some great weekend reads

• Julia Turner at Slate did a nice piece on the challenge of helping people find their way through large and complex stations, especially through-stations like New York's Penn Station.  It contains a good introduction to the key concepts of wayfinding.
• Aaron Renn at the Urbanophile looks at how Detroit can make tourist attractions out of its great abandoned buildings, such as the haunting ruin of Michigan Central Terminal.
• Daniel of Discovering Urbanism expands on the crucial role of jaywalking in the life of a healthy city, also the topic of a Tom Vanderbilt essay in Slate a while back.  Everyone who values both livable cities and Western notions of personal freedom and responsibility needs to understand how to argue against anti-jaywalking laws.

Comments

[rhywun]

Fascinating stuff about jaywalking. I live in NYC where jaywalking is the completely-accepted norm. Sometimes I wonder if the streets would be less "chaotic" if people followed "the law"--but I like the idea that jaywalking can calm traffic better.

[Ari]

Oh, jaywalking. I followed its rise through Google News: http://amateurplanner.blogspot.com/2010/03/rise-of-jaywalking.html
. Very interesting. I'd forgotten that Rudy Giuliani tried—and failed, miserably—to make New Yorkers not jaywalk. We seem to have turned a corner—in a lot of the country, anyway—that jaywalking is okay and laws against it are silly.

Jaywalk on.