a minipost
About twenty years ago I was associated with a human computer interface department. A good deal of the work was associated with this nebulous concept of “community”. The term tends to be defined in the mind of the person talking about it .. like the word god. We had a list of about twenty words that needed rigorous contest when we publishing internally or externally .. community was everyone’s first choice for the list, That said most of us default to a warm and fuzzy concept. How people and neighborhoods should interact. The sort of thing Bob Kraut worries about. (to be fair he also thinks about communities like QAnon)
A recent 99% Invisible podcast focused on Japanese community of place design.. deign for the six year old Mixed use zoning, very narrow roads, a school house at the center and very independent kids. Some of us worry about urban and suburban design and traffic - how to you minimize the two or three ton vehicle carrying a driver and a bag of groceries? We often look to the Netherlands snd the Nordics for inspiration Indeed they’re excellent examples of moving from 1970s car-centric design to something better for cyclists and pedestrians. Japan offers a different path - one that seems unlikely in the US.
Here’s the a link to the audio, a transcript and a few videos
A comment .. most of us of a certain age grew up with kids walking and cycling everywhere - starting around six for walking and seven or eight for cycling. It was the only way a kid could deal with the scale of suburban design with fixed zoning and wide roads. That’s the environment the Dutch and Nordics started with rather than doubling down on complete car dependance.
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