Cities from the Sky, Part Two

This post is the second in a series on cities as seen from above. If you missed part one, click here.

Cities at night are as wondrous as they are mysterious. With the setting of the sun, cities transform into entirely different entities. Just think about the varied experiences of walking down a street while the sun is shining and then again after dark. But how does this experience change if these cities are seen from above? And I'm not talking about just aerial photography this time.

In the following video, astronaut Don Pettit takes us on an orbital tour around the world of cities at night. He explains the challenges of capturing such clear images from space, as the International Space Station travels around the globe at over 17,000 miles per hour. Try going that fast and capturing a high-resolution, blur-free image from your point and shoot. It's not going to happen. But Pettit and his colleagues on the ISS assembled a sophisticated mechanism that cancels out orbital motion and produces the clear, striking images you see here:



Pettit's admiration of human settlement patters comes through in his commentary. His most insightful observation is that "Cities at night are caught in a triangle between culture, geography, and technology." These elements influence everything from a city's color and brightness to its geometry. Just as cities shape our actions, experiences, and quality of life, so too do we influence the forms our cities take. In part one of this series, I made the point that cities from the sky are works of art, and Pettit shares this sentiment: "We do not construct our cities by how they might look from space. Cities at night may very well be one of the most beautiful, unintentional consequences of humanity."

This next video will bring us down to earth, quite literally. Shot from the nose of a commercial airplane, we are escorted to the tarmac during its final descent into LAX. As the sun sets and the plane travels closer and closer to its destination, we get a unique look at the City of Angels. Enjoy:

We're Stickin' with LA, and Cars Still Don't Rule the Road

Two weeks ago I posted a video by Ross Ching depicting the streets of Los Angeles devoid of automobile traffic, which created an equally eerie and visionary display of what life would be like without our primary form of transportation.

This time, I've found something a little different. As you'll see in the following creative transformations of our beloved built environment, the cars remain but much of the infamous LA asphalt does not.

La Cienega Blvd and 3rd Street (Before)



(And after)

Who is the wizard behind this disappearing act? His name is David Yoon, a self proclaimed "urban planning geek" curious enough to investigate the question: Could the entire mood of a neighborhood depend on something as simple as street width?

Look at the following images and answer that yourself.

Rodeo Drive and Dayton Way (Before)

(And after)

Third Street Promenade (Before)



(And after)

One of the reasons these images are so powerful is because of the emotional response one has when looking at them. Wide streets are alienating physically and socially, not only limiting pedestrian mobility but also making it more difficult to meet with friends and even have basic interactions with other city goers. These images play with our impulses, as our reactions to the dichotomy displayed by them can be reasonably attributed to personal experiences we've had in similar spaces.

On his blog, Yoon describes how his work exposes the asphalt elephant in the room, so to speak, and how we got into this mess in the first place:

As a writer, street-narrowing to me represents an act of fictionalization, with fiction itself being an attempt to make sense of the randomness life flings our way. The grander absurdities of Los Angeles have already been well documented — its optimistically-named enclaves, phantom star maps — but its smaller, more micro-level oddities go mostly unnoticed: sunning at an outdoor cafe just steps from the edge of a six-lane, 50mph road; eyeing the 30-second countdown when crossing an intersection; bidding farewell to friends after dinner in dreary parking lots.

There's a yearning for a more human scale out there, and a growing realization that hey, this world wasn't created by some petulant, eight-armed Deus Urbanus but by people — ordinary people, struggling to make the best design decisions they could. Los Angeles, located at Manifest Destiny's terminus and born from a mad Levittown landgrab amid giddy postwar prosperity, was not designed badly per se; it was never really designed to begin with, at least not in a coherent fashion.

Yoon also hopes that his work will spark a debate about how we can further reimagine our cities and reinvent these broken and isolating design practices, hearkening back to a question I have asked myself many times before. If design dictates how we interact with the built environment, and the extensive infrastructure now in place has contributed to so many of the problems we face today (environmental degradation, social inequality, etc.) then what can we possibly do with all of that asphalt and concrete to improve the situation? Unfortunately we can't just slice out the middle of every major boulevard and reassemble the remaining pieces as Yoon has done. There may be some ways to adapt what exists to achieve different outcomes, but that discussion must be reserved for another day. For now, let's consider Yoon's work as a vivid look into what's possible through responsible urban design, and the reactions we have to it as the proof that design matters to each and every one of us.

For a full map of all of his LA transformations (as well as images and the significance of each one), click here.

New Video, No Cars

So it seems like I've been on a little bit of a video tear lately, and what's one more to add to the list? After all, if a picture is worth a thousand words than a moving picture must be worth a heck of a lot more than that, right?

I'll tell you what's NOT moving, though, and that's anything on the (in)famous highways and byways of Los Angeles in the following clip made by Ross Ching and posted on Good (which happens to be my new favorite blog, fyi. you should check it out).

Watch:



Eerie, right? It's hard to imagine streets without their primary occupants - cars - yet here is that vision realized. The following is Ching's motivation and inspiration for the video (from his website):

I live in Los Angeles. I drive in Los Angeles. I think about traffic a lot in Los Angeles. A few months ago, I discovered Matt Logue’s Empty LA photographs. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but every time I was stuck in rush hour all-hour traffic, I found myself thinking, “What if tomorrow everyone’s car disappeared.”

What would that scene look like? How would people react? How quickly would the atmosphere rebound from centuries of fossil fuel emissions?

So I took Matt Logue’s still photography concept and applied it to something that I do best — time lapse. I built a story around the idea of us being shackled to this ball and chain; this love-hate relationship with whom we spend so much time with here in LA.

This is a very cool concept, to be sure, and speaks volumes about how much we take our current primary mode of transportation (and the infrastructure needed to support it) for granted. An eight-plus lane highway looks a lot more bleak, and not to mention imposing, when there aren't cars whizzing along it, filling the empty space and distracting our wandering eyes.