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mobs.” It also introduces soft vehicles that allow users to be in direct contact with the street. While architects and urban designers mostly take cars as a given, and are content to design streets and public spaces around car movement, in Smart DOTS + Soft MOBS Joachim and his collaborators challenge this well-worn assumption. The design of Smart DOTS + Soft MOBS is organized into three phases: 2008, 2020 and 2028, respectively. In Phase 2008, Joachim suggests making minor design interventions. These immediate safety measures will mitigate conflicts between pedestrians and automobiles. Phase 2020 signals a transition period in which car lanes are narrowed, pedestrian zones are widened, and bicycle bollards are
DESIGN & SCIENCE
introduced with new car technology. Already in Phase 2020, Joachim and his collaborators suggest the placement of environmental “smart dots,” or green modules that filter rainfall—what is called greywater—and, at the same time, slow down traffic to separate walking zones, bicycles, and transportation zones. Phase 2028 is the future embodied in “pixelated” surfaces, gradient green zones, and living self-sufficient machines that provide their own energy. These machines generate electricity through air movement. In the future, giant benevolent air-cleansing blimps dangle tentacles, which collide spongy seats in a playful catch-and-release plan for people moving about town. All life is enveloped in a sentient ecology of street, mobile systems, and people.
While the proposal for Smart DOTS + Soft MOBS with the SOFT Blimp Bumper Bus is specifically tailored for the Ninth & Fourth intersection in Brooklyn, NY, it signals a new vision for the city, Smart DOTS + Soft MOBS also crystallizes images of civilization reinventing itself. Smart DOTS + Soft MOBS is a speculative, prototypical strategy for inserting soft plazas in various street intersections. But it demonstrates that we can rethink the city as a whole by making nodal changes. These changes have the potential to infiltrate the rigid grid that in which we currently live.