The libations of last night lay somewhat heavy on my brow, certainly on my ambition for the faulting undertow of Budapests subterranean metro. Quite wonderful it is the right side of nausea. Small boxed carriages, opaque of end, trundle along whilst celluloid windows gift beautifully glazed tiles, brass adorned wood and great boughs of concrete. A word of warning though, do stamp your ticket! In days previous, betrayed by the naivety that I could faultlessly navigate the network, I had been surrounded by tiny, stone faced women who spoke in laboured plosives of only one refrain: ‘this is problem, this is police problem.’ Nonetheless, stood in daylight with all the trappings of a recent robbery I recall the adrenal buzz of the metro door speaking directly to the lower brain. With all the flight of fights great company the decision is made, today’s ambulation will be of the purest form. The fresh air is good for a hangover n’all. The mise-en-scene here is quite different to what I’m used to. Home is London. It is a large city rich in the human scale, a dense cobbled mycelium of leaden streets. The scale here is curious to me but I enjoy it for it’s difference. Great arterial roads flood pedestrians, motorists and the crisp air of a burgeoning winter toward a glaucous Danube – albeit air anointed with the faint smell of diesel. Here blocks pass like book spines, original against revival against maybe original but don’t hold me to it. Medieval revivalist stalagmites marshal the banks of the Danube and as we turn our backs on the river and press on into the city I watch detail fade from facades becoming more congruent with the digitised post-communist grid. Mooching deeper into the city in which the people actually live I feel the urban landscape has become a bit oppressive. Take away the tourism, the shops, the impressively cheap just-shy-of-a-pint-pints I begin to feel that I have lost all commune with my surrounding environment. This is certainly not a sole commentary of Budapest, all cities are much the same, perhaps my sense of loss is compounded by the sheerness of the sprawl presented to me. But no less where is all the green? Some sort of forgotten, ancestral wonder kicks in and forces a smile across each face as you find a small corner plot hastily transformed into a park that cradles a sole tree like an extinct specimen in a museum. Sure there are neatly manicured civic parks but they’re not for the average bear, Boo Boo. Outside the Palace of Parliament the expanse of efficiently cropped grass and matching warning sign brought to mind the micrometer induced coiffeur of an 90s Schwarzenegger. Perhaps we could have incited a guerilla bowls game? Top down master planning performed in the name of capital growth teaches that the urban model we currently have is gifted in the name of the people, I question this. Not when green space cowers in ever darker corners of the city like mold clinging to a bathtub.
If our cities are driven by commerce, by getting where we need to be, by having the same miserable sandwich on every corner just so you’ve enough blood sugar to send that email about that phone call because they’re not calling back, then how do we get the life back into our urban lives? N55 know. They are a collective of designers who produce ‘manuals’ for public objects and interventions that allow individuals to engage with the urban environment on their terms. ‘Parkcycle Swarm’ is one such venture. Each unit is a cycle-driven green platform that can be arranged as the users see fit to any recreational end. N55 acknowledge this as ‘intelligent urban design’ for ‘intelligent cities,’ for a public that are ‘social beings needing space for being different.’ Where the dimensions of a car are given more worth in your environment than the individual passing through N55 have given opportunity for the inhabitants to reclaim this territory for non-polluting, non-profit activities. I mean I don’t know about you but I’ve never heard any Government espouse the need for the individual agency of communities having a meaningful impact on their own surroundings, have you? So I suppose here are your choices. Do you want to keep walking that same route to the station, footsteps all eventually describing the same meter like a herd of metronomes or do you want to turn up in flying-V formation, park your park sideways across the street and have a picnic? Precisely! I’m going to get some ice for these beers.
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