Friday, April 10, 2009

Honk! Livable Streets Promised Land

This just in from our friends over at Livable Streets and Streetsblog in New York City.

We share this with you because we have long been convinced that one of the keys to the kinds of pattern breaks which are needed to make our cities more sustainable and people-friendly are precisely these skills of convincing visualization to show in very concrete terms what the changes are going to bring about. When this is well done, it helps to take the fear of uncertainty out – most of us after all are not necessarily welcoming of change. Particularly when the future being proposed to us is not all that familiar.

If you click here you will be taken to the front door of this entry, which will one click later take you to their “photosim” interactive graphic. You will also be invited to join their (free) Livable Streets Initiative (very handy and highly recommended) as well as invited to join their contest with a two-step before-and-after picture simulation of a project you would like to see in your own city. And if you do, make sure to share it with us here on World Streets. This kind of change management is of interest to us all.

Note: Strongly recommend you have a look at the comments which are coming in on their site. Some of them are very challenging and very sensible.

The Editor


From Livable Streets:

Here's a nice visual of what cities will look like when the livable streets movement has completely emerged from the wilderness (sorry for the extended metaphor, couldn't help it today). GOOD Magazine ran this photosim done by our very own Carly Clark in their transportation issue, with text by Streetsblog Editor-in-Chief Aaron Naparstek. They've got a whole interactive graphic that walks you through the elements of a livable street, and -- hats off to my coworkers -- it looks great.

GOOD is also putting on a photosim contest where readers can submit their own designs for a livable street. If you send something in, don't worry too hard about impressing the jury. Aaron will be the only judge.

Print this article

1 comment:

  1. There is a similar photo/video competition going on in Montreal. The theme is "My life [survival] in traffic" and their goal is to make real the impact that traffic has on our day-to-day lives. There is a blog page (in French) - they have some nice examples which are worth looking at and make good usage of the Streets Films sources. Here is a translated version of the web-page.

    Cheers,

    Zvi Leve
    Montreal Canada

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for your comment. You may wish to check back to the original entry from time to time to see if there are reactions to this. If you have questions, send an email to: editor@worldstreets.org