In his vision, individual cars would be replaced by car-share systems that function like luggage carts at an airport. Pay, step into a smart car that communicates with the city grid, drive to your destination, and leave the car there. The cars would have soft, springy exteriors, inflatable protective bladders and transparent foil, which would enable them to bump together as they traveled in flocks. “The idea of sharp metal boxes is just done,” Joachim says. “We design cars with the principle that no one would ever die in a car accident again.”
I found Michell Joachim on the sputnik observatory a little while ago along with a lot of other very interesting, intelligent, and progressive people, whom I have been trying to look further into to investigate individual projects or ideas of theirs. Joachim is one who seems to be doing a lot. He is a co-founder of the group Terraform ONE, a non-profit design collective that works to explore fully-integrated urban planning. I looked at his blog today and found this article from Popular Science about Joachim's vision of his future ecological supercities. His energy and enthusiasm for creating spaces that he may not even live to see is very positive for me, along with his sense of taking responsibility for design decisions and every implications of each. I think for these types of visions to fulfill themselves there are going to need to be many other structural changes within how our culture functions and thrives but that there are people who are working so hard on this is exciting...
