Comments on: Exploring streets ahead

By: Christine

Christine — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 04:00:12 +0000

ps. OMA’s photo-background is a constantly changing…so..the link may not make much sense without some sort of visual cue…

This internet news report is a strange interpretation of the significance of the Greek street riots. [http://scrapetv.com/News/News%20Pages/Everyone%20Else/pages/Greek-riots-spark-global-realization-that-Greece-is-still-a-country-Scrape-TV-The-World-on-your-side.html]

I wonder if the world really has forgotten Greece is still a country? I wouldn’t have thought so….

By: Christine

Christine — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 04:13:42 +0000

Was looking at the website of McGill University, Canada’s premier architectural school, and I noticed the website of Dutch architects OMA (Office of Metropolitan Architects) [http://www.oma.eu/]…hopefully riot police and armoured vehicles are NOT the future of our urban streets!
The London School of Economics have published a series of essays on the December 2008 riots in Greece to try to explain the phenomenon of what they call ‘The return of street politics’.
[http://www2.lse.ac.uk/ERD/pressAndInformationOffice/publications/books/2009/GreeceDecRiots.aspx]

By: Tom Turner

Tom Turner — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 19:31:46 +0000

Congratulations to the Canadians! The concept of ‘street beautification’, popular in the UK during the 1930s involved tree planting of this type.
I agree that too much of the idea of making ‘streets’ has been lost – and I blame the highway engineers. Their instinct is to think of ‘roads’ instead of streets and to use legal powers to plan them as traffic arteries.But I suppose they could make an etymological point: our word street comes from the Latin via strata meaning ‘paved road’. Roman roads were paved in town and country – and it seems to have been done primarily for wheeled traffic. The streets of Pompeii were not the type of streets we would like to have, and were not planted with trees.