Walkshed

The Walkshed project is a very graphical representation of how easy it is to get around on foot in an urban area. It is similar to projects like Walk Score that rates neighbourhoods based on proximity to amenities used in your daily lifestyle. Both are very good attempts to visualize the concept of urban walkability, which is a combination of pedestrian pathways, accessible features, amenities and urban attractivity.

 

Urbanology

From the BMW Guggenheim Lab, a poll in the form of a quite simplistic “game” called Urbanology that lets you answer ten YES/NO questions and suggests a city that matches the profile based on the answers. Could be interesting and would be fun to see this fleshed out into a larger and more detailed “game”.

Urban farm in the suburbs

Oloph Fritzén at a "cow safari" guide session at Hästa Gård, September 11, 2011

Dagens Nyheter, one of the larger newspapers in Sweden, writes about a farm located close within walking distance of the subway line. The farm in question is named Hästa Gård, owned by the city of Stockholm but run in a low-impact fashion by Oloph Fritzén and Jenny Olofsson. They treat their livestock in a respectful way and allow cows, pigs and poultry to graze, dig and pluck outdoors, and due to a great collaboration project, the pigs get to eat excess fresh produce from a nearby supermarket. It is further surrounded by activities in conjunction with among others 4H and an educational project for growing vegetables locally.

Activities on these sites actually touch my thesis project site along their extension as their livestock grazes along the cultural reserve along Igelbäcken, almost to the extent of the border to Sundbyberg.

Urban Esc

This site is intended as a worklog of sorts for my masters thesis project. The name is derived from the construed word “urbanesque”, as in “of an urban character”, and the abbreviation of “escape”.