In this edition of City Planimals, we’re featuring renderings featuring birds. You know what really sells a project? Birds. We didn’t even need to use Photoshop for this one. The architects, planners, and artists did all the work for us.
Why not just put birds everywhere… even in the margins. This rendering, from the Civic Vision for the Central Delaware tell us two things: that boardwalks are fun and that wherever fun is being had, birds will surely follow.
Remember that baby in the lower right from that Dinosaurs show on ABC? “NOT DA MAMA!”
In this edition of City Planimals, we’re sharing a rendering from the Lower South District Plan that did not make the final cut. Our original recommendation for FDR Park was to transform it into a dinosaur wonderland a la Jurassic Park. This peerless attraction would give Philadelphia bragging rights for being the only city where humans would be able to mingle with genetically engineered dinosaurs while enjoying a cocktail on the porch of the renovated boathouse or riding a paddleboat in the lake. Alas, the public shot this idea down during one of our public meetings. Parks & Rec also had concerns about liability issues (I guess they saw the movie). Oh well…looks like we’ll have to settle for Six Flags over the Lower Schuylkill.
(Special thanks to jeffgoldblumdoesstuff.com)
We got a lot of reactions to one of our earliest posts, a tongue-in-cheek feature that we like to call “City Planimals.” The reactions fell mostly into two camps:
1) OMG I LOVE CATZ
2) Don’t you have anything better to do?
To your first point, everyone loves cats, even people that don’t think they do. Secondly, of course we have better things to do, but believe it or not, a lot of us work more than people might expect, and it’s on those late evenings or during the occasional weekend working session that these strokes of genius happen, so just go with it.
Today’s planimal is a logical and necessary follow-up to cats: dogs! It’s hard to walk through many parts of Philadelphia these days without tripping over one. In fact, it struck us that, like bicycles, they are fast becoming a staple of the urban landscape here. Proactive people that we are, we felt it prudent to make sure that Philadelphia is responding to this demographic change.
What if bike lanes were also dog lanes? We can’t condone the skateboarder’s actions (above), but we feel the question is worth posing.
On random Fridays we will roll out a recurring feature that will allow us to envision (wink, wink) how spaces in the city can be reclaimed for our friends in the Animal Kingdom. We’ve all seen these types of renderings before, but with people. Why should planning be so exclusive to hominids? These spaces need not be exclusive to the native animals of Philadelphia either. In order to be competitive in a globalized animal economy, our fair city must begin to attract animals from other habitats around the world.
