I took last Friday off to spent some quality time at the new MoMA (and alas, forgot my camera!) so here's the backlog.
"Planning our places around our people", Scotsman
An editorial about Edinburgh, Scotland's new outlook on creating places, not just designs.
"A path to road safety with no signposts", NY Times
Profile of a leading traffic engineer in Netherlands, who espouses the technique of no rules as the ultimate way to guide traffic for safer and less congested roads
"In praise of strip malls", Globe and Mail
Praising the vibrancy of strip malls, where multiple services are provided and many people congregate. This article is a direct refute of the longstanding opinion against the aesthetics of strip malls, but I personally find the actual buildings to be OK, only that they usually are fronted with parking lots, and also sit side by side along multiple lane highways, creating a certain contextless blandless, thereby affording passersby, who may not know about the Jamaican roti inside, little information about what the supposedly vibrant places offer.
1.24.2005
weekend roundup
Posted by Shin-pei at 10:35 AM
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2 comments:
There isn’t much about strip malls that I find defensible (though I plead ignorance to the economics of strip malls versus more traditional downtown development).
They are rarely physically attractive, largely because the face they show to the world is one of cars and parking lots. They are dehumanizing, because generally you get out of your car only to zip in and out of one store rather than to walk around and window-shop; one of the pleasures of walking through a downtown is the likelihood that you will bump into someone you know – a point made not long ago on someone else’s blog, although I forget whose. Bumping into someone at a strip mall is rare and fleeting, and more likely than not results in a trip to the body shop.
To top it off, the Globe and Mail author sets up a straw man when he says that strip malls offer more choices than the homogeneous indoor versions. That’s true, but so what? The choice to me is between strip malls and the much more pleasant and equally diverse downtown areas.
Plus, as I noted here (http://thissphere.blogspot.com/2005_01_01_thissphere_archive.html), with tongue in cheek, the social consequences of strip mall development take many forms.
Yes, I too prefer downtown spaces. But there can be hidden gems in strip malls, which I do not want to overlook and that I think this article highlighted, though not well. In some cases, strip malls are the only place where small business entrepreneurs can afford to take a risk. I remember eating at a divine Vietnamese restaurant somewhere in Maryland, outside of DC. It was in a strip mall, because that's where the Vietnamese community set down its roots.
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