Yule Heibel's Library tagged urban_design →  View Popular, Search in Google

Well, hear, hear.
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“Ugliness is so grim,” urban beautification advocate Lady Bird Johnson once said. “A little beauty, something that is lovely, I think, can help create harmony which will lessen tensions.”
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urban_design urban_forest trees smartplanet

Sure, ok, there's starchitecture that *is* obnoxious. But you know what's wrong with entirely "community-driven" design? It can suffer from Tall Poppy Syndrome (TPS) and end up celebrating the merely subpar. TPS is when you cut everything down to the same size. There are plenty of supposedly pro-community/ pro-people spaces that were built by starchitects (Italian Renaissance, anyone?), and they wouldn't stand a chance under the regime proposed by this article:
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We need to be very strong in our criticism. Both architects and landscape designers (many of whom are trying to outdo the architecture profession with shapes and forms and a "greenwash") need to be challenged. Only then will they be pushed to support communities in their quest to create places that are comfortable - places where community members can have a sense of real ownership and the ability to adapt public streets and places to their unique aspirations and identity.
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Places that are "comfortable"? What does that mean?
(File s.v. "love hurts.")

architecture starchitecture urban_design community sustainable_cities

Sounds <ahem> good to me...
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The whole idea here is that we don’t have to accept cities as noisy places, that apartments can be private and roads can be calmer and whole neighborhoods can sound, if not like the countryside, then something more humane.

“To just accept the status quo is turning our back on innovation and design,” Antonio says, “and why we’re doing this in the first place.”
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cities atlantic_cities noise urban_design

Some great ideas for public seating here:
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The boring benches installed in urban areas around the world are purely functional: you take a seat for a little while, and then you leave. But why shouldn’t public furniture be visually interesting, comfortable and even interactive as well? These 14 chairs, benches, loungers, tables and more often double as art objects, with designs that consider a wide range of needs.
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public_space seating benches urban_design cities furniture

Who would have thunk? Interesting video.
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A city’s typeface. It’s not the first thing I think of when I imagine ways to make a city great, but in Chattanooga, Tenn. they make a strong case for the importance of having a custom typeface for the city.
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chattanooga typeface design urban_design branding smartplanet

Right on.
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A few days ago, I was walking home with my 9-year-old son when I came upon a young woman standing in the middle of Cadman Plaza Park in Brooklyn, a block-wide island of green in the city’s downtown. She was staring fixedly at her smartphone, which she held up in front of her as if using it to sense a magnetic field, or perhaps radioactive contamination.

As I passed, she turned to look at me suddenly, her face drawn and anxious. “Excuse me,” she said. “Can you tell me which way to the Brooklyn Bridge?”

I turned around and pointed to the bridge entrance, which was in plain sight about 20 yards from where we were standing. “Thank you so much!” she said. “I just couldn’t figure it out with my GPS!”

“Wow,” said my kid as we continued on. “That’s really sad.”
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city_smarts urban_design gps navigation atlantic_cities

I wrote about the same thing on my blog recently, with respect to the neighborhood centers in Portland OR: the really successful ones draw in plenty of visitors from *outside* the immediate neighborhood, and they become attractions for people from surrounding areas. See: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/yulelog/2011/12/19/city-of-villages/ and scroll down to the section "Hungry and hungrier"...
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For the formula [of walkable, viable neighborhood commercial centers] to work, the businesses must also be large enough to draw some customers from outside the neighborhood:

The tricky part is that the business concentration needed to encourage walking appears to be larger than most neighborhood residential populations can support. Given that, suburban regions should focus both on fostering pedestrian centers and on knitting those centers together with transportation networks, though such networks need not accommodate only cars.
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To be read in conjunction with Why Do Some Neighborhoods Get Overrun With Chain Stores, While Others Don't?
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/01/why-do-some-neighborhoods-get-overrun-chain-stores-while-others-dont/909

urban_design walkability retail atlantic_cities kaid_benfield

An argument for making neighborhoods/ streets "nicer" as a means of returning power to residents so that crime is lessened.
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Did these neighborhoods become safer because better housing telegraphed to the residents that their communities were valuable?

“If there is crime in an upscale neighborhood, everybody would come together, people would be up in arms, they’d demand the police pay attention, they’d say ‘let’s get more patrols in here!’” Cahill says. “Low-income residents in a lot of poor areas, they’ve just given up on the police, they’re not treated well by the police. They feel like the problems are too large for them to address. This is returning that sense of power to the residents, increasing the community’s capacity to do something about their situation.”
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crime urban_design atlantic_cities housing

Fascinating look at tactical urbanism.
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City-making may have happened all at once at the desks of master planners like Daniel Burnham or Robert Moses, but that’s really not the way things happen today. No single master plan can anticipate the evolving and varied needs of an increasingly diverse population or achieve the resiliency, responsiveness and flexibility that shorter-term, experimental endeavors can. Which is not to say long-term planning doesn’t have its place. The two work well hand in hand. Mike Lydon, founding principal of The Street Plans Collaborative, argues for injecting spontaneity into urban development, and sees these temporary interventions (what he calls “tactical urbanism”) as short-term actions to effect long-term change.
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“We’re seeing a lot of these things emerge for three reasons,” Lydon continues. “One, the economy. People have to be more creative about getting things done. Two, the Internet. Even four or five years ago we couldn’t share tactics and techniques via YouTube or Facebook. Something can happen randomly in Dallas and now we can hear about it right away. This is feeding into this idea of growth, of bi-coastal competition between New York and San Francisco, say, about who does the cooler, better things. And three, demographic shifts. Urban neighborhoods are gentrifying, changing. They’re bringing in people looking to improve neighborhoods themselves. People are smart and engaged and working a 40-hour week. But they have enough spare time to get involved and this seems like a natural step.”
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nyt allison_arieff architecture tactical_urbanism urban_design urbanplanning urban_renewal pop_up

Some terrific ideas here:
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This summer the Institute for Urban Design asked New Yorkers to submit ideas for making the city's public spaces "smarter, more beautiful and livable." Some 500 responses later, the institute then asked designers from around the world to shape these raw ideas into concrete projects for the city. The results of this "collaborative re-imagining" of New York were revealed during Urban Design Week, which came to a close on Tuesday, with 10 entries declared collective "winners."
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urban_renewal urban_amenities urban_design cities nyc atlantic_cities design

Weird, or just common sense (to create pocket parks, etc.)?
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“Urban acupuncture is a surgical and selective intervention into the urban environment,” said Los Angeles architect and professor John Southern in an interview, “instead of large scale projects that involve not only thousands of acres, but investment and infrastructure that municipalities can no longer provide.”
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Compare this to other reports on Tokyo's stalled development climate, where sites are turned into surface parking lots (awful, malignant) instead of parks.

psfk acupuncture cities urban_energy urban_amenities urban_design

Pattern Cities' page explaining the term "pattern cities":
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In the history of civilization, select settlements have played a greater role than others in shaping regional and global urban landscapes. Today, a handful of cities continue to establish innovative urban development paradigms. These places, which we call Pattern Cities, provide the foundation and inspiration for this website.
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Cities listed: London, Paris, Copenhagen, Rome, New York, Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Curitiba, Bogota, Cairo, Johannesburg, Tokyo, Beijing.

cities pattern_recognition pattern_cities urbanism urban_design

Great blog and resource on urbanism. Emphasis is on "pattern cities," derived from Jane Jacobs' thesis on "pattern states" (in turn based on an idea of Sir George Clark's).
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Whatever their manifestation, patterns play an important role in understanding the past, and guiding the future of cities around the world. This blog is devoted to examining cities, the patterns they create, and the ideas they spread across the globe.
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cities pattern_recognition urbanism urban_design pattern_cities

Jan Gehl giving a talk at Cooper Hewitt. It's long, but worth watching.
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Urban life is in many ways a matter of rhythms, and the rhythms of human movement and perception have found a gifted interpreter in Gehl. Every city that has implemented his ideas has revived some of its livelier qualities, or discovered them anew.
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jan_gehl cities video cooper_hewitt urban_design

Jan Gehl on understanding humans, and thereby creating better cities:
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Ever since planning was professionalized around 1960, instead of adding new streets and new houses to existing cities, they switched to big scale stuff--big buildings, new districts, and handling the influx of automobiles. They were good at handling big blocks, but weren’t paying attention to people. In the book, I talk about three levels in city planning: the big story seen from above; the medium story--the site plans, and the little story--the people landscape seen at eye-level. Planners tended to the two bigger scales, but would not come down to eye-level and see the results. And architects became more and more interested in single buildings and in forms than in society. They were concerned with the skyline than the sidewalk. But the people scale is the most important scale, because that’s where the biggest attractions are--other people--and that is exactly the scale that has for years been forgotten and mishandled. Nobody has been commissioned to look after it in any systematic way.

We know more about the habitat of panda bears and mountain gorillas than we do about cities at eye-level. It’s intriguing why so little research has been done on the urban habitat of homo sapiens in urban settings. Since Jane Jacobs, maybe 10 people have studied it seriously: Holly Whyte; Christopher Alexander; Allan Jacobs and Donald Appleyard among them. Ten years ago, we started our consultancy firm to put all of their theories to work. And we’ve learned a lot about what works and doesn’t work. It’s partly a cultural question and partly it’s a matter of biology and what kind of animal we are--how far we can move, and see. Why is it that shops are four or five meters apart on all the good shopping streets all over the world? Because if you’re walking past, there is a new experience every four or five seconds, which is ideal from a stimulus point of view.
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cities jan_gehl urban_design

On cities built for people:
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In traditional cities – those places we instinctively love because they’re lovely and beautiful and make us want to sit and eat an ice cream or sip a coffee – the Godzilla factor doesn’t win. Great traditional places like the Piazza del Campo in Siena, Italy, or cities like Barcelona, or Gehl’s own beloved Copenhagen which have grown on a foundation of progressive urbanism, and great new places like Curritiba in southern Brazil built on sustainability principles, all are full of small signals and eye-level details that can only be seen as you walk along a human-scale street at 5 km/hr. And Gehl Architecture’s extensive research in the public realm – which could be characterized as an anthropological study of the wild homo sapien in his natural urban environment – backs this up. We don’t just happen to love Venice because it has great food or because it’s romantic and old. We love places like this because they’re built in a way that works for an average human being just walking or biking around being human.
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jan_gehl urban_design cities

More on urban planning and social media/ input by the people:
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The NYC Dept of Transportation continues to re-imagine traffic throughout the city; employing a system of bike paths, street closings and new traffic alignments to create public space and make traffic safer and more efficient. The task was to imagine the public spaces created by the new traffic alignments, and design a language of street furniture and planting that helped to define the space. Before beginning to develop our design principles, the design team first had to ask, what should a public place be?

The aim was to engage a wide audience in answering this question. Forty Dutch urban design students and their professors, landscape architect Erik de Jong and planner Arnold van der Valk, happened to be in town and were eager to discuss urban public space in the American context.

These young designers joined Balmori Associates staff and the client in a design discussion. The team also extended the conversation to a worldwide public through live video and twitter. The discussion touched on topics that including ecology, funding, furniture and materials, program, public/private, public amenities, scale, and circulation/traffic. In the Twitter forum, the discussion focused on sharable space, urban decorum, and contextual appropriateness. These topics helped us to develop our design principles.
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open_source placemaking streets reclaiming_streets urban_design urbanplanning balmori nyc

Lots of great ideas here:

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In its most naked form, 'open source' place-making is about taking a development site, establishing a very basic planning framework for it, triggering population of the site and then through its unfolding occupation form a forward plan for its development.

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A second dimension to open source place-making is to innovate the management of a neighbourhood, prioritise opportunities for tenants to benefit from short leases, self-build and self-management of the way in which they relate to buildings; also support different terms of trade and promote internal markets in goods and services on a barter basis - perhaps even follow a model by which tenants provide services-in-kind to external grant funders of a site, in lieu of rent.

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...be a talent scout, recruit and capitalise upon its momentum.

On one level, 'open source' place-making is asking the development sector to open its mind up to a different way of thinking about design and site assembly: what tech people call interaction design.

Start to see physical space as a form of sovereign real estate - much like a web page - who's personality unfolds through the involvement of users - and see activity on site as a sequence of what geeks call transient interrupts that develop, die or mutate in to profitable enterprises over time.

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On another level, 'open source' place-making is a plea: to slim down bureaucracy, open up development to taking an equity stake in the customer and reflect the fact that in an internet economy, people are loyal to data and experience and 'modal switch' between platforms; what's more, maximise opportunities to win a return on investment in certain markets or market-makers: such as social enterprise, independent retail, consumers who live in online, as well as offline spaces, and those who want autonomy.

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urban development has wound right down, with producers and consumers of land either deleveraging or starved of bank credit.

You don't need to be Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve t

open_source placemaking urban_design david_barrie innovation

Very interesting: Urban planning as not-planning, informed by social media...?

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The rise of social enterprise prioritises human relationships and transactions of social, not just commercial value, says Barrie. ‘It shifts the narrative of renewal from the provision of space to services, with sites acting as places that enable change, rather than dictate them via a masterplan.’ Social productivity, he concludes, presses for a new narrative in urban development. Historically, it has been social networks that have made places.

In online social networks, people have multiple independent groups of friends, often linked to family, shared experience and hobbies. Temporary ties are common-place. People rely upon the recommendation of friends to make decisions. Historically, these are drivers of human association with public space and it has been the physical public realm that has made a market in these relations.’

‘Increasingly, says Barrie, ‘minds copy the workings of the internet and flit sharply from one idea to another, addicted to the breadth of everything, rather than the depth of something This is at odds with one of the traditional functions of places and placemaking: to create fixed opportunities for human interactions and narrative. In this context, physical places start to look like either passing scenery or locations that host uses that enable people to fulfil a task.’

There is nothing new, he continues, about designing places that embrace the sociability and social value of business or human relations. ‘However, places that explicitly integrate the unfolding development of social ventures, or could be described as living rooms for a networked society, have been thin on the ground. 'no doubt because of the risks associated with social enterprise paying rent, the failure to find a profitable operating model for municipal wi-fi, the perception of social business as a means of addressing market failure, rather than creating wealth'.

Approaches to urban development that seek to trigger or build networks

placemaking rudi david_barrie urbanplanning urban_design socialmedia open_source

How curious - never occurred to me (since I don't live in a very hot climate) that getting a drink of water from a store would be a prime amenity for seniors.
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What people say they want most of all is to live in a neighborly place where it is safe to cross the street and where the corner drugstore will give them a drink of water and let them use the bathroom. They ask for personal shoppers at Fairway to help them find the good deals on groceries. They want better street drainage, because it is hard to jump over puddles with walkers and wheelchairs.
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seniors elderly senior_friendly cities urbanism urban_design