Aaron Draplin at the Walker Art Center

God View in Port-au-Prince

Fast Company asks, Port-au-Prince 2.0: A City of Urban Villages? discussing Duany Plater-Zyberk’s new plan for Port-au-Prince (download the Downtown Port Au Prince Renewal Plan for full draft proposal):

Can Port-au-Prince be saved? More than a year after a catastrophic earthquake devastated Haiti, much of the capital is still rubble, with basic infrastructure (water, power, sewage) nonexistent. Reclaiming the core of the old city could require block-by-block redevelopment, at least according to the plans presented last night in Haiti by the architect Andrés Duany and his firm Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company.

The plans envision partial demolition of existing blocks to create parking and open space in the middle of each one. Strict codes and zoning rules would carefully regulate what gets built. Over time, one- and two-story building would be built out to four stories, with buildings on the perimeter opening onto the streets.

Answering his own question of why the plans privileged so much parking, Duany — a founding father of the New Urbanist movement — was characteristically blunt. “If Port-au-Prince is to be rebuilt, it can only be amortized by the middle class and above. The question is: how do we bring them back? Because you cannot reconstruct the city without them.”

I can’t quibble with the design: Port Au Prince historically had a mid-rise density (3-5 floors) so replacing it with a plan for growth approximating the existing height does not bother me. The focus on cars is a Middle Class MacGuffin: setting aside so much land and infrastructure for private automobiles with a hope (a hope) of supporting a perceived want, instead of supplying a concrete need – that of providing room for 2 million people – is a huge oversight. 3-4 floors is fairly dense with the inclusion of front arcades, while historical, makes sense in a tropical climate. Hopefully any zoning would allow flexibility of use so that live/work spaces could occupy the block creating a vibrant streetscape and income for those living in the units.

But the real shortfall is deeper than the design presented and is illustrated by the above image: a god’s eye view. While there were community design charrettes (I would like to know more about the process), urban design as a whole seem to suffer from overuse of the god view, divorced from the street and the person. Perhaps the scale of the system and the totality which the designer is trying to control (not to mention the history of SimCity) pushes the god view as the only way to illustrate the total system.

I wish I had a better alternative. I admit that I am looking for a better theoretical underpinning for my thoughts on urban design, and I hope to talk more about this in the near future.

Saskatchewan Wheat Pool

The Saskatchewan Wheat Pool was a grain handling, agri-food processing and marketing company based in Regina, Saskatchewan.

Evergreen National Highway

Evergreen National Highway was an informal auto trail stretching from Portland, Oregon, to El Paso, Texasthat existed in the United States and Canada in the early part of the 20th century. In the mid-to-late 1920s, the auto trails were essentially replaced in the United States with the system of numbered U.S. Highways.

Above is a thumbnail of the Ohio section of the 1918 AAA Map of transcontinental routes, showing the Lincoln Highway (full route shown below), where my extended family live. As you can see, prior to 1926, not only was the physical infrastructure poor, but the graphical wayfinding was complex and equally poor.

National Park Service Pictograms and Symobls

NPS symbols are free and in the public domain and contain all sorts of symbols and pictograms (or pictographs if you like), including recreation pictographs, north arrows, bar scales, road shields, accessibility, winter recreation, and water recreation. One of my favorites is the dam pictogram above.

Download them in Illustrator, PDF, TrueType Font Symbols and map patterns here: Map Symbols & Patterns for NPS Maps.

TimeMaps: Showcasing Duration, not Distance

TimeMaps by Dutch designer Vincent Meertens redraws transit maps according to how long the trip is from any two points in the Netherlands:

Due to the good public transportation in the Netherlands distance has become irrelevant. We can reach almost any destination by train easily and relatively quick. In our busy lives we now think in time rather than distance. Therefore the current maps, as we know them today, are obsolete. Thinking in time affects a map and hence the shape of the Netherlands also depending on the perspective from which we look. From the perspective of Eindhoven, for instance, the Netherlands is relatively small because of the quick and easy connections to other cities. At the same time, seen from a more remote and small village such as Stavoren the Netherlands is much bigger. Not only the location from which one looks, or travels, but the hour of the day is very important. At night the map will expand because there are no night trains and in the morning it will shrink once trains will commence their schedules. The map of the Netherlands will never be the same again.