Category: transportation

  • The Suburban Prelude: The City (1939)

    An interesting film, created as part of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, is ‘The City‘, an heavily anti-urban vision of the perils of the the modern city agglomeration.  Using a number of images from both the smoky and polluted industrial Pittsburgh and the crowded, frenetic cosmopolitan New York City of the 1930s, the film…

  • Feral Green Streets (Tamed)

    It was bound to happen, but a nice walk for some coffee showed the new ‘orderly frames’ for the previously unruly green street planters along Burnside Street.  Some updated images displaying what is quickly becoming ‘stock’ in the local green street planting arsenal –  (c) Jason King | Landscape+Urbanism. I’m really intrigued by the planters…

  • Calthorpe on Portland…

    “…a global model of Transit-Oriented Development.”

  • Sodding Bridges

    Although I did get stuck waiting for one of the many bridges today, my title for this post is more tongue in cheek than brit-inspired rage. Bridges are part of the fabric of Portland, and give our city much of it’s identity while also serving as vital infrastructure connecting east to west (and north to…

  • Ephemeral Urban Gardens: Temporality + Mobility

    The last remnants of ephemera sitting around the archives is under the auspices of terrestrially based gardens within the foodsheds of our cities, and – and the need to address the issues of permanence (both the pros and cons). One option is to incorporate food production within our permanent landscaping by using the principles of…

  • Sunday Parkways

    I thought it apt to post something about Portland’s Sunday Parkways, as today the route leads right in front of our house in Northeast. This concept, inspired by the Bogota, Colombia concept of Ciclovía – which is the temporary event or permanent closure of a street to automobile traffic. This is the third year that…

  • Ephemeral Road Paint

    Ubiquitous markings in our roadways are a fact of life. From road striping, lane delineation, and construction utility locates – the street is often a rainbow of color and line. Ways of expanding this notion in interesting ways to take-back some of this area of cities and make us aware of the patterns underlying or…

  • The Park: Dallas

    Following up on the post about freeway capping, a reader alerted me to The Park, a Dallas, Texas based project aimed at reclaiming spaces atop the existing freeway corridor: “Five acres of shared, public green space will deck over the existing Woodall Rodgers Freeway, bringing new traditions, shared experiences and FUN to the center of…

  • Urban Crossings – Los Angeles

    Picking up on the threads of the Vegitecture post on ‘Crossings‘, a post on The Dirt made mention of the plans to cap a number of freeways throughout Southern California. “According to The Architect’s Newspaper, there are four separate projects being considered across L.A.: one in Hollywood, one in downtown LA, and two in Santa…

  • Smart Wayfinding

    A very interesting project spotted on Designboom: “….as part of the lighting plan in montreal, the quartier des spectacles explores the possibilities of light for creating signage and expressing identity. lead by designers ruedi baur and jean beaudoin from montreal architectural design studio intégral, this recent pilot project experiments with projecting light onto the pavement…