Food for Thought : Ode to the Pothole : Just add "Dirt!"

I watched "dirt! the movie" for the third time this week. I highly recommend it.

An ode to potholes, from my eco friends at Grist:

"In the interests of health and safety, if potholes are going to be unattended risks, why not mark them with style like Steve Wheen, London’s pothole gardener? Wheen regularly creates miniature versions of the English garden, adapted to such small spaces with kamikaze grace.
Indeed, make them monuments, green them up — or, more purposefully, fence them off — as yet another pocket of reclaimed guerrilla urbanism. Make those nasty, cordoned-off potholes what they already are: untouchable neighborhood open space, some suitable for dog walk way-stations (with scoopers, plastic bags, and special disposal containers), others for green space with exotic vegetation, or traffic-calming devices of various shapes and sizes.
Such altered potholes could become the new traffic-calming “woonerfs” — those shared spaces in intersections or roadsides borrowed from the Dutch, and already present in some Seattle neighborhoods. Woonerfs make us drive slower, as we must navigate around them to get from here to there, and they are often aimed at increased pedestrian presence on autocentric streets. Think of woonerfs — and the new pothole mini-parks — as Park(ing) Day on steroids.
And that’s the point. Potholes could be permanent, in a good way — which might just accelerate some people’s desired evolution away from the car." (source : GRIST) 

 -Mari