David Yoon Narrows the Streets of Los Angeles
David Yoon is a writer, designer, photographer, and “self-confessed urban planning geek” based in Los Angeles. For fun, he takes photographs of Los Angeles’ wide streets and digitally edits them to make them narrower. After a vacation to Paris (complete with plenty of narrow streets and alleys), he began to wonder “could the entire mood of a neighborhood depend on something as simple as street width?”
Some have a few elements that are different, an extra person here or there, an occasional building removed (he takes multiple pictures of his streets), but some are spot on: the exact same buildings, sidewalks, trees and people, just featuring a one or two lane street instead of five or six.
The resulting designs are quite remarkable. Streets that looks hostile to walk on instantly become pleasant.
His designs are some of the strongest indictments of 20th century urban planning I’ve seen. Wide roads may move more traffic, but at what cost to the neighborhoods they go through?
I also sense a touch of melancholy in the images. After all, redesigning a street of the same width by removing lanes, adding bike paths or widening sidewalks is a common enough exercise in urban planning. But narrowing streets by moving buildings is an impossible task. Unlike visualizations common in planning showing what could be by smart investment and pedestrian-oriented design, Yoon’s image are simply unobtainable by an conceivable plan. So perhaps they’re less a vision for what-could-be, and more a warning to other communities building new roads: make them narrow.
Here’s a big map of all the images Yoon has made. Be sure to check out his blog for more great stuff.
Magical Urbanism, a website about urbanization, design and social change, is maintained by Mike Ernst. I'm an urban planner and designer based in San Francisco. I am a graduate of the
10 Responses and Counting
In every case above, the street narrowing results in a ghetto look. To experience such ghetto-like narrow streets, go to Brooklyn, NY.
The resulting human interaction from such narrowed streets gives rise to ghetto life.
To comment above. Nonsense. Ghetto looks requires congestion in height as well as width. So you would need tons of signage, visually dissonant adverts, cookie cutter buildings, tons of litter and filth. Dark foreboding places. Brooklyn brownstones usually are not ghetto, and if you look at cities like Pittsburgh, there are small streets, one-two lane roads, in commercial and residential areas with no ghetto areas. The images above have a homey effect. Clean lines, no fear of cars trying to kill you, and venues appear accessible and human. Light colors, warm, Earthy tones. It *looks* like a place you want to be. Not a scene out if Bladerunner.
Don’t want that nasty human interaction, do we! Might find out that we’re all human, and where would that get us?
that is amazing editing, and an even more amazing artistic idea behind it. Gives us a glimps of what life in LA would be like if cars were not the dominant species
It looks perfect for pedestrians and cyclists. Bring it on!
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