A really good short video on the realization that’s decades-old but now spreading: cars occupy an incredible (some might say insane) amount of public space; it wasn’t always like that and doesn’t have to stay like that either.
We’ve linked before to articles by Reimagining the Civic Commons, a group that does important en interesting work. In this case, they share some of the work being done around socioeconomic mixing and introduce a longer report on the topic.
Those three questions are asked in a short article, by way of pondering if cities can thrive in turbulent times. The authors start with the sobering fact that so many of us have already taken stock of; even with all the good intentions of the beginning of the pandemic, we can’t take the hoped-for positive feedback loops for granted. Australia’s recovery for example was largely gas-powered. Calls for growth and the prioritizing of rebuilding the economy as it once was are already supplanting calls for rebuilding different and better.
A few months back we posted about the idea of a Department of Care which would be a cross departmental effort to take better care of the people and places in a city. The idea was originally proposed by urban designer Justin Garrett Moore.
Many people are bound to consider this group’s proposed plan no more than a pipe-dream–especially some friends in Berlin who regularly complain about the existing bike situation—but regardless, it’s a bold and beautiful one.
