Crossing Slips & Medians The crossing slips and medians act as the connective tissue of the village. Slips merge crosswalks and pocket parks, and are inserted along Kingston Road at intermittent locations. The use of slips slows traffic, encourages pedestrian fluidity between the two sides and makes a series of places each with a distinct identity. Depending on local conditions, these slips project differently; some connect to pocket parks while others connect across parking lots to the strip malls on the south side.. The crossing slips act as progenitors for anchoring temporary events within the large parking lots in underused times. The existing median, currently an inaccessible island in a sea of infrastructure, is expanded to become a resting point and to serve as a linear green buffer, providing a more intimate scale of street, both on the north and south side. The median also accommodates the proposed streetcar along Kingston in the future, incorporating transit shelters and rest points. Dockings Dockings are temporary urban infrastructures that bring street life to the parking lots of the strip malls on the south side of the street when they are not being used. These urban insertions allow for larger, temporal programs such as markets, outdoor cinemas and festivals. These would serve as early catalysts for the project, attracting people and extending the retail life of the surrounding shops.
Incremental Urbanism Cliffside Slips is an incremental project not a master plan. The project recognises that it is economically and logistically more feasible, in the short-term, to transform the public space of the street, particularly through program and temporal interventions, than it is to change the physical configuration of the built fabric. The crossings, slips, parks and occupations can be produced over time as the economy and culture of the neighbourhood changes and develops. Public space is defined not solely by built form, but equally by program, event and infrastructure. Appropriating existing street infrastructure such as the cross-walk, the median and the parking lot, allows a shift away from the purely pragmatic function of movement control to suggest new ways of occupying the public realm. p
1 Stephen Marshall. Streets and Patterns: The Structure of Urban Geometry. Abingdon, New York: Spon, 2005.
Project Team: Mason White & Lola Sheppard (Lateral Architecture) Chris Hardwicke (&co), Fung Lee (PMA Landscape Architects) Hon Lu (TEDCO)
onsite 19: street, streets and lanes, the straight and narrow, wide and busy
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