Two very cool videos of two very different cities. Above is a video of Paris rooftops (click here if video doesn’t load) and after the click is a time lapse aerial view of Tokyo. Hat tip to Digital Urban.
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Just How Aware Are You?
I like to think I am pretty observant when I am out walking through the city, but I totally failed the “Awareness Test” video up above. How did you do? Transport for London recently put these video advertisements out to draw attention to the “invisible cyclist” and experiments such as this show how easy it is to miss small details – like a cyclist. More Awareness Tests available here. (Hat tip to Open Culture)
My interest in this idea of awareness was piqued last year when I saw an article & video at Boing Boing (video after the click) describing a Harvard study on “Change Blindness” that demonstrated a shocking 75% of respondents didn’t notice a major change right in front of them. You’ll just have to watch the video.
Both examples demonstrate how little of our visual environment our brain actually processes. In the words of artist James Gurney, “Here’s proof that most of the time we look but don’t see.”
TARC Rolls Out Another Bus Music Video
After last year’s viral hit about TARC’s bike racks that generated kudos from coast-to-coast, the marketing masterminds behind Louisville’s transit agency have done it again. This time, the country hit TARC, That’s The Way I Roll has generated nearly 2,2000 online views in about 11 days. (If above video doesn’t load, click here.)
The song was written by TARC driver Dan Ridener and friends. Driver Dan Anglea plays harmonica, mechanic Warren Rowe is on guitar, and the TARCettes are dancing in Union Station. Does Louisville have the most musically inclined transit agency or what?
More On The Chickens Of Possibility City
After reporting on December 17 about two lost chickens in Nulu, readers wrote in to proclaim their love of urban chickens. It seems the mainstream media may have been listening as CNN (and Wave 3) picked up the story and ran. The piece showcases urban farmers in Old Louisville and Shelby Park. Most of the interviewees appear to be young people taking up the Urban Chicken Movement.
There’s a discussion going on at Louisville History & Issues regarding the image urban chickens bring to Louisville, but as readers repeatedly said earlier, I think this is a major bonus for the city. Urban farming represents a creative approach to urban living that should be fostered in Louisville and it certainly helps to keep Louisville weird.
If the video at the top of the post does not display, click here to watch the CNN report.
The Many Moods Of The Ohio River
It’s been a slow week at Broken Sidewalk, but I’m headed back to Louisville and plan on digging up some fresh stories to post online. In the meantime, check out this video I made comprised of photos of the Ohio River taken on the Belvedere between 2006 and 2008. As you can see, the river’s mood is constantly on the move. This is the rough draft of a three part series, so stay tuned for more in the future.
Disney’s Epcot And The City Of The Future
Take a look at Walt Disney’s vision for the city of the future, the Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow or Epcot. ”No city of today will serve as the guide for the city of tomorrow,” serves as a guiding principle as varied ideas from shopping mall living, to freeways, to pedestrian safety, to high speed transit are considered. Disney himself says the city of tomorrow must abandon the old cities and their problems and be built on virgin land from scratch.
From its “cosmopolitan convention center” to its theme-park shopping districts, Disney envisioned his 50-acre city core, completely enclosed and climate controlled like a shopping mall, hermetically sealed from the natural world. Outside of this air-conditioned environment of shops and offices, apartments, then parks and schools, then suburban houses radiate in a fantasy of controlled zoning where every use is separated from every other use.
Despite being conceived as a modern utopia based around the automobile, Epcot envisions a future of mass transit for the daily commute. ”Freeways will not be EPCOT’s major way of entering and leaving the city,” declares a confident narrator. Instead, an electrified monorail and people mover will connect the city and suburb, radiating in all directions from the core. It was envisioned that the primary use of the car would be for “weekend pleasure trips.”
Repeatedly, the dangers of automobile traffic for pedestrians are cited. The pedestrian is, in fact, declared “king” as transportation uses, like Epcot’s zoning, are completely separated. The pedestrian is “free to walk and browse without fear of motorized vehicles.” Children and bikes have separate paths in the suburbs for walking or riding to school. Electric vehicles travel on elevated roadway’s through Epcot’s downtown while underground transit carries workers in and out of the city. Separate facilities for cars and trucks are provided further underground.
Disney did eventually build a prototype city, but the end result was far from what was envisioned for Epcot. The town of Celebration, Florida chose not to abandon the cities of the past but to embrace the patterns that make them so interesting to experience. New Urbanism has been brought in to create a mixed-use town center and compact living. Celebration was just as carefully planned as the Epcot of old, but the end result is quite different. Whatever happened to abandoning the car for transit, leaving it in the garage for pleasure trips, though?
You can watch Walt Disney describe the vision in this video over here.
Celebration, Florida (Image via Wikimedia Commons)
Projectors Turn Architecture Into Public Art
A group from the Netherlands called NuFormer Digital Media has created a powerful projection system that interfaces dynamic and playful graphics with architecture. We’ve already seen how cool projected art can be when the interactive dog “Sniff” was projected onto the storefront of an East Market Street building. Imagine a building or even an entirre city that comes alive after nightfall. The temporal nature of such an installation is interesting on an urban level as well as it gets people onto the streets at night and provides a great benefit to actually living in the city (assuming the lights don’t keep you up). (via GOOD)
Apparently, projection art has really come a long way in recent years, besides the example above and Sniff, another group in Austria has created a sort of “digital wallpaper” that adds interest to the evening sidewalk-scape. See the video over here (via NotCot).
With Light Up Louisville just around the corner, how great would City Hall and Metro Hall look with such an installation? It’s not too late for 2010.
Everyone’s Doing The Pedestrian Scramble
Up above is a video showing the changes that were recently implemented on a major intersection in London called the Oxford Circus. Besides the traffic calming measures of reconfiguring the lane widths and alignments, the major change here is the implementation of what’s referred to as the “pedestrian scramble” where all vehicular traffic is stopped and the intersection is turned over to pedestrians to cross at any angle.
While this device is most commonly used for intersections with very high pedestrian volumes, such as this London intersection or the famous scramble in Japan at Hachikō Square in Shibuya, Tokyo, it has been used in less major cities as well. Wikipedia reports (without citation) that the first such intersection was implemented in the 1940s in Kansas City and Vancouver and has since been found in many other cities around the world. Tom Vanderbilt at How We Drive notes that the first occurrence could have been in Denver.
Louisville has its own pedestrian scramble of sorts without knowing it. Next time you’re at the intersection of Fifth Street and Main Street, notice how for a time all traffic is stopped and pedestrians can cross at all crosswalks (and no turns are allowed on red), meaning it should technically be safe to cross diagonally. That’s very similar to the scramble without diagonal movements codified. Below is the same intersection drawn with scramble markings. I am not sure why the intersection behaves this way without being a true scramble or if it’s legal to cross diagonally, but it’s an interesting part of Downtown.
(movie via How We Drive)
Scrambling at Fifth and Main Streets
