no2self.net

Happy birthday blog, you just turned 5 years old.

Here’s an interesting article on static caravan parks:

Trailers have long interested Morrish. He likes the simplicity of long, narrow, free-standing structures. Light and breezes come in from either side. If ceilings are pushed to 10 feet or higher, small rooms can feel much larger. And since most walls are exterior walls, the possibilities of adjacent gardens and indoor/outdoor spaces are many.

He had no quarrel, really, with the new urbanist movement. But stacking homes above retail shops along transit corridors can’t happen everywhere. Besides, there’s a “formula” to new urban design that doesn’t appeal to Morrish’s eclectic tastes.

And you thought I was kidding when I cited the caravan as fertile ground for housing ideas.

More from Morrish:

His new book, “Growing Urban Habitats, Seeking a New Housing Development Model,” will be out in June. It begins with a proposal to refashion an aging trailer park in Charlottesville, Va., and ends with a design that interlaces long, narrow structures that are affordable, sustainable and well-suited to the valley just below Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello estate.

“The project is fairly dense, but it doesn’t just stack units up into the air.”

Ok, point taken. I was exagerating for impact. Yet my drawing does rather neatly sum up the problem. Ask an architect about the opportunities for prefabricated housing and trailer park living and they’ll turn it into a building problem. A Rubik’s cube challenge of Lego-like simplicity.

As I said in the flickr comments for the image above, over at Axis we keep having conversations about housing models that get the balance right between independence and community/neighbourhood and we always end up at trailer parks. When those conversations turn into a live project we need to remember that this is a landscape problem, an infrastructure problem, a state vs. private, freehold/leasehold land ownership, territory problem. Not a building problem that’s solved with a crisp, cutaway axonometric.

Despite being unsuccessful in the Show Us A Better Way bid, I’m busy hatching plans to develop the neighbourhood activity map that I pitched for, thanks to the help of Tom Chance from Bioregional who I met at be2camp. I also need help from the Open Street Map community though to commence the cartography. Cloudmade put me in touch with Andy Robinson from the local group and he invited me to the next meeting – at the pub.

It’s a dirty job etc. My timing was perfect, as I discovered they were hours away from officially announcing the completion of the Birmingham map – the first English city to do so.

I distinctly remember the launch of openstreetmap.org. I also distinctly remember thinking it was a crazy idea, despite the fact that other examples like Wikipedia were beginning to make a difference. Mapping the whole world? By hand? Nuts.

I can’t remember the last time I was so pleased to have been so utterly wrong. Here’s a beautiful video showing exactly how wrong I was in full technicolour.

OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

“It’s very satisfying to see a complete city mapped in OpenStreetMap. Four years ago when this project was created we were looking at a blank screen and most commentators thought we were crazy.” said Andy Robinson, secretary of the OpenStreetMap Foundation and a prolific mapper in the West Midlands.

Quite. There’s also a video available on the group’s Mappa Mercia site of Andy and his fellow mappers drawing their traces all over our city during the last two years.

So now we have a map. What do we do with it? Anything we damn well want of course, which is precisely the point. The possibilities for community driven cartography explorations are endless. Anecdotal, human, personal and empowering marks to be made over a map that boasts a greater accuracy than any other online or satnav maps.

I look forward to deploying it, adding to it and promoting it. I’m going to start with the reason I was talking about @podnosh in the tweet from the pub – it’s time we included it in one of the other innovative online communities we have here in Brum: the Social Media Surgery.

The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession—a hive occupied by generations of bees. In America, the houses seem privately ours, even when we have not built them up, in pine two-by-fours and four-by-eight-foot sheets of plywood, from a poured-concrete foundation. Houses are, as Newland Archer sensed, our fate. The houses we build in our fiction need not conform to a floor plan—indeed, the reader’s capacity for visualizing spatial relations is feeble—but they must conform to a life plan, feeding the characters’ senses whenever these turn outward, confirming social place with their walls and accoutrements, echoing in authentic matter the spiritual pattern the author intends to trace. A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction. Every novelist becomes, to a degree, an architect—castles in air!—and a novel itself is, of course, a kind of dwelling, whose spaces open and constrict, foster display or concealment, and resonate from room to room.

John Updike on fictional houses. Found, about 5 links deep through twitter and web, here: Architectural Digest