“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

“Brainstorming Ways to Turn Tappan Zee Into Park

Peter Applebome. April 4, 2012

One drawing envisions a sprawling Seurat-like park scene with the towers of Manhattan beckoning in the distance. Others call for two ghost piers beginning at opposite sides over the river but not meeting, elegantly terraced gardens and plantings, a simple walkway surrounded by wind generators, photovoltaic cells and other examples of green energy.

The idea of turning the existing Tappan Zee Bridge into a walkwayand park when a new bridge is built remains more alluring dream than likely reality, though when Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo declared it in February to be an “exciting option,” that seemed to guarantee it would at least get serious scrutiny.

But since the proposal was floated last fall by Paul Feiner, supervisor of the Town of Greenburgh in Westchester County, enough people have become entranced by the idea that some have been imagining what it might look like, and have put those imaginings on paper.

Milagros Lecuona, an urban planning professor at Columbia University who with Mr. Feiner leads the Tappan Bridge Park Alliance, which is advocating the project, has worked with her class all semester on what it would take to make the park a reality. The New York Times also put the challenge to architecture students in Laila Seewang’s advanced urban theory class at Cooper Union. Ms. Lecuona is hoping to put together an international design competition to attract ideas for the Tappan Zee as park.

Still, the ideas already generated reflect the way the proposal is consistent with trends in preservation and urban design. After all, to the north is Walkway Over the Hudson, reclaimed from a 1.2-mile abandoned railway bridge linking Poughkeepsie and Highland. To the south, along the West Side of Manhattan, is the High Line, built on what was once a 1.45-mile-long elevated rail structure.

Lisa Tziona Switkin, an associate partner with James Corner Field Operations, was one of the designers of the High Line, and she cited it as evidence that the Tappan Zee project, no matter how outlandish it might sound, has potential.

“When the High Line was first proposed it was an impossible dream, and it became an exercise in making the impossible possible,” she said. “As a designer I’m incredibly excited about this kind of opportunity; something that crosses boundaries about what it is and what it is not. Is it a building? A bridge? A park?”

Still, many bridge experts and planning professionals urge caution, doubting it will be possible to turn the existing bridge into a three-mile, 30-acre park when a new $5 billion bridge is built. (And a more pressing issue for now is what kind of bridge that will be and whether it should be built without provisions for new mass transit.)”

Via: The New York Times

Photo: The Tappan Zee Bridge, which is likely to be replaced soon, is being reimagined for alternative uses. Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Time

“Low Tech Magazine on How To Heat And Cool Cities Without Fossil Fuels

Lloyd Alter. March 26, 2012

One of the fundamental problems about covering sustainable design is that really, the single family house doesn’t matter in the larger scheme of things. We spend so much time covering passive houses, for example, when they and all of the other green houses shown on every design website don’t add up to a rounding error when it comes to where people live in most of the world, which is in cities.

That’s why Kris De Decker’s post at Low Tech Magazine is so important and groundbreaking. He has written The solar envelope: how to heat and cool cities without fossil fuels. He writes:

Passive solar design does not involve any new technology. In fact, it has been around for thousands of years, and even predates the use of glass windows. For most of human history, buildings were adapted to the local climate through a consideration of their location, orientation and shape, as well as the appropriate building materials. This resulted in many vernacular building styles in different parts of the world. In contrast, most modern buildings look the same wherever they stand. They are made from the same materials, they follow forms that are driven by fashion rather than by climate, and are most often randomly located and oriented, indifferent to the path of the sun and the prevailing wind conditions.

He then goes on to describe how zoning and building rules might be changed to create solar envelopes and the ensure the principle of solar access. It used to be common practice; De Decker notes that ” The Ancient Greeks built entire cities which were optimal for solar exposure.”

Via: Treehugger

Image: © The density atlas

“Shoo! Teenagers, Shoo!

As you come up the escalator in the Gallery Place / Chinatown Metro in Washington, D.C., you are serenaded by loudspeakers playing Mozart, Chopin, Beethoven. But why? It turns out that certain sounds really annoy teenagers and cities are now using them to keep young people out of public places. As an effort to control crime or reduce vandalism, though, the use of high frequency noises, classical music, or nature sounds raise questions about whether cities are in fact serving their younger citizens well.

In Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian Museum first had the idea of blasting classical music from outdoor speakers at night. The city then ran with it and began offering a selection of classical hits at the busy Gallery Place / Chinatown Metro station, where teenagers had been congregating and robberies were occuring.

The new classical soundtracks replaced a “mosquito” device, which emitted a “shrill noise at 18 KHz, a high frequency that only young people can hear.” According to Greater Greater Washington, the devices, which were put in place by a local development company, were “wrong” and probably “illegal.” The city, responding to pressure by local community and youth groups, eventually forced the developer to stop using it. The local Web site said it was unfair anyone for under 25, especially those not out to cause trouble, to face sounds as obnoxious as a chalkboard being scratched. “Toddlers, teenagers, and young adults waiting for the bus or emerging from the Metro” had to endure “a shrill screech purposely aimed at annoying them and driving them away.” 

The bigger issue for them may be a lack of accessible public spaces for teenagers in cities. Greater Greater Washington bemoans that teenagers have been pushed out of all public areas. “Before the age of suburban development and private shopping mall, cities always included grand public spaces for relaxation and socializing. Sometimes these spaces were formal, grassy parks and sometimes these places were paved plazas like the piazzas in Italy. Unlike private shopping malls, which serve as the de facto gathering places in most suburbs, public streets, squares, and parks in cities are by their virtue open to the public.” Indeed, part of Chinatown’s charm as a public place may be that it’s filled with young people out on the town. Instead of driving teens away, they argue that curfew times could be made earlier, or police patrols can be beefed up to deal with kids committing crimes.

Communities, developers, and institutions seem to be using sounds to keep trouble teens away because they can’t afford the cops or security guards they need. In a recent example, a regional transit system in Portland, Oregon, has been adding opera to the mix at light-rail stations, bringing down loitering in the process. The Huffington Post writes: “At one station, an aria from Bizet’s ‘Carmen’ serenaded commuters waiting to board. ‘There’s no one that just hangs around,’ said Scott Nielsen, who has met the train at the stop for 18 months. Before the music ‘they wouldn’t get on the train, that’s how you’d know they were [loitering].’” For Lt. John Scruggs, a local policeman who created the program, it’s a success: he points to lower crime levels and a sense of “feeling safer” on the platforms.

However, the long-term effectiveness of these soundtracks may be in doubt.The Huffington Post queried Denis Crispo, Portland’s assistant city commissioner, who argued that “as a crime reduction strategy, it may work for a short period of time, but the criminals always adapt to police strategies. It really doesn’t have a lasting effect.” Vandals particularly annoyed by the music are also just ripping out the speakers. “

Via: The Dirt/ASLA

“Can This Suburb Be Saved?

 At MoMA, curators and architects seek a way out of the cul-de-sac.

By Justin Davidson

A few years ago, an architect with a global reputation was walking me through his busy studio, boasting of his exhaustive experience. I asked if he had ever designed in the suburbs; he looked at me as if I were out of my mind. Architects tend to treat the zones where half of all Americans live as a backward, inhospitable wilderness. The suspicion is mutual: Who needs a fancy designer when builders all over the country know how to construct a peaked-roof single-family house?

The Museum of Modern Art’s small but magnificently ambitious new show “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream” makes an overwhelming case that the two camps need each other now. Today’s suburb has little to do with the outwardly tidy, seething, monochrome world of Updike or Revolutionary Road. It’s got its own new set of dysfunctions: boarded windows and weedy lawns, acres of sparsely used parking lots flanking clogged roads, immigrant workers jamming by the dozen into houses conceived for the Cleavers, household food budgets eaten up at the gas pump. Then there are all the old urban ills of poverty, violence, drugs, and racial friction, which have migrated to places that were designed for escaping them.

Barry Bergdoll, the chief curator of MoMA’s architecture-and-design department, and Reinhold Martin, director of the Buell Center at Columbia University, believe that architects can help by rethinking the whole concept of what a suburb is, whom it’s for, and how it works. For several months, five teams of architects, economists, engineers, lawyers, landscape designers, and other specialists took up residence over at P.S. 1 and fantasized about how best to fix up a disparate selection of troubled suburban sites. Their presentations were critiqued, videotaped, tracked on a MoMA blog, then whipped into shape for “Foreclosed.” Now visitors can wander into a single gallery on the museum’s third floor and encounter inventive solutions to formidable problems they may have thought little about. Bergdoll has used the museum’s clout to create a glass think tank, a place where the public can keep an eye on experts at work.

Some ideas in the show sit on the border between bold and silly. You might be skeptical of the wisdom of introducing African elephants to a Southern California subdivision, as Andrew Zago has proposed. Maybe you doubt that Hilary Sample and Michael Meredith’s notion of filling in the streets of downtown Orange, New Jersey, with apartment buildings would strengthen the community. Or you wonder how much enthusiasm residents of Keizer, Oregon, could muster for living atop the smelly compost-to-methane-fuel plant that Amale Andraos and Dan Wood would build there. Fair questions, all.

As a whole, though, the show merges daydreams with pragmatism. Bergdoll nipped at the visionaries’ heels when they strayed too far into speculative territory. He handed them a statistics-rich research report prepared by the Buell Center and insisted that teams ground their reveries by figuring out what fire codes and zoning laws would have to be rewritten, what financing mechanisms would make projects feasible, where the residents of these brave new suburbs would work, how they would commute, and how much energy they would consume.”

Via: New York Magazine

Image: MOS Architects

“America’s Health Threat: Poor Urban Design

by Scott Carlson

Researchers can have revelatory moments in remarkable places—the African savannah, an ancient library, or the ruins of a lost civilization. But Richard J. Jackson’s epiphany occurred in 1999 in a banal American landscape: a dismal stretch of the car-choked Buford Highway, near the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Dr. Jackson, who was then the head of the National Center for Environmental Health at the CDC, was rushing to a meeting where leading epidemiologists would discuss the major health threats of the 21st century. On the side of the road he saw an elderly woman walking, bent with a load of shopping bags. It was a blisteringly hot day, and there was little hope that she would find public transportation.

At that moment, Dr. Jackson says, “I realized that the major threat was how we had built America.” His center had already been dealing with problems that he suspected had origins in the built environment—asthma caused by particulates from cars and trucks, water contamination from excessive runoff, lead poisoning from contaminated houses and soil, and obesity, heart conditions, and depression exacerbated by stressful living conditions, long commutes, lack of access to fresh food, and isolating, car-oriented communities.

Treatments could come in the form of pills, inhalers, and insulin shots, but real solutions had bigger implications. “More and more, I came to the conclusion that this is about how we build the world that we live in,” he recalls, speaking over the phone from San Francisco.

Dr. Jackson, who is now a professor and chair of environmental health sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles’s School of Public Health, has become one of the leading voices calling for better urban design for the sake of good health. Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, says that Dr. Jackson’s work has been highly influential in public health and public policy. Dr. Benjamin first started talking with Dr. Jackson about the links between urban design and public health in the 1990s.

“It was an eye-opening moment for me,” Dr. Benjamin says, adding that those links have since become widely accepted among public-health specialists. Dr. Jackson’s work, he says, “gets people who do not view themselves as health providers or health practitioners to begin thinking about their role in public health.”

Via: The Chronicle of Higher Education

Image: Richard Jackson waits for a bus outside Los Angeles International Airport. The UCLA scientist is a leading voice in the call for better urban design for the sake of public health. (David Zentz for the Chronicle)

“The 8 to 80 Problem: Designing Cities for Young and Old

John Lorinc. Jan 18, 2012

When he worked as the parks commissioner in Bogotá, Gil Penalosa helped trigger a quality of urban life revolution of sorts by promoting car-free Sundays – “ciclovias” — on hundreds of kilometers of the streets around the Colombian capital. As this video shows, over 1.3 million residents each week would take to their bikes or participate in festivals and activities throughout Bogotá. In so doing, they boosted both their enjoyment of the city and their own fitness levels, thus creating a lively, low-emission sense of community for people from all walks of life, so to speak. 

In his current gig as the executive director of Toronto-based 8-80 Cities, Penalosa travels the world with a trenchant question that arose out of those experiences: how do we create cities in which both 8-year-olds and 80-year-olds can move about safely and enjoyably? “We have to stop building cities as if everyone is 30 years-old and athletic,” he says.

His 8 to 80 litmus test involves imagining a public space, but especially a busy city street or intersection, and asking whether it is suitable for young and old alike. In all too many locations – signalized crossings on wide suburban arterials, narrow bike lanes, over-taxed sidewalks, etc. – the answer will be no.

By way of solutions, Penalosa’s group has advised cities like Seville and Guadalajara on the importance of more accessible surface transit, improved cycling and pedestrian infrastructure, and more programmable park space.

But in many aging societies, where the proportion of seniors will grow as much as four-fold over the next two decades, public space improvements alone won’t make large urban areas, especially car-dependent suburbs, more suitable to the needs of older residents. Indeed, one of the most difficult questions facing urban areas is how they will go about making themselves more age-friendly.”

Via: The Atlantic

Photo: Reuters

“Paved, but Still Alive

By Michael Kimmelman. Jan 6, 2012

THERE are said to be at least 105 million and maybe as many as 2 billion parking spaces in the United States.

A third of them are in parking lots, those asphalt deserts that we claim to hate but that proliferate for our convenience. One study says we’ve built eight parking spots for every car in the country. Houston is said to have 30 of them per resident. In “Rethinking a Lot,” a new study of parking, due out in March, Eran Ben-Joseph, a professor of urban planning at M.I.T., points out that ‘in some U.S. cities, parking lots cover more than a third of the land area, becoming the single most salient landscape feature of our built environment.’

Absent hard numbers Mr. Ben-Joseph settles on a compromise of 500 million parking spaces in the country, occupying some 3,590 square miles, or an area larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined. If the correct number is 2 billion, we’re talking about four times that: Connecticut and Vermont.

Either way it’s a lot of pavement.

As the critic Lewis Mumford wrote half a century ago, “The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is the right to destroy the city.” Yet we continue to produce parking lots, in cities as well as in suburbs, in the same way we consume all those billions of plastic bottles of water and disposable diapers.

What to do?”

Via: NY Times

Photo: Yann Arthus-Bertrand/Altitude

“Urban by Nature

On Thursday, December 8, at 6:30pm, landscape architect Diana Balmori will join architect Joel Sanders for a lively conversation hosted by the Museum of the City of New York, addressing what they call Urban by Nature: Healing the Landscape/Architecture Divide in NYC. From the event description:

Nowhere is the divide between nature and culture, country and city, seemingly more stark than in New York City, where concrete, glass, and steel long ago tamped down the native flora and fauna of Manhattan. How can architecture and landscape architecture, themselves the product of the nature/culture divide, help mend this physical and philosophical rift?

Balmori and Sanders recently co-edited the book Groundwork: Between Landscape and Architecture. There, in his introductory essay, Sanders writes that it is “imperative” today for “design professionals—architects and landscape architects—to join forces to create integrated designs to address ecological issues.” However, he mourns, “longstanding disciplinary divisions frustrate this crucial endeavor.” In part, Sanders looks back to the very idea of wilderness—that is, a pristine world separate from human activity—as a limit to discovering these “integrated” practices. In his words, “the idea of wilderness is so engrained in the American conscience—through literature, philosophy, and even notions of gender and sexuality—that it has effectively shaped the design approaches and even codes of professional conduct that in many ways still define the relationship between architecture and landscape practice.” 

So how can this divide be overcome? What specific projects could we propose in order to demonstrate the “integrated designs” whose absence Sanders highlights? And if the remedy is not a design project at all but a more subtle, philosophical shift in how we think about—and even believe in the concept of—wilderness, what is the proper arena for definitive action? ”

Via: BLDGBLOG

Image: Untitled, Diana Balmori (2010), via Architect’s Newspaper