Take Back the Streets 1

From Fast Company: "Most metropolis' are so busy building the future that they don't have time to re-think the past. Not so with Seoul, South Korea. In 2003, the city demolished a downtown freeway to restore an ancient stream that once flowed beneath the thoroughfare. More than 75% of the scrap material from the demolition was re-used to reconstruct and rehabilitate the stream banks and create a commercial corridor."


:: image via Fast Company

A couple of additional images from a great photo gallery via Inhabitat




:: images via Inhabitat

Finally, as a companion to the reconfiguration of Korean street to stream, a video 'Inspired Ethonomics' from Fast Company showing the relationship of streets and public space in urban areas.

Paper Cities

Another great video from Digital Urban shows a snippet of 'Metropolis' a time-lapse film by Rob Carter showing the evolution of Charlotte, NC: "Made entirely from images printed on paper, the animation literally represents this sped up urban planners dream, but suggests the frailty of that dream, however concrete it may feel on the ground today. Ultimately the video continues the city development into an imagined hubristic future, of more and more skyscrapers and sports arenas and into a bleak environmental future. It is an extreme representation of the already serious water shortages that face many expanding American cities today; but this is less a warning, as much as a statement of our paper thin significance no matter how many monuments of steel, glass and concrete we build."

Metropolis by Rob Carter - Last 3 minutes from Rob Carter on Vimeo.

Modelling Dynamic Processes

One of the interesting links I found on Bradley Cantrell's site showed a very cool project being developed by the UC Berkeley to simulate river dynamics, which have notoriously been difficult to replicate.

Via Science Daily: "Christian Braudrick, William Dietrich and their colleagues are the first to build a scaled-down meandering stream in the lab that successfully meanders without straigtening out or turning into braided streams. The substrate is composed of sand to represent real-life gravel; white light-weight plastic for sand, and alfalfa sprouts for deep-rooting vegetation."


:: image via Science Daily

The new information gleaned from this research will allow researchers "...to investigate the role of various factors in determining the shape and migration rate of streams and how variables associated with climate change and land use might be expected to affect river form."

While the sophistication of digital modeling continues to amaze, I find it very interesting that certain physical processes need analog physical models in order to capture the myriad variables in accurate ways. As we strive for more ways to plan for unpredictable circumstances, we may find a resurgence of the physical model, along with our digital tools, as new/old ways of understanding complex dynamic processes.