Home | Model Design Manual for Living Streets. Walkable.org: home. Get Your Walk Score - Find Walkable Apartments and Rentals. PARK(ing) Valuable urban real estate, reprogrammed One of the more critical issues facing outdoor urban human habitat is the dearth of space for humans to rest, relax, or just do nothing. For example, more than 70% of San Francisco’s downtown outdoor space is dedicated to the private vehicle, while only a fraction of that space is allocated to the public realm. Paying the meter of a parking space enables one to rent precious downtown real estate. What is the range of possible occupancy activities for this short-term lease? PARK(ing) is an investigation into reprogramming a typical unit of private vehicular space by leasing a metered parking spot for public recreational activity.
On November 16, 2005 we identified a site in an area of downtown San Francisco that is underserved by public outdoor space and is in an ideal, sunny location between the hours of noon and 2 p.m. There we installed a small, temporary public park that provided nature, seating, and shade. Welcome to Great Streets! Complete Streets. The street as platform. The street as platform The way the street feels may soon be defined by what cannot be seen with the naked eye. Imagine film of a normal street right now, a relatively busy crossroads at 9AM taken from a vantage point high above the street, looking down at an angle as if from a CCTV camera. We can see several buildings, a dozen cars, and quite a few people, pavements dotted with street furniture.
Freeze the frame, and scrub the film backwards and forwards a little, observing the physical activity on the street. But what can’t we see? We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. Such data emerges from the feet of three friends, grimly jogging past, whose Nike+ shoes track the frequency and duration of every step, comparing against pre-set targets for each individual runner. Three kids are playing an online game on their mobile phones, in which the physical street pattern around them is overlaid with renderings of the 19th century city.