urban_design - Yule Heibel on Diigo

18 May 09

Events | RUDI - Resource for Urban Design Information

Info page for an upcoming June 2009 UK conference I would love to attend: "a place for creativity? unlocking the original in urban design and development"

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rudi creativity urban_design manchester conference

how projects can and should be funded and ways of involving the people that live and work in the places to be re-designed.
- patronage - who pays? - on 2009-05-18
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08 May 09

Fairy tale or horror story - join the debate | RUDI - Resource for Urban Design Information

"Urban designer and artist collaborations: what value do they bring?"
QUOTE
The event did not focus on ‘how to do’ public art, but rather aimed to stimulate debate and throw up challenges to what some are coming to regard as a too-often standardised way of creating public spaces.
UNQUOTE

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public_art artists urban_design collaboration public_space rudi

throw up challenges to what some are coming to regard as a too-often standardised way of creating public spaces
failed to evolve
- - then why should it be a solution to turn B. into a fantasy land instead? ...Not sure I understand why this should work. - on 2009-05-08
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- The Presence of Absence: Where are the people in public space?
  
  • What is the role of new technology?
  
  • Are we being isolated by the iPod culture?
  
  • Is it possible to plan in spontaneity?
  
  • If an art object is chosen for a place, who does it represent?
  
  Diarmaid Lawlor, associate director of Urban Initiatives, says that places should be ‘centres of collective meaning'.
- ‘I think one of the fundamental issues is that there is a rift between the concept of ‘professional' and that of ‘artist'. Not in the usual terms - artists can be professionals and behave accordingly but they are in particular professionally individual (maybe even professionally difficult).
  
  This has to accepted as a manageable risk, which perhaps could be dealt with by raising the game of the people who brief and commission the artist - to find a better fit,' she says.
  - - look to 4culture.org in Seattle; they've found ways to do this - on 2009-05-08
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- where public behaviour comes under strict scrutiny
  - - while I agree with the critique of the "malling" of public spaces (privatizing what were public spaces), I'm very very tired of the suggestion, hinted at in the highlighted phrase, that public behavior should be exempt from scrutiny or controls of any kind. If you think about it, the move to privatization could be seen as a *failure* of public will to regulate behavior in public spaces (examples: social disorder, public drunkenness & urination, hooliganism, vagrancy, aggressive panhandling, and so on). Too often (esp'y if you're living in a place that has a British flavor - either UK or Canada, eg.), there's a tendency to not be judgmental about social disorder, to be forever tolerant, to not complain, and so on. But people still react (are reactionary), so eventually they allow privatization as a way of "sterilizing" what they don't like about the public space. It's almost certainly dishonest - it would be better to have frank (even "judgmental") discussions about our urban public spaces instead. But that's where we chicken out, because no one wants to be seen as some kind of "oppressor" of "freedom." whether of individual righs (even if they're infringing on others' rights) or expression, and no one wants to be identified as intolerant of the "hard to house" or poor. - on 2009-05-08
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- ‘This is not a development that will allow the area's own character to evolve over time. Its character has been predetermined by architects, marketing specialists and planners. No room is left for responsiveness to people and locality.'
  - - from my own p.o.v., this is the most valid critique of privatized formerly public spaces. But it applies to overplanning in general, too. - on 2009-05-08
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- Some of the key issues raised included:
  
  The profession has overdone planning for all – we have lost the ability to say no, do little, allow people to make places work. Should urban designers say no to briefs they don’t think will work?
  Artists get selected too often for the way their work looks rather than the way they think – this can lead to clashes of ideology and aspirations. Too often the creative input of artists is not taken seriously by others – there is a ‘throw away mentality’ - how do we rectify this?
  The debate surrounding objects being placed in our cities and towns is obscuring the need for thoughtful places, which encourage real interaction. How can the two professions unite to encourage more creative clients?

11 Mar 09

Putting Parking into Reverse - InTransition

"Professor’s Theories Influence Cities to Reconsider Pervasive Free Parking" : on how free parking has distorted urban centers.

intransitionmag.org/...Free_Parking.html - Preview

intransition parking cars cities urban_design surface_parking_lots

UCLA Planning Professor Donald Shoup has written 733 pages that say otherwise. Because when cars aren’t going, they are parked somewhere, and when they are parked in one place, an average of six spaces per car nationwide stand vacant. Shoup considers the proliferation of parking spaces to be a plague on American cities, and because the vast majority lie open for the taking, they represent the largest devaluation of real estate short of the subprime mortgage crisis.
If America’s streets were a Monopoly board, it would be a dull contest indeed, with almost every space “Free Parking.” Each of the country’s roughly 200 million vehicles typically demands spaces at home and work, with shares of countless spaces at the market, restaurant, post office, mall and every other imaginable destination. Eighty-seven percent of all trips are made by personal vehicle and 99 percent of those trips arrive at a free parking space.
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- Many of these spaces stem from carelessly planned street parking schemes and arbitrary minimum parking requirements, by which cities dictate the number of spaces that different types of land uses must provide for tenants and customers.
- “That makes parking artificially abundant and therefore cheap and does in some ways tend to subsidize auto use when people would otherwise make other choices,”
- Shoup has waged a campaign to convince cities to revolutionize their parking policies, from charging higher meter prices to allowing communal lots to reducing sacrosanct minimum parking requirements. Such efforts, he says, could speed the flow of traffic, encourage denser development, rehabilitate pedestrian environments and even make it easier to find a place to park. Now, four years after his book’s publication, cities across America are devising ways to stop parking in its tracks.
- Car Culture “Ruined the City”
- As parking requirements facilitate the use of cars, total travel increases, public transit use decreases, buildings scoot farther away from each other, density diminishes, central cities go into tailspins and sprawl increases—all of which, in turn, increases the need for more parking.
- “I’m really saying that cities are doing everything wrong, when it comes to parking,” Shoup said. “I firmly believe that. For 75 years we’ve made terrible mistakes with nobody noticing.”
- “Parking is the most glaring example of how we have systematically subsidized an auto-driven landscape and systematically devalued the pedestrian landscape.”
- A “pseudoscience” was created out of assigning precise requirements to everything from convents to batting cages, and couching them in terms of “requirements” implied that they must be provided free of charge.
- the absence of a price does not equate to an absence of cost.
- Though Shoup himself gives only the occasional informational lecture and admits that his book is nearly unreadable in its entirety, it has turned into a manifesto for a growing movement of planners, public officials and other loyal revolutionaries who decry the degradation of the urban landscape. These self-styled “Shoupistas” (yes, there is a Facebook group) have created a cult of personality and rationality around Shoup and his straightforward, elegant approach to healing American cities.
- Rather than focus on the supply side of the parking equation, Shoup focuses on the demand side and on the heretical notion that, even in a consumerist society, it might be all right to implement policies that would reduce demand.
- The fundamental change that cities need to make, according to Shoup, is to charge a price for metered parking that would be expensive enough to create roughly a 15 percent vacancy rate. At that rate, Shoup said, many drivers will either park in private lots or use other means of transportation, and those drivers who want to park on the street will find readily available spaces without “cruising” endlessly.
- Indeed, one of Shoup’s studies claimed that in a variety of high-traffic areas in Los Angeles, curb parking was always cheaper than pay parking, by as much as a factor of 10. In Westwood Village alone, this disparity leads to “cruising” that “creates enough vehicle travel to make 38 trips around the earth.”
  - yikes... - on 2009-03-11
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- One group likely to raise protests, though, are businesses owners who may fear that higher prices will drive away patrons. In fact, Shoup contends that higher turnover (prompted by higher rates) will benefit some businesses, and he ensures that the benefits will be more than just theoretical.
- Shoup proposes “parking benefit districts” by which revenue at the meters would be re-invested in the immediate neighborhood for upgrades such as sidewalk improvements, signage and other amenities that would make the areas more comfortable for pedestrians and less comfortable for cars.
  - - that's an excellent idea, and fits in well w/ studies that show how urban forests/ plantings improve commerce, lend an air of ease and pleasure to a district and raise its overall profile/ value. - on 2009-03-11
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- He recommends that cities “let the prices do the planning.”
- Leading the pack is San Francisco, where the new SFPark program has received $23 million in federal funding. SFPark takes nearly the entire suite of Shoupisms to heart and is implementing them in an 18-month pilot project that will apply to 7,000 curbside and over 11,000 off-street spaces. It will rely heavily on cutting-edge meter and data-gathering technology to adjust rates and reduce congestion.
- Still, Shoup’s optimism extends even to the typology that most revels in parking excess: the big box store. Convinced that urbanism can emerge in the backwash of sprawl, Shoup contends that if big boxes, malls and even strip malls were allowed to reduce their parking and replace excess spaces with something more useful, suburbanites might embark on the greatest land reclamation scheme this side of the Netherlands. He envisions apartment buildings and townhouses sprouting on the edges of malls parking lots and thereby creating nearly fully formed neighborhoods in place of vacant asphalt.
  - - this is what's supposed to be going up at Town & Country Mall right here in Victoria/ Saanich (if the current $-downturn hasn't killed the project...) - on 2009-03-11
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04 Mar 09

Carrot City: Designing for Urban Agriculture — City Farmer News

Post about the exhibition, Carrot City: Designing for Urban Agriculture, February 25th – April 30th 2009 – Free Admission (Opening reception: March 3rd 2009), at Design Exchange, Toronto (website: www.dx.org)
QUOTE
This exhibition will show how the design of cities and buildings is enabling the production of food in the city.
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08 Jan 09

"How the city hurts your brain," by Jonah Lehrer ( Boston.com)

The title is quite misleading since only the first half of Lehrer's article chronicles the city's stressful effects on the brain, while the second half describes urbanism's benefits, and that that it's a question of designing cities so that nature continues to intervene and refresh/ calm / regenerate the brain.

QUOTE:
Given the myriad mental problems that are exacerbated by city life, from an inability to pay attention to a lack of self-control, the question remains: Why do cities continue to grow? And why, even in the electronic age, do they endure as wellsprings of intellectual life?

Recent research by scientists at the Santa Fe Institute used a set of complex mathematical algorithms to demonstrate that the very same urban features that trigger lapses in attention and memory -- the crowded streets, the crushing density of people -- also correlate with measures of innovation, as strangers interact with one another in unpredictable ways. It is the "concentration of social interactions" that is largely responsible for urban creativity, according to the scientists. The density of 18th-century London may have triggered outbreaks of disease, but it also led to intellectual breakthroughs, just as the density of Cambridge -- one of the densest cities in America -- contributes to its success as a creative center. One corollary of this research is that less dense urban areas, like Phoenix, may, over time, generate less innovation.

The key, then, is to find ways to mitigate the psychological damage of the metropolis while still preserving its unique benefits. Kuo, for instance, describes herself as "not a nature person," but has learned to seek out more natural settings: The woods have become a kind of medicine. As a result, she's better able to cope with the stresses of city life, while still enjoying its many pleasures and benefits. Because there always comes a time, as Lou Reed once sang, when a person wants to say: "I'm sick of the trees/take me to the city."
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27 Dec 08

Urban RainCatchers Gazette: Frontpage

QUOTE
Judging by what's covered in the media, it would appear that so-called "green" developers are leading the way when it comes to sustainable water and stormwater practices. But there is plenty of evidence to debunk that myth.

This website will showcase innovation in the public sector, leadership from the grassroots, inspiration from NGOs and - above all - partnerships that empower citizens to become part of the solution to floods, droughts and stormwater problems.
UNQUOTE

www.urbanraincatchersgazette.ca - Preview

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"Treating a city, new houses as twain that meet," by Christopher Hume (TheStar.com)

Discussion of the work of architects Stephen Taylor (London) and Ryue Nishizawa (Tokyo), featured at an exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. Focus on how housing can be integrated into the fabric of the city.

I'm thinking about this in relation to heritage.

www.thestar.com/558360 - Preview

thestar christopher_hume urban_design stephen_taylor heritage

city of houses
city of gaps
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- Now his oeuvre is co-billed in a small but enormously useful volume titled Some Ideas on Living in London and Tokyo. As the book makes clear, Taylor is so relevant because of his deep understanding of the relationship between housing and the urban fabric.
- "Looking at the Georgian terraced houses of London," he says, "I am constantly reminded of the subtle interplay between the individual house and its collective belonging within the wider urban context: of how design details such as the door and porch, the steps and railings at once define the individual occupant and become the property of the city ... the interface these have with the pavement are all aspects of an `in-between architecture' that mediates the public and private realms."
- Unlike so many of his contemporaries, he has no problem taking his cues from the neighbours, especially older structures that aren't landmarks but have acquired the dignity of age. Because of his preoccupation with issues such as the placement of windows and doors, materials and height, his buildings have an uncanny sense of belonging. They are much the same as what's next door, but different, unabashedly new yet respectful of history.

23 Dec 08

"Enhancing city life, one landscape project at a time," by Christopher Hume (TheStar.com)

QUOTE
For the last 50 or 60 years, urban topography has been a largely accidental creation. Although planned in every detail, it adds up to less than the sum of its parts. As a result, we inhabit a terrain of unintended consequences. Little wonder, then, that landscape architecture could be to this century what architecture was to the last.
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www.thestar.com/556182 - Preview

thestar christopher_hume urban_design landscape parks landscape_architecture

For the vast majority of Canadians, who live in towns, cities and suburbs, the geography of daily life revolves around the man-made environments of work, home and play.
We're starting to wake up to the fact that the world we have created – especially the public realm – leaves much to be desired.
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- For the last 50 or 60 years, urban topography has been a largely accidental creation. Although planned in every detail, it adds up to less than the sum of its parts. As a result, we inhabit a terrain of unintended consequences. Little wonder, then, that landscape architecture could be to this century what architecture was to the last.
- Conditions on the waterfront make the landscape architect's job easier than it would be in already built-up precincts of the city; starting from nothing allows for a seamless integration of the various urban components that comprise the larger community. In such a case, buildings will have to be fitted into the landscape, not the other way around.
- For the most part, however, the task will be to intervene in existing situations with the idea of using landscape to organize the surroundings and reflect the fluidity both of the city and the natural forces within it.
- As we know from painful experience, the notion that there exists a topology of rationality and certainty no longer holds. Instead, we should be talking about the landscape as a stage that enables an endless variety of activity.
  The new landscapists will need to adopt a more opportunistic approach, taking advantage of the unexpected.

02 Oct 08

How to Create a Vibrant Waterfront | Project for Public Spaces (PPS)

Portal page for two additional links, "10 Qualities of a Great Waterfront" and "The 9 most important steps in revitalizing a waterfront." The main worry for the authors here ("A common challenge is how to revitalize places where the river, lake or sea has been cut off from the rest of town by wide roadways or hulking industrial facilities") doesn't apply to Victoria, whose waterfront is *not* cut off by road arterials or industrial areas. But in general terms, there are still some nuggets on the linked-to pages.

www.pps.org/...to_Create_a_Vibrant_Waterfront - Preview

project_for_public_spaces waterfront urbanplanning urban_design

Connected Urban Development - Connected Urban Development - Cisco Systems

This is the Cisco site that CEOs for Cities blog post pointed to. It describes the Cisco-funded/ sponsored program, "Connected Urban Development" (CUD), now in several cities around the world.

Question: how does a city get involved with this? From the webpage:
QUOTE
By using network connectivity for communication, collaboration, urban planning, and other activities, CUD will help change the way in which cities do the following:

* Deliver services to residents
* Manage the flow of traffic
* Operate public transportation
* Use and manage real estate resources
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www.cisco.com/...index.html - Preview

cisco urban_design cross_use connectedness infrastructure ceos_for_cities

08 Sep 08

Video podcast: Cycling for Everyone: Lessons for Vancouver from the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany | The City Program | Continuing Studies | Simon Fraser University

Thanks to a pointer from Roland Tanglao, here's the complete video archive of Gil Penalosa's recent talk at SFU on Walking, Bicycling and Public Spaces.

www.sfu.ca/...city_pgm_video022.htm - Preview

gil_penalosa sfu urban_design bicycles cycling video

19 Jul 08

A design-savvy city defined, by Knute Berger (Crosscut Seattle)

For future reference: Berger's article about a report by architectural firm RMJM, which identifies America's top 10 best-designed cities. His article focuses on the aspect of heritage preservation, which factors into RMJM's weighting and criteria, and he notes that Portland seems to beat out Seattle.

From there, Berger segues into whether or not (or to what extent) citizens are "pleased with their urban architecture," and observes that only LA residents are "less happy with their city" than Seattlites. (I'm not sure how he manages the leap from heritage preservation to 'being pleased" by contemporary/new architecture, but there you have it.)

Anyway, the really useful thing about this article is that Berger lists the 7 categories RMJM used to answer the question, "what makes a design-savvy city?", and also summarizes each aspect (with commentary of his own, in italics). All in all, the list makes a great framework for thinking about urban design.

www.crosscut.com/...A+design-savvy+city+defined - Preview

urban_design urbanplanning seattle crosscut knute_berger heritage preservation designsavvy

Public transit and urban infrastructure: Public transit systems can't stand still, even in mature transit cities like Boston and New York.
Portland was off the charts in transportation favorability, rating a higher approval than any of the top 10 cities at 79 percent.
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- Sustainable design: It's important to make things greener and some cities, like Seattle, have ambitious greenhouse goals, but the report found that in the top-10 designed American cities, only 45 percent of people surveyed were even aware of their city's sustainable initiatives. Those numbers were higher in Seattle (59 percent) and Portland (64 percent).
  - - if residents aren't aware of it, that indicates that city planners (staff) aren't articulating it clearly enough for the elected politicians to convey the message to residents/ voters. It's a failure of leadership on both sides. - on 2008-07-19
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- Art and design education: "Creative schools, especially at a university level, spawn creative businesses and endeavors and, in turn, elevate design sensibilities in their local communities," the report maintains. Boston, with top architectural programs at Harvard and MIT, is an exemplar. The gist: Break the barriers down between city and classroom.
- Innovative architecture: The report says the "Bilbao effect," where one stunning building can put a city on the map, actually dates back to the ancient Greeks. The Parthenon was the first Guggenheim. World's fairs and the Olympic games are occasions for creating legacy structures which act as statements "of investment in a city, demonstrating commitment to the future and driving up tourism."
  - - in his aside, Berger asks, "How do we overcome our tradition of hiring great architects to do mediocre work (Frank Gehry's EMP, Robert Venturi's SAM). Do the ephemeral Rem Koolhaas library or Olympic Sculpture Park get us off the hook? Or should we be satisfied that the Space Needle will make a great ruin one day?" - on 2008-07-19
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- Creative community: Great cities, it seems, are filled with idea people, the creative class who, if they are not lucky to be architects are perhaps their social and creative equals. San Francisco is cited as being "one of the most well-known havens of the creative economy."
  (Great cities, in other words, need to have a high tolerance for over-educated trustafarians and a capacity for vigorous self-regard.)
- Art, galleries, theater spaces, and museums: All the places where the creative class does its business are important, but so is bringing art to the masses. The study points to Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper's public art initiative, timed to coincide with the 2008 Democratic National Convention there in August and featuring, according to a press release, "10 site-specific art installations catalyzing public discourse in neighborhoods" throughout the city. "Catalyzing discourse" is always good for bonus points in a "savvy city" competition.
- Preserving historic buildings: The report says, "How a city treats the past says a lot about its values for the future. And anecdotal evidence suggests that cities that take care of their old landmarks are likely to embrace new ones." In addition, the study encourages sustainability through preservation by touting an effort in Boston to "revitalize the existing City Hall in Government Center as opposed to relocating it to the South Boston waterfront, claiming adaptive reuse would provide more environmental benefits than building a new sustainability designed building."

17 Jul 08

architecture for hertzian space | varnelis.net

Fascinating essay by Kazys Varnelis, which takes as its jumping off point the potential discrepancy between designing for "hard" stuff (whether factories, industrial production, or ...architecture/buildings) vs. designing for networked stuff and software and mobile technologies. After this initial set-up, Varnelis then quickly goes into describing some very specific site- and urban-intervention type projects that subvert the "hard" aspects of planning & building via software/ new technologies. The former points are not that difficult to address, using predictable interventions and affordances (see my notes/ annotations), but the latter are mind-blowing and difficult to contain within predictability.

varnelis.net/...rchitecture_for_hertzian_space - Preview

varnelis.net futurismo architecture urban_design portals

Krushchev promised to outdo the industrial production of the United States within two decades. By the 1980s, the Soviet Union had achieved that goal, producing more steel, more cement, more oil, more fertilizer and more pig iron than its Cold War rival. At the same time, however, the USSR utterly missed the revolution in information technologies.
the PC revolution simply never came in a country tied to a paradigm of information centralized under government control.
- "information centralized under government control" could be corollary to this article's later description of the Windows on the World project, which subverts "information centralized under city planning departments"...? - on 2008-07-17
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- Today, however with the boom on the wane, we ask what does this pursuit of the material have to do with the increasing dominance of immaterial forces in everyday life? Is architecture—much like the Soviet Union in the early 1980s—pursuing the wrong path utterly?
- Coinciding with the twin cultural ruptures of the dot.com crash and 9/11, Apple turned toward a studied minimalism, to designs that harkened back more to the Ulm School minimalism of Dieter Rams instead of conjuring a vision of the future. Dispensing with the notion that design is primarily a question of unprecedented form, these devices simply get out of the way so that individuals could use them.
  - "...get out of the way so that individuals could use them" is key, and in good urban buildings this might be matched by buildings that do a good job in how they "meet the street," creating / designing spaces or interactions that are good for people to use, so that it's not about the building as such, but about the user (pedestrian, urban dweller). - on 2008-07-17
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- The iPhone
  - - note that this, like so many other devices crucial to our networked world, is a *handheld* device. See comments/ highlights further down... - on 2008-07-17
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- Compare this to how today’s top architects think of computation in design, using advanced software to make ever-more-complex forms. The only debate seems to be whether these forms should be produced by scripts or whether they should be tweaked by hand to achieve a desired effect. This pursuit becomes an architectural equivalent of Moore’s law as each avant-garde designer tries to outdo the competition with a project previously impossible to build or model. Ultimately such a condition is unsustainable, producing research that has little day-to-day application and misses the point of a radically changed urban condition as much as the Soviet Union missed the PC revolution.
  - Immediately at the end of this highlight, Varnelis gets into Hertzian space, but I want to add the following before we leave the concrete world of city streets...
    Remember that iPhones/ iPods, etc. are all about the human hand: these are HANDheld devices. But then, for purposes of design, consider that the human hand is but synecdoche for the human being: these devices, manipulated by our hands, recreate our whole (virtual) being, from here to there. So, while they're designed for my hand, and I use only my hand to interact with them, they transmit, however, all of me (human being), albeit altered digitally, and conveyed in bits and pieces (or bytes and postings).
    
    Architecture might take that aspect of good handheld design: it can design for humans (whole body); it can focus on the street / pedestrian interaction, on how people enter and exit the building, and how people use the building once they're inside; and it can focus on how people perceive the building from the outside (by using biophilic design principles and evolutionary psychology). - on 2008-07-17
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- For beyond corporeal space, we increasingly also live in Hertzian space, a cloud of electromagnetic radiation that bathes us in information.
- What might an architecture that actively engaged Hertzian space look like?
- Two examples tentatively suggest ways in which urbanism might take into account our radically changed environment. The first of these forces us to confront the invisible forces in our environment. The second proposes to warp the very fabric of the city.
- In Osman and Omar Khan’s project “SEEN-Fruits of Our Labor,” the designers crafted an 8’ tall, 4’ wide black acrylic screen, reminiscent of the 2001 monolith or perhaps a massive iPhone (the iPhone was actually released a year after the first installation) and installed it in front of the San Jose Museum of Art.
- As the mysterious object incited viewers into photographing it, viewers saw a message that otherwise existed only in Hertzian space, invisible to the eye, on their camera screens. Repeated photographs yielded new messages and, as viewers stood in front of the monument with their cameras, the experience spread virally.
- By hiding the messages in plain view, however, the designers subtly expose our own complicit relationship to conditions that we prefer to keep invisible. The project does not so much make visible the invisible as force us to engage in it. We can’t help but ask what mysterious forces—Hertzian or economic—permeate the city?
- Robert Sumrell and I produced the second piece, “Windows on the World” at AUDC, an architectural and urban research think-tank in 2005.
- We were captivated by an earlier work done in November 1980 entitled “Hole in Space” by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz. A “Public Communication Sculpture,” Hole in Space turned two walls, one at Los Angeles’s Century City Shopping Center and another at New York’s Lincoln Center, into two-way portals. Video cameras transmitted images from each site to the other where they were beamed, full size onto walls. Microphones and speakers facilitated audio transmissions.
  
  Hole in Space lasted three nights. During the first night, encounters were casual and accidental. Many of the first visitors did not believe it was live or thought that the ghostly black and white spectres on the wall were actors on a nearby set. Disbelief soon gave way to the creation of a new social space, to the invention of games and the telling of jokes. As word spread, separated friends and family made arrangements to meet through the portals on the second evening. On the third night, after Hole in Space was featured on television news, so many people attempted to participate in this shared human experience that traffic ground to a halt and the experiment was forced to end by the authorities. Incredibly, Galloway and Rabinowitz's project is all but forgotten today.
  - The Kit Galloway/ Sherrie Rabinowitz project, "Hole in Space," could well be an example of something that was too early, too ahead of its time...? Although, what's really interesting is that it was so popular: there was a hunger for it, but at some level the technological infrastructure wasn't there, or was too cumbersome / clunky to allow it to manifest in such a way that people gridlock didn't cause shutdown? - on 2008-07-17
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- AUDC suggested that more than ever we need to radically reconsider the already existing. We accept the scale, setting, and privatization of telematic communication too easily and have ignored the fact that these conditions limit the ways by which we communicate.
- Windows on the World proposes to site multiple portals in multiple cities to create a true world planetary network, based not on capital and planning but on chance encounters. Remixing Hole in Space and Guy Debord’s map of the “Naked City,” we propose a telematic dérive, with each portal becoming what the Situationists called a plaque tournante, a center, a place of exchange, a site where ambiance dominates and the power of planners to control our lives can be disrupted.
  
  Windows on the World operates outside of commerce and planning. There is no advertisement. The project is at its strongest when it is by chance. Some portals are temporary, even hidden. Others are improbable or difficult to access. In a back alley in Prague is a portal to a zoo in Sao Paolo. From a dangerous street in the Bronx, a door opens onto the Champs-Elysees. Another portal, in Zurich, looks out onto a busy railroad yard in Rotterdam.
  
  Expenses are relatively small: each portal needs only a video projector, amplifier, speakers, microphone, webcam, computer, and a wireless link. Portals will be operated by groups following the model of, and in conjunction with the free wireless community networks that have sprung up worldwide. Connections can be easily made with free software and public servers.
- Eventually portals would be everywhere. The result would be a new city, a psychogeographic remapping of the Earth according to our desires

14 Jul 08

Closing on Broadway - Two Traffic Lanes - NYTimes.com

Article about the "Broadway Boulevard" project, which will take some of current automobile lanes and turn them into public seating/ parks and bike paths. The project stresses the importance of wresting public space back from cars, for public/ pedestrian/ non-vehicular use.

QUOTE:
“Broadway is not famous because there are a gazillion cars going through it,” she said. “We’re trying to have the public space match the name.”
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www.nytimes.com/...11broadway.html - Preview

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03 Jun 08

Urban Research: Shibuya vs. Marunouchi - PingMag - The Tokyo-based magazine about “Design and Making Things”

Written by Ryoko (translated by Kevin McGue): An absolutely fascinating article in PingMag on how Shibuya (a hip, youth-oriented area) and Marunouchi (a more upscale and dignified area) are designed differently. While those sorts of differences are things we think we expect to recognize and anticipate, it's very effective to have them laid out and itemized so clearly.

Ryoko's analysis starts with how the train stations for each district are designed differently, and how they therefore signal different trends and intentions. From there, the piece moves to "towns," that is the districts themselves, paying particular attention to outdoor/ public advertising and streetscapes, and architecture; then, a comparison of how greenery and public seating arrangements are used (or are absent); next, it's the streets themselves, this time with a focus on layout and grade (interestingly, Shibuya slopes and has many changes in grade, as well as narrower streets, while more sedate Marunouchi is level and has wider streets); finally, the author looks at products: what's for sale, particularly in terms of publications/ magazines.

pingmag.jp/marunouchi - Preview

pingmag shibuya marunouchi urban_design cities tokyo districts conscientious_design

15 May 08

eGoodman

This is the portal page of Elizabeth Goodman, one of the "explorers" mentioned by Nat Torkington in his O'Reilly Radar article, "Ghandi on Ubicomp."

www.confectious.net - Preview

egoodman ubicom urban_design ubiquitous

06 May 08

City needs to put its foot down, by Christopher Hume (Toronto Star)

This article, linked to the other Apr.26 piece in terms of theme and championing the idea that sidewalks (& therefore pedestrians) are key to a good urban fabric, tackles the question of planning & design. Too much is individual project driven, vs. falling into place as part of an overall sense of what the city should be.

www.thestar.com/417262 - Preview

thestar pedestrians infrastructure toronto urban_design christopher_hume

Architecture is important, but planning is crucial. Though Toronto's known for second-rate design, our real problem is poor planning. Throughout the city there are examples, painful examples, of the lack of intelligent planning. The result is not just visual chaos, but a clear feeling that nothing adds up, that nothing makes sense, that the city consists of a growing number of disjointed projects.
insist on certain basic elements that will eventually allow a number of unrelated developments to be transformed into a genuine neighbourhood? And why doesn't the city do what's necessary to give the pedestrian a fighting chance? As it stands, the residents of these new condos are at the mercy of (usually bad) drivers more focused on their cellphones than pedestrians. They block the crosswalks, drive too fast and generally treat walkers with utter contempt. Given that Lake Shore Blvd. has six lanes and Fleet two, pedestrians must take their lives into their hands just to cross the street. This isn't just suburban; it's dangerous, dumb and no way to build a city. It also reveals the hollowness of a community that loves to congratulate itself on its creativity, and its innovative spirit. When it comes down to making choices between cars and people, we invariably choose cars. This is outdated and marks us for the civic dinosaur that we are.
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- Lake Shore must be narrowed and new buildings designed to have a relationship with streets with adequate sidewalks and connections beyond. Right now, unless you're a resident, there's no reason to be here. And the south side of Lake Shore, with green space and of course the lake, is almost completely unreachable from the north side of Lake Shore. The result isn't a city but a series of enclaves cut off from one another and everything else by highways. Fleet St. isn't just a missed opportunity; it's a disaster in the making.

01 May 08

In Defense of Townhouses — Sightline Daily (formerly Tidepool)

- great article by Eric de Place on why so many new TH developments are so ugly. As his lede says, "How parking laws make housing expensive. And ugly."

daily.sightline.org/...in-defense-of-townhouses - Preview

sightline_daily seattle urban_design urbanplanning cars parking architecture

Some of the new townhouse developments are pretty bland, and many seem divorced from the street. But why are the designs so flawed?
Here's one explanation. Nearly every townhouse in the city is required by law to provide offstreet parking. Since cars don't fly, the practical effect of the minimum parking regulations is that each and every townhouse has a garage on the bottom floor. And these garages are often the prime culprit in walling off the townhouses from the street, and of sending the residents upstairs.
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- because the garages are small and the driveways are tight, the residents who have cars often end up parking on the street anyway. All this puts city planners in a lose-lose situation.
- One obvious solution would be to strip out the parking requirements, which would revolutionize the design possibilities. But so far, the city's modest attempts to remove minimum parking mandates in a few urban areas have been greeted with howls of protest from angry mobs wielding pitchforks and torches.
- Contrary to the screeching of some neighborhood activists, the reason that townhouses are sprouting up everywhere is not because developers are part of a notorious cabal dedicated to ruining Seattle's aesthetics. No, the reason is because people want to buy them.
- Not only are single-family homes about 25 percent more expensive, on average, but the single-family homes are more often older, requiring expensive fixes and upkeep. (Believe me, I know). Meanwhile the townhouses are sparkling new, very energy efficient, and often within walking distance of services and transit. As a result, the true price differential is much greater than the sale prices suggest.
- But now there's a push to subject townhouses to more extensive permitting, increased design scrutiny, and more neighborhood input. And while those may or may not be wise public policy decisions, they are precisely the sort of regulations that -- bit by bit -- increase the price of housing.
- Another possibility is simply to downzone neighborhoods, so that it's illegal to build townhouses. But that kind of supply-side restriction -- already common throughout much of Seattle's land-base -- is likely one big contributing factor to unaffordable housing.
- minimum parking requirements -- the ones that foul up townhouse design -- they may also make the townhouses more expensive. In fact, it's been estimated that parking requirements can add tens of thousands to the price of a condo, and it's fair to think that a similar price hit happens with townhouses.
- And free parking is ugly too.

20 Apr 08

The new oases | Economist.com

"Nomadism changes buildings, cities and traffic" - Economist, April 10/08: interesting article about unmooring and how that's reflected in architectural trends, too. Sent this article in its entirety to my email archive, since I can't seem to use Diigo for highlighting. Key excerpt:
QUOTE:
The fact that people are no longer tied to specific places for functions such as studying or learning, says Mr Mitchell, means that there is “a huge drop in demand for traditional, private, enclosed spaces” such as offices or classrooms, and simultaneously “a huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces”. This shift, he thinks, amounts to the biggest change in architecture in this century. In the 20th century architecture was about specialised structures—offices for working, cafeterias for eating, and so forth. This was necessary because workers needed to be near things such as landline phones, fax machines and filing cabinets, and because the economics of building materials favoured repetitive and simple structures, such as grid patterns for cubicles.
UNQUOTE

Other key idea: how this turns the "third places" critique on its head, too.

www.economist.com/...displaystory.cfm - Preview

the_economist urban_design workspaces mobile_city nomadism mobility third_places

FRANK GEHRY, a celebrity architect, likes to cause aesthetic controversy, and his Stata Centre at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) did the trick. Opened in 2004 and housing MIT's computer-science and philosophy departments behind its façade of bizarre angles and windows, it has become a new Cambridge landmark. But the building's most radical innovation is on the inside. The entire structure was conceived with the nomadic lifestyles of modern students and faculty in mind. Stata, says William Mitchell, a professor of architecture and computer science at MIT who worked with Mr Gehry on the centre's design, was conceived as a new kind of “hybrid space”.
The fact that people are no longer tied to specific places for functions such as studying or learning, says Mr Mitchell, means that there is “a huge drop in demand for traditional, private, enclosed spaces” such as offices or classrooms, and simultaneously “a huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces”. This shift, he thinks, amounts to the biggest change in architecture in this century. In the 20th century architecture was about specialised structures—offices for working, cafeterias for eating, and so forth. This was necessary because workers needed to be near things such as landline phones, fax machines and filing cabinets, and because the economics of building materials favoured repetitive and simple structures, such as grid patterns for cubicles.
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14 Apr 08

"Don't be dense" by Zev Yaroslavsky - Los Angeles Times

"The debate about the availability of housing in Los Angeles and the city's development policies has been testy but long overdue." An interesting article by Yaroslavsky that initially makes the reader think that he's advocating a sort of nimby-istic "pulling up the drawbridges" mentality, but if the reader perserveres to read the entire piece, it seems his suggestions are really LA-specific. They're not necessarily in conflict with infill development; development around transit routes & hubs; and creation of density in areas that really need it (in our case, downtown). He does bring in late 80s experiences, however, which make you wonder if things haven't irrevocably moved beyond thel contexts he's referencing.

www.latimes.com/...oslavsky13apr13,0,544304.story - Preview

urbanplanning urban_design density los_angeles neighbourhoods nimbyism smartgrowth eco_density affordable_housing

The debate about the availability of housing in Los Angeles and the city's development policies has been testy but long overdue.
Fueling public outrage over growth policies that would significantly increase density are well-grounded fears that, in the clash between overdevelopment and neighborhood preservation, the developers will prevail.
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- Urged on by some elected officials, city planners have decided that the "smart" and "elegant" way to grow the city's housing stock is to double the allowable size of new buildings,bust through established height limits and reduce parking-space requirements -- effectively rolling back more than two decades of neighborhood-protection laws.
  
  There is nothing smart or elegant about such growth. On the contrary. It's development run amok and with an utter disregard for how it affects the livability of the city's neighborhoods. Should these efforts -- the city's version of a state law encouraging greater density; ad hoc zoning changes to double the size of residential development on commercial property to facilitate more density; widespread approval of zoning variances for parking, height and property-line setbacks -- succeed, they will irreparably harm some of our most cherished neighborhoods and diminish our traditional sense of place.
  - - at first blush, this reads like possible nimbyism, but when Y. gets into the nuts & bolts of zoning policies as they relate specifically to his place, Los Angeles, his stance can be seen as well-differentiated, modulated urbanism. However, I could see how this opening volley could become a rallying cry for change-resistant neighbourhoods and neighbours everywhere, too... - on 2008-04-14
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- * Can more housing be built without destroying neighborhoods?
  
  Absolutely. Housing development should be encouraged on the thousands of properties throughout the city that have sufficient lot size and depth relative to surrounding neighborhoods. Such properties can accommodate well-designed, denser and even taller buildings without the collateral damage of traffic congestion, loss of privacy and other community effectsoften associated with such development. In some cases, these projects would even enhance commercial thoroughfares -- such as the Figueroa corridor near USC -- that are in desperate need of revitalization. At short, larger housing projects should be built where they fit.
- * Where can this housing be built?
  
  It belongs in the city's many employment and residential centers -- downtown, Hollywood, Wilshire Center, Harbor Gateway, Warner Center and the Van Nuys Civic Center. These and similar areas can absorb more housing under current zoning laws. In Century City, for instance, developers are converting traffic-generating commercial buildings to residential uses, resulting in more housing and a net reduction in peak-hour traffic.
- Housing should also be built around subway, bus and light-rail stations. Many of these transit stops -- Warner Center, where the Orange Line busway ends in Woodland Hills, is one -- are already employment magnets, and they would be appropriate sites for additional housing as well. But it makes no sense to reflexively boost residential density and building size along every Metro Rapid bus route, as the city's version of the state's density-bonus law allows, when the streets that the buses travel often cross low-density, pedestrian-friendly commercial districts serving some of the city's most charming neighborhoods. The city should be guided by one principle: The scale of development should be informed by the character of its surrounding neighborhood. The one-size-fits-all approach embodied in the density-bonus law and the indiscriminate approval of denser residential housing on commercial property is not an appropriate growth strategy for Los Angeles.
  - "The scale of development should be guided... informed by the character of its surrounding neighborhood." --> well, that's *tricky* insofar as it can result in a drawbridge or stand-off. At what point do you say, "the character has to change"? And at what point do you say, "the character *deserves* protection"? Why should it? Who determines that? - on 2008-04-14
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- * What can the city do to provide more affordable housing?
  
  It can require developers as a matter of city policy to set aside a certain percentage of units in new buildings for people with low-to-moderate incomes. L.A. doesn't need to offer development bonuses allowing taller and bigger buildings to achieve this.
  - ? really - on 2008-04-14
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- The city also owns a considerable amount of underutilized real estate on which affordable housing could be built. As a council member, I pioneered the creation of several housing developments above city-owned parking lots that were 100% affordable, a policy that should be applied more widely. The county has also made surplus property available to nonprofit developers to build affordable family and senior housing. The office building formerly housing the Department of Public Social Services, at Pico Boulevard and Veteran Avenue in West Los Angeles, is one example.
- It's noteworthy that a major contributing factor to the loss of our affordable housing stock is the demolition and conversion of apartments to make way for condominiums and other luxury housing. Accommodating renters displaced by such developments must be one of the city's top housing priorities.
- The burgeoning neighborhood rebellion we are witnessing throughout the city is the predictable consequence of an increasingly insular and exclusionary planning process.
  - It could also be the result of a vociferous resistance to change. - on 2008-04-14
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