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| Morningside Heights, A Saturday |
''In our ever-urbanizing world it is essential to be both idealistic and pragmatic about how we choose to live. If we’re to make our cities healthy, happy and resource-efficient then we must recalibrate the measures used by practitioners to focus more on quality of life: we should invert the space given to cars for people.''
Gehl Architects
According to research evidence, 80% of the public space in
towns consists of roads for vehicles. In the early 90s, a worldwide movement
was founded in London called "Re-claim the streets" where people
occupied the streets organizing dance festivals or street parties. In that way
they made them a free public space available for citizens. They also wished to
promote through interaction the neighborhood values that are arguably lost in
modern mega-cities. As Henri Lefebvre
claimed, public space is a space that everyone has the right to be. Nowadays,
this has the form of street markets or other events like the one in Manhattan
last Saturday where an inflatable construction for kids, designed to promote
playing in the streets, could possibly change the way we represent in our mind
the icon of a mega-city. What will be the future of the street? Is it going to
remain just a medium for transportation? Or, is it going to be a void in the
city occupied by people?
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