“The Atlantic Cities:

Imagining a Drone-Proof City

Sarah Goodyear. February 6, 2013.

“Architecture against drones is not just a science-fiction scenario but a contemporary imperative,” writes Asher J. Kohn.

Kohn, an American law student and editor of The Tuqay, a website covering “Central Asia and its hinterlands,” has recently put forth a theoretical proposal for a city built to passively shield its residents against this ultramodern tool of warfare — a drone-deflecting city. He created it for a class he was auditing in extreme architecture, and it has since been picked up for discussion by several websites.

Kohn’s envisioned drone-proof community, which he calls “Shura City,” is a thought experiment, a provocation (shura, Arabic for consultation, is a word associated with group decision-making in the Islamic world). It’s a self-contained environment with elaborate architectural devices designed to thwart robotic predators overhead. Minarets, along with the wind-catching cooling towers called badgirs, would obstruct the flight path of the drones. A latticed roof, extending over the entire community, would create shade patterns to make visual target identification difficult. A fully climate-controlled environment would confuse heat-seeking detection systems. He has not included any anti-aircraft weapons in this scenario.”

Image: Asher J. Kohn

New Geography:

“LIVABILITY” VS. LIVABILITY: THE PITFALLS OF WILLY WONKA URBANISM

by Richey Piiparinen 12/31/2012

livability: (livable) fit or suitable to live in or with; “livable conditions”.

“Livability” has been a buzz word in city development for some time, and for good reason, as who doesn’t want livability, outside the zombie cohort? Things get hairy, though, when “livability”—as an economic development strategy—gets unpacked, because questions arise: “Livability” for whom? “Livability” at what cost? 

Making a city “livable” these days largely means appealing to a select group of folks so as to form “an attractive economic place”. This notion of “livability” really came on in the late 1980’s, and was done under the presumption that certain cities offered higher quality of life, read: better lifestyles. For instance, in 1989 geographer David Harvey wrote that cities need to “keep ahead of the game [by] engendering leap-frogging innovations in life-styles, cultural forms, products, and service mixes…if they are to survive.” This was a radical departure from previous societal efforts to make quality of life a priority (think: pollution remediation) in that “life” was swapped out for “lifestyle”.

 The Atlantic Cities:

“A Bold Concept for Post-Sandy Manhattan

Roy Strickland. Dec 28, 2012

In New York City, the wreckage caused by Hurricane Sandy has created the unique opportunity not only to plan for the protection of the city, but also to re-imagine it. Rising water tables and increasingly frequent “100-year storms” are big challenges. New York City needs to respond in a big way.

Following Hurricane Irene, a team of young architects, landscape architects and urban planners from the University of Michigan’s Master of Urban Design Program, where I teach, gathered to develop an innovative concept to keep Manhattan safe from climate change.

The concept took the long view – 25 to 100 years out – and emerged from a set of assumptions. These included decreases in regional climate stability; global decreases in the availability and affordability of oil; increases in Manhattan’s population; and increasing emphasis on health, education, research, technology and tourism in the city’s economy. The team did identify an important constant: the power of the street grid in organizing Manhattan’s urbanism. It also understood that the concept’s capital costs – in a city where the new Second Avenue subway line is expected to cost $17 billion – would be high but when placed against the New York area’s contribution of nearly 10 percent of the nation’s GDP (as quantified by the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto), would be worth it.”

Image:  Concept Plan: Highlighting waterfront reconfigured with marshes, tidal defense berms, hydroponic farms and floating neighborhoods; areas for highest density development outside of flood plains; and thoroughfares turned into soil channels providing water run-off, new public spaces and light-rail routes. University of Michigan. 

Design Observer:

The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit

 ANDREW HERSCHER Nov 17, 2012

Unreal Estate: An Introduction 
unreal, adjective. 1. not corresponding to acknowledged facts or criteria; 2. being or seeming fanciful or imaginary; 3. lacking material form or substance; 4. contrived by art rather than nature; 5. Slang: so remarkable as to elicit disbelief. 

Detroit: a city seemingly so deep in decline that, to some, it is scarcely recognizable as a city at all. 

And so, to most observers, and more than a few residents, what’s there in Detroit is what’s no longer there. Theirs is a city characterized by loss: of population, property values, jobs, infrastructure, investment, security, urbanity itself. What results is vacancy, absence, emptiness, catastrophe and ruin. These are conditions of the “shrinking city,” a city that by now seems so apparent in Detroit as to prompt not verification but measurement, not questions but responses, not doubts but solutions. [1] 

Built into the framing of Detroit as a shrinking city, though, are a host of problematic assumptions about what a city is and should be. On the basis of these assumptions, changeis understood as loss, difference is understood as decline, and the unprecedented is understood as the undesirable. These understandings presume the city as a site of development and progress, a site defined by the capitalist economy that drives and profits from urban growth. The contraction of such a site, therefore, provokes corrective urbanisms that are designed to fix, solve or improve a city in decline. 

What corrective responses to shrinkage reciprocally preempt, however, are the possibilities and potentials that decline brings — the ways in which the shrinking city is also anincredible city, saturated with urban opportunities that are precluded or even unthinkable in cities that function according to plan. Taking advantage of these opportunities requires us to consider the shrinking city not so much as a problem to solve but rather as a prompt to new understandings of the city’s spatial and cultural possibilities.”

Photos: Andrew Herscher

“Architizer:

Harvard’s New Ecological Urbanism App Offers A Glimpse Of Our Urban Future

Do you have a passion for design, urbanism, and the Ivies? Perfect: us too! So, of course, we were thrilled when the Harvard Graduate School of Design released the new Ecological Urbanism app last month. The interactive app, available at the iTunes store, adapts content from the GSD book of the same name, which explores how designers can unite urbanism with environmentalism. Combining data from around the world, the app “reveals and locates current practices, emerging trends, and opportunities for new initiatives” in regard to the future of cities.”

Images: courtesy of iTunes Preview

Human Transit:

is speed obsolete?

Jarrett Walker. April 21, 2010

For a while now, a strain of urbanist thought has been asking:  Should we want transit to be slower?

That, broadly speaking, is the question raised by Professor Patrick M. Condon at the University of British Columbia (UBC).  Condon heads the Design Centre for Sustainabilityinside UBC’s Department of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, and is the author of the very useful book Design Charrettes for Sustainable Communities.  In his 2008 paper “The Case for the Tram: Learning from Portland,” he explicitly states a radical idea that many urban planners are thinking about, but that not many of them say in public.  He suggests that the whole idea of moving large volumes of people relatively quickly across an urban region, as “rapid transit” systems do, is problematic or obsolete:

The question of operational speed conjures up a larger issue: who exactly are the intended beneficiaries of enhanced mobility? A high speed system is best if the main intention is to move riders quickly from one side of the region to the other.  Lower operational speeds are better if your intention is to best serve city districts with easy access within them and to support a long term objective to create more complete communities, less dependent on twice-daily cross-region trips.

It’s an interesting question, and it’s having a significant if not always visible impact on transport planning.  Darrin Nordahl’s 2009 book My Kind of Transit, reviewed here, also praises slow transit; he makes that case in the same way you’d advocate for “slow food,” by pointing to the richness of experience that comes only from slowing down.” 

Better! Cities & Towns: 

The new incrementalism

Blog post by Howard Blackson on 22 Oct 2012

The latest design trend appears to be designing a place to be realized in very gradual stages. Not in terms of planning for phases of development pods, built-out in a predetermined sequence, but about individual lots changing — evolving — over time. Very rarely now are we designing to build immediately for a project’s absolute highest and best use or, as Nathan Norris calls it, its “climax condition.” This new incrementalism focuses on how lots change — how they’re built upon and reconfigured over time before, ahem, reaching their climax.

I see this slow urbanism as having three typologies, based on time, from less permanent to more permanent structures:

1. Blow-up architecture: A movable, removable or deflatable architecture that is the most temporary of any building type. While it may last too many years for its neighbors, the tent, mobile trailer, and inflatable jumpy are easily put up and removed with very little regard for site preparation, such as grading, and utilities beyond an extension cord. Portland, Oregon’s Mississippi Avenue Market Place is a favorite of John Anderson, of Anderson+Kim in Chico, California. Tom Weigle of TownMakers has built a successful business model around his temporary Market Hall project first set up in Hercules, California.”

Photo: Market Hall (Image courtesy of Tom Weigel)

“The Future of Measuring Community Sustainability

KAID BENFIELD JUNE 21, 2012

Some very interesting things are happening in the world of sustainability measurement, or our ability to gauge how well we are doing in moving neighborhoods, cities and regions toward a healthier future. It’s a new and rapidly evolving field, and in some ways an elusive one: as I’ve written before, there are some concepts critical to our well-being that don’t lend themselves to objectivity, and frankly I think that’s a good thing. As a lover of art, music, romance and matters of the spirit, I don’t particularly want to live in a world that can be entirely reduced to numbers.

But there are some things that are important to our well-being and to our environmental health that we can measure, and it is fascinating to follow the systems some leaders are coming up with, such as the “happiness index” pioneered by the government of Bhutan. Closer to home, I have been impressed by efforts I have recently gotten to know in Illinois and New Jersey. I’ll get to them in a minute; but, first, a little background.

LEED-ND and neighborhood measurement

As longtime readers know, NRDC was deeply involved for the better part of a decade in the construction of a sustainability tool called LEED for Neighborhood Development. (Our partners in the endeavor were the US Green Building Council and the Congress for the New Urbanism.) The idea was to come up with a set of measurements that can be used to identity and certify smart, green land development, in order to encourage more of it and help us separate the praiseworthy from the pretenders.  Our hope was to do for multi-building, neighborhood-scale projects and for smart growth what the LEED systems had already done for individual green buildings. 

LEED-ND measures things like proximity to transit and existing infrastructure, walkability, mix of buildings and neighborhood amenities, and the likely performance of environmental management systems. Applicants that pass certain prerequisites may then earn credit points toward a certification by the US Green Building Council; as with other LEED systems, the more points, the higher the rating.

Although our system had the misfortune to hit the street at the same time that the Great Recession slowed real estate development to a crawl, I think there is little doubt that we created something useful and influential, if inevitably a bit imperfect. 

Over a hundred projects have been certified under the pilot program and the fully launched system, with at least that many more in the pipeline for eventual approval. Some are truly outstanding examples of just the sort of development that brings environmental, social and economic benefits. LEED-ND is better at measuring some things (for instance, transit richness) than others (inclusiveness), but it’s been a good start and will be improved over time.”

Via: The Atlantic

Photo: Dockside Green in Victoria, British Columbia, courtesy Perkins and Will

“ TALKING TACTICAL URBANISM

Branden Klayko

As interest in urban planning surges across the country, Mike Lydon discusses the small changes that make a big difference.

Everyone can be an urban planner, and that’s a good thing, according to Mike Lydon, principal at Brooklyn’s Street Plans Collaborative and author of Tactical Urbanism, Volume 2. With a surge of interest in urbanism across the country and at every level, communities are rethinking public space, or the lack therein. Into the breach, so-called tactical urbanism has surged, offering quick, affordable tools for making a big impact. Lydon and other tactical urbanists will be contributing to the U.S. Pavilion’s Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good at the 13th Venice Biennale in August. AN gets a jump on the conversation:

The Architect’s Newspaper: How does tactical urbanism differ from traditional forms of urbanism? How did you get involved with the movement?

Mike Lydon: In 2010, I began noticing a lot of little things happening that were, in a lot of ways, self-funded or self-organized but having a big, longer-term impact. One of the flagship examples of tactical urbanism, Build a Better Block, which started in Dallas, was just a weekend event. Essentially it put a three-lane one-way street on a road diet—adding chicanes [bump outs] and a bike lane. They visually mocked up an environment, a neighborhood setting, that the community wanted. The result was huge. It rippled all across the Internet and produced actual change in the city of Dallas itself.

After seeing that, I started looking for similar efforts—both bottom-up and top-down—and it was clear people were being really creative in making physical changes in their neighborhoods. New York City is the great example of public space reclamation. Using very temporary materials in plazas and public spaces built literally overnight, [those plazas] became these placeholders that are very highly used. Now we’re seeing some of them up for permanent design and construction. That process is what’s fascinating and what I have been very interested in trying to document.

What is the value of this tactical approach?

A lot of these efforts are not expensive. Really, $2,000 can help people envision change. What’s difficult about the traditional planning process is that it’s behind closed doors. It can be intimidating for people to get involved, but if you’re experimenting with change in real time on the street, on your block, or on your sidewalk, people get a real understanding of what that means. Especially when it’s part of the larger planning process. You can mock it up, and it becomes a type of rendering in real time. People can say, “This really works for me. I like it.”

What are the tactical urbanism projects that have achieved long-term success?

Open Streets [Appropriating a street for non-automotive uses] is one of the most successful that’s out there. We’ve been documenting Open Streets programs around the country as part of the Open Streets Project. There are now 70, from very small towns to large cities like New York, Chicago, and LA. It’s something that can be scaled to each individual town and it touches on a number of issues facing communities, from public health and community exercise to developing discussions around making cities more pedestrian and bike friendly. Businesses tend to do very well during Open Streets, so it’s good for the economy, too.

Build a Better Block and all its variations is also a very good tactic. It’s basically a neighborhood barn raising. People really get together and volunteer time for a week-long or weekend-long event during which they mock up what they want to see on the block.” 

Via: The Architect’s Newspaper

Photo: REPURPOSED DUMPSTERS DEFINE SAN FRANCISCO’S SHOWPLACE TRIANGLE PEDESTRIAN PLAZA, DESIGNED BY REBAR GROUP IN 2009. JEREMY A. SHAW/FLICKR