The folding car, but not only. There has been talk of Hiriko, in the articles on the internet of the last few weeks, like a curious piece of news, the car-stroller, the two-seater which, once folded, occupies only one and a half meters in length, the toy car that each of us would like to park. It's all true, but that's not all.
Hiriko, despite the sound reminiscent of Japan, is a Basque word, as well as Basque is the consortium of seven small companies based in Vitoria-Gasteiz, (city named "European Green Capital 2012"), which built it on a project by MIT.
The word Hiriko means urban, and it means in one old and new wayurbanity as belonging to the city, but also as openness, civilization), in the round. Because the design inherent in the project, its overall vision, is very urban.
Urban is the environmental need to occupy little space, decongesting traffic, and not polluting, urban is thethe public mobility project, which provides that the municipalities that adopt it will possess a more or less large fleet of these cars to be rented for a small fee to the citizen (who will be able to track them down at any time via smartphone).
More urban still it is the idea of combining the change (for the better) of the way of living in a city with the idea of doing social good. In fact, the project envisages that the mass-production of the cars takes place in the most disadvantaged areas of the cities where their use is envisaged, thus combining the desire (but perhaps the right word is need) to clean up the city with that of creating work.
The project will soon debut in Malmö, the third largest city in Sweden, a rich and odd metropolis broken transversely by a thin dark line that divides it into two areas (the affluent east area and the west area rich in immigrants and poor in work) which have grown inversely, bringing social differences to unsustainable levels. The plant will be built in the west area, in the Rosengard area torn apart by riots and fires and also mentioned several times by Italian newspapers as the violent milieu of Ibrahimovic, to explain naturalistically the less successful headers. There is talk of giving work to over thirty immigrant families, mainly Iraqis, with the hope that support industries will soon spring up in the area.
The experiment should then continue in Berlin, Barcelona, Vitoria-Gasteiz, San Francisco and Hong Kong. The idea behind Hiriko is that a social project can be only one and a half meters long, if you have an eye, the hope is that at least this is not foldable.
