“A City Rises, Along With Its Hopes

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN. Published: May 18, 2012

Medillin, Columbia.

FOR some time now, if you asked architects and urban planners for proof of the power of public architecture and public space to remake the fortunes of a city, they’d point here.

Twenty-odd years ago, this was Pablo Escobar’s town, with an annual homicide rate that peaked at 381 per 100,000. In New York City that would add up to an almost inconceivable 32,000 murders a year.

But Colombia’s second city has lately become a medical and business center with a population of 3.5 million and a budding tourist industry, its civic pride buoyed by the new public buildings and squares, and exemplified by an efficient and improbably immaculate metro and cable car system. Linking rich with poor neighborhoods, spurring private development, the metro, notwithstanding shrieks elsewhere in Colombia over its questionable construction cost, is for residents of Medellín a shared symbol of democratic renewal. Even on the rush-hour train I took the other morning, crowds stepped aside to let a cleaning woman with a mop and bucket scrub the floor.

That evening I headed high up into a steep hillside slum where rival gangs still shoot unsuspecting trespassers who cross invisible borders. The city has recently installed an escalator ascending 1,300 feet, much debated at $7 million and disconnected from the rest of the city’s transit network but shortening to a five-minute ride what had been a brutal 30-story climb for some 12,000 residents. I trudged by foot, past armed soldiers, past mothers taking breathers on the decrepit steps that meandered up the mountain, past toddlers on plastic tricycles plunging down vertical streets, to a brightly painted cinderblock hut, a ramshackle aerie overlooking a sprawl of tin houses and open sewers.

The shack is home to Son Batá, a cultural initiative founded by young black migrants from the Chocó region of Colombia. Son Batá promotes Chocano music and dance, and it benefits from yet another Medellín initiative: participatory budgeting. Residents here have voted to direct a share of government financing to new schools, clinics and college scholarships. Son Batá got to hire music teachers and bought instruments and is adding a new recording studio to its headquarters. A group of players showed me the studio under construction. From another room, music drifted over the barrio and into the warm night air.

I arrived in Medellín to see the ambitious and photogenic buildings that have gone up, but also to find what remains undone. The murder rate, while hardly low, is now under 60 per 100,000. Architecture alone obviously doesn’t account for the drop in homicides, but the two aren’t unrelated, either. Around the world, followers of architecture with a capital A have focused so much of their attention on formal experiments, as if aesthetics and social activism, twin Modernist concerns, were mutually exclusive. But Medellín is proof that they’re not, and shouldn’t be. Architecture, here and elsewhere, acts as part of a larger social and economic ecology, or else it elects to be a luxury, meaningless except to itself.

The story of Medellín’s evolution turns out to be neither as rosy nor as straightforward as fans of new architecture have tended to portray it. It’s generally told as a triumph for Sergio Fajardo, the son of an architect who is the governor of the region and who was the city’s visionary mayor from 2004 to 2007. He pushed an agenda that linked education and community development with infrastructure and glamorous architecture.

But the city’s transformation established roots before Mr. Fajardo took office, in thoughtful planning guidelines, amnesties and antiterrorism programs, community-based initiatives by Germany and the United Nations and a Colombian national policy mandating architectural interventions as a means to attack poverty and crime.”

Via: NY Times

Photo: Paul Smith for The New York Times

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“ EDITORIAL> GETTING IT RIGHT IN THE QUEEN CITY

Alan G. Brake. May 11, 2012

America has a deep-seated anti-urban streak, which happens to dovetail, in the eyes of many, with a mistrust of government at every level. The Republican presidential primary has flared with anti-urban rhetoric, which is particularly shortsighted given the still-weak state of the economy, one in which urban areas are bouncing back faster than their rural and exurban counterparts. That cities are the country’s economic engine seems obvious almost to the point of being self-evident, so why is it still seen as politically advantageous to denigrate urban areas? And why are urbanists so bad at making the case for cities with the public?

Meet Cincinnati Mayor Mark Malloy. His mid-sized city is currently engaged in building three important, interconnected urban projects, which could bring a real spark to downtown and surrounding neighborhoods. One project will create a new mixed-use neighborhood in between the city’s riverfront stadiums, along with a generous new waterfront park. The first phase of the Banks, as it is called, is complete and the second is breaking ground within the month. The latter is a coordinated redevelopment—including renovation and new construction—of a large piece of the Over the Rhine neighborhood, just north of downtown. The third, and arguably most important, project is a long-planned and hotly contested streetcar line connecting both areas with downtown in between.

And Cincinnati is no bastion of progressive urbanism. It has long been plagued with a history of racial strife, white flight, and purse strings controlled by wealthy, exclusionary suburbs.

Malloy has been extremely effective in making the economic case for these developments as a necessary strategy for Cincinnati’s competitiveness. In a recent video for Smart Growth America, the mayor articulated his vision: “We’ve got to be able to attract and retain young people, and we’ve got to be able to attract and maintain the companies that are going to create jobs. People are looking for public transportation when they are deciding which city they want to be in. They are looking for public infrastructure to be in place. All the elements you see in larger cities that are stable, that have growing populations, we are trying to incorporate into Cincinnati so we can level the playing field.”

Malloy is making the case for Cincinnati’s urbanity, for its cityness, as a competitive advantage, something that many small and midsized cities have long scorned. He has put public space, place making, and mixed-use development at the center of his mayoral agenda. And he makes the case that it’s not downtown versus neighborhoods or city versus suburbs, but that an integrated, economically dynamic region only thrives when the center really holds.”

Via: The Architects Newspaper

Photo: AERIAL VIEW OF CINCINNATI’S WATERFRONT SHOWING THE BANKS REDEVELOPMENT ALONG THE OHIO RIVER. COURTESY CASTELLI MANAGEMENT

irishboyinlondon:

Artinfo: Pop-Up Populism: How the Temporary Architecture Craze is Changing Our Relationship to the Built Environment

America is fast becoming a pop-up nation. From sea to shining sea, her cities have been swept up in the frenzy for temporary architecture: Brooklyn vendors sell their wares in artfully arranged shipping containers; Dallas’s Build a Better Block group champions DIY painted bicycle routes and pop-up small businesses; architects in San Francisco are repurposing metered parking spaces into miniature parks; residents in Oakland, California rallied to create an entire pop-up neighborhood. The phenomenon has even climbed its way from grassroots origins to the agendas of local authorities: D.C.’s office of planning sprouted a Temporary Urbanism Initiative, while New York’s transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan is implementing what she calls “Jane Jacobs’s revenge on Robert Moses” with her fast-acting interventions favoring pedestrians and cyclists. The temporary, so it seems, is overtaking the permanent. But how permanent is our current fascination for the temporary?

(via morusnyc)

“Urban farms, gardens, reforestation all part of Detroit Works vision for remaking city.

John Gallagher. May 8, 2012

Faced with growing vacancy in the city, Mayor Dave Bing’s Detroit Works long-term planning team is moving closer to recommending a set of diverse options for remaking Detroit’s neighborhoods.

In an interview with the Free Press, planning team leaders say they envision some neighborhoods remaining traditional residential while others evolve toward open land used for storm-water retention ponds, urban farms and energy production.

The slate of draft ideas for community debate moves the process toward a future discussion of specific ideas for specific neighborhoods.

Some areas, such as the city’s Indian Village or Palmer Woods neighborhoods, might continue to thrive as areas of single-family residences. Other districts suffering considerable vacancy might transition to what the team calls “green residential,” a mix of homes and small community gardens or parks.

Still other neighborhoods that are almost entirely abandoned might be used for reforestation or experimental fields where sunflowers and other plants could be used to detoxify contaminated land.

The team leaders emphasized that residents and community groups will play a major role in deciding what happens in their districts.

“They have the authorship as to what tool is applied where,” said Dan Kinkead, an architect and planner with Detroit-based Hamilton Anderson Associates who is part of the technical team.

Menu of options

The draft ideas are just a menu of options for discussion. They are not attached to any specific districts in the city.

The team is expected to produce a final report by late summer, offering options for residents and civic leaders to consider rather than strict recommendations about what should happen where.

“There is room for a broad spectrum of interventions to be played out,” said Toni Griffin, a City College of New York professor of urban planning who co-chairs the Detroit Works technical team developing the list of options.

Karla Henderson, Bing’s group executive for planning and facilities, said the mayor and his aides are looking forward to receiving the report from the planning team.

“We’re very interested in what comes out of the community conversations and how that aligns with some of (the team’s) recommendations,” Henderson said Monday. Once the report is done, work can then begin on deciding what options should be implemented and how that might take place, she said.”

Via: Detroit Free Press

Photo:  AMYLEANG/DETROIT FREE PRESS

“A Micro-Market for Vacant Housing

Julia Leavitt 5.11.12

Vacant buildings can languish for a variety of reasons. Some are chronically disused: a neglected property falls into disrepair, making it a liability that is eventually more expensive to fix than to ignore. For others, leaving units empty is a management choice. When rent-controlled apartment buildings are slated for refurbishment or re-purposing, for example, the process of moving tenants out can take years, with the first units vacated remaining useless until the process is finished.

In London, which has its fair share of blighted properties, one organization is working on a solution to the city’s housing waste problem by offering community-minded individuals the chance to live cheaply in apartment homes that would otherwise sit empty. Dot Dot Dot Property Guardians has plenty of raw material to work with: slightly more than 3 percent of the total housing stock in England (more than 700,000 homes) was reported empty last year by the independent non-profit Empty Homes Agency (figures, based on council tax data, do not include homes deemed “uninhabitable,” homes slated for demolition, or apartments above storefronts which, though habitable, are counted as commercial property). Of these, 39 percent had been empty for more than six months. Despite a nationally recognized housing shortage, many landlords still find it preferable - financially, legally, or as a matter of convenience - to keep homes unoccupied.

Renting these properties encumbers many owners’ long-term plans, so Dot Dot Dot takes advantage of a legal loophole by vetting and placing live-in “guardians” in the properties. Guardians are people who are willing to exchange traditional tenants’ rights — their stay can be terminated with only two weeks’ advance notice — for reliable space at a fraction of the typical cost.

Legally, guardians share a status similar to someone employed to service the property, such as a professional house cleaner. As such, they don’t technically pay “rent,” but instead pay a management fee to Dot Dot Dot — on average £50 per week, about a quarter (or less) of the typical cost of a shared flat in London. Property owners also pay a management fee to Dot Dot Dot. Owners don’t earn income from the arrangement, but installing guardians often prevents neglect and vandalism (plus, says founder Katharine Hibbert, it can be good PR).

The business model itself is not new. Established players in property guardianship include European companies Ad Hoc and Camelot. Dot Dot Dot, however, attempts to differentiate itself with an element of social benefit. Its competitive screening process for guardians is designed to select those who will be “great neighbors,” actively contributing to the communities where they live. “We manage intensively,” says Hibbert, 30, who sets up her clients in peer groups to encourage them to share resources and meets with them regularly to check on their welfare and community projects.

So far, the new company is on a positive trajectory, Hibbert says, enjoying support from an advisory board that includes affordable housing advocates and legal professionals. Since its launch last summer, Dot Dot Dot has established contracts with several private property owners and two housing associations, with more on the way. ”

Via: The Atlantic Cities

Photo: Julia Levitt

“Can Inactive Landfills Become Assets?

Nate Berg. May 3, 2012

There were about 8,000 active municipal solid waste landfills in the U.S. in 1980. In 2009 that number was down to just about 1,900. So, assuming there hasn’t been some miraculous evaporation of decades worth of municipal waste, more than 6,000 landfills across the country are now sitting inactive.

That may be fine for most; garbage dumps are full of stuff we wanted to get rid of, after all. But as this recent article from Places shows, simply leaving these landfills to rot quietly out of our sight ignores the potential they carry – both on top and within.

Architect Michael Ezban spent a few months as a visiting scholar in Rome and became interested in a centuries-old landfill, Monte Testaccio, and his article tours through its history and, most interestingly, its current state as a living part of the city. Now towering as one of the eight hills in the city, Monte Testaccio grew to a height of more than 100 feet as a dumping ground for millions of clay vessels used over the centuries to transport olive oil into the city. Unlike modern-day dumps, this now-inactive landfill has become an active and useful part of the urban landscape.

As landfills in the U.S. meet and exceed their capacity and fall out of use, they face a fairly uniform future of being capped with clay and left alone to slowly decompose from the inside. Ezban argues that Monte Testaccio is a good example of a way we might be able to rethink these sealed landfills.

Monte Testaccio has hosted a range of marginalized populations for most of its existence, but now the constituency is evolving as socio-economic changes bring a greater diversity of activity to the area. The new annex of MACRO, Rome’s museum of contemporary art, is located in the slaughterhouse just yards away from the horse stalls and carriage storage. Adventurous foodies trek to Testaccio for traditional cuisine. Auto mechanics rebuild old Fiats at the base of the landfill as archaeologists piece together amphorae at the top. Ravers dance in the 17th-century caves until early Sunday morning, followed by Catholics attending mass in the chapel next door. Can waste management agencies, municipal parks departments, landscape architects and urban designers work to enable this kind of cultural mosaic on the slopes of contemporary landfills?

Ezban points to a few modern-day examples where this idea is starting to take shape. Freshkills Park in Staten Island, New York, is re-animating more than 2,200 acres of what at one time was the largest landfill in the world. The park will feature a number of activities, as well as an intricate system for sequestering and capturing the gaseous results of 150 million decaying tons of New York City garbage. Another dump makeover is underway in Tel Aviv, Israel, where the Hiriya Garbage Mound has been re-engineered and renamed as Ariel Sharon Eco Park. Closed after more than 40 years in 1998, the dump is being turned into a 2,000-acre park space and will feature a lake and a 50,000-seat amphitheater. Another dump-to-park conversion is Byxbee Parkin Palo Alto, California, where more than 60 vertical feet of garbage have been capped with a bayside regional park. The Trust for Public Lands estimates that about 4,500 acres of landfill in U.S. cities have been converted into similar public spaces.”

Via: The Atlantic Cities

Photo: Flickr/TyB

“The Rise of the Temporary City

by David Lepeska. 5.1.12

While artists, activists and event organizers have embraced the pop-up phenomenon, urban visionaries have remained overwhelmingly concerned with permanence.

That may be changing, according to The Temporary City, a new book by urban planner Peter Bishop and environmental scientist Lesley Williams that outlines a greater appreciation for immediate outcomes and temporary activities among planners, architects, developers and city officials.

“An alternative approach to master planning is beginning to emerge,” the authors write.

Temporary uses are nothing new. Nearly all of the 200 buildings of Chicago’s magnificent 1893White City came and went within a few years.* And the reclaiming of public space has been going on for more than half a century, in free zones like Copenhagen’s Christiania, a squatters’ settlement founded in 1971.

The continuing economic crisis has curtailed development funding and increased unemployment, particularly among the young and educated. Many cities have lost sizable chunks of population, leading to vast swathes of vacant property. And today’s constant communications capabilities have made organizing events much simpler and quicker.

Combine these with the appeal of time-limited exclusivity and you have a boom in pop-ups, like the recent weekend-long mall on Cambridge’s Newbury Street, or the 10-day food truck park, with furniture, plants and a performance space, in Surrey, England.

These enrich urban life, acknowledges Bishop, but it’s the grander, longer-lasting temporary projects that have begun to alter thinking in the field. Eric Reynolds of Urban Space Management created London’s Camden Lock Market a few decades ago. Initially a group of temporary cart stores and retail outlets in and around vacant warehouses, it has since become one of the city’s most popular markets and helped rejuvenate an overlooked neighborhood.”

Via: The Atlantic Cities

Photo: Peter Bishop 

“FIGUEROA COMEBACK

James Brausell. 4.23.12

One of LA’s most important urban projects is back on track after the dissolution of California redevelopment funding almost shut it down for good.

Since 2010, the MyFigueroa project had tried, through street, landscape, and land-use planning studies, to pave the way for the city’s most innovative pedestrian and bicycle environment along Figueroa Boulevard between LA Live, on the southern end of Downtown, and Exposition Park, adjacent to USC. It included separated cycle lanes and improvements to streetscape, pedestrian infrastructure, and transit stops.

The Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles had served as custodian to the $30 million Proposition 1C grant funding the project. But once the California State Supreme Court dissolved the state’s redevelopment agencies at the end of 2011, it fell into limbo.

But in early April, the LA mayor’s office and the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (DOT) struck a deal to move administrative oversight of the project to the DOT. Now MyFigueroa appears primed to move forward quickly. According to Tim Fremaux, a city traffic engineer, DOT will bundle the project’s environmental review with that of the city’s plans to build 40 miles of bike lanes. DOT would serve as lead agency on MyFigueroa’s construction, overseeing work by a yet-to-be-determined contractor. The Proposition 1C grant money will fund it, and additional Metro Call for Projects money could be used to improve connections between the Figueroa Street and the new Expo Line.

All told, the project will add pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure improvements on 4.5 miles of streets along the Figueroa Corridor. LA-based landscape and urban design firm Melendrez Design Partners has already completed initial designs. The centerpiece of the project would be a separated cycle track (SCT) running in each direction along Figueroa Street between 7th and 41st streets. The SCT would slide parking spaces out toward the street, leaving curb, sidewalk, and drainage infrastructure in place.

Grant funding for the MyFigueroa project also targets improvements for 11th Street from Broadway to Figueroa, Bill Robertson Lane between Martin Luther King Boulevard and Exposition Boulevard, and, finally, MLK Boulevard between Figueroa and Vermont. Eleventh Street, which feeds into LA Live, would add a bike lane and enhance pedestrian infrastructure—including a possible 19-foot-wide sidewalk. Improvements along Bill Robertson Avenue, currently flanked by a sea of surface parking lots and the LA Coliseum, could become a pedestrian promenade. MLK Boulevard would see improvements to sidewalks, setbacks, and lighting.”

Via: The Architect’s Newspaper

Photo: COURTESY MELENDREZ, GEHL ARCHITECTS, AND TROLLER MAYER ASSOCIATES

“Green Infrastructure Could Save Cities Billions

Nate Berg. April 24, 2012

Compared to canvas grocery bags or CFL light bulbs or even solar panels, larger “green infrastructure” projects such as roof gardens or permeable streets can be hugely expensive. It turns out, however, that they’re actually not that expensive when compared to the costs of building more traditional infrastructure, and can even save money. According to a new study, governments are wasting billions of dollars a year by not going green.

Looking at 479 case studies of green infrastructure projects around the U.S., the report finds that the majority of projects turned out to be just as affordable or even more so than traditional “grey” infrastructure. About a quarter of projects raised costs, 31 percent, kept costs the same and more than 44 percent actually brought costs down.

“The lesson learned so far by early adopter communities who have already implemented green infrastructure in a significant fashion is that a wide-ranging commitment to including green infrastructure stormwater approaches, on public as well as private properties, can result in long-term fiscal savings for local governments as well as provide numerous, tangible economic and community benefits through related ecosystem services,” notes the study, co-authored by the American Society of Landscape Architects, American Rivers, the Water Environment Federation, and ECONorthwest.

The costs of traditional infrastructure are especially pronounced in cities and regions with combined sewer systems that collect both sewage and stormwater. During heavy rainfall, these systems are often overwhelmed, pouring sewage-laden water into drinking water sources and greatly increasing water treatment costs.

Technologies like permeable pavements and rain gardens can capture, naturally treat and filter stormwater back into the ground, preventing overflows and reducing reliance on treatment centers. Chicago’s existing green infrastructure, including its green alleys, diverted about 70 million gallons of stormwater from treatment facilities in 2009, according to the report.

These projects can create significant costs savings. New York City plans to build green infrastructure to cut down discharges into its combined sewer system – a project expected to save about $1.5 billion in treatment and infrastructure costs over 20 years. Replacing streets in Seattle with permeable pavement and other green infrastructure has cut paving costs nearly in half.

And by allowing natural processes to take over the work we’ve been building infrastructure to handle, operations and maintenance costs also fall. The report concedes that some maintenance on green infrastructure will still be required, but that it is significantly less than what’s required by traditional infrastructure.”

Via: The Atlantic Cities

Photo: Shutterstock