The Sound of the Road, and other imaginative musings on urban mobility design: - a workshop event retold

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.