TreeHugger

“Prefab lifeguard and comfort stations on New York beaches will open by Memorial Day

Lloyd Alter. May 20, 2013

Superstorm Sandy washed away the lifeguard stations and washrooms on the many beaches around New York City. The season really starts on Memorial Day and the beaches can’t operate without them. A lot of design sites have shown the Jim Garrison-designed prefabs, and attracted comments like ” Are you kidding, ready by Memorial Day? The construction workers laugh when you ask them for the ETA”

It looks like those skeptics are about to be proven wrong.

David Burney, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Design & Construction, spoke at the Modular Construction Summit at Pratt School of Architecture on May 16. (that’s him in the lower right corner). He described how the normal development process of designing and producing projects like this in New York City would take four years; he had five months.”

Image: © James Garrison Architects

The New York Times:

“Revival Is Planned for a Derelict Downtown Newark Park

By LISA W. FODERARO. Published: February 5, 2013

NEWARK — During a recent tour of Military Park on a frigid afternoon here, Daniel A. Biederman waved his arm at the derelict plaza before him, with its once-proud statuary gazing out at ailing trees and graffiti-covered garbage bins.

“This could be the Bryant Park of Newark, but nobody uses it,” said Mr. Biederman, the urban parks expert who two decades ago transformed that park in Midtown Manhattan from a forbidding drug haven to a jewel-box refuge. “If it was a gorgeous day in June, you’d still have six or eight people here.”

But with the city in the midst of a building boom, Military Park is poised for its own makeover. This spring, ground will be broken on a $3.25 million renovation overseen by Mr. Biederman and his firm, Biederman Redevelopment Ventures.”

Photo:A statue of John F. Kennedy is one of the features of Military Park in Newark, which will undergo a $3.25 million renovation.. Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

“The Atlantic Cities:

How to Make Privately Owned Public Spaces Truly Open to the Public

By Emily Badger. Dec 17, 2012

Some of the best privately owned public open spaces in downtown San Francisco are, by nature, a little hard to find. They’re on upper-floor terraces with fantastic views of the city, or in interior plazas of office towers that look from the sidewalk like places where you don’t belong. Part of their charm comes from their hybrid nature: These “POPOS” can be more intimate sanctuaries than traditional open spaces, with office-caliber amenities – leather chairs and potted olive trees – you’ll won’t find in Golden Gate Park.

San Francisco’s 1985 downtown plan required large new office and hotel developments built since then to incorporate such public spaces, in proportion to the size of the properties. But it’s the kind of ordinance that’s been easily thwarted in spirit. As the San Francisco Chronicle’s urban critic John King wrote several years ago, some buildings have embraced their POPOS, “others are more Scrooge-like than welcoming.”

Now, more than 25 years after the idea was first built into San Francisco’s downtown plan, the city is now updating the requirements to reinforce the initial goal of truly opening up private buildings to public citizens looking for a quiet lunch break, a reading nook, or a toilet. That means no more hard-to-read, out-of-the-way Public Open Space signs (King has documented some really disingenuous examples). No more private corporate events in these public spaces. No more misdirectional cues on how to find them.”

Image: popos.sfplanning.org

“Swim to Work in This Goofy New ‘Commuter Pool’

• MOLLY COTTER
• OCT 09, 2012

Londoners who are growing bored of their typical morning commute may be in for an exciting change of pace. Alex Smith and David Lomax of Y/N Studio have proposed to revamp the city’s Regent’s Canal into a swimming commute lane. The LidoLine would convert the unused 8.6 mile waterway into a super clean stream for people to swim and sail to work. As for those pesky winter months, the team envisions the frozen lane to appeal to ice skaters too.

Ever since New York City’s High Line walkway changed the way people see urban spaces, cities around the world have been developing their own alternative green walkways. The Mayor of London recently launched a city-wide competition, asking architects and designers to create their own High Line-inspired space. While many entrants scoured the city for green plots, Y/N Studio dove right into a prominent yet underused resource: water. The LidoLine would not only encourage exercise and eco-friendly commuting, but would also revitalize a run-down industrial area with waterfront hang-outs and corporate sponsored competitions and events on floating rafts and amphitheaters.”

Via: The Atlantic Cities

Image: Y/N Studio

“In Philadelphia, a Porch for an Entire City

Kaid Benfield. Aug 9, 2012

If you care about green cities, you have to like a lot of what’s happening in Philadelphia lately, from land use planning to watershed management to the greening of vacant and blighted lots and, now, the opening of a lively new public space that makes the city a better place to live, work and visit. In particular, last week I learned about The Porch at 30th Street Station, a very promising new plaza just outside the city’s iconic train station. The creation of University City District, an organization dedicated to revitalization and community improvement, The Porch opened last fall and has been hopping all summer with activity. It is at once ambitious and low-key.

The new 50-foot-wide, block-long plaza replaces an unnecessary outer parking lane and barren sidewalk on one side of the station with seating, tables, shade, plantings and, depending on the week or day, perhaps music, a farmers’ market, a beer garden, or even miniature golf.  It is ambitious because, in its statement when The Porch opened, UCD said that it “sees this new space as Philadelphia’s front porch, a welcoming entryway to the city, as well as a place to linger and socialize, and to entertain and be entertained. The Porch serves to balance the indoor grandeur of 30th Street Station with the wonder and expanse of Philadelphia.

What a great idea. The space is adjacent to the country’s third busiest train station and within easy walking distance of over 16,000 jobs. UCD’s executive director, Matt Bergheiser, says that 1,800 pedestrians on average stroll along the sidewalk every hour on weekdays. With some nine acres of developable land now covered only by surface parking lots, the area also has the potential for further walkable development linking Center City, the station, and University City. 

According to a fact sheet on the project, UCD was able to take advantage of a larger state transportation project to rehabilitate six bridges adjacent to 30th Street Station. Key partners highlighted in the fact sheet include Councilwoman Jannie L. Blackwell, the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, the city’s Streets Department, Amtrak, and Brandywine Realty Trust. ”

Via: The Atlantic Cities

Photo: Courtesy of Shaping Spaces

“Stop thinking big

Forget stadiums: Let’s build a pop-up park. Smart cities know the future is cooler, cheaper — and smaller

Will Doig. June 16, 2012

Last week, a press release from Chicago’s Office of the Mayor proclaimed something that would have sounded like a Yes Men prank just a few years ago: Rahm Emanuel, it said, has a plan to get rid of the city’s “excess asphalt.”

It wasn’t a proposal for a big new park or recreational facility, but a plan to take little bits of public space here and there — streets, parking spots, alleyways — and turn them into places for people. It was the latest example of a municipal government taking an active role in tactical urbanism, that low-cost, low-commitment, incremental approach to city building — the “let’s not build a stadium” strategy.

For a long time, tactical urbanism was associated with guerrilla gardeners and fly-by-night pop-up parks, whereas large-scale “city planning” was seen as the job of bureaucrats with blueprints. But more and more often, City Hall is taking a more active (as opposed to purely reactive) role in these types of smaller, cheaper, localized efforts, and sometimes even leading them. “Tactical urbanism has always been a combination of both bottom-up and top-down,” says Mike Lydon, a principal at the Street Plans Collaborative, an urban planning firm, “but now you’re seeing more of these ideas proliferate at the municipal level.”

In a way, thinking small is the next logical step in America’s urban renaissance. When cities really started changing 10 or 15 years ago, the economy was booming and the Internet was a newfangled gizmo. Today, cities have less money but more ways to communicate, two conditions perfectly suited to more focused, low-cost planning. Now you can home in on a specific neighborhood (or even just a few blocks), find out what the residents there want or need, cheaply implement it on a trial basis, and make it permanent if it works.”

Via: Salon

Image: Lorelyn Medina via Shutterstock/Salon

Who Wins When a New Park Seems Public But is Privately Owned?

Bonnie Alter. June 15, 2012

A huge new square, Granary Square, has just been opened in a formerly gritty part of London. The King’s Cross area is undergoing a major urban transformation, and this 8,000 sq.M park, one of the largest new spaces in Europe, is part of the regeneration.

It used to be a railway yard from the 1850’s and there is much to praise: the lovely and fascinating fountains, the benches made out of chunks of old wood, and the bits of railway heritage left in the ground.

But the park is not public: it has been redeveloped by a private developer and they own it and run it. Why should we care? There are lots of benefits to redevelopment: cash-starved City councils get a lovely space and don’t have to pay and we can all sit out in it and enjoy it.

Sort of. These privately run parks are often characterised by lots of security: forget about cycling, skateboarding, busking, filming, and of course, political protests. One only has to think of the problems for the Occupy movements in New York and London . They thought that they were demonstrating in public places but in fact they weren’t and they got turfed out.

One could also argue, as representatives of London Sustainability Exchange do, that the developers want the public spaces to be ornamental, corporate-looking and not very sustainable. For example, in Granary Square, “it’s just a massive paved [area] … fountains which are very nice for cooling but don’t actually really cool you if there’s no shade. It’s energy intensive. In terms of upkeep you need to keep cleaning and grouting them out, but biodiversity is poor.”

Via: Treehugger

Photo: Bonnie Alter/CC BY 2.0

“Using the High Line as a Model, Jersey City Bets on the Embankment

By SHARYN JACKSON. June 8, 2012

At the intersection of Jersey Avenue and 6th Street, in downtown Jersey City, stands an imposing structure of stone and granite that towers over a Brownstone-lined street. Ivy cascades down the sides, while 20- and 30-foot-tall trees grow on top. Huge reddish brown boulders pile up for two stories, with tiny fern-like plants breaking out of the crevices. It’s Stephen Gucciardo’s favorite section of the Embankment, a six-block, half mile-long spur of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

“Without any of us having touched the Embankment, it’s already a park,” Gucciardo said.

He is the president of the Embankment Preservation Coalition, a group that has fought to preserve the rail spur that slices through the historic Harsimus Cove neighborhood. The tracks haven’t been used since the early 1990s.

“The stones are beautiful, the color is delicious. They beautifully fit together, and the top is perfectly level,” Gucciardo said. “You’re looking at master craftsmanship here that was hard to come by and expensive at the turn of the century when this was built.”

Jersey City residents and government officials are closer than ever to concluding a 13-year battle to acquire the Embankment and turn it into an open space at the center of this urban neighborhood. The process has been saddled by a series of lawsuits involving the city, private developer Steve Hyman and railroad company Conrail, over who has the right to own the property. The issue hinges on arcane federal railroad law over whether Conrail’s sale of the property to Hyman in 2003 for $3 million was legal. So far, the city has spent $500,000 in legal fees, according to corporation counsel Bill Matsikoudis.

But a settlement authorized by the City Council in February may finally move the process forward — if Conrail and Hyman sign on. Under the terms of the settlement, Hyman would get $20 million, Conrail would get development rights on one block of the Embankment, and the city would pay $7 million for the remaining five blocks to build a park and mass transit corridor. The Council voted unanimously to authorize the settlement in February.”

Via: WNYC.org

Photo: Stephen Gucciardo

“Can Inactive Landfills Become Assets?

Nate Berg. May 3, 2012

There were about 8,000 active municipal solid waste landfills in the U.S. in 1980. In 2009 that number was down to just about 1,900. So, assuming there hasn’t been some miraculous evaporation of decades worth of municipal waste, more than 6,000 landfills across the country are now sitting inactive.

That may be fine for most; garbage dumps are full of stuff we wanted to get rid of, after all. But as this recent article from Places shows, simply leaving these landfills to rot quietly out of our sight ignores the potential they carry – both on top and within.

Architect Michael Ezban spent a few months as a visiting scholar in Rome and became interested in a centuries-old landfill, Monte Testaccio, and his article tours through its history and, most interestingly, its current state as a living part of the city. Now towering as one of the eight hills in the city, Monte Testaccio grew to a height of more than 100 feet as a dumping ground for millions of clay vessels used over the centuries to transport olive oil into the city. Unlike modern-day dumps, this now-inactive landfill has become an active and useful part of the urban landscape.

As landfills in the U.S. meet and exceed their capacity and fall out of use, they face a fairly uniform future of being capped with clay and left alone to slowly decompose from the inside. Ezban argues that Monte Testaccio is a good example of a way we might be able to rethink these sealed landfills.

Monte Testaccio has hosted a range of marginalized populations for most of its existence, but now the constituency is evolving as socio-economic changes bring a greater diversity of activity to the area. The new annex of MACRO, Rome’s museum of contemporary art, is located in the slaughterhouse just yards away from the horse stalls and carriage storage. Adventurous foodies trek to Testaccio for traditional cuisine. Auto mechanics rebuild old Fiats at the base of the landfill as archaeologists piece together amphorae at the top. Ravers dance in the 17th-century caves until early Sunday morning, followed by Catholics attending mass in the chapel next door. Can waste management agencies, municipal parks departments, landscape architects and urban designers work to enable this kind of cultural mosaic on the slopes of contemporary landfills?

Ezban points to a few modern-day examples where this idea is starting to take shape. Freshkills Park in Staten Island, New York, is re-animating more than 2,200 acres of what at one time was the largest landfill in the world. The park will feature a number of activities, as well as an intricate system for sequestering and capturing the gaseous results of 150 million decaying tons of New York City garbage. Another dump makeover is underway in Tel Aviv, Israel, where the Hiriya Garbage Mound has been re-engineered and renamed as Ariel Sharon Eco Park. Closed after more than 40 years in 1998, the dump is being turned into a 2,000-acre park space and will feature a lake and a 50,000-seat amphitheater. Another dump-to-park conversion is Byxbee Parkin Palo Alto, California, where more than 60 vertical feet of garbage have been capped with a bayside regional park. The Trust for Public Lands estimates that about 4,500 acres of landfill in U.S. cities have been converted into similar public spaces.”

Via: The Atlantic Cities

Photo: Flickr/TyB

“How Building Beautiful Spaces Can Foster Environmentalism

Kaid Benfield. April 23, 2012

Can placemaking - the building or strengthening of physical community fabric to create great human habitat - be a new environmentalism? The question is posed by a provocative short essay, which I first discovered last summer. Written by Ethan Kent of the Project for Public Spaces, the article has recently resurfaced, perhaps in honor of yesterday’s celebration of Earth Day. The essay influenced my own writing last year, and I’m returning to it today because the issues Ethan has raised continue to be important.

My answer, by the way, is a qualified yes: creating the right kinds of places for people, particularly at the neighborhood scale, has indeed become a new approach to environmentalism and one to which I am deeply committed. But I qualify my answer because placemaking is by no means the only important aspect of today’s environmentalism (not that Ethan suggested that). In addition, I think the physical building of community can become even stronger as an environmental tool by becoming somewhat more explicitly environmental in its content. I’ll get into all that in a minute.

First, though, I want to explore the phrase “new environmentalism” a bit.  A decade ago, the well-known urbanist Andres Duany was kind enough to write a cover blurb for NRDC’s then-new book about smart growth, Solving Sprawl. Andres wrote, “finally, here is a book on the environment that includes the human habitat as part of nature. This may be the first text of a ‘New Environmentalism.’” I was quite honored by the flattery that our book was being considered important and new, and by the parallel language to new urbanism, bestowed by one of that movement’s pillars. Might our way of thinking – advocacy for smart, green people habitat – be earning its way to an impact on the environmental movement as significant as that brought by the new urbanists to architecture and planning?

I’ll let others judge the extent to which that has come to pass, and quite immediately proclaim that, to the extent it may have, the philosophy expressed in Solving Sprawl was neither all ours nor all new. (New urbanism wasn’t really new, either.) All that said, there was indeed something new about the environmentalism that developed in the 1990s and continues so far in this century, in that now what we are for is every bit as important as what we wish (and need) to stop. I detailed my personal version of that transition (“NIMBY to YIMBY”) in an Earth Day essay written two years ago. And people habitat – neighborhoods, cities, metropolitan regions – is every bit as important to the environment as natural habitat and wilderness. Indeed, making cities great should be seen as a key strategy for protecting wilderness. 

Today’s environmentalism incorporates the truth that, yes, we do need to build things. We need homes, workplaces, shops, schools, streets, factories, warehouses, ports, mobility, sources of energy. We need sustenance and we need commerce. To me, the excitement in environmentalism today is in making all that as good and as sustainable as possible.  While there are still far too many things we absolutely must say no to, I’ve lost patience with the old environmental approach of saying no without a clear sense of the preferable alternative. It’s OK to be idealistic, if you must (I’m more of a pragmatist, myself), but please do have a vision if you want my personal support. 

So that brings me back to Ethan’s essay about placemaking, which is eloquent on the subject: “having less impact is noble, but aspiring to have a big impact, to create the world we want starting in the place where we live, work and play, is a transformative agenda.” And so it is, because placemaking is an affirmative act, fundamentally about creating something: quite literally, making a place. At the Project for Public Spaces, where Ethan is vice president, the focus is on our public realm – our streets, our plazas and squares, our waterfronts, our parks, our markets and so on. 

These are incredibly important aspects of our people environment and, by placing them in cities and walkable neighborhoods, they become incredibly important to our natural environment as well. To the extent we use great public spaces to anchor compact people habitat, we reduce the spread of environmental harm. I would argue that the shaping of the private realm is also an important aspect of placemaking, and that we must get that part of our community fabric right, too.”

Via: The Atlantic Cities

Photo: jah_maya/Flickr