“The Architects Newspaper: 

EDITORIAL> LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE’S ASCENDANCE

Alan G. Brake on the growing importance of landscape architecture.

Dec 4, 2012

In recent years, landscape architects have seen their profile rise. The discipline has gained stature in the public’s imagination, as well as among the allied disciplines of architecture, planning, and even civil and transportation engineering. Some, like prominent New Urbanists, have tried to paint this growth as a threat to architects and town planners, couched in a reheated rad versus trad debate (don’t we have more pressing issues than endlessly rehashing the style wars?).

There are a number of reasons for landscape architecture’s prominence. Catalytic projects like the High Line, Chicago’s Millennium Park, and LA’s new Grand Park have certainly galvanized the public around the need for high quality parks and public space. New York is reclaiming its waterfront through projects large and small, and marquee projects like Governor’s Island the Fresh Kills promise to re-orient the city to embrace its identity as an archipelago.

Landscape architects have also been actively redefining what they do, reclaiming the profession’s civic role and layering on new environmental and infrastructural potentials. Landscape architects have also been effective in claiming urbanism as their purview. Changes in federal and city policy have reinforced that role through programs like “Greening America’s Capitals” and New York’s Clean Water Act consent agreement with the EPA. As an observer, these developments appear great for urban areas. As cities cope and adapt to climate change and rising sea levels, I expect the discipline’s role to continue to expand.

Landscape architecture’s dynamism, however, also points to certain weaknesses in contemporary architecture and planning. Architecture has been caught in a kind of hangover from the pre-crash years. Much of the profession, not to mention architectural education, is still too obsessed with architecture-as-object. The rise of tactical urbanism is a reaction to this, and also often involves landscape-based projects. Planning seems even more stuck. Too afraid to engage with design—following the failures of much of modernist planning—planners have either buried their noses in policy or retreated into colored-pencil-clichés of urbanism that seem dated. Landscape architects have stepped into that vacuum.”

Photo: BROOKLYN BRIDGE PARK BY MICHAEL VAN VALKENBURGH ASSOCIATES.

“ 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

“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

“Marginalia: Little Libraries in the Urban Margins

A few years ago libraries were flying high. I wrote a book about the so-called “third wave” library-building boom of the ’90s and early aughts, a boom made possible in part by the dot.com bubble. Today, nearly a decade later, our cities and their libraries find themselves in a very different situation. While libraries are welcoming record numbers of visitors and breaking circulation records, library budgets are facing drastic cuts, some of those flashy new buildings are often shuttered, and cities are resorting to the privatization or outsourcing of library services. Meanwhile, many services that patrons once relied on libraries to provide — specifically the provision and preservation of information in multiple formats — are now accessible elsewhere, including in our living rooms, and even in the palms of our hands. 

Libraries are about much more, of course; they exist not simply to store and provide access to information. Advocates argue that libraries continue to serve crucial civic and social functions, and their tenacious faith is reinforced by a flurry of recent street-level library activity. The last few years have seen the emergence of myriad mini, pop-up, guerilla and ad-hoc libraries, which are part of the phenomenon that Mimi Zeiger, in her Interventionist’s Toolkit series for this journal, calls “provisional, opportunistic, ubiquitous, and odd tactics in guerilla and DIY practice and urbanism” — to which I might add, librarianship. Nowadays we have libraries in phone booths and mailboxes, in public parks and train stations, in vacant storefronts and parking lots. Often these are spaces of experimentation, where new models of library service and public engagement can be test-piloted, or where core values can be reassessed and reinvigorated. They are also often an effort to reclaim — for the commons, for the sake of enlightenment (or does this term now carry too much baggage to be used without scare quotes?) — a small corner of public space in cities that have lately become hyper-commercialized, cities that might no longer reflect the civic aspirations of a diverse public. As DePauw University librarian Mandy Henk puts it, “They … show the power of self-organization and what people can build working together, outside of traditional institutions. Building and using them is a form community empowerment.” [1] 

These new library projects might seem to emerge from a common culture and uphold a common mission — a flurry of press coverage in late 2011 represented them as a coherent “little library” movement. But in fact they don’t. They have varied aims and politics and assumptions about what a library is and who its publics are; their collections and services differ significantly; and their forms and functions vary from one locality to another. I want to attempt here to identify a loose, and inevitably leaky, typology of “little libraries” — to figure out where they’re coming from, how they relate to existing institutions that perform similar roles, and what impact they’re having on their communities.”

Via: Design Observer

Photos via Design Observer