in the future we all live in transects
Today I woke up around 11ish and got ready. K and I ate lunch at Green Scene Bakery (article) at Boulevard and Hiawassee, I had a tofu salad sandwich and she ate some textured soy protein bbq.
She's looking for an internship in city planning, she is a supporter of "new urbanism". It aims to create cities like the old and European cities, with less reliance on cars and more walkable and safe spaces. "multi-use" is an important keyword here, because if spaces don't have several uses, they may become deserted at night and thus more dangerous. An example of a multiuse space is a tall building with shops and services at the ground level and housing up above. Some of the goals are to save energy (from car overuse) and space.
Cities after this pattern are built (or retrofitted) in shells or concentric circles, with dense urban regions in the center and gradient rings of less density stretching out to suburb style developments. It reminded me of a passage Olinda from Calvino's Invisible Cities (Hidden Cities 1):
In Olinda, if you go out with a magnifying glass and hunt carefully, you may find somewhere a point no bigger than the head of a pin which, if you look at it slightly enlarged, reveals within itself the roofs, the antennas, the skylights, the gardens, the pools, the streamers across the streets, the kiosks in the squeares, the horse-racing track. That point does not remain there: a year later you will find it the size of half a lemon, then as large as a mushroom, then a soup plate. And then it becomes a full-size city, enclosed within the earlier city: a new city that forces its way ahead in the earlier city and presses its way toward the outside.
Olinda is certainly not the only city that grows in concentric circles, like tree trunks which each year add one more ring. But in other cities there remains, in the center, the old narrow girlde of the walls from which the withered spires rise, the towers, the tiled roofs, the domes, while the new quarters sprawl around them like a loosened belt. Not Olinda: the old walls expand bearing the old quarters with them, enlarged but maintaining their proportions an a broader horizon at the edges of the city; they surround the slightly newer quarters, which also grew up on the margins and became thinner to make room for still more recent ones pressing from inside; and so, on and on, to the heart of the city, a totally new Olinda which, in its reduced dimensions retains the features and the flow of lymph of the first Olinda and of all the Olindas that have blossomed one from the other; and within this innermost circle there are always blossoming--though it is hard to discern them--the next Olinda and those that will grow after it.
Sets of zoning codes enforce and encourage the right kind of growth. Older supposedly counterproductive rules are revised, ie buildings must be X far from the street or sidewalk (engages ped interest less) and mandatory parking at businesses (buildings lost in a sea of parking and discourages ped). There was this jargon word she introduced to me, transect, which are kind of the slices for different purposes zoned in land use.
After I got home I took a short nap and drank some ostfreisian tea my parents recieved as a gift from godparents years ago. I called one of my old gfs back, we are to have coffee. She is graduated, married, and soon be moving to Germany with her military husband and studying international affairs in grad school. It will be nice to see her after a while!
Am getting some things ready for new apartment. Dad helped me put together the bedframe, and we got some furniture together for me to take tomorrow, when I grace the city for Jesse's going away luncheon. Just for reference, he is the guy who inspired me to start composing music in high school. Now he is moving back to the Netherlands (he is a dual citizen) to study composition at a conservatory.
Tonight will hopefully be more music-making.
She's looking for an internship in city planning, she is a supporter of "new urbanism". It aims to create cities like the old and European cities, with less reliance on cars and more walkable and safe spaces. "multi-use" is an important keyword here, because if spaces don't have several uses, they may become deserted at night and thus more dangerous. An example of a multiuse space is a tall building with shops and services at the ground level and housing up above. Some of the goals are to save energy (from car overuse) and space.
Cities after this pattern are built (or retrofitted) in shells or concentric circles, with dense urban regions in the center and gradient rings of less density stretching out to suburb style developments. It reminded me of a passage Olinda from Calvino's Invisible Cities (Hidden Cities 1):
In Olinda, if you go out with a magnifying glass and hunt carefully, you may find somewhere a point no bigger than the head of a pin which, if you look at it slightly enlarged, reveals within itself the roofs, the antennas, the skylights, the gardens, the pools, the streamers across the streets, the kiosks in the squeares, the horse-racing track. That point does not remain there: a year later you will find it the size of half a lemon, then as large as a mushroom, then a soup plate. And then it becomes a full-size city, enclosed within the earlier city: a new city that forces its way ahead in the earlier city and presses its way toward the outside.
Olinda is certainly not the only city that grows in concentric circles, like tree trunks which each year add one more ring. But in other cities there remains, in the center, the old narrow girlde of the walls from which the withered spires rise, the towers, the tiled roofs, the domes, while the new quarters sprawl around them like a loosened belt. Not Olinda: the old walls expand bearing the old quarters with them, enlarged but maintaining their proportions an a broader horizon at the edges of the city; they surround the slightly newer quarters, which also grew up on the margins and became thinner to make room for still more recent ones pressing from inside; and so, on and on, to the heart of the city, a totally new Olinda which, in its reduced dimensions retains the features and the flow of lymph of the first Olinda and of all the Olindas that have blossomed one from the other; and within this innermost circle there are always blossoming--though it is hard to discern them--the next Olinda and those that will grow after it.
Sets of zoning codes enforce and encourage the right kind of growth. Older supposedly counterproductive rules are revised, ie buildings must be X far from the street or sidewalk (engages ped interest less) and mandatory parking at businesses (buildings lost in a sea of parking and discourages ped). There was this jargon word she introduced to me, transect, which are kind of the slices for different purposes zoned in land use.
After I got home I took a short nap and drank some ostfreisian tea my parents recieved as a gift from godparents years ago. I called one of my old gfs back, we are to have coffee. She is graduated, married, and soon be moving to Germany with her military husband and studying international affairs in grad school. It will be nice to see her after a while!
Am getting some things ready for new apartment. Dad helped me put together the bedframe, and we got some furniture together for me to take tomorrow, when I grace the city for Jesse's going away luncheon. Just for reference, he is the guy who inspired me to start composing music in high school. Now he is moving back to the Netherlands (he is a dual citizen) to study composition at a conservatory.
Tonight will hopefully be more music-making.