Et Cetera

Exhibit: The Road Ahead

The VeloPlus Wheelchair Transport Bicycle is on display at The Road Ahead exhibit. Photo courtesy VeloPlus.

The future of transportation is explored in The Road Ahead: Reimagining Mobility (cooperhewitt.org/channel/road-ahead), an exhibit running at Manhattan's Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum throughout March. The show doesn't offer answers; it examines possibilities. The fundamental question it poses? "How do we want to live?" says Cynthia Smith, the museum's curator of socially responsible design.

The exhibit contains 40 design projects involving "technologies to move people, goods and services." There's what you'd expect: drones, droids, autonomous vehicles, electric scooters, trikes. There's also an installation that imagines how streets will sound with new transportation technologies and a look back at predictions of future mobility from the 1939 World's Fair. One display focuses on MIT Media Lab's Moral Machine, an online platform that allows users to consider what ethical dilemmas AVs could face.

Smith says we're at an inflection point similar to the turn of the 20th century, when cars rapidly outnumbered horses. "We don't really know where these mobility transformations will take us," she says.

Panels of experts helped create the show. One conclusion Smith took away from them was that "a lot of the innovation and changes will come from urban planning and policy."

— Jim Sweeney

Sweeney writes about architecture, art, and design from Rockville, Maryland.

Now Streaming: Human Flow

Image courtesy Amazon Studios.

A new documentary by the celebrated, often controversial, and formerly detained artist/dissident Ai Weiwei presents a beautiful portrayal of a distressing global phenomenon: the international migration of more than 65 million refugees since the end of World War II, displaced as a result of war, hunger, and environmental degradation. Produced in partnership with Amazon Studios (and streaming on Amazon Prime), Human Flow (humanflow.com) covers nearly two-dozen countries, from Bangladesh to Turkey to the U.S.-Mexico border, plunging down to ground level to see the effects of migration on individuals, families, and communities.

Despite the film's stunning camera work and deeply artistic imagery — which capture the poetic, even hypnotic, movements of masses of people — Weiwei never strays from his fundamental goal of cultivating empathy in the viewer and creating a space for reflection and connection. As the title implies, the film focuses on the individual people captured in these international flows — the humanity hidden in the headlines.

— Ezra Haber Glenn, AICP

Glenn teaches at MIT's Department of Urban Studies & Planning and writes on cities and film. Visit him at urbanfilm.org.

Apps

SoMo

Here Technologies has released a new app that rounds up all public, private, and personal transportation options in one easy-to-use interface. It also works as a social platform, allowing users to coordinate trips to special events and recurring journeys with friends, family, and coworkers.

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Refuge Restrooms

This iOS app maps and categorizes user-generated data on unisex public restrooms around the world. The platform identifies which are accessible, their specific locations, and whether they're available to paying customers only. While the map covers every continent, some areas, like the U.S. and Europe, are more densely reported on.

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YourCoast

A new collaboration from the California Coastal Commission and Napster creator Sean Parker is making the beach a little easier to find. The app catalogues 1,563 public access points (which sometimes amount to an unmarked alley wedged between gated communities) to California's all-public coastline. Details like parking options and accessibility provisions are also available.

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Et Cetera is a curated collection of planning odds and ends. Please send information to Lindsay R. Nieman, Planning's associate editor, at lnieman@planning.org.