea, but with being a part of the same history as this man.

Buildings are very solid, permanent things in our day-to-day experience of the world around us. It makes perfect sense, then, that on some level we look at ruins as artworks, once-lived-in sculptures. They provide us with an opportunity not just to connect with the past, but also take part in the imagined past of the future...if that makes any sense. Ruined buildings are not solid, permenant things, but continually-evolving pieces of collaborative art. They are living history. By touching a deteriorating wall, we become architects of destruction.

(Photo from Flickr user liquidhotmagma.)


Links:
Machu Picchu site at risk (LA Times)

Remember Not to Touch the Alamo (Architectural Record)