Kish Island Cultural-Local Path
Competition / Kish Island, Iran
A Streetscape for Walking
Walking is the most natural, oldest and most essential way to move through a city, and still the best way to discover places, activities and the life hidden in an environment. It shapes how people perceive the identity of a space, feel they belong to it and take in its qualities.
As cities give priority to cars, almost everything is built for the speed and perception of drivers, and the pedestrian, the main maker of the city, is forgotten. This proposal treats a pedestrian route as an urban space in its own right and sets out the elements and qualities that make its streetscape desirable.
People experience the city through sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, yet urban design has mostly addressed sight alone. The project uses a combined method of environmental sensory assessment to record the different sensory stimuli along the route and respond to what each one lacks, improving a dimension of the streetscape that is often overlooked.
The proposal is told as two sequences of one story. The first walker hurries along roofless, sun-baked pavements with nowhere to pause. The second finds shade, water, meeting places and alleys reconciled with the street, where no empty space is without value and one can walk in light and shadow to the end of the day.
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