fedward, tumbling

goes on, and the heat goes on
~ Thursday, August 21 ~
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As I watched the intricate social ballet that occurred as cars and bikes slowed to enter the circle (pedestrians were meant to cross at crosswalks placed a bit before the intersection), Monderman performed a favorite trick. He walked, backward and with eyes closed, into the Laweiplein. The traffic made its way around him. No one honked, he wasn’t struck. Instead of a binary, mechanistic process—stop, go—the movement of traffic and pedestrians in the circle felt human and ­organic.
The Traffic Guru, an essay on Hans Monderman by Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic.