Designed to restore and augment the city’s floodplain, this new green recreation space features thousands of acres of forest as well as playgrounds, lawns and trails. Upon completion, it will be one of the biggest urban green spaces in the country (more than 10 times the size of Central Park in NYC).

In a state not exactly known for its greenery (or environmentalism), this project in Texas by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates is designed in part to address a critical and ongoing issue: flooding damage during severe weather events.”I believe we can create the most value and the greatest benefit to our citizens when we complete projects around nature,” said mayor Mike Rawlings  of the project.

The park aims to serve both recreational and engineering purposes, shoring up the city against future floods while creating a great green asset for citizens and visitors. Developed in collaboration with government engineers, it will be part community resource but also (and critically) part infrastructural insurance against the effects of climate change.

The development is part of a larger series of projects along the flood plain and will link into over seventy miles of regional trails. At an estimated cost of $50 million, the park is not cheap but surprisingly inexpensive given its scope and aims. So far, a private donor has stepped forward offering $20 million of the funds needed, leaving a smaller bill for the city and state governments as well.

When thoroughfares are subtracted from city grids, subsequent urban infill is shaped by the voids of these former roadways, streetcar or rail paths, standing out like architectural scar tissue when viewed from above. The effect is all the more pronounced when the disappeared passageways cut at odd angles through city blocks, forcing particularly odd-shaped ‘scarchitecture’ to follow.

When architectural writer Geoff Manaugh came across this phenomena in the streets of Los Angeles, readers rapidly began sending in examples from other cities. Some are surprisingly complex and counterintuitive, like the half-circle seen below (if you look closely) that seems to arbitrarily slice across multiple city blocks.

Manaugh’s fascination is infectious: “The notion that every city has these deeper wounds and removals that nonetheless never disappear is just incredible to me. You cut something out—and it becomes a building a generation later. You remove an entire street—and it becomes someone’s living room.”

Perhaps most remarkable of all: many of these scarchitectural expressions frequently go largely unnoticed on the ground level. Most, however, emerge immediately as visual patterns when seen from aerial vantage points, their persistently unconventional orientations going against the grain of gridded streets surrounding them.

Small buildings can completely conform to the unusual geometries these ‘ghost streets’ trace; some sides of other structures, reconfigured paths and even parking space orientations may also follow these uncanny trajectories, in part or in whole, as if aligning to secular ‘ley lines’ of invisible force. Next time you are using Google Maps, pan around your own neighborhood and you could find evidence of scarchitecture, perhaps cutting right through your own backyard.

Using augmented reality highlights, hints and cues to guide bikers through complex city paths and streets, this conceptual system addresses issues of wayfinding and safety, speculatively asking: “Could a cycle path be created, or at least augmented, using connected technologies?”

Five initial functions are proposed by the Connected Cyclists project for this wearable prototype, all around themes of navigation in London, a place notorious for the variety of its path types and unexpected route shifts. With so many transitions between street paths, parks and alleyways, it can be hard for bikers new to the city to know where to go – subtle highlights of next steps could solve that problem.

“We see that cyclists often take bearings when paused at traffic lights—this interface could essentially simply provide the next direction, reinforcing the journey. We also feel that the visual nudge implied here, using the fabric of the city itself, is more akin to how cyclists move and navigate—a more fluid movement through and sometimes across the streetscape, as opposed to the very directed navigation delivered for drivers.”

Blind spot visualization assists travelers as they pass in the shadows of cars, buses and trucks, while an overall approach promoting backstreet network paths helps avoid traffic and poor air quality in the first place. Monuments, icons and landmarks displayed subtly in the background can also give clues to riders about where they are in the city.

Already there are many programs like CityMapper built on OpenStreetMaps that contain the necessary information about routes and paths but using those on the go via a typical mobile device means either unsafe cycling practices or frequent stops, hence the augmented heads-up display. “If these displays talked to the city around them—if they knew where the cyclist was and what they were looking at—they could give much more subtle spatial and contextual information that builds on the surroundings of the cyclist.”

The key is making such technology accessible and seamless, a distraction-free overlay to other visual information being taken in by those on bikes moving through the urban environment.

“Many cities are spending serious money, time and attention on improving the ‘hard infrastructure’ of cities to make cycling safer, more convenient, more attractive,” but “there is potential of a ‘soft infrastructure’ which can be overlaid on existing urban fabric to further support cycling, which takes advantage of contemporary technologies such as wearables, the internet of things, real-time sensor data, and so on.”

While none of this is a reality quite yet, “‘Design stories’ allow you to try on a future for size, and to imagine how a prototype might fit into its urban context. With prototypes to point at, critique and discuss we can begin to imagine other externalities or knock-on effects and build up both understanding and language to discuss what can otherwise be fairly abstract and technical ideas.”

Using a mapping algorithm coupled with citizen reviews of sights and scenery, a team of researchers has developed a way to choose paths through cities based on beauty, quiet and happiness rather than simply the shortest distance between two points.

The project employed Google Street View and Geograph as well as Flickr images and their metadata to build out an initial estimation of probable best paths, then solicited human feedback (to check and enhance the results) from a group of participants on the website UrbanGems (shown above).

The study, published by Cornell University’s arXiv, came up with a number of route suggestions in Boston and London and contains a number of interesting findings. For starters, the ‘beautiful’ routes were only slightly longer than the shortest routes, and significantly shorter than typical tourist-oriented directions and guided-tour paths. As the algorithm improves, it is increasingly able to generate paths through new cities via metadata alone, reducing reliance on input from people.

The project’s creators included Daniele Quercia and Luca Maria Aiello of Yahoo Labs in Barcelona and Rossano Schifanella of the University of Torino, Italy. From their abstract: “When providing directions to a place, web and mobile mapping services are all able to suggest the shortest route. The goal of this work is to automatically suggest routes that are not only short but also emotionally pleasant.

The assessments are not simply qualitative value judgments, but a hybrid of human and machine input: “Based on a quantitative validation, we find that, compared to the shortest routes, the recommended ones add just a few extra walking minutes and are indeed perceived to be more beautiful, quiet, and happy.”

From UrbanGems: “Buildings and neighbourhoods speak. They speak of egalitarianism or elitism, beauty or ugliness, acceptance or arrogance. The aim of UrbanGems is to identify the visual cues that are generally associated with concepts difficult to define such beauty, happiness, quietness, or even deprivation. The difficult task of deciding what makes a building beautiful, or what is sought after in a quiet location is outsourced to the users of this site using comparisons of pictures. With a comprehensive list of aesthetic virtues at hand, we would be more likely to systematically understand and re-create the environments we intuitively love.”

Following in the footsteps of the United States’ largest urban center, the 2nd and 3rd most populous cities in the country are each (respectively) developing and building extensive elevated parks, inspired in part by the success of The High Line in NYC.

The Los Angeles River Greenway Project

On the West Coast, Los Angeles has a plan to connect and create 50 miles of continuous bike and walking paths through the city. Over half of these segments are completed but the whole is not yet contiguous, forcing cyclists and pedestrians through dangerous crossings and other workarounds.

Ramping up support for the last few years, the LA River Greenway 2020 project includes provisions for public space as well as private enterprise, with everything from gathering and performance areas to dining venues, yoga classes and bike-in movie theaters in mind.

The Chicago 606 & Bloomingdale Trail Project

Meanwhile, in the Midwest, Chicago’s Bloomingdale Trail is the centerpiece of a larger plan dubbed The 606. Already midway through construction, much of the multiple-mile trail follows existing east-and-west-running railroad tracks set a story above street level.

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High Line West Chicago La On Track For Elevated Greenways