PUBLIC SPACE is the place where the drama of urban life spread out.

Leon Krier’s opinion in his book entitled Architecture and Urban Design; 1979-1992, judging that the public space can only be formed from the street and square.

Stephen Carr guides the design of public space in his book entitled Public Space that public spaces should be; responsive, democratic and meaningful.

Responsive means public space should be used for various activities and broad interests. Democratic means of public space should be used by the general public from various social backgrounds, economic and cultural as well as accessible for the disabled body, the elderly and the human physical condition. Meaningful means of public space must have a link with the human, public space and the world at large. Public space should also have links with the social context.

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A stream runs through the center of Seoul, dividing the city into North and South, but for three decades it was totally buried beneath a busy downtown highway. In 2003, as part of a vast urban renewal project, the highway was removed and the stream was recovered and turned into a beautiful 5.8 km urban park. Demolishing roads in favor of urban parks is is a development project we can really get behind.

The Cheonggyecheon stream was formed during the Joseon Dynasty in order to provide drainage for the city. It lasted for hundreds of years until the 1940s, when the city became so populated that a shanty town popped up around the stream and began polluting the area. The stream was gradually covered over with concrete, and by 1976 a 5.6 km elevated highway was built on top of it.

Considered an example of ‘successful industrialization and modernization’, the highway remained there until 2003, when city planners tore it down to revitalize the area and help Seoul remake itself as a modern environmentally friendly city. The Cheonggyecheon Restoration Project took two years and cost around $281 million, but it has created a thriving stretch of green public space in the middle of the city.

What was once a dividing line between the north and south parts of the city has been recreated as an urban park that bridges the gap and brings people together. Over 75% of the material torn down from the old highway was reused to construct the park and rehabilitate the stream. Now fish, bird and insects have made their way back into the urban river, and the area surrounding the park is about 3.6 deg C cooler than other parts of the city.

In addition to the restoration project, Seoul has also implemented transportation planning, rerouting traffic through other corridors and adding more public transportation. As a result there has been a decrease in the number of vehicles entering the city and bus and subway use has increased. Even though the city took away one of the major thoroughfares, they were able to redirect and decrease traffic through efficient planning and expanded public transportation. Sounds like an amazing renewal project with many, many benefits.

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While the reason the name “Meteor Alley” was chosen is lost to history, it’s established that typically the City polled residents on a name choice. Perhaps kids in the neighborhood, fresh off reading Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, insisted it would be a neat idea, and their preferred name change prevailed. Either way, meteors and meteor showers invigorated the fascination of the public in the 1890s, as scientific theory on their nature and origin advanced considerably. The renaming of the space to “Meteor Alley” would have been very timely.

It was during this decade that astronomers George Johnstone Stoney (did his mother know that her son, with his rock-themed name, would contribute so much to our understanding of sun-orbiting stones?) and Arthur Matthew Weld Downing first offered the idea of a meteoroid stream or trail, calculating how meteoroids, once freed from a comet and traveling at low speeds relative to the comet, would drift mostly in front of or behind the comet after completing one orbit around the sun.

Only a few decades prior to this period, meteors were still thought to be only an atmospheric effect, similar to lightning, not objects colliding with the mesosphere. After Yale professor Benjamin Silliman theorized in 1807 that a meteorite fall had extraterrestrial origins, President Thomas Jefferson dismissed Silliman’s claim, saying, “I would more easily believe that (a) Yankee professor would lie than that stones would fall from heaven.” The progression in understanding astrological phenomena started to reach a crescendo in the decades to come. The renaming of Anderson Alley to Meteor Alley would have been a sign of the times.

Meteor Alley runs over the area where a millpond once existed prior to the early 1880s, when the Hydraulic Canal leading into the neighborhood was filled and this swath of land was prepped for residential development. As in most traditional neighborhoods that have alleys, Meteor Alley is fronted by garages and back yards, making driveways unnecessary and allowing detached houses to be built closer together, enhancing the civic scale of the streets the houses face. The co-mingling of back yards has always made alleys, with their minimal auto traffic, ideal places for children’s play and neighborhood gatherings. Modern planners now see alleys, or “rear lanes,” as essential tools for integrating automobile and pedestrian traffic in neighborhoods. Alleys are also more efficient spaces to plow than numerous, separate driveways.

Alleys tend to be forlorn, forgotten spaces, but they are being rediscovered by urban planners and developers who point to their functional utility and their unique charm. In Chicago, which has 1,900 miles of alleys that make up the largest network of alleys in the world, has even instituted a Green Alley Program (check out these links on the program at the New York Times and Streetsblog) to convert asphalt in alleys to permeable pavement types, better able to absorb stormwater run-off. The alley, once derided, is cool again. A name like Meteor Alley makes it even cooler!

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