URBANmedias

The phrase “the other side of the tracks,” connoting declining neighborhoods across from railroad lines, could easily translate to the community havoc wreaked by urban interstates.

Noise, pollution, and walls of concrete can be more than a little off-putting. But new projects in cities around the world prove that freeways don’t necessarily have to be urban dead zones.

In places like San Francisco and Oakland, where earthquakes led to the replacement of several freeway stretches, interstates have been redesigned and upgraded into walkable, pleasant spaces.

Other innovative approaches are showing how to transform the right-of-way land, overpasses, and adjacent spaces to be visually attractive assets--and even raise property values as businesses and residents move closer and begin to look at their infrastructure more favorably. In Seattle, Freeway Park includes space on both sides of I-5 and a green-covered pedestrian overpass connecting them, giving a convention center easy access to a large parking structure across the freeway.

Shanghai’s dramatic light-sculpture installation on its freeway placed the road in a new visual context for residents, and dozens of examples have followed. Melbourne used art panels and artful sound barriers to enable development to move closer to the freeway. Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park, located underneath an interstate, attracts thousands of annual visitors to festivals and events and is facilitating adjacent property-enhancement by private owners.

Via Lauren Moss

Given the environmental straits we find ourselves in at present, architects and policy makers have to rethink our strategy of how to shape the city, buildings and urban space alike. This entails that we refrain from the strategies of the past and make do with the standing infrastructure that we already have.

Preserving and rehabilitating the aging steel relics of our global cities has proven an ingenious way of saving energy, while enabling newer methods of architectural planning. Projects such as the High Line have kickstarted a new age of urban regeneration–for good or bad–with initiatives from Tel Aviv to Philadelphia attempting to replicate it success on their own turf.

When it comes to urban transformation, size does not matter, per se. The subtleties of thoughtful urban projects shine through at every level, and sometime outperform their more ostentatious contemporaries.

 

Visit the link for photos and descriptions of 10 projects from across the globe, including public parks, infrastructure projects, cultural buildings and more...

Via Lauren Moss