Reply To: New Urbanism.

Have a lot at some of the little houses designed by Meier in the 1970s and 1980s – he could manage to build in such as setting. But it takes confidence and design ability to do so.

Little Britain

30 minutes from London city centre – but like a different world – an area that just ‘happened’ around some old disused gravel pits. Land which ‘might’ some day become valuable for development – but at the moment, is just the space between factories, shopping centres and transport infrastructure.

Did anyone see the piece about ‘Little Britain’ and edgedom’s in the BBC last night? The opposite to the ‘planned environments’ in Britain like Milton Keynes.

I mean, here in Britain and Ireland we don’t have any policy to edgedoms, other than to ‘control them’ just because we like to control things. In Finland especially, i did notice a slightly different attitude to these marginal zones, where it is neither country nor city.

the point was made too – that building types and fauna can exist in ‘edgedom’ which couldn’t exist in typical rural farming subsidised environments – where the cows are ‘paid’ to chew everything to death.

Whereas, to take the urban slant, these places mostly get fenced off, or simply become pitch and putt courses – i.e. brought into the city in some kind of acceptable way.

I guess, that was the approach taken when Bolton Street done some Dublin Docklands projects a few years ago now. Pity no publication or online resource was ever made available from that – i.e. like Fluid Space thing in UCD.

BTW too, on ‘Fifth Gear’ there was a segment about road rage – the antidote to road rage seemed to be walking around a pedestrian area of town – and asking road rage sufferers, why they do not get as angry when a pedestrian cuts them off etc.

Apparently the psychologist said, that the car in modern society is the number one murder weapon and that has indeed affected how we behave.

I really don’t know about using Dublin city pedestrian walking to relieve rage though. 🙂