Abstract
Dansk Sociologkongres 2013, 24.-25. januar, Roskilde
The Sound of the Road, and other imaginative musings on urban mobility design
- a workshop event retold
Ditte Bendix Lanng, Ph.D. fellow
Department of Architecture, Design & Media Technology, Aalborg University, Denmark
If you drive at the right speed along the Melody Road of Gunma in Japan, grooves cut into the concrete
surface allow you to play the tune “Memories of Summer” with your car and the road as the hybrid
instrument.
Such a design intervention could occasion us to reconsider the properties and possibilities of our
mundane transit sites, and ask how we can identify and articulate design potentials for such sites as
great sensory and social public spaces. This is what happened in the fall of 2012, when, as part of the
course, Theories of the Network City, for students at the urban design master programme at Aalborg
University, a workshop was organised with the intention of exploring re-design potentials of a specific
transit site in the suburban district, Aalborg East.
The outset of the workshop was to conceptualise the transit site as a `Critical Point of Contact` (Jensen
and Morelli 2011), which organises and orchestrates the temporal and spatial co-existence of multiple
daily journeys. The workshop assignment was arranged in two sections: Mapping and Designing. The
first covered a journey to the site to do field explorations by different vehicular modes, and the latter
studio re-design experiments.
The paper will present the workshop and a selection of the tangible workshop outcomes, spanning from
design musings on the sensory drive, over the parking lot garden, to fluent landscapes articulating the
arrival and departure situation of bus-passengers.