Cities are becoming more built up and less hospitable to wildlife, which is in alarming global decline. Consequently, cities are becoming worse for their human inhabitants, who benefit from contact with nature, and losing out on the vital ecosystem services that urban greenery provides. This is a particular issue in residential streets, as domestic gardens offer significant potential for greenspace and wildlife habitat, but their value is misunderstood and their management is largely unregulated. Visual communication techniques are effective at engaging residents in city planning and could therefore offer a solution by inspiring community action to rewild urban streets. The article argues, with reference to an urban rewilding campaign created to support London becoming a National Park City, that visualisation can be used as part of an agenda to reverse biodiversity loss, and make cities healthier, more sustainable places to live and work. The case study uses architectural drawings of a residential street adapted to enhance its greenspace and biodiversity to encourage residents to transform their homes, gardens and streets. The study found architectural drawings have the potential to inspire and empower people to make changes to their neighbourhood by communicating an aspirational vision, depicting a cohesive proposal at a whole-street scale, and organising practical information and guidance. The case study provides a model for London and other cities to use vision drawings as a catalyst to increase their greenspace and biodiversity, creating a worldwide network of National Park cities.
“Es Pou de Can Marianet Barber” is a historical place name in the interior of the island of Formentera (Spain). A rural plot where several..
The Stura di Lanzo is a river that flows into the Po in Turin, in proximity of an old, devastated, celebrated park. The juxtposition of many contrasting aspects (the park, fossils of infrastructure…
Image 10 of 14 from gallery of Flashback: Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum / Safdie Architects. Photograph by Timothy Hursley
Image 15 of 29 from gallery of Architecture in Mexico: Projects that Highlight the Chihuahua Territory. COºRDENADA Centro de Diseño / HADVD Arquitectos. Image
“Es Pou de Can Marianet Barber” is a historical place name in the interior of the island of Formentera (Spain). A rural plot where several..
Wow, some incredible captures of buildings designed by the great architect Louis Kahn, photographed by Naquib Hossain. In fact Naquib has a small website dedicated to Louis Kahn which he has coined a “Visual Archive”, quite fitting for this particular series. If you’ve not seen it before I’d recommend having a browse here, it’s basically a homage to Louis Kahn and his works through a collection of photographs. Interestingly enough ...
The collapse of Maningrida's art centre in the Northern Territory last year was a wake-up call for the Aboriginal art community, which continues to suffer.
Latz + Partner: With some 100 projects, the International Building Exhibition Emscher Park (IBA) in the Ruhr District was attempting to set quality building and planning standards for the environmental, economic and social transformation of an old industrialised region. The landscape park Duisburg Nord is one of these projects: The existing patterns and fragments formed […]
Matthew Rangel is an artist from the San Joaquin Valley in California beneath the Sierra Nevada Mountains. His digital and analogical prints communicate his thoughtful explorations of mountainous territories made through cross-country hikes, interviews and pictures. Rangel's works reveal how...
Designing for Personal Space in Public Interior Spaces Everyone has four different spaces, intimate, personal, Social and Public (shown in image above). Personal space – “an area with invisible boundaries surrounding a person’s body into which intruders may not come.” Robert Sommer. Therefore everyone is like being wrapped around by a bubble (shown in the image above.) The average distance or the radius of personal spaces is around 60cm; this number differs from person to person. Ones personal space is influenced by gender, size, personality, mood and age. When personal spaces are invaded, this will bring a level of uncomfortable feeling to the one being invaded. Sometimes this unwanted feeling cannot be escaped, especially in public spaces of the highly dense cities. Can designs help to resolve or ease this unwanted feeling? Hitting into stranger’s shoulders constantly happens on the streets of Hong Kong, especially during the public holidays (shown in the image below.) No Hong Kongers can escape from it when they walk on the pedestrian walk way. What can design do to help fewer invasions of personal spaces? For example, Planners could Separate the direction of traffic to onward on one side and downward on the other, or widening the pedestrian walkway to allow ones to evade each other. From my experiences, lifts in Hong Kong can get very packed sometimes. I used to get quite uncomfortable standing inches away from strangers from all front. What if travelling between floors could be done without lifts? Slides could be installed instead of lifts, as they only allow one person to travel on per time (shown in the image above.) While peoples personal space won’t be invaded and also making the journey a fun experience. The orientation of sitting can also determine ones level of comfort. As the results from the observation carried out from the Robert Gifford book show, people seems to prefer sitting back to back from strangers, then sitting side by side to strangers.) In public spaces such as the underground train, where row seats are applied (shown in the images above), designers could consider back to back sitting arrangements as this will give a better level of comfort due to the back to back orientation, and less interaction between ones personal space. Having travelled to a lot of different airports, I can’t help notice transit passengers sleeping on the seats of the airport. Most of the time, I tend not to seat in the same row as them or even not sit at all. With the installation of sleep boxes, passengers don’t have to take up the whole row of seats while they are sleeping (the image above shows the layout of the Dubai airport with sleep boxes installed.) References- http://www.femalenetwork.com/travel-leisure/travelers-tales-a-weekend-in-hong-kong http://www.jupiterimages.com/Image/royaltyFree/dv1923006 http://www.spaciousplanet.com/world/all0/question/china.html http://personalitycafe.com/intj-forum-scientists/8564-intjs-reactions-breaking-personal-bubble-2.html http://leecannon.blogspot.com/2009/09/personal-bubble.html http://www.thecoolhunter.net/article/detail/1699
Image 1 of 23 from gallery of Integral Territorial Center of the Commonwealth of Olivenza / Daniel Jiménez + Jaime Olivera. Photograph by Jesús Granada
