Case Study:
The Word on Streets
Inaugural Sunday Funday! Los Angeles, CA
(Photo: Margot Rogers Ocanas)
Why Care About Streets?
"Just as all urban infrastructural innovations, modifications to streets are indicative of cities’ economic priorities and aspirations. At the same time that questions of how, where, for whom, and at what costs infrastructure works are municipal, national, and global in scope, they are also very personal, bearing out direct consequences for individuals and communities."
"...As networked social systems, infrastructures are both a product and producer, affected by and affecting both local and extra-local sites of modern social organization, spreading physical conditions and their institutional forms and agents through pipelines, powerlines, roadbeds. But because they also comprise a technical complex, infrastructures are a proxy for the state of the art in engineering and materials sciences and prevailing ideas about the control of nature."
(...)
"And because streets serve as state-constructed arteries of urban circulatory systems, the places they connect and how space in them is allocated and regulated are important indicators of which landscapes will thrive in the future. The political decisions that direct these are inherently contentious, since, in addition to possible experiences, they affect peoples’ life chances in cities."
(Petersen, 2011)
"Just as all urban infrastructural innovations, modifications to streets are indicative of cities’ economic priorities and aspirations. At the same time that questions of how, where, for whom, and at what costs infrastructure works are municipal, national, and global in scope, they are also very personal, bearing out direct consequences for individuals and communities."
"...As networked social systems, infrastructures are both a product and producer, affected by and affecting both local and extra-local sites of modern social organization, spreading physical conditions and their institutional forms and agents through pipelines, powerlines, roadbeds. But because they also comprise a technical complex, infrastructures are a proxy for the state of the art in engineering and materials sciences and prevailing ideas about the control of nature."
(...)
"And because streets serve as state-constructed arteries of urban circulatory systems, the places they connect and how space in them is allocated and regulated are important indicators of which landscapes will thrive in the future. The political decisions that direct these are inherently contentious, since, in addition to possible experiences, they affect peoples’ life chances in cities."
(Petersen, 2011)
Los Angeles
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New York
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