Hey y'all. It's nice to be back blogging again. I've decided to commit to two projects this next semester. The first one I will be doing on my own and the second I will be doing with Kendra, Gi, Corinne, and Maddie. We will be creating a "kiosk" to help make more social and interactive spaces on lower campus. We want the campus to be interesting and exciting and compelling, and we want people to meet each other there. My personal interest in this project is the mission, because I truly feel that campus is sleeping, and if we wake it up so much more of the potential of the university could be reached. My individual project related to the perception of transportation on campus. I plan to create unobtrusive sidewalk graphics that casually point out different, more positive ways to view transportation while de-emphasizing the need for personal vehicles. My main motivation for this project is the air quality and the inefficiency of the way transportation is done in the valley. The commuters to the U are a large part of the Salt Lake City urbanscape, and if the attitude here changes, we might actually have a shot at improving things for the city.
One of the websites we looked at last week in class showed the aerial difference between the structure of cities in the early 1950's as opposed to their modern structures. Here is the website: http://iqc.ou.edu/2014/12/12/60yrsmidwest/
There was an overwhelming trend of urban sprawl throughout all the pictures. The streets got wider, the buildings got bigger. Giant parking lots emerged. For some reason, it looks like God swooped down and tried to put spacers in the cities. I guess this sort of makes sense, because if there are more people you need more space. My issue is that I don't think the space used was efficient. Enlarging the buildings makes sense to me, because if they have a wider base they can be taller and possibly utilize more space. But most of the expansion was done for cars, which is so not okay. Cars are a means to an end. Freeways are an even larger extension of the God-spacers. They take up so much of the area surrounding the city, and unfortunately, the thing they have replaced is the residential areas that used to be near the city. This forces the city to become a place of work, the area away from the city an area for homes, and all of this forces people to rely more and more on cars. Ugh. It's a vicious cycle. I also noticed though, that there is more green space being incorporated into modern cities, which is apparently another form of God spacer. I wish there was some way to make green space that is enjoyable to humans, but that isn't composed solely of grass. The only reason we even have grass is because it grows well in Britain because IT RAINS THERE A LOT... Which it doesn't do here. So, even though it's better than parking lots, grass isn't really the best use of space either. What it comes down to is that we don't need as much space as we give ourselves. In class we referred to it as an epidemic, and I think that's a valid way to describe this trend. The transformation is horrible, and awful, and shocking, and unpleasant, and bad, and appalling, and upsetting, and saddening, and frustrating. There is so much that that space could be used for. =( Arg. Alright, I'm out.
