“The Plain Dealer:

Cleveland is slowly becoming a more bike- and pedestrian-friendly town

Steven Litt. March 10, 2013

With little fanfare, Cleveland is undergoing a revolution in attitudes toward public space, city streets and walkability.

This has been a car town for decades, but that’s changing now.

After pitched battles among activists, trucking interests and the Ohio Department of Transportation over the past decade, dedicated bike paths have been installed on the Detroit-Superior andLorain-Carnegie bridges.

Regional trails are weaving their way into the industrial Flats alongside the Cuyahoga River and are within striking distance of the lakefront.

Mayor Frank Jackson wants the big new investments downtown, including the casino, the new convention center and the Global Center for Health Innovation, aka the medical mart, to be accompanied by beautiful new landscaping on Public Square and the downtown Mall.

None of this was happening 10 years ago, and it could not have happened until fairly recently. Civic and business leaders weren’t interested.”

Photo: John Kuntz, The Plain Dealer

Architect’s Newspaper:

Nov 6, 2012.

“CRIT> ADJAYE’S D.C. LIBRARIES

Gwen Webber.

Two new libraries by David Adjaye push accessibility, transparency, and sense of ownership to the forefront.

Washington, D.C was once a swamp. Today it stands as an architectural and urban exemplar of austerity and sobering restraint. The outlying residential areas have also been pulled out of the marshes and, over time, developed into sprawl, some of which play host to the demons of modern urban American society: inferior amenities, poor education, and social inequality. Though it doesn’t pretend to solve these problems, DC Public Library (DCPL) has begun to chip away at some of these ills with a program to improve a vital piece of community infrastructure.

Aware that it wasn’t enough to simply build or restore the most dilapidated of the district’s 24 libraries, many of which have not been refurbished since the 1960s, DCPL Chief Librarian Ginnie Cooper and the library’s board enlisted designers whom they felt would challenge the status quo. Their libraries had to offer something that a wireless connection and a PC couldn’t. Along with Davis Brody Bond Aedas, Freelon Group, and Bing Thom, Cooper commissioned David Adjaye, the Ghanaian-British architect who flipped the notion of a traditional library on its head with his East London Idea Stores in 2005.

Unlike the other architects, who were paired with contractors and set to work on a single site, Adjaye and local firm Wiencek and Associates, was commissioned to design two distinct libraries, both in Ward 8, with the same brief, budget, and timeline. The result, from the outside, puts to rest any questions that high-profile architects are as good as their signature styles. Indeed, vocal neighbors have been quick to compare the two libraries as if penned by a different hand. Yet, these polarized forms belie their interiors where Adjaye’s characteristic affection for design is played out.

In the Frances A. Gregory Library on Alabama Avenue in the Fort Davis neighborhood in the S.E. district, material exuberance begins on the outside. Sliced into a lattice of different sized diamonds, the two-story pavilion’s external spandrel and low-E glazing form a skin that simultaneously draws the environment in and reflects it back, like a circus mirror. Designed to “dissolve,” as Adjaye puts it, the 22,000-square-foot building sits anchored like an island between the local school and a playground, but its closest neighbor is the stretch of protected woodland behind it. To say it revives DC’s historic swamp would be going too far, but from the rear verandah on the first floor and the purpose-built plywood nooks in the children’s section on the second floor a less manicured environment than the surrounding neighborhood is easy to imagine.

It is this subversion of context and play on the suburban site that Adjaye deftly taps into with his D.C. libraries. The squat, shoebox form speaks to an earlier civic architecture that was rolled out in the 1950s and, despite its conspicuous shell and heavy steel cantilevered canopy, the building somehow resonates with the residential milieu. Inside the circus theme is explored further with a frenzy of colors, materials, and reflected geometries that is more akin to an urban pavilion. Underlying this energy though, the library’s civic duty is clearly defined and the materials have been carefully choreographed. As with all of Adjaye’s public buildings, there is a clear and coherent code. Legibility is king.”

Photos: Edmund Sumner

“Better Block: Bottom-Up Urban Reboot In a Single Weekend

Julie Ma. August 23, 2012

It’s remarkable what some people can accomplish in a single weekend. While others spend those days catching up on lost sleep or exploring their city with friends, Texas-based nonprofit The Better Block uses that time to rally communities to rethink their neighborhoods. Since itsinception in 2010, the project has built temporary dog parks, pop-up shops, urban forests, cafes, and bike lanes. They’ve left their mark in more than 35 cities including Philadelphia, Wichita, Cleveland, Houston, and Oklahoma City.

The organization’s next stop: Detroit, where the city’s first-ever Better Block project will take place from September 22 to 23 as part of theDetroit Design Festival. Headed by volunteers from the US Green Building Council and Wayne State University, the project aims to reshape a location with plenty of vacant commercial space—New Center.

Better Block will fill the vacant lots with work from local artists and artisans, food and drinks, and art exhibits via collaborations with local galleries and art organizations. There will also be pop-up retail shops, music performances, outdoor games, yoga instruction, urban farming demonstrations, and general lounging. The project aims for zero net waste, a temporary bus route to access the site, plus bike lanes and crosswalks painted around the block for the occasion. 

Better Block wants to jumpstart local policy shifts. “We want to change the planning process in the United States,” says organizer Andrew Howard. “It can be frustrating when things are taking too long, and our idea is that we don’t have to wait for the perfect city. It starts from the bottom up.”

The Better Block gives neighborhoods a temporary community-focused facelift, and can give struggling areas a glimpse into their futures. The organization provides training to community members interested in revitalizing their blocks by increasing multi-modal transportation and fostering economic development. Post-project, the communities work with The Better Block to see what was successful and take the steps necessary to turn these temporary solutions into permanent fixtures. In some cities, weekend pop-up shops have even turned into lasting storefronts. “

Via: GOOD Magazine

Photo: Better Blocks

“Hong Kong, the City Without Ground

Nate Berg. August 20, 2012.

For miles and miles, you can walk through the city of Hong Kong without ever once putting a foot on the ground. All day you can get everywhere you need to go, taking care of any errand you might have on your list, all while separated from the streets and surface of the city. This is possible thanks to the network of elevated walkways and underground tunnels that have gradually developed in the city – both formally and informally – over the past 50 years.

It’s an impressively widespread pedestrian infrastructure, linking people to the waterfront city’s wide array of transportation options. And as a forthcoming book contends, it’s also a new kind of civic space and even a new form of citymaking. Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook, out in September from ORO Editions, considers the city through the lens of these above- and below-ground walkways, creating the first-ever maps showing the extent and variety of these networks.

Co-authored by Adam Frampton, Jonathan D. Solomon and Clara Wong, architects and academics who spent time living and working in Hong Kong, the book comprehensively documents the walkways through highly detailed drawings and 3D models. Mostly visual, it presents a different kind of city guide, showing both how to get around within these networks and how they’ve developed and grown despite any formal planning or blueprint.

“It’s an exciting urban experience,” says Solomon, now associate dean at the School of Architecture at Syracuse University. “You’re constantly shifting from underground to above ground, from interior to exterior, from air-conditioned to non-air-conditioned, from public to private, and the dimensions are constantly going from large spaces to tighter spaces.”

The walkways are so varied because they were all developed at different times and by different people. The first was built in the 1960s by the Hongkong Land company, one of the main developers in the region, to connect a high-end hotel to the second-story of a shopping mall. Gradually they began to see that they could rent out the walkway-accessible second story retail space in the mall for as much or even more than the ground floor space, and so the company started building more and more walkways connecting their various properties.

“And then the government saw it and said, ‘Hey this looks like a good way to circulate people without getting in the way of the movement of cars.’ So they start building bridges to link the ferries and the trains and the buses and everything into the center of the city,” Solomon says.”

Via: The Atlantic Cities

Photo: Adam Frampton

“A Gallery Atypical to Its End

 RANDY KENNEDY. August 3, 2012

How long can an art gallery that has no regular hours, no staff, no windows, no air-conditioning and — perhaps more relevant to the question at hand — pays no rent remain open in the heart of Chelsea, one block from behemoths like the Pace Gallery and Gagosian?

The answer in today’s art world, with today’s High Line-spiked Chelsea real estate prices, should be that such a place does not have the slightest possibility of existing. But the correct answer, as it turns out, is 4 years 7 months 15 days, give or take a hiatus or two, and counting on everything going well until the end of September.

That is when Honey Space, one of the city’s strangest art establishments, will officially be no more, ending what Tom Beale, a sculptor who opened the space in February 2008 in a ramshackle warehouse along the West Side Highway, liked to describe as an artist-run, unattended no-profit gallery (nonprofit being far too formal), the kind that otherwise hasn’t existed in Manhattan for decades.

Mr. Beale moved into the building from Bushwick, Brooklyn, in 2007 — swimming against the tide of most young artists looking for affordable space — when the four-story warehouse was opened as an experimental artists’ cooperative called Emergency Arts. That plan fell apart. But Mr. Beale stayed on, earning a free ground-floor studio space by serving as the building’s carpenter, salvage man, plumber and all-around concierge after Alf Naman, a developer who controls the property, hatched a plan to make the building temporarily into a rough-hewed event space with inexpensive rental studios for artists.

“When I first came in, they told me, ‘Just go tape off your space,’ ” Mr. Beale, now 34, recalled. “And so I took this ridiculous amount of space for myself, right on the street in Chelsea, which I didn’t deserve at all. And I knew that somebody was going to figure it out pretty soon and take it back.”

But then, in the summer of 2008, a funny thing happened: The economy fell off the cliff, and plans for demolishing the warehouse to develop the site commercially went onto a slow track. The building, on West 21st Street, quickly filled up with artists — some well known, like Iona Rozeal Brown and the street artist Swoon — and became a kind of creaky, dusty small town, with a town square in the form of a second-floor kitchen and dining hall that Mr. Beale fitted out with scrap lumber he scavenged from the building and the streets.

With so much room on the ground floor, Mr. Beale said, he decided he would regret it for the rest of his life if he didn’t try to turn at least part of it into a gallery space for young artists he liked.”

Via: The NY Times

Photo: Tom Beale works on a wood sculpture in his studio in Honey Space. Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

“ CRIT> LA’S GRAND PARK

Sam Lubell. 7.26.12

The renovated public space, by Rios Clementi Hale, is an important step for a city shedding its old ways.

Often the difference between a good city and a great one is its defining public park, which becomes a destination, a refuge, and a transformer of peoples’ conceptions of the place. Can you imagine New York without Central Park? Paris without the Tuileries or the Luxembourg Gardens? Contemporary Chicago without Millennium Park?

But when you think of Los Angeles, central urban spaces do not spring to mind. Downtown, which has been undergoing a metamorphosis in the last few years, is still culprit number one in this shortage. Its most notable park is Pershing Square, a concrete-dominated postmodern monstrosity that draws more vagrants than tourists or residents. Other small parks in the area suffer similar fates.


But the new Grand Park, whose first phase opens today (the second half should be done by the fall) is a huge step in the right direction.

Designed by local architects and landscape architects Rios Clementi Hale, the $56 million park, funded mostly by the Related Companies (who chipped in $50 million as a trade off for being able to develop their largely-on-hold Grand development) begins to mend the deep scars created by the city’s auto-centered, modernist planning dogma and changes one’s perception of its neighborhood, and to some extent, of the city at large.

What was once an off-putting, sterile, unfinished, and overlooked space called the Los Angeles County Civic Center Mall is now inviting, vibrant and, yes, transformative. While it’s not perfect, it’s an example of how for once the city’s public realm has aspired to greatness, not good-enoughness. It’s also a perfect example of how LA’s attitude toward urbanity has transformed in recent years, however the city kicks and screams.”

Via: The Atlantic Cities

Photo: LOS ANGELES’ GRAND PARK WITH CITY HALL IN THE BACKGROUND. SLICES OF LIGHT/FLICKR

” Mom, Dad, This Playground’s for You

Winnie Hu. June 29, 2012

IT was a classic father-son moment, reversed: The 2-year-old sat and watched patiently as his parent hung upside down from the monkey bars. A few feet away, a white-haired man skipped across an S-shaped metal beam. Another man squeezed his six-foot frame onto a metal rack for situps, and two others hoisted themselves up chin-up bars.

Never mind the punishing diets, the gym dates and the doctors’ warnings, the quest to live a healthier, more active lifestyle has come to this: playgrounds for adults.

New York City is testing its first such playground in Macombs Dam Park in the Bronx, and plans to bring as many as two dozen more to neighborhoods across the five boroughs in the next 18 months, park officials said.

The goal is to lure people off their couches and into the outdoors with specially designed playground equipment — in grown-up shades like forest green and beige — that recall the joy of childhood play while tightening up flabby abs, thighs and triceps.

Though there are no swings or slides — these are essentially outdoor gyms — such playgrounds not only have the look of traditional children’s play spaces, but they are also built in some cases by the same manufacturers.

The adult playground concept is borrowed from China and parts of Europe, where outdoor fitness areas for adults have become as routine as high-fiber diets or vitamin D supplements in preventive care, particularly for older people.

Now a growing number of city and park officials, health experts and community leaders throughout the country are praising the health and social benefits of adult playgrounds. They say that the playgrounds will succeed where treadmills have failed in combating rising rates of obesity and related illnesses by enticing the grown-ups out for play dates.

“Let’s face it, most of us dread going to the gym,” said Dr. David Ludwig, a Harvard Medical School professor who directs the Obesity Prevention Center at Boston Children’s Hospital. “The point is to make physical activity fun, easy and accessible, so it’s the normal thing to do.”

Adult playgrounds have spread across the nation, including to Miami-Dade County in Florida, where four fitness zones with advanced strength-training equipment opened this year in neighborhoods with high rates of cardiovascular diseases. San Antonio has added outdoor fitness stations to 30 parks since 2010. Los Angeles has 30, with 15 more on the way, after park officials found, to their surprise, there were “lines of people waiting to use the equipment.”

Via: The NYTimes

Photo: GROWN-UPS New York City installed an adult playground at Macombs Dam Park in the Bronx. Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

“Colombia Has 100 Tiny Libraries in Public Parks

Sammy Roth. June 27, 2012

It’s no secret that ink-and-paper books are going out of style, mostly due to the rise of e-readers but also because fewer people are reading in general. And considering that the print book industry is pretty bad for the environment, maybe that trend isn’t all bad. Still, not all is lost for fans of old-fashioned books—especially in Colombia, where tiny public libraries are operated out of parks all over the country.

The program was started more than 15 years ago, and it has continued to thrive, operating 51 mini libraries in Bogotá and more than 100 throughout the country. The libraries themselves are rather remarkable—they hold about 350 books each, and they’re operated by volunteer librarians who organize activities and help kids with their homework. They’re only open 12 hours per week, but at least those hours are usually over the weekend. The program is run by the nonprofit literacy group Fundalectura in conjunction with the parks system.

Regardless of how you feel about the future of print, it’s hard not to be impressed by this innovative network of tiny public libraries. And if they manage to get people reading—not to mention spending more time outdoors—it’s hard not to hope that they’ll stick around another 15 years.”

Via: The Atlantic

Photo: Bilingual Librarian

“The Street Hacker, Officially Embraced

EMILY BADGER MAY 07, 2012.

Inside the civic digital space, anyone can download a public dataset, build an app, share it with others. There are no permit fees, no regulations to research, no paperwork to file. You don’t have to trudge to City Hall. Everything is (or at least, it should be) open.

In this way, the digital world is vastly different from the physical one. Want to make use of a transit dataset at a hackathon? Have at it. But want to hack the physical space at the actual train station, maybe plant a few flowers, throw up a bike rack? Well, good luck with that.

The explosive growth of the open-data movement has taught a generation of city-dwellers that they have a right to peek behind the curtain of local government, to identify civic problems and help solve them, too. In the digital world, that means the relationship between city governments and residents has been shifting for a few years now. But what happens when these newly engaged citizens want to have an equally hands-on role with the physical space in our cities, with our streets and sidewalks and public parks? Could cities make it just as easy to hack the physical world as the digital one?

Maybe this sounds a little abstract. But there are many examples – not all of them legal – of creative citizens already tinkering with public space. The most well-known is probably Park(ing) Day. The project started in 2005 when Rebar, a San Francisco-based art and design studio, converted a single metered parking spot in the city into an impromptu public park. Since then, the idea has evolved into an international movement, with citizens reclaiming parking spots in more than 150 cities on six continents for Parking(ing) Day last September. Rebar now calls this “an open-source global event,” borrowing from the language of hackathons.

“A lot of us have one foot in each of these communities,” says Jake Levitas, the research director for the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts in San Francisco. The foundation works primarily to promote creative technology and digital culture, but Levitas often talks with friends at Rebar who might better be described as hackers of the built environment. “I realized how much we were speaking the same language,” Levitas says. “The whole DIY urbanism community, if you change two words out of everything that they say, it’s the exact same as the urban hacker, the civic hacker, the technology community. It’s very much DIY, very much taking the city into your own hands, with new forms of civic participation.”

The open-data movement, from which many of these ideas are migrating, is really only a few years old. But the fact that it has taken root so quickly – with city governments all over the country now welcoming civic hackers and turning problems over to them – suggests we might see the same kind of spreading popularity and official embrace of DIY urbanism.

“Last year, hackathons weren’t on the political agenda, and now we’re hearing from the mayor’s office like, ‘a cat got stuck in a tree, can we have a hackathon to get it down?’” Levitas laughs. “We’re excited to do the same thing for this area, blending the physical and digital as forms of civic participation.”

The challenge, though, is that this is all much harder to do in the real world. Even converting a street into a block party, a fairly old idea, requires in most cities months of  of planning and plenty of paperwork. And city code at least understands a “block party.” Most cities have no idea what to do with parklets, pop-up playgrounds, or quirky street furniture.”

Via: The Atlantic Cities

Photo: Rebar Group

“Los Angeles Seeks Pedestrians

The automobile is undoubtedly the dominant mode of travel in Los Angeles. But to write off the city as made up entirely of car-driving, bumper-to-bumper rush hour commuters is clearly an over-generalization. A growing group of Angelenos is finding ways to make transit, cycling, and walking (and, often, a combination thereof) relevant and viable in their daily lives.

A physical example of this transition opened this weekend in the city’s Silver Lake neighborhood. On a short strip of street bordering a small triangular park within a vibrant commercial area, officials from the city’s departments of planning, transportation, and public works partnered with the county’s public health department to close the street off to car traffic and convert it into an outdoor plaza. On 11,000 square-feet, the roadway has been effectively removed form the automobile grid with the simple application of paint (in glowing neon green polka-dots), bike racks and planters around the edges and seating in the middle. The project was inspired by similar street plazas created in New York City and San Francisco.

“In L.A., 60 percent of our land area is devoted to streets and parking lots. So the real hope here is that we can take that and transform it into something really different than just spaces for cars,” says Bill Roschen, president of the city’s planning commission.

Roschen helped spearhead the street-to-plaza project, part of an effort called Streets for People. His intention is to spread projects like this one throughout the city.

“It’s about culture change,” Roschen says. “It’s looking at streets as not always for cars, but a real shared effort around mobility.”

At least a hundred people were milling around the plaza for its opening day ceremony this past Sunday – an especially warm and sunny day. A line trailed out of the door of a café right on the plaza’s edge, and people moved chairs to find some shade underneath the umbrellas sprinkled throughout the area. Kids ran around, while adults and community members crowded around local officials to talk about – and congratulate each other on – the project.”

Via: The Atlantic

Photo: Nate Berg