Rearranging Our Pieces, Playing With Our Future
Is our imagination so limited that we think anyone will survive by doing the exact same thing we've done for half a century? Why can't we take the same simple wonder of an afternoon of play and build a new world with the pieces we already have? Why can we not take our bricks and track and blocks and rearrange them, as we did countless times as children, into new buildings, new cities and new transportation networks? Why can't we put our architects to work redesigning the decrepit spaces that already pepper our world? Why can't we put builders to work reconstructing our destroyed communities? Why must we mine new materials and continue the urbanization of our wild lands when so much unused housing stock and other structures sit vacant?
Why can't we rearrange the pieces we already have? If we could do it endlessly as kids, we really can do it now.
Adaptive Reuse: Parking Meters to Bike Racks
Some readers may know I'm working on a magazine-length news feature exploring the opportunities to change transit behaviors, policies and infrastructure in Los Angeles given the constraints of current resources, technology and politics. I'm most interested in what steps can be taken to permanently change how people move about the region. One thing I'm learning and hearing from others is that a crucial reaction to our economic and environmental crises is to effectively reuse, redeploy and repurpose the infrastructure and materials we already have available to us.
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