Design Public

So last night I attended a meeting about The Beltline and found out about a fun website called walkscore.com. You simply type in a zipcode and the site shows you the most walkable neighborhoods. I put in my own address and it showed me all the walkable amenities close to me:

While the site isn’t perfect, it’s fun to see, and is very useful if you are researching a move.

By the way, the meeting I attended was about The Beltline:

OK, if you aren’t from Atlanta, you might not care about this. However, The Beltline is a huge urban planning project (thought up by a grad student for his thesis) that involves new development, land use, transportation,re-configuring roads and traffic patterns, historic preservation, new park space and greenspace, hopefully cleansing runoff, daylighting creeks, public art, et alia, and involves planning development at a very large scale for the next 30-50 years. Last night I attended a meeting about The Beltline and its effect on my neighborhood, which borders Olmsted’s Piedmont Park. Like most cities that did most of their growing after the invention of the car, Atlanta is a very car-dependent, pedestrian and bicycle-unfriendly city, and the Beltline is a loop that will connect MARTA to a new transit loop connecting many of the intown neighborhoods. Along with the development will be new connecting streets to alleviate traffic and potentially some traffic circles. I shudder at the thought of Atlanta drivers trying to navigate a rotary, as this city is truly full of the worst drivers I’ve ever seen this side of the D.C. Beltway.

The following image is from a pre-first draft conceptual plan they (EDAW) are calling “Concept A”:

One thing I’d forgotten about from my grad school days and planning board job is that urban planners talk in a bunch of acronyms. I’d also forgotten about the fugly magic-marker images they come up with, and in spite of the simplicity of their designs, no one could tell the difference between the shades of purple on this thing, which was the difference between 9 story buildings and mile-high buildings, which caused quite a ruckus. One really scary thing about The Beltline, which is supposed to be surrounded by parkland and bike paths, is that one legal option at the moment is to sell off the land for single-family homes (the red line and yellow line along The Beltline represent a new road and single family homes along Piedmont Park). Considering some of the vultures that have been trying to profit from this project already, a lot of the possiblities are scary and I can see what a tough job the color-challenged planners have in front of them.

In a city with such severe water problems, one can only hope all of this development, which has a goal of creating at least 15 dwelling units per acre (supposedly, this is the ideal transit-friendly figure), will provide some solutions instead of making the problem worse. I haven’t heard this issue addressed much in regards to the potential of The Beltline land. Kathy Poole was a huge influence on me, and I would feel much better if she had a voice in this project.

Have you heard of Majora Carter? She rocks. In 2001 she founded Sustainable Bronx, an organization that “aims to alleviate poverty and remediate the environment through green-collar jobs.” She says “we believe that don’t you need to move out of your neighborhood to live in a better one. We believe we need to create opportunities for people who are living here already so they can stay.”

She wrote a $1.25 million dollar grant for The South Bronx Greenway:

She’s big into  green roofs as well.  There’s a Smart Roof Demonstration Project video here. To make a contribution towards the Greening the Ghetto effort, click here.

quotes and first two images via CNN.com

before and after renderings by Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects

“The library is earthy and spare, planting Modernism’s clean confidence in the blood-soaked dirt.”

O.K., that line is a bit heavy-handed, but this article is more interesting than anything I can come up with today. I keep looking over my shoulder at this page I marked in the June issue of Metropolis. It’s just such a cool story (by William Bostwick) that has it all, like solving problems of bloody civil war and kidnapping right-wing guerrillas with architecture and public spaces. It mentions Medellin, a  word I’ve only heard on Entourage.  It has  bright-eyed architects fresh out of school who win the commission before they even have an office set up.  There is striking vernacular style made from local materials and constructed by the community. I can’t come up with anything half as interesting as this article, so I’m sharing it with you. Go read it in full over here. Maybe you already did. It is the June issue, after all. I tend to let my Metropolis issues stack up like most people let The New Yorker stack up.

photos by Nicolas Cabrera Andrade via Metropolis.com

This NYTimes article cracked me up this morning. Much as I dream of living in Manhattan, this shot makes me appreciate having a dining room all the more:

Although, the idea of having an impromptu dinner party on the Brooklyn Bridge sounds genius to me:

photo by Andrew Henderson for The New York TImes, Piotr Redlinkski for The New York Times