Is this thing on?

I wonder how cities will change in the 21st century, and believe that it will generally be for the better. That is a good thing given that most people will be city dwellers. One problem which I expect to be solved is traffic as an environmental problem. As travel becomes relatively cheaper and more convenient (which I think it will in the long run) people will travel longer and more often, so the time spent travelling won't decrease even though the injury caused by it hopefully will.

Assuming that the car will retreat from ever-larger parts of our cities, that gives us an interesting problem, what shall we do with the spaces thus liberated? If you go to a city like Copenhagen many central streets seem curiously overdimensioned when the cars are largely gone. Of course there were streets long before there were cars, but in the middle part of last century the city plans were often designed for the car. What can best be done with streets like this when vacated by cars? The traffic and pollution might be gone, but the street is still not an integrated part of the city, and cities abhor empty spaces.

That makes some rationale for a design competion.

The value of human-scaled carfree areas is increasingly appreciated, both among urbanists and the general public. Yet how can we transform existing areas to create lively people-oriented spaces free of traffic?

Through our 2nd Annual Street Conversion Design Contest, we are challenging architects, artists and ordinary citizens from around the world to design carfree spaces from formerly car-oriented spaces. And where possible, we're also encouraging people to realise the designs on the ground. Update: Thanks to a grant from Artists' Project Earth, we are able to do further global outreach to announce this year's contest more widely. Therefore the deadline has been extended to November 15, 2007. The grant has also allowed us to offer cash prizes of €100-200.

The principle is that street space was once used for both transport and human interaction. But with the arrival of the automobile, street space has become monopolised by cars and other vehicles, resulting in a loss of community and livability. This competition aims to reintroduce a level of humanity to the streetscape, both on paper and by encouraging lasting on-the-ground initiatives.

We are asking participants to design carfree spaces from formerly car-oriented spaces, in three categories

Berlin may be my most bypassed city. In the old days I would either take bus or train the Oslo-Göteborg-Malmö-Sassnitz-Berlin-Dresden-Prague route. Apart from train change I rarely spent much time in Berlin, and the bus wisely took a huge circle around it. So it is now when I'm mostly flying over the city that I seek it out, and this time I did it the old-fashioned way, taking the Budapest-Hamburg train from Prague. The web site had warned me the train was running 18 minutes late so I could leave later than I otherwise would have to. The 350km train ride might have costed more than the 900km airfare from Oslo but that is fair since the ride lasted more than twice as long, passing through the pretty but depressed landscape of the Czech-German hinterlands.

Maybe more than any other European city Berlin symbolises transition, in particular the reunion of the four occupation zones, and the restoration of Berlin as Hauptstadt Deutschlands, in many respects a geographical Hauptstadt Europa. I was getting off the train at Zoo, a station in the former British zone, an area I hadn't visited in fifteen years. The Zoo was the terminal station at the time of the West-Berlin enclave, a train station I remember with fondness as having the rudest train information staff in the known universe (usually the customers yell at the staff, not the other way around). I hadn't time to check if it still had the old spunk, as I hadn't reserved accomodations for the night and there was a film festival going on.

The centerpiece of my visit was The Pergamon Museum. The result of true cultural imperialism a century or two ago when architecture was taken wholesale back to Berlin, Paris, or London from the countries of origin. But apart from making the artifacts available to the public this has let them more protected than they would be where they came from. For the Pergamon Museum this hasn't been entirely true, it was ravaged by the end of WWII, but most of the pieces were saved. In particular for the Ishtar Gate and the collection of Babylonian, Sumerian, and Assyrian artifacts Berlin is the place to go as visiting Babylon is not currently an option.