Tag

Olympics

The Rundown

By | The Good Plan | One Comment

In a deviation from the biweekly rant and rave on one thing in the world of planning, TheGoodPlan is pleased to present a current rundown of … well, several things in the world of planning:

It Snowed.

Yes, dear Baltimoreans, our godforsaken winter isn’t over yet. And while I’m keeping sane with salt sprays and irresponsible trips to the Caribbean, I cannot escape the cold or the snow forever. This past week, winter storm Pax blanketed us with more of the cold wet white grit, causing us to hunker down, bundle up, and express our displeasure through wails of desperation or clenched teeth of remorse. In the planning world though, the snow created a visual map, indicating places we didn’t need to tread. Coined “sneckdown,” snow has added a new lens – and abbreviation – to the transportation term “neckdown,” used to refer to the sidewalk extension occurring at a crosswalk. Bear with me. When we shovel snow or remove it from our path of travel, we’re leaving a physical indicator that the space is used and desired. Piles of untouched snow, however, indicate the realm of public space that isn’t desirable, isn’t traveled upon, and isn’t used. This essentially means that our still snow-covered roadways are showing the planners and the engineers that there are spaces in the street which nobody uses. Due to the seasonality of park benches and plazas, the sneckdown is most effective with traffic and on roadways, but the concept of how much extra space we have is pretty cool to think about.

Source: Twitter User Prema Katari Gupta

Source: Twitter User Prema Katari Gupta

It Rained.

It continues to rain in the United Kingdom. Reportedly the worst rainfall in 250 years, winds over 100 miles per hour are pummeling homes and forcing the Prime Minister to scrounge up money for emergency management and relief services. While a plethora of organizations plan preemptively to protect against forces of nature like earthquakes and hurricanes, it may be time for planners to take a more realistic approach to combat increased rainfall and extreme heat. While floating schools and Waterworld-style planning is hypothesized and entertained, the reality of extreme weather is here and now. It’s time for planners to focus not just on disaster relief due to an unprecedented force of nature, but relief from climate change induced storms.

Source: Daily Mirror

Source: Daily Mirror

Sochi Isn’t Perfect.

THE OLYMPICS AREN’T PERFECT (did you read my last blogpost?). The Twitter account @sochiproblems blew up in popularity, gaining over 110,000 follower in two days. Through snark and wit, @sochiproblems documented the yellowed water, bashed through bathroom doors, and fallen athletes (no, truly, athletes who have fallen over). Despite criticism for posting photos without context or timeliness and for portraying an ethnocentric level of entitlement, the account brings Olympic problems to the human level.

Source: The Independent

Source: The Independent

Southeast Baltimore Activates.

With crime rising in the southeast district, two floors of standing-room only residents and tenants packed house this past week to discuss city actions. With Mayor SRB present, word on the street was that Commissioner Batts was the true star of the evening, providing direct answers to tough questions. As a resident of the neighborhood in question, this past week has featured an increased police presence on the roads and a rise in awareness when walking from place to place. The hope and approach to crime prevention is to stop crime before it starts. And kudos to all the residents who attended the meeting. Apathy is not alive here in the district.

IMAGE CREDIT. [Wikimedia Commons].

My Love for Olympic Sized Disasters

By | The Good Plan | No Comments

The Olympics are my circus. Like politics to the Daily Show or Justin Bieber to CNN, the months leading up to the biannual exhibition of athletic prowess and city makeover are the zenith of planner porn. Imagine a city somewhere in the world, trying to achieve someone’s dream of hosting nearly every other country in the world, spending millions of dollars to participate in a two-year bid process, only to realize, upon winning, they must spend tens of billions of dollars to build just the right number of hotel rooms, construct venues that will potentially crumble after a two week usage, and expect an increase in infrastructure pressure from tourism, athletes, friends, family, traffic… it is of the Olympics that I am obsessed.

The temporary use of space is something that has always fascinated me. Similar to Burning Man or the annual pilgrimage to the Ganges, cities have forever shouldered the expectation and burden of temporary human influx. Often, the mass hysteria of invasion comes and goes without a lasting scar. Burning Man prides itself on the desert being left as it was found:

It isn’t as easy for the Olympic Games, though, to take down what has been constructed and let it blow away with the dust. Every year I scour articles and anecdotes of planning visions gone awry. The forced removal of homeless people for the Beijing Olympics, the collapse of the new stadium for the World Cup, crumbled Olympic venues, and cities like Lake Placid New York who still hang on with all their marketing might to their Host City days … of 1980.

Just as much fun as the pre and post game speculation of course, is the cleverness and creativity of the world around the Games at a more human scale. For example, the London Games sparked an incredibly creative cabbie, who overcome the hotel shortage by turning his cab into a one bedroom suite.

Hosting The Games is a significant gamble, exposing a nation to the international maelstrom of critique. Russia continues to receive criticism and protest on human rights, gay rights, terrorism, and budgetary outlay on the road to their games. Let us not forget that an inordinate number of individuals have already been SET ON FIRE by the so-called cursed Olympic Torch relay. The Economist, bless their souls, features a triple sow-cowing Vladimir Putin on the cover, skating in circles around a fallen Russian skater. The cover cleverly captures the suspicion that countries will endure for host city notoriety, no matter what the toll on their country may be.

That migrant workers were shipped out of the city or Russia’s atrocious record on gay rights has been exposed is of little consequence to the organizers, unfortunately. The host country will brush past all of this to spend obscene amounts and build architectural wonders in order to capture their two weeks of worldwide visibility. It almost seems like no lessons have been learned from the past, where certain cities haven’t ever truly recovered from hosting the games. Economically, the cost is significant. Politically, the potential impact is great enough to warrant a gold medal worthy attempt. Here’s hoping that exposure on the world stage will have more of a lasting impact on Russia’s values than the mad scramble for the Olympics will have on its landscape.

IMAGE CREDIT. Wikimedia Commons.