As a remarkable new photo archive of urban transformations shows, making city streets more user-friendly doesn’t have to be that complicated. The archive put together by Brazilian urban design collective Urb-ihouses a collection of more than 350 before-and-after shots showing city blocks across the world that have been transformed by pro-pedestrian makeovers.
Browsing through the crowd-sourced images (culled mostly from Google Street View), the redesigns often seem pretty straightforward. Cities narrow or eliminate car lanes, put in cycle tracks, maybe lay down a light rail line if money permits. Then they expand sidewalk space and put in some extra greenery to make the place more welcoming, enticing strollers back into a formerly arid, polluted space.
So far, so standard. So why then is the archive so striking? Mainly because of its sheer volume of images, and because of its vast geographical range across six continents. This scope shows that, when it comes to policies for weaning cities off cars, we may soon reach a watershed after which such policies will no longer be an exception, but a rule.
[For more of this story, written by Feargus O'Sullivan, go to http://www.citylab.com/cityfix...reet-designs/405424/]
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