This Big City

Does the Hilliness of San Francisco Affect it’s Walkability?

Walkonomics — Tue, 22 May 2012 08:53:05 +0000

San Francisco is famous for its steep hills, in fact they are part of what makes the city so distinctive and unique. There are over 50 hills within the city and while they provide some great views once you’re at the top, they can also be a real pain to walk up!

But walkability isn’t just about hilliness or proximity to shops, its a combination of many different factors. Now Walkonomics.com has created walkability maps of San Francisco that compare the Hilliness of streets to several other factors including:

Quality of sidewalks;
How smart and beautiful is each street;
Fear of crime;
How easy it is to cross the street.

To do this, the Walkonomics web app combines Open Data such as 311 trip hazard reports, crime statistics, accident locations and the number of trees in each street. It also calculates the slope of each street using elevation data and measures how difficult this would be to walk up for the average person.

Using this data, each of the 14,000 streets in San Francisco are given a rating out of 5 stars for each walkability factor. This is mapped on a Google map and local residents can add their own ratings and suggestions of how each street could be made more pedestrian-friendly.

The Walkonomics map shows that while hilliness is quite severe in San Francisco, the city has many other aspects that make its streets more walkable.

For instance the 64,000+ street trees in the city have significantly improved the ratings for ‘Smart and Beautiful’ on many of the streets. Some of the cities steepest hills, such as Filbert Street, may be tiring to climb, but have plenty of trees and are relatively safe from crime, thus averaging out the overall walkability rating.

But the walkability map of San Francisco is an on-going, crowd-sourced project, as local communities and visitors are invited to correct any inaccurate ratings by adding their own reviews of each street and ideas for improvement.

San Francisco is a truly great city, with some fantastic streets and many great reasons to move around the city on foot. And while the steeper hills may be a problem for some, for others they just provide a more efficient way to burn calories!

Image courtesy of http2007 (adapted).

Microcities: The Rise of the Mini Home and the Walkable Neighbourhood

This Big City Team — Mon, 21 May 2012 08:38:50 +0000

By Jillian Glover - a communications advisor specializing in urban issues. She is a former Vancouver City Planning Commissioner and holds a Master of Urban Studies. She was born and raised in Vancouver and is very interested in how people in urban environments engage in their cities.

I’ve written before about how much I enjoy living in a small home in a walkable neighbourhood. Apparently I am not the only one. Real estate trends, urban planning theorists, and architects in North America are coming to the realization that more and more young people – Generation Y – and even their soon-to-be-empty nest parents, want a smaller home. And not just anywhere, they want it in a walkable community. And most of those Generation Yers don’t even want to own a car!

If you are a relatively young person who grew up in the 80s like me, you probably grew up in the suburbs on a street surrounded by big homes with big driveways and big backyards. Walking to school was a 20-30 minute walk past more big homes with the odd gas station, fast food joint and 7-11 along the way. Other than this walk to school, you spent most of your time in a car. Getting your license was the ultimate ticket to freedom.

If you are like me, you do not look back at this as the ideal lifestyle because – lets face it – no matter how sexy car companies make driving look, it is expensive, boring and stressful.

As an adult, I have no desire to return this lifestyle. Unless I become a farmer (which would be nice but horribly impractical), I do not want a big house surrounded by other big homes.

North American demographics, car buying trends and real estate market research are all converging to prove what the urban planning community has been touting for years: the home of the future is small and in a walkable community.

America’s National Association of Realtors’ 2011 Community Preference Survey found that 58 percent of respondents indicated a preference for “a neighborhood with a mix of houses and stores and other businesses within an easy walk.”

This makes sense considering demographic trends. According to a recent Atlantic Cities article, the two largest generations – the Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) and Millennials (born 1981-2000) - are reducing the share of total households with children, traditionally the portion of the market most interested in suburban homes with sizeable lots for kids to play in and grownups to maintain. Neither the Millennials with their preference for urban lifestyles nor the empty-nesting Boomers fit that suburban home market to nearly the same degree as their parents did. According to a recent article by Patrick Doherty of the New America Foundation:

Boomers and millennials, the two largest demographic groups in the country, are converging in a time-of-life moment where what they want is smaller homes on smaller lots in walkable, service-rich, transit-oriented communities. Boomers, who have just started turning 65, are empty-nesting and downsizing. Millennials are in the process of getting married and having kids, and according to market surveys, 77 percent simply don’t ever want to go back to the ‘burbs.

We need to build more dense, walkable communities, but what do homes in these communities look like?

Due to limited geography and developers preferences, Vancouver has spent the past 10 years focused entirely on building a walkable, liveable downtown filled with high rise condos. While this worked for downtown, not everyone in the rest of the city wants a one story home in the sky. Some people want a front door, an entrance to the outdoors, a small yard/outdoor space, two stories, not living under someone, etc.

If we build smaller homes, we can still have walkability without relying entirely on condos. There are many options. A recent article by Dan Parolek in Better! Cities & Towns: Missing middle housing: Responding to demand for urban living notes that we need a complete paradigm shift in the way that we design, locate, regulate, and develop homes. As a report by Urban Land Institute states, “it’s a time to rethink and evolve, reinvent and renew.” Missing Middle housing types, such as duplexes, fourplexes, bungalow courts, mansion apartments, and live-work units, are a critical part of the solution.

Vancouver’s new laneway housing initiative is a step in the right direction, but there are several middle housing types that also need to be encouraged to allow more density, affordability and walkability in existing neighbourhoods. My only hope is that Vancouver City Hall, developers and particularly residents continue to embrace these more gentle forms of density in our neighbourhoods so that young families can continue to live in the city. High-rise condo living is not for every one, but few people want a big home any more. Not me. Not Generation Y. Not even our parents.

This Big City’s Megacities/Microcities series runs throughout May.

Image courtesy of iheartcities on flickr

Crucible of Innovation, Memeplex of Modernity: Why Cities are Where ‘Ideas Have Sex’

This Big City Team — Fri, 18 May 2012 08:54:52 +0000

By Steve Jurvetson. This piece is our second exclusive article from the ‘From Sustainable to Evolvable’ series published on Arup’s Thoughts website. Follow #sus2evo on Twitter and check out the first article here.

Innovation is critical to economic growth, progress, and the fate of the planet. Although innovation may seem to happen at random, planners and politicians could take advantage of patterns that emerge to encourage innovation and growth.

One emergent pattern, spanning centuries, is that the pace of innovation is perpetually accelerating, driven by a combinatorial explosion of possible recombinations of good ideas that accumulate over history. And that is why cities are the crucible of innovation.

Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute argues that cities are an autocatalytic attractor and an amplifier of innovation. On average, people are more innovative and productive when they live in a city because ideas can cross-pollinate more easily. Matt Ridley calls it “ideas having sex”. This positive network effect drives a positive feedback loop – attracting the best and the brightest to flock to the salon of the mind, the memeplex of modernity.

Why does this drive innovation and accelerating change? In The Nature of Technology, Brian Arthur argues that ’all technologies are combinations of technologies that already exist.’ In any academic field, today’s advances are built on a large edifice of history. This is the foundation of progress, something that was not so evident to the casual observer before the age of science. Science tuned the process parameters for innovation, and became the best method for a culture to learn.

The number of possible idea groupings grows exponentially as new ideas come into the mix (Reed’s Law). This explains the innovative power of urbanisation and networked globalisation. And it explains why interdisciplinary ideas are so powerfully disruptive; islands of cognitive isolation such as academic disciplines are vulnerable to disruptive memes, much like South America was to smallpox from Cortés and the Conquistadors.

So what evidence do we have of accelerating technological change? At Draper Fisher Jurvetson, we see it in the diversity and quality of the entrepreneurial ideas arriving each year across our global offices. Scientists do not slow their thinking during recessions.

For a good mental model of the pace of innovation, consider Moore’s Law in the abstract – the annual doubling of computer power or data storage. As Ray Kurzweil has plotted, exponential progress spans from 1890 to 2012, across countless innovations, technology substrates, and human dramas – with most contributors completely unaware that they were fitting a pattern.

Moore’s Law is a primary driver of disruptive innovation – such as the iPod usurping the Sony Walkman franchise. And now it drives not only IT and communications, but also genomics, medical imaging and the life sciences. As Moore’s Law crosses critical thresholds, what was formerly a lab science of trial and error experimentation becomes a simulation science – accelerating the pace of progress and creating opportunities for new entrants in new industries. As a result, the industries effected by the latest wave of tech’ entrepreneurs are more diverse, and an order of magnitude larger – including everything from automobiles and rockets to energy and chemicals.

Biology is in the midst of this transformation; we are actively reengineering the information systems of biology and creating synthetic microbes whose DNA was manufactured from bare computer code and an organic chemistry printer. But what should we build? So far, we largely copy large tracts of code from nature. But the question spans across all the complex systems that we might wish to build, from cities to designer microbes, to computer intelligence.

As these systems transcend human comprehension, will we continue to design them or will we evolve them? As we design for evolvability, the locus of learning shifts from the artifacts to the process that created them. There is no mathematical shortcut for the decomposition of a neural network or a genetic program, no way to ‘reverse evolve’ with the ease that we can reverse engineer the artifacts of purposeful design. (My Google Tech Talk goes into some detail on the dichotomy of design and evolution.)

And what about human social systems? The corporation is a complex system that seeks to perpetually innovate. Leadership in these complex organisations shifts from direction setting to a wisdom of crowds, where the locus of learning shifts from products to process. The lessons learned so far are a bit counterintuitive to some alpha leaders: cognitive diversity is more important than ability; disagreement is more important than consensus; voting policies and team size are more important than the coherence or comprehensibility of the decisions; and tuning the parameters of communication (frequency and fanout) is more important than charisma.

The same could be said for urban planning. How will cities be built and iterated upon? Who will make those decisions and how? We are just starting to see the shimmering refractions of the hive mind of human culture, and now we want to redesign the hives themselves to optimise the emergent complexity within. Perhaps the best we can do is set up the grand co-evolutionary dance, and listen carefully for the sociobiology of supra-human sentience.

Image courtesy of Torcello Trio on flickr

Could Less Material Wealth Make us Happier?

This Big City Team — Thu, 17 May 2012 08:56:00 +0000

By Hannes Kunz. This piece is the first of two exclusive articles that form part of the ‘From Sustainable to Evolvable’ series published on Arup’s Thoughts website. Follow #sus2evo on Twitter.

Could our children be equally happy, or even happier, with less material wealth? Could we ourselves be happy if next year’s income is lower than this year’s? In most advanced economies today’s reality is imposing those exact questions upon us, whether we want it or not. Average incomes, except for the top earners, are shrinking almost everywhere, and even a good education is no longer a guarantee for a prosperous life.

At the Institute for Integrated Economic Research (IIER) we address these questions by trying to create an honest picture of economics, a picture of how our ‘human ecosystem’ works. In doing so we’re trying to match economics with the reality of our planet and the boundaries of its environment. In short: we are trying to bring economics and natural sciences together.

When you make that shift in thinking, you become aware of some basic principles that apply to humans as to any other life form. Everything that has a ‘price’ involves an energy conversion of some kind – from the fast food burger you eat to the petrol you put in your car. All biological systems – including ours – rely on a stable supply of energy and other important inputs. If those inputs change, become scarce or more expensive, our system changes too.

Until the end of the 20^th century we’d seen everything go up as more and more people consumed more food, used more steel, burnt more oil – more of just about everything. But the situation becomes critical when you can’t afford more, or if there simply isn’t any more. This is exactly the point our planet is now approaching.

And actually, it’s nobody’s fault. We may blame the politicians in power for an economy that no longer grows as expected, but apart from the fact that we’ve all used too many resources for too long, there wasn’t a specific mistake that got us into this situation. Now we just need to accept it and take action.

All our research suggests that it seems unlikely that fossil fuels will continue to be available with the same benefits we enjoyed until recently – either due to extraction limits, higher cost or because we start to burden their use with carbon taxes or the cost of carbon sequestration efforts.

Unfortunately, when looking at the elementary physics involved, it is unlikely that renewable energy sources will ever become as beneficial to our societies as oil, coal and gas were last century. This doesn’t mean that we can’t and shouldn’t use renewables, and that they will further improve, but the benefits we were able to draw from easily accessible compressed and condensed solar energy that was buried in the earth over millions of years – and this is exactly what oil, gas and coal represent – will always be higher than what we can extract from renewable energy technologies like wind, solar power, or biomass production.

So what can we do? Buying a hybrid car or taking one or two fewer flights each year won’t be enough. So why not follow a different path – one that would adjust to that reality of ‘less’ without pain, and allow improvements in the quality of life, health, and wealth for most of us?

Research we conducted at IIER found that introducing simple, mostly non-industrial renewable and sustainable technologies could help the rural poor who make up the majority of the population in developing nations, and 70% of those living on less than $1.25 per day. They’d benefit from significant life and wealth improvements, while greenhouse gas emissions would stay the same or even shrink. But an ‘improved rural lifestyle’ is not what everybody strives for, this goes against the desire to lead lives with a dishwasher, a car and a TV, where most food comes from the supermarket shelf.

But ultimately, this isn’t about aspiring nations, it is about all of us. We’re at a point where ‘more each year’ simply becomes impossible based on the laws of physics. We can fight it or accept it.

So maybe, in order to get in tune with the realities of planet Earth, we might have to accept that less might in fact be more, a place where we will grow some of our food in our backyard, and spend an evening playing board games instead of watching TV. To achieve this, we need to learn to have more fun with fewer resources. If we accept this as a positive challenge, the results might be rewarding.

Image courtesy of suzettesuzette on flickr

Wealth, Status and the Creative Reinterpretation of China’s Ming Chair

Megacities: Eight Ideas from #citytalk for Developing Future Cities

Joe Peach — Wed, 16 May 2012 02:48:16 +0000

Last week we hosted another #citytalk tweetchat with the New Cities Foundation on the topic of Future Cities. With the world urbanising, current cities are growing and many new cities are being built. But will the future of the world be led by megacities? Our dicussion looked at the future of current urban areas, how we are developing new cities, and how this might affect urban citizens.

The discussion was a great success, reaching over 35,000 people and making the Twitter Trending Topics for the first time. Though the pace was fast, we read all your tweets and have selected eight of our favourites for this list (if you missed out and want to see the whole discussion, check it out here).

1. Existing cities will not be forgotten

Though new cities are being built across the globe, existing cities are critical for tackling the global urbanisation trend. Will megacities become more common?

A1. No. Existg cities will be the starting place for redevelopment and densification bc infrastructure already there @thisbigcity #citytalk

— abbEy (@alo83) May 9, 2012

2. The themed city

Cities are increasingly turning to branding to establish their identities. Is this a good idea?

A2) Something about themed city does not sit well with me. I do support focused cities.Cape Town, sometimes tries to be everything #CityTalk

— futurecapetown.com (@futurecapetown) May 9, 2012

3. Technology may well bring us closer

With technology (theoretically) allowing us to work almost anywhere, why are we choosing to live closer together? Though it might seem illogical, could technology actually be encouraging geographical closeness?

A3 Technological development has introduced new ways to connect with the city and made it a more interesting place as a result #citytalk — Joe Peach (@thisbigcity) May 9, 2012

4. Cities without governments

Cities are being developed with industry in place, but no governments. Might future cities exist without any governmental presence? Is this a good idea? Is this actually any different to how cities have developed in the past?

A4. historically company towns formed around factories. workers either created own gov alongside the comp rules or factory did #citytalk

— abbEy (@alo83) May 9, 2012

5. Partnerships for urban success

Collaboration between urban stakeholders will be critical in future cities, just as it is in present cities!

A5 Everybody living in a community should be involved in partnerships for the better of that community, be it urban or rural. #citytalk

— Mayra Hartmann (@MayraHart) May 9, 2012

6. Single-purpose cities will continue to exist

Whether it’s political ambition or a compromise between bickering cities (Melbourne, Sydney – calm down), capitally cities built specifically for the purpose of governance will continue. Cities built to cater to one goal, be it industry, environmental sustainability, etc. – will also continue to be developed. But will they develop a diverse culture beyond their initial single purpose?

A6 Planned cities, if they work, arguably do so despite the plan: observe that a range of planning paradigms have worked. #citytalk

— Rory Williams (@carbonsmart) May 9, 2012

7. Decentralised cities

Don’t want to commit to building an entirely new city somewhere? How about a satellite city, located on the edge of an already developed metropolis? This approach has been taken in the past with cities like Milton Keynes in the UK, but is it a good idea to continue with this into the future, and could it end up creating more megacities?

A7) The problem with “decentralized” cities is that eventually it stands a lot of potential to create a breeding ground for sprawl #citytalk

— UT Built Environment (@UT_BuiltEnv) May 9, 2012

8. Future citizenship in future cities

Cities will be different in the future, but how might the changes we’re anticipating affect urban citizens? Yesterday I hosted a panel discussion at the New Cities Summit on Greener Districts and our panelists largely agreed with your comments from #citytalk – the future citizen will hopefully be engaged, digitally enabled, with access to information and an awareness of their options in the dense urban area they live in.

A8) the future citizen will be a connected citizen – connecting to fellow citizens, gov, issues, community, online and offline #citytalk

— Chris B. (@FromBKtoBXL) May 9, 2012

This Big City’s Megacities/Microcities series runs throughout May.

Image courtesy of ILMO JOE on flickr

Microcities: Five of the World’s ‘Smallest’ Cities

Joe Peach — Tue, 15 May 2012 08:21:33 +0000

For the first time ever, the majority of the world’s population live in cities. But whilst Asian megacities get most of the column inches, what makes a city varies wildly. If you checked out yesterday’s list featuring five of the world’s ‘biggest’ cities, this post could be considered its antidote. Here’s five of the world’s ‘smallest’ cities:

St Asaph – the newest and second least-populated city in the UK

A few months ago, St Asaph was just an ordinary town in north Wales. However, with the Queen celebrating her Diamond Jubilee in 2012, she decided to assign city status to three UK towns. St Asaph got lucky, meaning all 3,500 residents can now consider themselves city-dwellers. Meanwhile, down in south Wales, St David’s remains the UK’s smallest city with just 1,800 residents.

Vatican City – the world’s smallest city-state by geographical area and population

Located in Rome, Vatican City is 0.17 square miles in size and has a population of only 800. Though Vatican City is a largely historic walled-enclave, it only became an independent city-state in 1929.

Maza – the former least populated city in the USA

At 8 square miles and a population of five (yes, five), Maza was both the least populated city in the USA and least densely populated city. The reason for the past tense is that, despite being founded way back in 1893, Maza’s city status was dissolved in 2002.

City of London – a city within a city

At 600 square miles and around 8 million residents, London is no microcity. But within London lies the City of London, otherwise known as the City or the Square Mile. Confused yet? During the Medieval period, the City of London was pretty much all of London, but as London grew the City of London’s boundaries remained the same, and to this day it still has city status in its own right.

Adamstown – the world’s least populated capital city

The Pitcairn Islands are located in the southern Pacific Ocean and have a population of only 48. That makes the islands the least-populated jurisdiction on the planet and home to the world’s least populated capital city, in which all 48 of the island’s residents live. Almost all residents descend from the crew of the HMS Bounty – a British merchant vessel that settled on the islands in 1790.

This Big City’s Megacities/Microcities series runs throughout May.

Images courtesy of nerissa’s ring, National Assembly for Wales, ChrisYunker, afiler and garryknight on flickr, and Wikimedia Commons.

Megacities: Five of the World’s ‘Biggest’ Cities

Megacities: Five of the World’s ‘Biggest’ Cities

Joe Peach — Mon, 14 May 2012 08:48:26 +0000

As the world urbanises and our lifestyles evolve, cities are getting bigger. And I’m not just talking about population sizes. As This Big City kicks off a fortnight of themed posts on Megacities and Microcities, what better way to start than by taking a look at five of the world’s ‘biggest’ cities?

Tokyo – the world’s largest metropolitan region

Which city has the biggest population? The answer to that question depends a lot on how you define ‘city’. If we look at the complete metropolitan area of a city, Tokyo comes out on top with around 35 million residents. But with the city’s metropolitan area being the largest in the world, covering a whopping 5,000+ square miles, the total population might be impressive but the density isn’t.

Manila – the world’s most dense metropolis

The world’s most dense city is located in the Philippines. The city itself (excluding its suburban regions) has a relatively small population of 1.6 million, but with this area covering less than 15 square miles, Manila wins hands down on the urban density scale. 111,000 people per square mile? Impressive stuff.

Nauru – the most overweight city in the world

Which city has the biggest population? Nope, I’m not repeating myself, I’m thinking about which city has the most overweight or obese population. The World Health Organisation states that those with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 25 and above are ‘overweight’ and 30 or above are ‘obese’, and using that definition, Nauru comes out on top with an… enormous… 94% of its population registering as overweight or obese (and yep, the tiny pacific island of Nauru is actually a country, and its de facto capital is Yaren).

La Rinconada – the world’s highest city

At 5,100 metres (16,700 feet) above sea level in the Peruvian Andes, La Rinconada is the world’s highest city. The small population of 30,000 have no plumbing and no sanitation, though they do have one thing which may explain how a city could become established in such a location – gold. The city’s economy is almost entirely dependant on production from the nearby gold mine.

Shanghai – the world’s most populated metropolis

With a population of almost 14 million in Shanghai’s established city border, China’s largest city is also the world’s largest city. Obviously, counting only the population of the urban locality without its suburbs is pretty ignorant of Shanghai’s true population, but by this definition, China is home to the world’s biggest city.

In the end, it all comes down to how you define ‘biggest’ and how you define ‘city’.

This Big City’s Megacities/Microcities series runs throughout May.

Images courtesy of decade_null, oisa, jdn, sadie and maude’s place, John Donaghy and Gregory Jordan on flickr

Human and Social Capital Takes the Bus

Forum for the Future — Fri, 11 May 2012 08:26:24 +0000

By Betsy Reed at Forum for the Future

I was sitting on the bus one morning this week, wearing my headphones, studiously avoiding eye contact with strangers and still waking up for the day ahead. Adhering to the unspoken rules of commuting in a major city, in other words. It was 8.15 in the morning, and I hadn’t had any coffee yet. Mulling over human and social capital – ie the value that humans possess and how it can be tapped into – was not high on my agenda.

A few stops into my ride, a man boarded and worked his way to the back of the bus in what I would only describe as pro-active, animated friendliness, speaking to people as he went. As the bus pulled back into traffic, he turned to those of us sitting in the back of the bus, where he had finally settled in the aisle, and said in cheery fashion, ‘Smile! You have jobs to go to and you’re earning money. Life is good!’ He had a cheery demeanour and a twinkle in his eye. He should have been able to get away with it. He was just aiming to create a bit of social capital before most people had had breakfast. Ambitious, but hardly offensive.

I smiled shyly and went back to reading the news on my phone. The scowling man across from me, however, turned to Mr Cheerful and told him to speak more quietly. Some people rolled their eyes in agreement. Most of us just stayed quiet, trying to avoid becoming part of the unfolding scene.

Mr Cheerful politely refused and said, ‘No! Life is good! We need to talk about it more – recognise it! You know what I do? I make energy from waste. Let me tell you about it – here’s my card.’ He patted his pockets and emerged with a card, which he presented to the scowling man.

I discreetly turned off my iPod to hear what happened next, which is the reason I am writing this: the scowling man turned in disgust, tore Mr Cheerful’s card in half and threw it on the floor. Mr Cheerful was clearly taken aback, offended and stunned – as most people who’d witnessed the scene apparently were – but managed to hold his tongue. A man next to him said something quietly reassuring and apologetic. Mr Cheerful got off at the next stop, but the mood at the back of the bus had changed. And it had changed in a way that later got me thinking about the definition of Human and Social Capital at the beginning of this blog.

In a refusal to let my mood for the day – which hadn’t even really started – be shaken by an aggressively rude stranger, I turned to the woman next to me and said, ‘That man (Mr Cheerful) just made my day a bit brighter.’ She nodded and smiled shyly. A woman sitting nearby smiled and glanced at me out of the corner of her eye and nodded. Suddenly, we were connected, even if just fleetingly. Social capital happening right there, right then. Even if we were still trying to avoid eye contact.

As the bus emptied more a few stops later, I bent to pick up Mr Cheerful’s torn-up card and give it a read.

So, to Tom Machler of Intertom Establishment Ltd, where, apparently, ‘The good guys assist where it counts…’ thank you for reminding me that I am human, and that the wave of people who surround me each day have lives and passions and personalities and VALUE.

I’m not suggesting everyone should go around speaking to perfect strangers – unless you really want to. What I am suggesting is that each of us would be richer, investing in and reaping the gains of human and social capital, if every day we found even just one thing that allows us to remember that humans have value, and the connections we make and the relationships we forge – even if for a fleeting moment on a bus – have value.

Thanks, Tom. The man who treated you with rudeness and disrespect is but a fading memory. You’re creating capital. You win.

This article originally appeared on the website of independent sustainability experts Forum for the Future. Image courtesy of epsos on flickr

Events and the City: Bringing Fun to a Built Environment Near You

This Big City Team — Thu, 10 May 2012 08:20:09 +0000

By Alison Killing – architect, urban designer and founder of Killing Architects. She recently completed the Urban Tactics research project, which looked at case studies of temporary use projects to find out what works and why.

8pm, September 25, 2010, Bat Yam, Israel: a crowd stand waiting impatiently on the sea front. At one end of the grassy park, on a makeshift stage, a ballot is being drawn – it will determine which brief each of the assembled groups of designers will get in the public space design competition they came here to take part in, some from the other side of the world. They haven’t seen the sites yet and the cryptic descriptions they have just pulled out of the hat don’t really help, but the excitement is growing as the start of the event comes closer. Finally it’s time. Aware of the need for spectacle, the mayor has brought a starting pistol for the launch of this three day sprint of designing and building. He fires the pistol and the designers are off, racing through the city to find their sites for the 72 Hour Urban Action competition.

Architecture events like this, as well as larger festivals and biennales, are growing in popularity. They bring fun, speed and excitement to processes that can be laboriously slow and therefore difficult for a wider public to engage with. The initially superficial appearance of these projects can mean that they’re dismissed as having little value. In fact, they can have depth and complexity that allows them to make a valuable contribution to the process of urban development.

Take the community consultation, for example. One of the most difficult things with these is the ‘echo chamber’ effect, where as people to try to brainstorm solutions to problems, they are able only to imagine things that they are already aware of. This was what the team behind the 72 HUA competition found when they went to talk to the residents of the street intended as the site for their first event. They could see that the public space was of poor quality, but when it came to solutions, what they asked for was for the streets to be cleaner and for better lighting.

These weren’t stupid things to ask for by any means and they may well have been appropriate in certain parts of the street. Equally, in the absence of any other ideas, they betrayed a lack of awareness of what it might have been possible to do to improve the public space. By inviting teams of designers to create interventions for neglected pockets of public space along the street, it was possible to introduce people to a greater range of approaches to the public realm, arming them to engage better with architects, designers and the local council on future public space projects.

Events can do other things too. In Bat Yam, the spectacle of the competition attracted a large amount of attention to a largely ignored part of the city and helped create a forum for discussion of issues around public space. For the designers themselves there is the opportunity to experiment in a real-world situation, which is rare in architecture. Temporarily transforming a space for an event can also show people how it might be different and give them the information they need to assess what they really think of proposed changes.

Public space proposals are, in some ways, relatively easy to try out – temporarily removing traffic or parking to make way for other public space interventions can make a dramatic difference. This is what was done with Exhibition Road at the London Festival of Architecture in 2008, to try out the architects’ (Dixon Jones) proposals, including their idea of a ‘single surface’ for the street. The proposed paving pattern was painted onto the existing street by the architects in the early hours of the morning ready for a weekend of interventions, activities and festival crowds.

If it allowed the public a valuable glimpse of what this public space could be, it also gave feedback to the architects. In this case it was not at an early enough stage to go back and modify their design in line with what they learned, but in theory at least, it should be possible to try out this sort of project earlier in the design process. The fact that the changes only last a very short time are also key – it requires far lower stakeholder commitment than the same changes would if they were permanent, meaning that it is possible to try out new solutions.

It’s not quite as easy as that, however. For all their growing acceptance amongst design and planning professionals, these projects can be difficult to realise. For a start, there are no standard, straightforward procedures for getting all the different permissions necessary – from events licensing, to dealing with the council’s highways department and of course, building permits. Where most countries’ planning systems are biased towards the permanent (defined as more than 28 days in the UK) the system of acquiring building permission is often out of proportion for temporary projects.

The project described above was able to go ahead because of support from the local municipality and strong relationships between the people working there and those initiating the project. Compromises and flexibility were needed on both sides to find ways to make the projects work. Crucially however, they allow trust and networks to be built, laying the ground work for future projects, including permanent ones.

Images courtesy of Olivia Woodhouse and Dixon Jones Architects

Homebuilding: A Slideshow on the Guggenheim’s Transhistoria

This Big City Team — Tue, 08 May 2012 06:09:26 +0000

By Jon Cotner & Claire Hamilton - Jon and Claire’s work revives the ancient, endangered practices of walking and talking. They have done projects for the BMW Guggenheim Lab, The Believer, and The Hairpin. Cotner is coauthor of Ten Walks/Two Talks. This summer Cotner and Hamilton will lead 12-hour nocturnal Fire Island walks. Follow them here.

We moved recently from one Brooklyn neighborhood to another. “Home” is on our minds, so it seemed the perfect moment to visit Transhistoria, an edition of the Guggenheim’s stillspotting nyc designed by architects at Solid Objectives–Idenburg Liu.

Transhistoria is a self-guided two-hour walk through spots of stillness (“stillspots”) in Jackson Heights, Queens. Each stillspot features somebody reciting stories from Queens-based writers. Though these stories address urbanity’s darker aspects, they’re consistently frank when it comes to celebrating the architecture we all practice: homebuilding.

Home can be a major source of calm and joy. In its boundaries (whether a room, an apartment, a city) we feel saner; external nuisances don’t touch us. Transhistoria leads attendees across one of the world’s most culturally diverse neighborhoods. We encountered living communities and saw their homes.

Conceived by David van der Leer, curator of architecture and urban studies at the Guggenheim, stillspotting nyc is a two-year multidisciplinary project that will stage exhibits in all five boroughs. Transhistoria follows To a Great City (Manhattan) and Sanatorium (Brooklyn). A new edition opens this July in Staten Island.

Here is a slideshow documenting our Transhistoria visit. Under hazy skies we heard at least a dozen of Jackson Heights’s 138 languages. By the time we left the neighborhood we felt stronger connections with life’s ceaseless flux, with the human capacity to build, rebuild, then build again.

Smith Street

Moving hurls us into new sounds, sights, smells. All over Brooklyn it’s construction season. We’d grown accustomed to domestic renovations on Clinton Avenue. Smith Street has different, jarring noise – road repair.

F-train

We take the F-train through Manhattan to Queens. This line seems reliable, even pleasant; there are open seats. The bench across from us is full. One guy scratches each box off a lottery ticket. Other passengers are digitally absorbed.

Transhistoria Lobby

As a mobile exhibit in the physical world, stillspotting nyc opens spaces. Today is our first trip to Jackson Heights. A Thai cook waves from Himalayan Yak Restaurant. Claire and I enter the Transhistoria lobby, which SO–IL put in a soon-to-be-completed development called Plaza 75. We pick up a guide.

75^th Street

Outside we hear “Open House” flags flap. Claire suggests dropping in Plaza 75’s main lobby.

Plaza 75 Lobby

One-bedroom condos start at $350,000. Two-bedrooms cost 560. Management says everything is concrete and solid steel. A Wells Fargo rep is present to sign paperwork.

stillspot #1: Jackson Heights Pedestrian Plaza

At our first stillspot the performer notes: “Being Indian is as diverse as being American – perhaps more so.” She portrays Jackson Heights as “a miniature world, a slice of home in a sometimes hostile world.” Life goes on along the spot’s peripheries. One father/son pair eats lunch; another man collects recyclables.

Frank D O’Connor Playground

The next stillspot is in Elmhurst Hospital. A volunteer tells us the performer, currently reciting his story, will be ready in ten minutes. We don’t mind waiting. We sit at this playground where local families gather.

stillspot #2: Serenity Room

Trains speed below Broadway as we return to the hospital. We’re led to the staff’s Serenity Room, which has garden-themed floor tiles, a falling water panel, and mountain landscapes. The story chronicles a Mexican immigrant recovering from physical and psychic scars. In his room he regains joy by videochatting friends.

Baxter Supermarket

We pause to contemplate a local supermarket – cereal, milk, beer, cellphone cases, T-shirts, socks.

stillspot #3: Wall-All Apartment

Claire and I follow the map to someone’s apartment. Before entering we take off shoes. This migration story combines poetic rhythms (“The search for a quiet place amid chaos. Om. Home. Om. Home.”) with sharp images (“‘Queens’ tattooed on my heart”).

Josefine Hair Salon

Lively hair salons adorn 37^th Avenue. Each one is its own discursive universe, its own social scene.

34^th Avenue

Suddenly the roads get broader. Block after block there are buildings with structures resembling bell towers. Claire snaps photos of the leafy avenue’s architectural bliss.

stillspot #4: Terraza 7

When we arrive at Terraza 7, Transhistoria attendees are buying drinks and talking. There’s another wait. Claire and I begin to realize the piece’s significance exists both in its stories as well as in these intervals between stories. Walking through town, or sharing anecdotes at the bar, we make stillspots.

Terraza 7

Everybody goes upstairs. The performer climbs into a hammock. During this tale of urban exhaustion, the protagonist deals with anonymity through routines. He works, he eats, he sleeps. Routine acts as consolation.

37^th Road

Hungry, Claire and I head back to the pedestrian plaza. We’ll hit two more stillspots on our way.

stillspot #5: Garden at St Mark’s Episcopal Church

I lose sentences when people laugh or buses go by. During such moments I’ll watch birds in a fountain. They move their wings vigorously and noisily, splashing water. A line heard between birdbaths: “Six out of ten people in the neighborhood were born in another land.”

stillspot #6: Erin’s House

One last site. Our second apartment. This story poses a crucial question: “The uncertainty of the moment – right here in Jackson Heights, on Planet Earth, in the Milky Way. Can you feel it?”

Frank D O’Connor Playground

The playground’s squeals are delightful. No place is ever twice the same, especially not in Jackson Heights, which is a dazzling human sea. Kids fly down slides where the local families gathered. Spaces – homes – fluctuate in this ever-changing world. We build them; they vanish. It’s up to us to rebuild.

Jackson Diner

Transhistoria consists of new beginnings. It intensifies “the uncertainty of the moment.” Time’s unpredictable narratives unfold along improvisatory paths that include hospitals and plazas, apartments and cafés. Existence can be joyful in spite of dislocations and hassles. Dinner arrives. I’m reminded of this haiku by Japanese poet Matsuo Basho:

Lucky

to be bitten by

this year’s mosquitoes

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