In anticipation of the impending Olympics, Beijing’s subway has undergone a series of major changes, documented in this series of photographs. With a total of five lines totaling 140 kilometers of track, Beijing plans to add three more lines this year to extend coverage to 200 km.
In Tokyo, green space is scarce. Photo by Yuki Yaginuma.
Over at PingMag, a website that bills itself as “an online design magazine based in Tokyo,” you can find some really neat photos and videos about what Tokyo’s residents are doing to make the dull and drab cityscape a little more green. Some of the things range from the obvious - “guerilla planting” or, if you’re a little less radical, moving potted plants onto the sidewalk - to the bizarre - playing recordings of bird’s chirping in the subway (there’s a funny video of this). There’s also the tacky - building concrete trees and plastic plants.
What’s clear from all this is that Tokyo’s residents are desperate for nature, in whatever manufactured form it can come in.
Thanks to Joe Foti for this one!
New York Times Magazine writer Randy Cohen, aka The Ethicist, sits down with Mark Gorton from The Open Planning Project and discusses the ethical implications of driving, congestions pricing, biking and the use of public space by private individuals. Mr. Cohen argues passionately for cities that are clean, livable and pedestrian friendly. Moving to a post-car culture is not about asceticism, he argues, but quite the opposite: “what we’re talking about is how people can be happier…that the automobile undermines…our ordinary daily happiness…”
Special thanks to Rob Katz for finding this outstanding video!
Jabbour’s New York City subway map alongside the current, more cluttered version.
In 1972, the Vignelli’s, the husband-wife designer-duo, created New York City’s subway map, a splendid synthesis of simplicity and elegance. Their design, with lines running at 90 and 45 degree angles, was an immediate hit, becoming an instant icon of high-modernism. But as New York City grew out of its grit - the Vignelli’s map depicted New York’s rivers a grimy brown - it was soon scrapped and later replaced with the map plastered on the hundreds of subway cars that criss-cross the city. Now Eddie Jabbour, an obsessive designer and founder of Kick Design, has taken a shot at the subway map, creating a bright and bubbly map, inspired by the aesthetic of web 2.0. Sadly for Jabbour, his map has not been embraced by the MTA, who, according to the Gothamist, claim that it is riddled with geographical inaccuracies. (It’s not like this stopped the MTA before; after all the Vignelli’s map displayed Central Park as a square.)
In a future post, I’ll talk a little bit about the design of the Metrobus map for Mexico City, where designers relied heavily on iconography as opposed to text in order to make the map accessible to the illiterate.
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