The Alley With a Street Sign

This project was for my math and science course named Urban Planning. I learned a lot about what urban planners do and also how they make places look better. I also learned about what makes certain urban planning decisions good and what makes some decisions bad. I also learned how to rethink how a space is laid out and how you can make it better. The purpose of this project was to choose a city block/blocks and redesign them to make them better. We were asked to change 5 things about the current space and try to make the space the best it can be, thinking about what cities around the world have done to make their streets better. I am proud of the changes I made to my space because now I feel it is at its best and is actually more efficient.

The current space I am redesigning is on Strong street and Pulaski to Strong and Avers in Albany Park. This is meant to be a side street but it is currently used as an alley because it has the feel and look of an alley and has no real use. Nobody ever uses the street and it is close to my house so I use it as a shortcut but it doesn't have a real good use to other people other than me. One of the worse things about this space is it has the look and feel of an alley, it has potholes, it's narrow and has a rusted broken fence. First thing I would do to make this space better is Make it wider, take the fence away, make it feel like an actual street, repave the street to cover the potholes.

My space is a rectangle that is 200 meters by 84 meters and the total area is 16,800 meters^2

The volume of the pyramid on top of the first house is 2,666 and the volume of the rectangular prism under it has a volume of 4,800 the total volume of the house is 7,466. Another one of my houses has the same volume for the rectangular prism (4,800) and the volume of the pyramid on top of the other house is 3,373 and the total volume is 8,173.

A few things that  would do to make the space a little bit better is

1.Take away the garden space on the side of the school

2.Take the ugly dangerous fence and make it a concrete barrier or a brick wall
3.Expand the street
4.Add a sidewalk so the kids still have a walkway next to the school
5.Take Springfield street and make it go through the useless parking lot so it doesn't just stop and start and have the parking lot on one side of the street and the school on the other so kids have less risk of car accidents and don't have to worry while they play.

BKJ, School Sketch (2015)

One thing that inspired me was the alley directly next to Aspira Haugan middle school because currently it is a pretty nice alley that is paved and still bigger than Strong street. London inspired me to change the width of my street because over there the streets are very narrow and I don't think that's a good thing in a place like Chicago.

One way me redesign will make transportation easier is that it adds an extra side street for people to drive through and since I extend Springfield you wouldn't have to go around to get to the next intersection of Springfield so it would be easier to get places using that route. I don't feel that my design would directly effect the houses in the area but it will extend the street which may make it easier to drive on that block because as of now it is a dead end. it will also cut part of the side of the school making the side of the school a bit smaller. I affected the infrastructure of the space by making one road more noticeable and connected an already exciting one.

some of the problems i encountered is that I wanted to expand the street but I didn't know how to cut into the school in one place and make it up by giving back in another place. Then, I realized that the school has a useless garden space directly next to Strong Street that they don't use so I ended up taking that space to extend the street. Along the way I realized that I have to make sacrifices to make things better in the end. If I has to do this project again I would pick a space that has more opportunities for change and can be easily manipulated