Are towns designed for the benefit of men? BBC on a Cambridge University study explaining road planning is better suited to men’s needs than women, “Studies show women make more complex journeys than men, dropping children off at school, going to work, getting the shopping before going home…In contrast, men tend to just travel straight to work and back again. Women are also more dependent on public transport, making 75% of bus journeys and only 30% have access to a car in the daytime.” (via.)
Years ago, in George Ayittey’s Africa in Chaos, I read about African cities replicating European landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, hoping to attract tourists. Unfortunately, I can’t find any photographs or references of this practice online. But, the Wikipedia entry for Architecture of Africa is a fascinating read, “The Italian futurists saw Asmara as an opportunity to build their designs. Planned villages were constructed in Libya and Italian East Africa, including the new town of Tripoli, all utilising modern designs.” Here’s an article on the capital of Eritrea, and another from the NYT, “Bold experimentation that might have gone too far in Europe was permitted, even encouraged, in this colonial outpost. ‘The Italians tried to express the modern Roman empire in grand terms on a blank slate, just as the British did in Delhi,’ said Gabriel Abraham, an Eritrean architect based in Cambridge, Mass. What remains today is an architectural mishmash, but one that makes Asmara one of rarest concentrations of modernism in the world.” Here’s a book about “Africa’s Secret Modernist City.” (And some Flickr images.)
What is the life of models /proposals /plans for projects that never get built /realized? Do these become art? Documentation of fictions? Narratives of the future? Yes, they become art. Art is, in general, nothing but failed or dysfunctional design - Art Lies interviews Boris Groys, author of Art Power (via.)
Why not camp off the highway? “I don’t know off hand what commercial land near a major highway in the GTA goes for, but I am sure that speculators have stood on an overpass, cigar poised in frustration, at the thought of the wasted space. And have hungrily schemed of a way to generate revenue from it.” Already camping is contrived for a taste of danger, what better than the “abject terror at 4:00 am when the 18-wheeler veers onto the corrugated shoulder. He’s over duty-time and dozing despite the coffee and you swear his rig has your name on it. But the ridges wake him and he pulls the wheel just in time to save his life and yours.” - Raise the Hammer
“The Rise of the Ephemeral City” in Metropolis: “Likely to fail, are the attempts of places such as Manchester, Cleveland, and Detroit to tie their futures to becoming ‘cool.’ With an emphasis on what the Romans would have called ‘bread and circuses,’ leaders in these old industrial centers think cultivating their cultural cachet will lure enough skilled workers and affluent singles to their towns… ‘There are simply not enough yuppies to go around,’ demographer William Frey says.”
In the early 90s, Jan Gehl was invited to Melbourne to suggest ways to improve the streets and public spaces. Ten years later, the city emerged as a “pedestrian paradise.” And it serves as a model for other “New World” cities, built around the automobile. This “provides ample evidence that those who say it can’t be done in Indianapolis, Detroit or LA may be selling their cities short.” - Treehugger.
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