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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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For reference (great resource on urban planning history/ codes):
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This website is an anthology of the codes, laws and related documents that have created, or sought to create, particular urban forms. It is a searchable archive drawn from a broad array of historical documents. We have selected documents from around the world, and from all time periods.
We include both legally-binding codes as well as customary rules that may not have involved a governing authority. These documents provide a rich cultural resource for urban planners, architects, and all others involved in the construction of place.
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So true.
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Streets and parking can take up as much as a third of a community’s land, and designing them solely for the comfort of people in cars, and then only for the most congested hour of the day, has significant ramifications for the livability and economics of a community. Under the planning and engineering principles of the past 70 years, people have for all intents and purposes given up their rights to this public property. Streets were once a place where we stopped for conversation and children played, but now they are the exclusive domain of cars. Even when sidewalks are present along high-speed streets, they feel inhospitable and out of place.
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Short blog post with wonderful video embedded featuring Amanda Burden (NYC planner) who talks about Yolanda Garcia. QUOTE
Via Verde aside, nearly a dozen public housing complexes have been built in Melrose during the last decade, as part of the mayor’s $3 billion initiative to add some 165,000 new subsidized apartments around the city. It seemed like a good idea to make the video to give Times readers a look at a few of the buildings and some sense of the scope of the change that has come to the South Bronx.
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Fascinating talk by Charles Marohn - at about 5min., I was reminded of Gordon Price's "Motordom"… Must think about the two in tandem… Also, his talk touches on the problem of down- or offloading by senior levels of government to lower levels of government. And just get a load of the talk at around 9min. So true, so sad. "We're so obsessed with moving cars…" It's all about the cars, which are hogging everything related to infrastructure, and it's sapping the economy. Not "a value-creation machine." The way we physically structure our (suburban) environments retards innovation, which is based on interaction.
Great article by Nicholas Kevlahan, comparing Vancouver and Hamilton (Ontario). In the conclusion:
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...the most important lessons from the Vancouver Model are generally applicable:
1. Residents have the power to decide what sort of city they want to live in. Vancouver residents deliberately rejected an urban freeway-based proposal, and eventually developed a dense, mixed-use pedestrian-based alternative. (...)
2. Effective city planning requires deciding on a strategic vision and sticking to it. Vancouver has followed the same basic urban planning strategy for 40 years now, regardless of changes in council and city administrators. This consistency allows the city to learn gradually how to do things right, and lowers the risk to developers. However, it needs all city staff (and council) to work together. (...)
3. Sustainability and livability are achieved in dense, mixed use, pedestrian-oriented development. Vancouver is consistently rated one of the most attractive and liveable cities in the world because it has focused on these qualities. Density makes cities more financially sustainable because it costs much less to provide services for a given number of people in a dense neighbourhood. (...)
4. Planners must be insulated from council and flexible in achieving strategic goals. Vancouver's planners operate largely free of direct council (and OMB!) interference, and have the power to mandate mixed use and particular built forms. Planning is prescriptive and interventionist. (...)
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Fascinating post on how the "needs" of Motordom (as per Gordon Price) screw over residents/ people and nature.
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I have written previously about parking spots replacing parks and playgrounds in cities like Bangalore and Chennai. Now we learn that even houses will be demolished and river beds covered up to make parking lots. It is time we asked our government – in this case the Chennai Corporation – why parking should be given such high priority. How much more should we give up for parking?
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Right on. Excellent critique.
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While Campanella says that we need a muscular government to accomplish such great things, he for the most part blames a citizenry that no longer shares values about the public realm that are necessary to support a bold course of government action. He attributes this to a sense of self-interest that he finds rooted in the various "cultural revolutions" that started with the civil rights movement.
It seems bizarre, at least to this reader, to blame America's failure to maintain and modernize its transportation systems, its schools, and every other aspect of the public realm (with the exception of sports stadiums!) on the social and cultural gains of minorities, women, gays, etc., when a much more obvious explanation is the fact that for 40 years America's economy and fiscal decisions have largely been in the hands of the intellectual, economic, political, and actual descendents of those who fought tooth and nail the New Deal that Campanella appropriately admires.
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Ed Glaeser on development limits. (This fits in with the recent spate of interest in Vancouver around Market Urbanism, too.)
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The relationship between housing supply and affordability isn't just a matter of economic theory. A great deal of evidence links the supply of space with the cost of real estate. Simply put, the places that are expensive don't build a lot, and the places that build a lot aren't expensive. Perhaps a new 40-story building won't itself house any quirky, less profitable firms, but by providing new space, the building will ease pressure on the rest of the city. Price increases in gentrifying older areas will be muted because of new construction. Growth, not height restrictions and a fixed building stock, keeps space affordable and ensures that poorer people and less profitable firms can stay and help a thriving city remain successful and diverse. Height restrictions do increase light, and preservation does protect history, but we shouldn't pretend that these benefits come without a cost.
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This sentence, "Simply put, the places that are expensive don't build a lot, and the places that build a lot aren't expensive," applies very well to greenspace-eating suburban sprawl, too. It's cheap to build single-family homes for Victoria families on Langford's Bear Mountain or in the Cowichan Valley, but our city politicians (and NIMBY community organizations) continue to ensure that it's prohibitive (if not impossible) to develop (tall) buildings right downtown, where we have ridiculous height restrictions to go with a moribund economy and scores of empty storefronts. Further down in the article, Glaeser also notes: "One could quite plausibly argue that if members of the landmarks commission have decided that a building can be razed, then they should demand that its replacement be as tall as possible." This makes sense, and again, we don't do it (here), insisting that razed, empty parking lots in heritage-designated districts can only be built up according to severe height and density restrict
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The cost of restricting development is that protected areas have become more expensive and more exclusive. In 2000, people who lived in historic districts in Manhattan were on average almost 74 percent wealthier than people who lived outside such areas. Almost three-quarters of the adults living in historic districts had college degrees, as opposed to 54 percent outside them. People living in historic districts were 20 percent more likely to be white. The well-heeled historic-district denizens who persuade the landmarks commission to prohibit taller structures have become the urban equivalent of those restrictive suburbanites who want to mandate five-acre lot sizes to keep out the riffraff. It’s not that poorer people could ever afford 980 Madison Avenue, but restricting new supply anywhere makes it more difficult for the city to accommodate demand, and that pushes up prices everywhere.
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The land costs something, but in a 40-story building with one 1,200-square-foot unit per floor, each unit is using only 30 square feet of Manhattan—less than a thousandth of an acre. At those heights, the land costs become pretty small. If there were no restrictions on new construction, then prices would eventually come down to somewhere near construction costs, about $500,000 for a new apartment. That’s a lot more than the $210,000 that it costs to put up a 2,500-square-foot house in Houston—but a lot less than the $1 million or more that such an apartment often costs in Manhattan.
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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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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
Brilliant:
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The 6 Species Of Vancouver’s Arm-Chair Urban Planners
1. Smarmy City Sucks!
No one can live here. Another high-end condo will just continue to force normal folk out of town.
2. Resort City Sucks!
All anyone does is live here. We need more offices and jobs.
3. The City is an Extension of my Ego!
A world-class city requires a grand statement to inspire [our journey over the Burrard Bridge]. And it’ll make the car ads better.
4. Table Top City Sucks!
We, the Skyscraper Nerds, call for an end to monotonous rows of mid-rise, cookie-cutter buildings and demand taller, architecturally expressive, “signature” towers.
5. That thing’s gonna block the fucking view!
Nimbys and View Coners united will never be defeated.
6. Where’s Everyone Going to Park?!
These are the “think of the children” people when it comes to urban planning.
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Unlocking creativity in placemaking doesn't need to depend on huge budgets or complex megaplans. Successful places inspire, engage and surprise. Urban environments that make the most of existing place assets and 'energise' or activate our places and spaces is what most of us are looking for.
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Sounds like this conference included a lot of talented people:
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The two days that some 42 journalists and Nieman fellows spent at the Journalists Forum on Land and the Built Environment: The Reinvented City, late last month were packed with compelling conversations about all the re-engineering, re-imagining and retrofitting metropolitan regions need to be doing these days. The writers, editors, producers -- and one artist! -- gathered in Cambridge as they do every spring for the forum, put on by the Lincoln Institute, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, and Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. Though part of the idea is to take a break from the daily pressures of the newsroom, there was much real-time blogging and the filing of weekend stories: Mary Newsom of the Charlotte Observer in The Naked City, Tim Halbur at Planetizen, on Andres Duany's talk and the former mayors of Seattle and Miami; Tim Bryant of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in Building Blocks, Josh Stephens at California Planning & Development Report and Roger Showley of the San Diego Tribune on housing and recovery.
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"Masdar City gehört ebenso wie das vom Schweizer Urbanisten Franz Oswald für die Entwicklung energieautarker Siedlungen in ländlichen Regionen Afrikas entwickelte Lowtech-Modell «New Energy Sustainable Town» (NEST) und die grenzübergreifend vernetzte urbane Struktur «Taiwan-Strait-Inkubator» von Raoul Bunschoten und seinem Londoner Büro Chora zu den neuen Entwürfen und Projekten, die im Januarheft der Zeitschrift «Arch+» unter dem Titel «Post-Oil City. Die Geschichte der Zukunft der Stadt» in grössere entwicklungsgeschichtliche Zusammenhänge gestellt werden; eine zugehörige Ausstellung haben die Redaktoren für die Galerien des Instituts für Auslandsbeziehungen («ifa») in Stuttgart und Berlin kuratiert. In die sich mehrfach überschneidenden Abschnitte «Nachhaltigkeit», «Stadtverkehr» und «Stadtsystem» gegliedert, beziehen das inhaltsreiche Heft und die ausstellungstechnisch improvisierte Schau heutige Lösungsvorschläge auf Vorläufer wie die utopischen meta-urbanen Strukturen von Yona Friedman aus den 1950er und 1960er Jahren oder die 1975/76 von Christopher Alexander konzipierte partizipative Stadt Mexicali."
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Die Ausstellung «Post-Oil City. Die Geschichte der Zukunft der Stadt» ist bis zum 20. März in Stuttgart und dann in Berlin zu sehen. Begleitpublikation: «Arch+» 196/97, Januar 2010, € 19.–. Die Ausstellung Philippe Rahm in Stuttgart dauert bis zum 4. April. Jürgen Mayer H. und Neeraj Bhatia: Arium. Weather + Architecture. Hatje-Cantz-Verlag, Ostfildern 2010. 224 S., € 35.–. Ecological Urbanism. Hrsg. Mohsen Mostafavi mit Gareth Doherty. Lars Müller Publishers, Baden 2010. 640 S., Fr. 69.90 (erscheint im April).
Roger Scruton at his curmudgeonly best, but I can't say but that I don't agree with quite a few of his insights...\n"Architecture clearly illustrates the social, environmental, economic, and aesthetic costs of ignoring beauty. We are being torn out of ourselves by the loud gestures of people who want to seize our attention but give nothing in return."\nHe includes an interesting parsing of Jane Jacobs's ideas in this article. Intriguing thoughts around the role of planning the notion of "side constraints."
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The second assumption, congenial to those who adopt the first, is that beauty doesn’t matter, that it is a value without economic reality, which cannot be allowed to place any independent constraint on the workings of the market.
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The first assumption, that beauty is subjective, owes much of its appeal to the fact that it is functional in a democratic culture. By making this assumption you avoid giving offense to the one whose taste differs from yours.
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"Land use and urban form are key contributors to greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) through the physical arrangement of streets, building types, and land uses that influence vehicle use and energy consumption in buildings. City and regional officials now facing new emissions reduction requirements are increasingly turning to urban design as a key component of climate mitigation. But, this approach requires decision support tools that illustrate the GHG implications of land use and transportation options. While a wide spectrum of tools currently exists, few have the capacity to work simultaneously at both the regional and local scale, or to capture both building performance and transportation demand analysis.
This report reviews existing tools by scope, scale, methodology, and policy support, and presents four case studies illustrating how existing tools at various stages of development have been used. "
I have some questions about the source of this report/ research, which claims that density (including examples such as Vancouver's eco-density) "would yield insignificant CO2 reductions."
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Even if 75 percent of all new and replacement housing in America were built at twice the density of current new developments, and those living in the newly constructed housing drove 25 percent less as a result, CO2 emissions from personal travel would decline nationwide by only 8 to 11 percent by 2050, according to the study. If just 25 percent of housing units were developed at such densities and residents drove only 12 percent less as a result, CO2 emissions would be reduced by less than 2 percent by 2050.
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I guess the problem is with defining real density as a mere "twice the density of current new developments": if you consider that new developments include suburban greenfield spreads on 1/4 to 1/2 acre for each SFH, then doubling that density really doesn't amount to much.
Further down, the report just makes the case for building more fuel-efficient cars - so maybe that's where the report's agenda originates.
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Seattle's Privately Owned Public Open Spaces: A Walking Tour
8/26/2009: Councilmember Nick Licata defines POPOS: Privately Owned Public Open Space. Under Seattle city zoning laws, building developers can engage in zoning tradeoffs that may allow them to build bigger or higher, if they provide a specified amount of space for public use. Landscape architect Guy Michaelson, representing Seattle Architecture Foundation, leads a walking tour highlighting POPOS buildings, historic landmarks, public art and other public amenities. For more information on POPOS and monthly tours offered by SAE, visit:seattle.gov/council/issues/public_space.htm, seattlearchitecture.org
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Great review by Howard Husock of 2 new books about Jane Jacobs: Anthony Flint's Wrestling with Moses, and Glenna Lang and Marjory Wunsch's Genius of Common Sense.
Love this quote, which Husock provides, from Jacobs: “To approach a city or even a city neighborhood as if it were capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art is to make the mistake of substituting art for life.”
Why do I single this one out? Because it takes aim at the "aesthetes" who infest our midst (even in Victoria, BC, at the City council level and beyond).
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