Biophilic Design’s Post

🌨️❄️ WINTER IS COMING ❄️🌨️ Every winter, the fresh snow unveils the true nature of our streets and roads—over-designed for cars, making them faster and more dangerous. It also reveals the immense potential to reclaim space for people and public life. Let's embrace the power of snow to reshape our urban landscapes! ❄️🏙️ 🚸 Have you heard of 'sneckdowns'? It's a fascinating urban design concept where planners leverage snowfall to observe how roads are used by cars and identify unused spaces that can be repurposed for pedestrians. This principle can be applied to public spaces, helping us understand how citizens navigate and interact with their environment. 👇 Check out this fantastic animation and example of a sneckdown created by Oto Ozols! Let's harness the power of snow to drive positive change in our streets, public spaces, and workplaces. ❄️💼

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Harry Doling

Premium Window Treatments & Electric Shade Experts | Consulting on blinds for prime and super-prime residential properties.

11mo

Great use of nature. Except it doesn't show the true picture of road use during non-snow days when the volume of traffic would be significantly increased. It would be dangerous and short sighted to plan a city based on snow-days. If we did that in Britain we'd also be assuming half the number of schools and shops are required. 🙂

Tobi Olabode

Freelance Data Scientist • Machine Learning Engineer • Data Analyst • Data Engineer | Python, SQL, PowerBI, Pytorch | Foxtrot Services

11mo

interesting perspective on winter weather as a design tool rather than just an inconvenience.

Bjørn Breitzke

Senior Mechatronics Specialist and Product Development Engineer Helping Product Development to Faster Time to Market

11mo

It seems that the most used road has been ignored by the process... Always cross-check with other data sources.

William Dowie M Env, BA, ENV SP, WELL-AP, LEED AP

Design-Build Professional | Researcher & PM

11mo

Universities: pay attention to the spontaneous snow-trails that students create to traverse ‘to & fro’ with: transit stations, faculty buildings, parking lots, smoking areas — special reflection on this planning exercise for universal design improvements ❄️

Luis Mendez

Residential designer | simple, clever, sleek

11mo

This is a worst solution that before (traffic flow speaking); they need a roundabout, not making the intersection tighter

Graham Marshall

Director - Prosocial Place | Senior Visiting Research Fellow Institute of Population Health Sciences University of Liverpool

11mo

I love it when it snows because it turns the urban landscape into a blank canvas, obliterating all the clutter if modern life However, while it often illustrates profligate highway allocation, it is no way to design streets. They also need to accommodate once a decade emergency fire tenders etc

This is great if the streets/ intersections are only for POV vehicles but reducing a 40 ft radius to between 5-8 ft radius means nothing larger than a small to mid-sized sedan/SUV/Crossover can use these side streets. If a traffic study can validate this being practical and that no large vehicles need to access these routes then fantastic but at a surface level it seems a bit dramatic of an illustration.

Neil Hodkinson

Manufacturing/production/application engineer. Cad cam offline programmer Powermill, Hypermill, Fusion. Inventor, Catia, Powerhsape design. 3d scanning reverse engineering. Polyworks and gom inspection.

11mo

I get this is really do but you've got to understand people are using cars more and more not less. Public transport in my country in my opinion is a joke and way too expensive for the roads to become quieter. Also the path in the snow left by cars is because there is less traffic in bad conditions and much slower. Take this design on a dry day it'll be chaos by the increase in traffic caused by "streamlining"

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