What would our world’s cities be like if they were filled with great public spaces, using human-dominated design instead of auto-dominated design? Our Cities Ourselves, a project of the Institute for Transportation & Development Policy (ITDP) imagines this in ten mega-cities across the globe, from Jakarta to Mexico City to Buenos Aires, asking some of the world’s leading architects to rethink certain areas within them. The renderings show freeways turned into “High Line” style parks, roadway areas converted to public space and new parks along riverfronts. As the project website indicates, given that 60 percent of the global population, or five billion people will live in urban areas in 2030 (mostly in the developing world) — how we build our cities is of utmost importance for public health, climate change and other big issues.
WNYC provides a nice summary of all the cities, showing the “before and after” possibilities. One is below, from Buenos Aires shows how even small changes could make a big difference:
Filed under: international
So if I make some pretty pictures that are no where near grounded in reality then everything is groovy? Please…..and i’m so f*(*&^ tired of hearing about the Highline. Give me a $100 million/mile and I can achieve genius.
Rethinking urban environments is much more than photoshop
….absolutely!