More Thoughts on Google Street View

I don't play video games, unless you count Google Earth Street View. For me, GESV is a fun way to explore landscapes and think about configuration and form. The quest for images with strong composition and interesting subject matter is a scavenger hunt. The moment of discovery is the reward. In rural areas, I am looking for interesting forms. In urban areas I am usually looking for life in the street, which usually means people. One of the principal problems discussed in Landscape Architecture is how to bring life to the street. Designing cities for people is the focus of New Urbanism and groups like The Project for Public Spaces. In our landscape architecture classes we discuss walkability, sense of place, and read a lot of stuff by Peter Calthorpe, Andres Duany and Kevin Lynch. It's all about people in public space and the human experience of spaces. Generally, nice photographs of public space or street space features lots of people experiencing the space. In Landscape Architecture magazine, Landscape Architects become perplexed when the public fails to utilize a well-designed space or when a poorly designed space gets a lot of use. I remember a particular example of a simple field of artificial turf, but I don't have time at the moment to track it down.

Google Earth Street View shows you the other side, the reality (of a sort). Drop in from the Google Earth Eye of God into any street grid and chances are you will find it empty. If you peruse randomly, it could be a very long time before you see any people at all. If you do this often enough, you develope a sense of what configuration of streets are more likely to yield human forms. Grid or wagon-wheel configurations, usually indicating the oldest part of the city, are generally better candidates. The professors always tell us "pay attention to the corners," and this holds true in GE, especially corners near open space. Areas along rivers, or, more likely, a block or two from the river, are good candidates. I believe GESV could be used in an exercise in a Landscape Architecture class. The instructor could present the student with a short list of things to find: somebody sitting down, somebody on a bicycle, a child under twelve, etc. The student would learn to recognize from the air how to "read" the landscape, find the mass transit system, the arteries, and the nodes.

Here is a blog in which someone has found a little story in the street in GE Street View. A woman is walking and trips and falls. If you look closely, you can see the chunk of rock that she tripped on. She stays on all fours for a moment but eventually stands up. Yesterday you could see her quite clearly, but today, perhaps because the internet found out about her, it appears that Google has pixellated her. More interesting (to me anyway) is that this is a street with a surprising amount of life in it. In fact, if you continue down the street, you find eleven more people sitting on the sidewalk. They appear to be a little scruffy, as if sitting on the sidewalk is about all they have been doing and all they intend to do for the day. Some of them are watching the woman trip and fall. It is a little vignette played out on a street in Brazil. Perhaps not exactly the kind of 'life" the urban planners want, but it is alive.