Imagine taking the blinding advertising screens and countless pedestrian and cab traffic in Times Square and combining it with the quaint charm of the polluted Gowanus Canal to create a new public urban swimming pool. That’s basically what Osaka, Japan, is proposing as a way to clean up the Dotonbori Canal. Located in a Times Squarish nightlife and entertainment district, developers are hoping to transform the unsavory canal to spur gentrification in this gritty area. This ain’t no Plus Pool.

According to the Japan Times, the canal has garnered a reputation as a place for drunk Hanshin Tigers fans to occasionally take a refreshing late-night dip after a baseball game victory. It is also the site of a statue of Kentucky Fried Chicken’s Colonel Sanders. Once dim and polluted, the canal’s neighborhood has seen much transformation, including the construction of an Atlantic City-like boardwalk, to make the area more family-friendly. To stimulate further development, Dotonbori River Poolside Avenue, a private company, hopes to turn the canal into a 12-meter-wide, 800-meter-long swimming pool, effectively one of the largest in the world.

As one commentator on the Japan Times pointed out, the canal is also frequently graced by the urine of late-night revelers. A spokesman noted that the canal will be maintained and filled with purified city water, not canal water. However, we wonder if the partygoers will find a new place to, erm, celebrate publicly. If approved, the pool is set to be complete in 2015.

[via PSFK]

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Image via BikeSnobNYC.

This past weekend, millions of the lazier breed of New Yorker smugly enjoyed the yearly sight of their sweat-drenched peers traversing the city, in that annual phenomenon known as the New York Marathon. The Marathon, which is a sight to behold if you haven’t had the chance, actually has a pretty interesting legacy, paralleling the transformation of the neighborhoods it’s cut through over the last forty years. The New York Times has a great little animation and data visualization of how the route of the 26.2-mile run has changed since 1976 (the first year the Marathon reached all the buroughs), and how the demographics of each neighborhood has changed with the route – for better or worse.

Rather than synthesizing the accompanying trend piece for you, we think it’s funnier to just list a few of the descriptors used to paint a picture of gentrification in New York, circa 2011:

• Buddy Holly glasses
• Experimental rock band
• $18 a six-pack
• 19th-century cast-iron pot holders
• black-white flip-flop
• An acting teacher at Yale’s drama school
• Chardonnay from stemless glasses
• alcohol-free perfume

You can go take a look at the great infographics here.

Image via.

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Herzog & de Meuron’s scheme for Roche’s new tower in Basel.

Blight returns to recovered block, Herzog & de Meuron go big in Basel, and OMA revives the utopian masterplan. We ask: who will be the Mark Zuckerberg of Russia’s Silicon Valley? Jump!

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