The West is beginning to catch on: Seoul has created the most significant new public space in the world. Here’s an article from the Guardian on the Cheonggyecheon greenway:
The demolition of a vast motorway through the centre of South Korea’s capital and the restoration of a river and park in its place proves that mega-cities can be changed for the better.
Here’s the image and article from Wikipedia:
And a post from the Sightline Insitute’s Daily Score, which noted a critcial point:
“The idea was sown in 1999…We had experienced a strange thing. We had three tunnels in the city and one needed to be shut down. Bizarrely, we found that that car volumes dropped. I thought this was odd. We discovered it was a case of ‘Braess paradox‘, which says that by taking away space in an urban area you can actually increase the flow of traffic, and, by implication, by adding extra capacity to a road network you can reduce overall performance.”
Seattle is in the midst of a debate on whether to tear down (and replace) the Alaskan Way Viaduct. Here in B.C. we’re just going ahead and widening the highways with no real debate at all.
