Fryer oil turns plain old potatoes into delicious french fries. It powers our biodiesel cars. And, now, it’s being used to turn the dusty surfaces of rural Canadian roads into stable makeshift asphalt—AND THEY SMELL LIKE FRENCH FRIES. God bless our obsession with that infernally unhealthy liquid.
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You might not realize it, but quitting our addiction to oil means more than just finding something besides gasoline to put in our cars. If we really want to stop using fossil fuels, we have to change the way we make roads—and cooking oil might just be the answer.
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As a surface for wheels, pavement does its job well enough. Asphalt concrete is flat, smooth, and solid (usually). But there is a price we pay for the convenience of paved roads and parking lots everywhere—a price paid in heat, noise, and polluted runoff. We went in search of better pavement and found these potential solutions.
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I’m something of an uncultured swine when it comes to jazz, so weird little Pavement songs
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The days are getting longer, the weather’s getting warmer. It’s this time of year that anyone and everyone could use some killer strollin’ music to strut to. Might I suggest the hidden Pavement not-exactly-a-classic-but-damn-well-should-be "The Sutcliffe Catering Song"? You just have to like it.
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A couple of months ago, we saw people bouncing along to their destinations thanks to design firm Salto’s Fast Track trampoline installation. Pathways are once again getting a redesign, this time of the watery kind, with artist collective Raum’s waterbed-like pavement.
The pavement, which was installed in Bourges, France a couple of years back, was created in collaboration with the National Art School of Bourges and FRAC Centre. What they did was install a huge pad filled with liquid underneath the bricks to turn that stretch of pavement into a moving waterbed.
The project is called ‘La Ville Molle’ (‘The Soft City’) and while it’s a completely fun concept, it was created with a very serious message. The project was meant to question the ‘hardness of the city and its ability to change’, which I think is a pretty common problem that many cities all over the world face. While replacing sidewalks with waterbeds probably won’t solve that problem, at least it might make you think about it, and lighten up for a few minutes.
[via Pop Up City]
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