Community prosperity means social, economic and environmental prosperity. Each of these dimensions is strongly influenced by the physical design of the places where people live. Physical design influences human behaviour, which in turn influences community prosperity. The most important aspect of physical design is connectedness. Connectedness can be measured scientifically. Its effects on societal wealth have been identified by UK scientific research over the last forty years.
Category: Architecture
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Can the value of design be measured? This house believes it can.
Yesterday evening’s debate at the Royal Institute of British Architects addressed the following motion:
“This house believes the value of design is not measurable”
The motion was overwhelmingly defeated. Rightly so – for, as long as architects claim that the value of design is intangible, the profession does itself a disservice. It is unsurprising that the real worlds of institutionalised politics, social activism and finance undervalue the contribution of design when designers claim that their importance is not only immeasurable but unmeasurable. This sounds hollow in the ears of people used to setting targets, taking action and measuring outcomes. (more…)
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Portland: city of hub and spoke centrality
Thank you to all the people that kindly hosted me in Portland over the past three days: Portland Bright Lights, the City of Portland, Portland State University, Ankrom Moisan and Portland TriMet. Thank you to everyone that came to hear me speak – five talks in three days was a challenge that I was happy to accept. To those of you who came more than once, I salute your interest as well as your patience. My first presentation, “From highways to handshakes” is now online.
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Technology & Serendipity: Stumbling in the City
Monday, 31st January at 6:30pm
Stubbins Room, Harvard Graduate School of Design, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138Loeb Fellowship Spring Seminars
Much, Much More with Much, Much LessThe Loeb Fellows invite…
Ethan Zuckerman, Senior Researcher, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society
Moderated by Nicco Mele, Adjunct Lecturer, Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Founder of EchoDittoFor thousands of years, social networks have been transacted in the physical space of buildings and cities. Facebook and Twitter have changed the landscape of transaction. To what degree is this a good thing? Do digital networks create new, unexpected and beneficial forms of transaction? Or, do they just reinforce ties with people we already know? Do these digital interactions change the ways that people behave in physical space? How should urban planners and designers be responding? (more…)
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Dharavi – slum for sale
Notes from screening at Harvard GSD
The key issue is employment, not housing. Need to retain micro-industry as well as housing.
Resident’s comment on high rise housing proposal (but no clear proposal for providing places of work): “Will the oxygen up there fill our stomachs?”
Industry generates 750 million dollars per annum. Dharavi therefore as an economic object. Much of the economy is informal.
Redevelopment as a step backwards because people can’t continue their previous trade and have to shift to new trades – “lift men and doorkeepers”
“Let people build for themselves – give them water not money.”
SPARC: Don’t leave it to the international developers.
The proposed redevelopment is not just professionally poor but morally poor because it raises expectations among the poor. The plan should instead be done by the municipality.
One objective should be to see Dharavi as a test case of dense, mixed use, low carbon community.
The lack of evidence seems important. Proposals being made in a vacuum of knowledge.
Bryan Bell – need to tap into social capital there rather than turn up in a Mercedes.
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Architecting the unexpected
“Serendipity”: it’s what cities have always provided but online environments only sometimes produce. Why “search” isn’t enough, hackers need to think like urbanists and the internet needs urban design.
It’s the start of a new semester at Harvard and there’s a real buzz about the place. I had breakfast with Nicco Mele and Chee Pearlman this morning and the Charles Hotel was a hive.
What a difference a day makes. Chee and I were in the same place yesterday and it was almost empty. On that occasion we were meeting Ethan Zuckerman who, like Nicco, lives much of his life and does most of his thinking online. He studies how people throughout the world use new media to share information and moods across cultures, languages and platforms.
Both meetings were in preparation for an upcoming seminar that the Loeb Fellows are hosting at the Graduate School of Design. Themed around “technology” this will be the first of a series of four events that aim to tackle big issues in planning and design, including food, extraction, waste and community activism. (more…)
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Connecting the disconnected – how much is enough?
Yesterday evening, Ed Parham gave a talk at the Graduate School of Design on Space Syntax’s work redesigning unplanned settlements in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Despite the really awful weather, which turned Cambridge into a pedestrian sludge, there was a full house.
Ed showed how Jeddah’s unplanned settlements share a common spatial property of being locally walkable but globally disconnected from the bigger movement structure of the city. This supresses the economic potential of these places. To counter this, the Space Syntax team has developed Area Action Plans for dozens of unplanned settlements, identifying opportunities to bridge between the local and global movement networks with new streets lined with commercial activity. These streets allow the unplanned settlements to trade outwards in new ways.
The big question raised by this work is: to what degree should unplanned settlements be reintegrated into the spatial fabric of the city? To a degree, the spatial distinction of these places creates a cultural identity for the inhabitants, with certain social benefits. The risk of reintegration is that this identity will be diluted or even lost by the new flow of movement, social identity and capital through the unplanned areas.
Ed described how, in fact, a spatial hierarchy can be created that leaves much of the original spatial fabric intact, especially the fine-grained, more residential and more spatially segregated fabric that helps to structure the cultural identity of the unplanned settlements. The long audience discussion that followed Ed’s talk showed how relevant the challenge of urban connectivity is to urban practice.
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From landscapes of extraction to creative industries of organic matter & waste
Monday, 14th February 2011 at 6pm
Stubbins Room, Harvard Graduate School of Design, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138Participants
Pablo Rey, Basurama
Manolo Mansylla, Trashpatch
Robin Nagle, anthropologist of material culture (waste)
Scientist doing research in biomaterials (Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering/ Materials Research Science and Engineering Center – School of Engineering and Applied Sciences)Moderator
Richard Forman
Abstract
Technology has no limits. Science has no limits. Human creativity and imagination have no limits. The limits are imposed by matter. Raw materials are being extracted from the remotest of geographies and we are beginning to exhaust the last reservoirs of available minerals in order to perpetuate a production system based on disposability and the consumption of wholes, not parts; of large, not small; of new, not old; of multiple, not the one that is needed. In order to extract such minerals, we often deplete forests, along with the cultures that inhabit them, or contaminate river basins. Science and technology can produce brilliant responses to our environmental problems, but unless they take into account the source of the materials they consume, the counter landscapes of extraction, those of waste and slums (people get displaced as we render their land useless through monoculture or extraction), will continue to grow; setting off our good intentions to move towards a more sustainable future. (more…) -
Upcoming talk: “From highways to handshakes – taming roads for people”
Monday, 24th January at 6:00pm
Jimmy Mak’s, 221 NW Tenth Ave., Portland ORA conversation with Tim Stonor of the renowned London-based planning firm Space Syntax
When it comes to transportation, planners use “science” for cars but more often “intuition” for pedestrians. Elaborate computer models have been developed to model traffic scenarios for vehicles, but when it comes to forecasting how people will move on two feet, it’s all observation and guesswork. In the 1990s, the London-based firm, Space Syntax, changed all of that. Mapping neighborhoods from a pedestrian eye-level and then applying relatively simple algorithms to model behavior, Space Syntax developed robust new computer predictions that led the way to successfully pedestrianizing such car-choked places as Trafalgar Square in London and Old Maket Square in Nottingham. Today, with 13 offices across the globe, the firm is leading the design and redesign of districts in cities as diverse as Jeddah and Beijing. Stonor will speak about the development of and the ever-expanding use of Space Syntax’s techniques and will offer thoughts on the relationship between the centre and the suburbs in Portland. (more…)
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Upcoming talk: “Planning the unplanned: An evidence-based approach to design in informal settlements”
Harvard Graduate School of Design, 18th January 2011, 6:30pm
With the world population of slum dwellers set to increase to 2 billion over the next 30 years, the need to provide adequate living conditions for the urban poor is recognised as a major challenge. Political and economic pressure to implement improvements quickly, often means that the contribution slums make to the wider city is not recognised as part of the solution.
Using the case study of his work in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Ed Parham of Space Syntax will explain how advanced techniques of spatial analysis have been used to identify a core spatial problem at the heart of the slum condition. These techniques have been used further to develop solutions in the form of individual area profiles, city-wide prioritisation strategies, settlement-specific needs-based improvement strategies, and to help generate detailed area action plans. Based on in-depth knowledge of the role and importance of spatial networks in cities, these solutions can be implemented incrementally and flexibly with the long-term aim of reintegrating the unplanned settlements, and their residents, through the minimum disruption.
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Social Entrepreneurship in the Built Environment
Tweetroll from an evening at the Harvard Graduate School of Design with actor/activist Edward Norton and developer Jonathan Rose
Social Entrepreneurship in the Built Environment
Piper Auditorium, 1st December 2010Edward Norton quoting his grandfather Jim Rouse: The purpose of business is not profit but the provision of an authentic service from which profit is a derivative @HarvardGSD
Jonathan Rose
Cities are the answer to the increase in population and demands on energy.
People who live in New York City consume 25% energy of people in suburbs.
Birth rates a lower in cities.
Opportunities are greater.Edward Norton
Jim Rouse: Assess the field of opportunities and go for the most difficult. Blow off people who say you shouldn’t because the most difficult problems are the ones that most people should be going for.Jim Rouse: Intractable problems are problems of apathy and complacency and not of impossibility.
Jim Rouse: Form should follow function and function should emerge from the service the project provides, especially in the urban design.
Jonathan Rose: Cities are about connectivity, culture, universities, access to nature. Cities are not just piles of buildings clustered together.
Edward Norton: We need to promote a reboot of our sense of self. We are not #1. We are not who we project ourselves as being. @HarvardGSD
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Weekly update
22-28th November 2010
Monday
Meeting with Space Syntax colleagues regarding company strategy in preparation for visit to London next week.
Call with Steve Coast regarding open source software development.
Meeting with Jim Stockard, Curator of the Loeb Fellowship.
Tuesday
Call with Bridget Horner, Director of Space Syntax South Africa.
Meeting with Harvard GSD design student.
Lunch with Sally Young, Program Coordinator of the Loeb Fellowship
Meeting with Kishore Varanasi of CBT Architects, Boston.
Presentation to Kairos Shen, Chief Planner and colleagues at the Boston Redevelopment Authority.
Meeting with David MacKay regarding speaking at an Urban Land Institute event on urban zoning in January 2011.
Wednesday
Call with Steve Coast.
Thursday
Thanksgiving.
Friday
Thanksgiving rcess.
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Much much more with much much less
Inspired by a comment by Rahul Mehrotra, “Much much more with much much less” is the theme of next semester’s Loeb Fellowship Public Seminar series.
The four seminars in the series will take place at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
The working titles for the seminars are:
Technology
Resources, Money & Economy
Food, Agriculture & Basic Needs
Process, Participation & EngagementDates to follow…
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Getting to know-your-place
Stub…
If the future is local, we need to get to know local.
Academy of Urbanism: http://www.knowyourplace.info
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Why it isn’t all about common sense…
There is a view that historic cities have all the answers and we just need to look at them. Or, in any case, it’s just common sense. If professionals had a bit more common sense they would make a better set of decisions.
There are at least three reasons why this can’t be entirely the case. Or, if it is, why our definition of common sense needs careful construction. (more…)
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Connectedness & continuity
There is a view that the creation of continuously connected places leads to sameness.
Looking at real places suggests otherwise – witness the distinctly different quarters of Paris, New York’s strikingly heterogeneous local centres, or London’s urban villages. So what is it that makes this possible? One seemingly counterintuitive factor, it turns out, is a continuously connected street network. (more…)
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Landscape Urbanism & New Urbanism: it shouldn’t be so divisive
Summary
Despite the efforts of each party to highlight its differences, there is a significant overlap between Landscape Urbanism and New Urbanism, both positive and negative. Positive: a concern about urban harmony. Negative: a tendency to fragment (call it sprawl). Urbanists of both colours would do better to recognise this common ground and realise that fragmented urbanism risks the social, economic and environmental health of cities.Some thoughts
The current Metropolis magazine exchange between Andres Duany and Alex Krieger, on the respective merits of New Urbanism and Landscape Urbanism, has brought a simmering debate to the boil. This week’s 50th Anniversary celebration of Urban Design at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) looks set to be an intriguing engagement. Duany, a pioneer of New Urbanism, will be speaking alongside (among?) the pioneers of Landscape Urbanism. How will Daniel deal with the lions’ den?Charles Waldheim, Chair of Landscape Architecture at the GSD, gave a revealing and stimulating presentation on Landscape Urbanism recently to Christian Werthmann’s class there on “Sustainability for Planning and Design”. The foundational concept of Landscape Urbanism – that a balance needs to be found between human and non-human habitats, between the green of the landscape and the grey of the city – is undoubtedly correct. The sterility of most contemporary urban environments is evidence of ignorance or antipathy among planners and designers towards the biodiverse landscape. The consequential impact of insensitive, resource-depleting and damaging development on watersheds, soils, flora and fauna is ultimately costly for the human economy. Water is, especially, a resource that can and does provoke hostility and conflict.
Landscape Urbanism proposes that a new attitude is taken towards first, the preservation of natural habitats and second, the introduction of these into the barren settings of our towns and cities. This is a difficult proposition to argue against in principle. However, in practice it is apparent that the means by which the ecological enhancement of cities takes place – the manner in which urban places are “greened” – is, above all, a design problem. And here’s the rub. (more…)
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Istanbul/Shoreditch crits
Istanbul
Richard Peiser
John Portman
Alex
David
TSTS site analysis
Site is at the intersection of a major radial and a major orbital route.
V strong road connections.
Potentially local drive/walk connections.
Key will be to exploit both. But local connections cost.Nature of road to the north. Being treated as a negative.
Nature of route network. Precedents from elsewhere in Istanbul and beyond – all part of continuous spatial networks with overlapping and intersecting patterns of multi-scale movement. This site does not allow this unless connections are made.
Carolina
3rd St Mall, Santa MonicaIgnacio
“Buffer”
DNA of the siteContours…
Contours look steep.
How does route network map onto contours?Plan B is cranked.
Need to see sections/true 3D.
Parking?
Macy
Desire to integrate site with surrounding neighbourhoods.
Connections diagram would be more convincing if we could see what the new connections are connecting to.
Separating different modes of movement – why?Shoreditch
Land use plan – need fine-grained analysis
Land value – key is reln between City to south and Shoreditch to north. Broadgate was not in City and land value was low but development transformed this. Produce a large-scale plan to show this.
Conservation areas?
St Paul’s/other protected views?
Be careful about retail on interior of blocks – look at Broadgate latest phase. Where does ew route go? A retail anchor is not enough.
Likewise, inner block route running parallel to Shoreditch High Street.
Why 5*hotel an anchor?
Major bus routes and vehicular routes are also major pedestrian routes.
Order of phasing – why that order?
Christine, Andrea & Eric
Sophisticated analysis and design proposals.
Major open space – is it too big?
Tim Stonor 