This project makes me so incredibly happy. It makes use of a disused elevated old railway system in NYC and turns it into a fantastic civic space through which one gets an alternative view of the streets of new york.
Instead of demolishing this disused infrastructure, landscape architects and urban designers Field Operations along with architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro and planting designer Piet Oudolf collaborated together to celebrate civic life in one of the worlds most famous metropolises with this elevated park corridor. Remaking an old and once vital part of the industrial city into a new, vital part of the public city.
perspective view, merging vegetation and the built environment around it, giving an indication of what sort of space you can expect upon visiting the Highline.
The design celebrates the human scale, interaction between people, interaction between people and the surrounding built environment, interaction between people and industrial heritage and the interaction between people and a more romantic planting scheme that could be argued somewhat removes the visitors from the very city that this piece of infrastructure once served. As the people at dezeen describe it:
The park accommodates the wild, the cultivated, the intimate, and the social. Access points are durational experiences designed to prolong the transition from the frenetic pace of city streets to the slow otherworldly landscape above.
Top view of the Highline Park, some vegetation found on the elevated level is in fact tree canopies planted on ground level. image via dezeen
“By its nature, the Internet undermined anyone whose status depended on a privileged access to information.” —Michael M. Lewis, Next: The Future Just Happened
The loveland project has introduced inchvestments of so called microhoods, real urban lots in Detroit, that are made online, so you can say that they are rebuilding Detroit through the internet. (They are even suggesting that you buy inches as gifts) hardcore!
These spaces are located within housing and urban lots that are no longer 'productive', I am guessing that previous commercial and industrial ventures are now long gone as these buildings and lots ceased to be profitable and this obviously would've led to an abandonement in residential lots too. So these 'empty' urban lots have been standing in limbo waiting for somebody to come in and start making use of them. These microhoods are envisioned to be visitable park and garden spaces along with renovated abandonded buildings. Inchvestors buy into a set of inches and then collaborate with other inchowners in their microhood to carve out some fine ideas of what to develop on the sites. In other words, it sounds like the loveland project are creating a new type of public space based on the redundant urban spectacle. This is made possible by an innovative social tool, the internet. Watch the TED talk by founders Jerry Paffendorf and Mary Carter:
“Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings."
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Loveland is a fantastic innovation in urban development and should receive praise on the highest level. Hopefully they can maintain this concept around community based ownership and investment. The danger in rejuvenation through the arts and crafts, through creative endevours is that a gentrification eventuates in those neighbourhoods as the creative lifestyles become fashionable and so you see residential prices shoot through the roof and eventually move the artists elsewhere.
Plymouth, Lovelands first digital/analogue neighbourhood.
The Loveland website as it is formatted looks very digital. I mean, that IS the whole point. But, I guess what I am trying to convey is a need to perhaps start spatialising the incentives and the projects that are forming in the microhoods so that we can understand them more beyond a planning llot that is either square or rectangular and coloured in red, green or yellow. More pictures, more plans, sections etc. would aid in understanding the impact that this DIGITAL system as had on our ANALOGUE reality.
Living in the map is a take on the rather drained and seemingly old expression of community consultation. The idea of traditional paper pushing and prolonged waiting periods due to bureaucratic red tape seem to have been moved aside as the internet provides a platform in redeveloping and rethinking Detroit. Imagination station is behind the Living in the map concept which is a continuation of the loveland project that basically offers people to invest in so called microhoods starting as small as an inch. Living in the map seems to have just been powered up and is a website still in need of some work but the general concept is to act as a social platform for job opportunities and for sharing general information and city data of what is going on in Detroit. Imagination station also thinks up clever reclamation installations and public artworks such as this beautiful piece by Katie Newell called Salvaged Landscape whereby she intervened in a burnt down building and used wood to reconfigure the destructed material and building into a so called passageway.
Sewell is gradually demolishing this building turning it into an intervention in the process. Catie Newell describes it:
Salvaged Landscape appropriates the charred wood from an arsoned house to create spatial adjustments which uncover the material qualities reliant on flame to exist. Amidst a purposeful tear-down, the project responds to the new textures, spaces, and light effects that resulted both from the fire and demolition. Using existing material from the house as the palette and existing spaces as form-work, Salvaged Landscape creates a new room in the life of the house keying into the opportunities present in its own timeline; constructed with the demolition of the house occurring around it
Following insertion of the left-over firewood into the hollows of the savaged structure, the artist will attempt to invert the passageway. She wants to remove the remains of the old building structure and flip the passagewayonto its side so that it becomes an impenetrable structure and a celebration of the building that once was...
In the 1950s, 60 odd years ago, this ghost town was once a promising beach resort developing on Salton Lake, a saline lake located on the San Andreas Fault in Southern California. But when sea levels started to rise and increasing salinity and pollution levels and unemployment gloom became evident, the developers quickly abandoned this grand scheme to move elsewhere in search of a profit margin.
abandoned boat
saltencrusted caravan and other structures images from wikipedia
What is left is an entropic landscape of human settlement, economic dismay and namely ecological disaster. Yes, this type of phenomenon is often viewed through a negative lens. Viewed as being an end of a line, a finished state of being, a non functional environment and so on, you get my drift. Instead, I view this as being a moment in time, a state that is constantly changing, in this case there would be both new and adapted ecological environments produced by the highly saline environment and the degradation of the structures brought here by us humans, a highly functional system that may not be your picture perfect traditional beach resort but a system and a space where events still occur. There's potential to explore and investigate these new environments before deeming them redundant and proceed with generic restoration principles.
There is an irony in the faith of Salton Beach, instead of your typical charter tourists coming here for a 2-4 week holiday from their 9-5 jobs to enjoy the pastel colours, cocktails, suntanned bodies, white beaches and crystal clear water you will now get another tourist, the one that is interested in this unexpected outcome, for example, you may have movie crews shooting some scenes here for their post apocalyptic action flicks.
Salton Beach works, it's function and existence lying in our attitudes toward it. This is a stunning movie shot on location:
