Working with Brian Eno on design principles for streets
Bringing a cultural voice into an urban planning conversation that has become narrowly technical, and diversifying the thinking around what streets are about, and what cities are for
Planning, designing, and managing cities in Sweden can be a largely joyless, technocratic affair, dominated by efficiency-oriented engineering, economic and managerial sensibilities. Although the Swedish state continues to fund arts and culture at a level that would make many other countries green with envy, it tends to keep those practices and perspectives quite separate from questions of city planning, governance, and even design. This is far from unusual, of course, but it is perhaps heightened in the highly pragmatic Nordic countries, their governance cultures reconstituted for New Public Management.
So one of the many ideas I wanted to test within the One-Minute City street retrofit projects I’ve been leading in Sweden was how we might deliberately counterpoint those sensibilities, enriching the mental models that shape how cities are handled with other thoughts, other questions, other positions, offering a richer diversity of outcomes.
