25 de março de 2013

Post+Capitalist City #4 Move

Collage Competitions is a cycle of competitions for prospective thinking in terms of urban planning, architecture, political, social and economical spaces in a global scale.

Students, architects, urban planners, designers, artists and all active thinkers are invited to submit their ideas and share their visions to the world.

MOVE

[Traffic, transit, migration, nomadism]

«When traffic delays and confusion seem hopeless, remember that men of vision are working on the problem. Actually traffic engineers are planning city streets and country highways free from stop and go…
1. Sidewalks will be elevated – you’ll walk and shop ABOVE Main Street, actually cross OVER it.
2. Local traffic will use the FULL width of the streets below – no sidewalks, no parked cars. Loading and unloading will be done INSIDE the buildings.
3. High-speed, long-distance traffic will have its own elevated, one-way lanes, no stop lights or intersections.»
«Pedestrians -
Express Traffic -
Local Traffic -
- each will be given a clear path by 1960»
- predicts NORMAN BEL GEDDES, authority on future trends.
~ «This is the City of TOMORROW» Advertisement brochure for SHELL, before 1960.

Since Norman Bel Geddes predicted a bright future for transportation in our cities, our way to envision traffic today still deals with the same issues. Nevertheless, the way we approach them is orientated towards conscious and eco-responsible visions. Only 100 years after the beginning of mass-production of affordable cars, today the notion of traffic jam became of common knowledge. Whereas technologies and progress along the past century increased speed and reduced psychological distances, the super- abundance of motorized self-transportation tends to slow down exchanges and connections.

As most roads belong to the public space, this can be seen as a «tragedy of the commons», for which planers and engineers attempt to forecast traffic flows using empirical models. But despite all the attempts for fluid traffic, people all over the world – when asked what could change to make their city better – would answer in majority: the traffic. The seemingly limitations of transportation do not stop with the example of cars and roads. Transport systems, such as the Tokyo Metro suffer regularly from rush hours. The need to move has become an indisputable matter – even more with the urban growth and the dependency of the city for its flexible citizens.

Planes and high speed trains complete the image of the extension and almost unlimitedness of our extended possibilities of the radius of our movements. Though in fact, it became usual for urban citizens to spend up to 50% of the time they spend working simply «commuting». If urban centers keep being the place of work, the distance from the affordable house to work increases naturally with the raise of the estate market and the continuous movement of the populations to the outskirt of cities.

With the extension of the city, the possibilities for restructuring or adding new transport systems appears. Contemporary visions contain solutions for a human and eco-conscious flux management. Political initiatives as the phenomenal urban renewal of Bogota and the implementation of the bus rapid system Transmilenio are being copied in several highly congested cities around the world. Models of democratization of the public transportation come to become popular, such as the Netherlands, Denmarks and Germanys endeavor towards the «bike-able city» or the implementation of low consumption car-sharing systems, take-away bicycles or plugs for electric cars.

Traditionally the freedom of movement contains issues of gender and class as well. Still today patterns of mobility differ between social groups. These inequalities can be observed on a global scale. As transportation has always been the mirror of social conditions, today the movement of populations towards other economically more attractive countries create a new phenomenon of global economic migration and more particularly a new status: the economic refugee. The freedom of movement is therein contested, as the subsequent reinforcement of borders polices tend to question the meaning of freedom, identity and citizenship.

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Could we imagine an alternative society in which the free movement of people takes part of their human rights? If people could follow the path of the internet and the migration of information, what would happen to our society? Would our ability to move depend on money and how would it influence tourism? How can we deal with the freedom of movement and borders? How could we overcome the dilemmas of urban mobility? Would there be a changing urban aesthetic relating to urban space and technologies of transport and communication? What could be the future of the pedestrian? And how could our movements shape the urban landscapes and our daily lives in the cities?

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>>> Now it’s your turn! Show us your ideas to re-think how we move, how we migrate and a city with another system of moving culture and structure!

Ver mais:
http://www.collagelab.org/en/post-capitalist-city-move/
http://www.collagelab.org/pdf/poster_MOVE_EN.pdf

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