I thought this might be a rotten way for you to start your day. Just to let you know that all the dinosaurs are not dead. This chilling Brave New World illustration from an article that appeared in Monday's New York Times. Click here to check it out.
The news is not quite as bad as that, this being one of the more outrageous images resulting from an architectural completion commissioned by the government last summer, looking for ideas for Le Grand Paris (the greater Paris region which as yet has no legal entity), but which is marked by very large economic and life quality differences depending on where you live. They selected ten mainly well known architectural firms to have a go. There are, as you might well suspect plenty of worthy ideas in the contributions. For more you can Google "Le Grand Paris" or, in French "Grand pari de l’agglomération parisienne"
Perhaps someone might tell me how much do architects actually know and or think about the complex ins and outs of sustainable transportation. A lot?
Eric Britton
Source and fair use:
This article originally appeared in the New York Times of 16 March 2009, by their reporter Nicolai Ouroussoff. You can view their original article here.
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Something that disturbs me about all the entries for this competition is the amount of investment in Paris that is involved. This will reinforce the dominant position of Paris in France, which is already excessive. The growth of Paris since WW2 seems to me to be a terrible tragedy. A similar mistake is being made here in London and in many other large cites round the world, especially capitals. I think investment in these cities shoukd be minimised and should instead be directed to buiding up regional centres
ReplyDeleteStephen Plowden, stephenplowden@blueyonder.co.uk
www.worldstreets.org
London, England
1. To follow Stephen: I totally agree with you here. The proposed High Speed Rail Lines in the UK will provide better connections to London, but will lead to the sucking out of life from our regional capitals and other big cities. The money would be better spend on local transport initiatives in all our cities over 500,000 population.
ReplyDelete2. I think sometimes, embarrassingly, Architects (and particularly Urban Designers) know and sense more than we transport planners are comfortable with. In teaching and practicing the same old rubbish for the last 50 years, we have stayed still while the world has moved on. At the most local level, we are in the street (which is the domain of the Urban Designer, and often the Architect). We need to have knowledge of many disciplines - in fact, I would argue that we should be "Urbanists" rather than sitting in our boxes of Town Planner, Transport Planner, Urban Designer, Arts Officer, Regeneration Officer etc. Transport in cities is dead. Life in cities is just beginning.