Planetizen:

“Urbanism and the Landscape Architect

Mark Hough. May 30, 2013

Landscape architects are not given nearly enough recognition for being urbanists.

This is not because we don’t get enough work in cities but, rather, it is the types of projects we get or, more importantly, don’t get. We have always been the go-to designers for parks, waterfronts and streetscapes, but have had a tougher time finding seats at the table alongside (or instead of) planners and architects when broader planning decisions are being made. Because of this, we are usually forced to respond to change orchestrated by others rather than direct it ourselves. Exceptions to this certainly exist, but aside from landscape architects working as planners in public offices, there aren’t many.

I’m not whining. I’m just trying to establish a benchmark in relation to the more optimistic direction I see things headed. Urban design is changing, and it is changing fast. Due in large part to environmental and climatological crises that are translating directly into quality of life issues, cities are focused on their urban landscapes as perhaps never before. This is not groundbreaking news, and I’m not the first person to bring it up, but it is still a worthy discussion.

Urban landscape is a tricky term that is often misunderstood and incorrectly used by people who don’t really know what to do with it. Architects, for instance, whose preference for a top-down, figure-ground approach to urban design that lets buildings alone dictate urban form, relegates the landscape to a series of insertions fitting within the pattern of buildings. Planners, whose sensibilities are typically more in line with landscape architects, don’t really get it either. Their habit of treating landscape as generic green shapes on land use maps or as elements to standardize within form-based codes isn’t much better.”

A public park redesign proposal that I and my colleagues at Mass Urban have been assisting Jersey City-based RTNA (Redstone Townhomes Neighborhood Association) with in collaboration with 3x3 Design, a partner organization, has begun coming to life!

NJ.com:

“Jersey City park blooms with help from neighborhood volunteers

Rafal Ragoza/ The Jersey Journal.  April 27, 2013 

Web Urbanist:

“Buildings that Don’t Exist: Fake Facades Hide Infrastructure

By Steph.  

From the sidewalk, this Paris building looks just like those around it, complete with doors, windows and balconies. but take a look at Google Maps, as Paul of the blog Paris by Cellphone did, and you’ll notice something strange: there’s nothing behind that facade. Like many others all over the world, this ordinary-looking building is just a shell to disguise unsightly infrastructure.

The building, at 154 Rue La Layette, is hiding a giant ventilation chimney for the metro. The chimney is about as large as one of the real buildings that surround it. In another location in Marais, artist Julien Berthier constructed a false door to go on the side of one of these buildings that wasn’t quite as well-disguised”

The Atlantic Cities: 

“The Coming Bold Transformation of the American City

Enrique Penalosa. April 30, 2013

In 40 years, 2.7 billion more people will live in world cities than do now, according to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Urban growth in China, India, and most of the developing world will be massive. But what is less known is that population growth will also be enormous in the United States.

The U.S. population will grow 36 percent to 438 million in 2050 from 322 million today. At today’s average of 2.58 persons per household, such growth would require 44.9 million new homes. However American households are getting smaller. If one were to estimate 2.2 persons per household—the household size in Germany today and the likely U.S. size by 2050—the United States would need 74.3 million new homes, not including secondary vacation homes. This means that over the next 40 years, the United States will build more homes than all those existing today in the United Kingdom, France, and Canada combined. Urban planner and theorist Peter Calthorpe predicts that California alone will add 20 million people and 7 million households by 2050.

To meet this demand, completely new urban environments will have to be created in the United States. Where and how will the new American homes be built? What urban structures are to be created?”

Photo: Battery Park City in Manhattan exemplifies how the quality of urban life can be enhanced by replacing waterfront roadways with parks or pedestrian infrastructure. (Left); A “highway” for pedestrians, bicycles, and transit on Jiménez Avenue in Bogotá, Colombia. (Right) Photo courtesy of Enrique Peñalosa.

The Guardian: 

“Water sensitive design: integrating water with urban planning

For too long we have been designing water out of our cities when we should have been designing it in

Sue Illman. 19 April 2013

In March this year, the Mayor of London and RoDMA announced a tender to create the UK’s largest floating village in London’s Royal Docks, on an area one and a half times the size of Green Park. Planners in Norwich, meanwhile, will be scrutinising plans submitted earlier this year for a rain square and flood park that aims to create 670 homes and new public spaces on a flood-prone site at the juncture of the Wensum and Yare rivers.

As long as we want to keep developing in low-lying areas, particularly around our tidal rivers and coasts, then creating whole settlements that rise and fall as the water ebbs and flows is a perfectly legitimate solution. The Dutch – the ultimate early adopters when it comes to water – already boast examples such as Amsterdam’s pioneering Ijburg community. But for the majority of people living in urban centres, floating villages aren’t the future. In fact, they often obscure what we really need to be focusing on when we think about the relationship between our cities and water.”

Photo: The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. A water feature in the heart of a city will enhance the micro-climate and reduce heat island effect. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

The Atlantic Cities:

Is It Time to Move Past Urban Studies and Toward Urbanization Science?

 Eric Jaffe. March 19, 2013

William Solecki compares the current study of cities to natural history in the 19th century. Back then most natural scientists were content to explore and document the extent of biological and behavioral differences in the world. Only recently has science moved from cataloguing life to understanding the genetic code that forms its very basis.

It’s time for urban studies to evolve the same way, says Solecki, a geographer at Hunter College who’s also director of the C.U.N.Y. Institute for Sustainable Cities. Scholars from any number of disciplines — economics and history to ecology and psychology — have explored and documented various aspects of city life through their own unique lenses. What’s needed now, Solecki contends, is a new science of urbanization that looks beyond the surface of cities to the fundamental laws that form their very basis too.

“What we need is a comprehensive, integrated, system-level analysis of the city-building process,” says Solecki.

Solecki recently made the case for a new science of urbanization in an issue of Environmentmagazine [PDF], alongside environmental scholar Karen Seto of Yale and geography colleague Peter Marcotullio of Hunter. The current fragmentary nature of urban studies, they write, has led to a disconnected “smorgasbord of information” about cities. In response, they suggest moving away from the study of cities as “places” and toward the study of urbanization as a “process.”

“Urban studies illustrates the diversity of cities, the conditions under which cities are built,” says Solecki. “But that really, in large part, hasn’t focused on the process through which there’s this ongoing development or change of cities. … I think one of the things we can start to ask is how do we look at cities as not only objects, but also to look at them in a slightly more sophisticated way.”

Photo: Shutterstock

“The Atlantic Cities: 

Benjamin de la Peña. March 11, 2013

Embracing the Autocatalytic City

We are living on an urban planet; our cities are growing at spectacular rates. This growth has created new energy and excitement (cities account for 70 percent of the global economy), and it has highlighted the dysfunctions of cities. Most of our cities, particularly the fastest-growing ones, are messy, confusing places, even for the citizens who call them home. From the massive week-long traffic jams in Beijing to the crowded favelas of Rio de Janeiro, urban dwellers everywhere can easily rattle off a list of what doesn’t work in their communities. The call to action is always the same: “Better planning, better management!”

That call, though, rests on an unquestioned assumption about cities. In this modern age, we think of cities as large institutions or machines. We talk about their failures as failures of management, coordination, governance. We think we could have “better” cities if we could only tune the machine to make it more “efficient.” The machine model is implicit in the popular language around “smart cities.” The promise is that shiny, smart boxes will figure out how to make our cities tick by smoothing traffic flow, monitoring crime, and allocating power through smart grids. Cities will be run by supersized versions of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL crunching continuous streams of big data. As Donald Fagen of Steely Dan sang, “A just machine to make big decisions / Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision.”

Photo: Benjamin de la Peña

Architizer: 

“Can New York Turn Its 11,000 Payphones Into Public Smartphones?

Lamar Anderson. March 7, 2013

When Mayor Bloomberg announced New York City’s Reinvent Payphones Design Challenge last winter, we were excited to see how designers would reimagine these idle relics of last century’s infrastructure into something other than a shading device for smartphone-browsing in sunny weather. From the looks of the finalists, which Bloomberg announced Tuesday, tomorrow’s payphone could have a lot of app-style features, from weather reports and wayfinding to voice and gesture control.

A handful of New York’s roughly 11,000 payphones already serve as wifi hotspots thanks to a pilot program (PDF) launched by the city last summer, so the leap to hyperconnectivity isn’t as far-fetched as it may seem.”

Image: Best Creativity: NYC Loop, by FXFOWLE.

The New York Times:

“Now Atlanta Is Turning Old Tracks Green

Robbie Brown. Feb 14, 2013

ATLANTA — Until last year, the old railroad tracks that snaked through east Atlanta were derelict. Kudzu, broken bottles and plastic bags covered the rusting rails.

But these days, the two-mile corridor bustles with joggers, bikers and commuters. Along a trail lined with pine and sassafras trees, condos are under construction and a streetcar is planned.

The Eastside Trail, as the path is known, is one of the first legs of an ambitious proposal that has been in the works since the early 2000s — to transform 22 miles of vine-covered railroad into parks, housing and public transit around Atlanta.

“We are changing Atlanta into a city that you can enjoy by walking and riding a bike,” Mayor Kasim Reed said. “We have been so car-centric that you didn’t experience the city in an intimate way.”

Photo: Rich Addicks for the NY Times

The Architect’s Newspaper:

“ ANYTHING NY CAN DO, LA CAN DO TOO

Sam Lubell asserts that LA’s next mayor must step up with ambitious design plans for the city.

Sam Lubell Feb 6, 2013

Having lived in New York and Los Angeles for more than six years apiece, I’ve learned that while they have plenty in common—they’re obviously both huge cities with a level of cultural dynamism and diversity that dwarfs most American metropolises—they’re also utterly different places.

In the design world perhaps the most important division is this: New York has a number of important, powerful, and effective design champions, among them mayor Michael Bloomberg, planning director Amanda Burden, and transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. The results have been, by all measures, impressive. The city has transformed itself through design, creating an elite new collection of parks, buildings, and master plans, including the High Line, Brooklyn Bridge Park, dedicated bike lanes, and iconic buildings by most of the world’s most celebrated architects, including Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Renzo Piano, BIG, DS+R, and so many more.

Los Angeles is sorely lacking any such unifying galvanizers. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, while a stunningly effective promoter of transit, and leader of a recent triumph (despite heavy lobbying) on the Sixth Street Bridge, is still often subservient by legislative design to warring city council members and various agency heads. The planning director, Michael LoGrande, appears to have a rather tepid vision for long term, proactive planning. And few in the community seem to have taken the lead to fill the created vacuum. Instead of true design champions we have Eli Broad, who builds with little regard for public input or (despite hiring the best) even the input of his architects. Another is Metro, which has been enriched through recent measure R. But despite the valiant work of planning director Martha Welborne, the agency has shown little design savvy in its recent transit projects and transit oriented developments.

So who will step up for Los Angeles?”

Photo: Ben K. Adams/Flickr