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Infrastructure and Planning Now
ARCH 416
Spring '15
Where do we want to live?
How do we want to live?
Proposal for Blatchford redevelopment site, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
how can we make our cities
better spaces?PROS
lots of economic
opportunity
lots of social opportunity
lots of diversity
lots of culture
CONS
not enough sunlight
not enough green space
not enough clean air
not enough of outdoor
exercise/play
addressing problems
FIX
more outdoor,
multiseason space
more parks
more play/exercise
space winding through
parks
more trees, fewer cars
CONS
not enough sunlight
not enough green space
not enough of outdoor
space
not enough clean air
The City has an ambitious goal to convert 9,500 impervious acres to “green
acres” that capture and manage the first one inch of rainwater runoff.
Big fix:
reduce hardscape
Big fix: redevelop existing green space for multi-use: parking, play, exercise.
Removing the existing park features.
"Cutwalk," South Pointe
Park, Miami Beach, FL
design by Hargreaves Associates
opened 2009
curb bulge, Vancouver, BC
curb bulge, Portland, OR
small fix: Incremental infrastructure
Urban bioswales in NYC.
Not free, but vastly less expensive than a sewer retrofit.
Bioswales ease stormwater runoff.
Add green space.
Improve air quality.
Look nice.
Retrofitting existing planting areas to improve drainage.
Bioswales in Brooklyn.
Ebenezer Howard predicts
The suburbs will grow and grow...
and grow and grow and grow...
is Howard still right in 2015?
Um, yes.
After the recessionary period, people are now leaving the
city again at faster rates.
And not only suburbs but exurbs are growing again.
given this reality
which is unfortunate in terms of sustainability, because
there is a direct correlation between density and transport
energy use
sustainability is not the only problem
...we need to
worry about
suburban
quality of life,
too.
Suburban Dream,
Suburban Reality
plenty of space and freedom constantly stuck in the car
Lewis
MUMFORD
The City in History: Its Origins, Its
Transformations, and Its
Prospects. (New York: Harcourt,
Brace and World, Inc., 1961.)
In the mass movement into suburban areas a new kind of
community was produced, which caricatured both the historic
city and the archetypal suburban refuge: a multitude of
uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform
distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste,
inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the
same age group, witnessing the same television
performances, eating the same tasteless pre-fabricated
foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward
and inward respect to a common mold, manufactured in the
central metropolis. Thus the ultimate effect of the suburban
escape in our time is, ironically, a low-grade uniform
environment from which escape is impossible. What has
happened to the suburban exodus in the United States now
threatens, through the same mechanical instrumentalities, to
take place, at an equally accelerating rate, everywhere else--
unless the most vigorous countermeasures are taken. . . .
Levittown, NY, aerial view, 1950s
Levittown, NY
Under the present dispensation we have sold our urban
birthright for a sorry mess of motor cars....Future generations
will perhaps wonder at our willingness, indeed our
eagerness, to sacrifice the education of our children, the care
of the ill and aged, the development of the arts, to say
nothing of ready access to nature, for the lopsided system of
mono-transportation, going through low density areas at sixty
miles an hour, but reduced in high density areas to a bare
six. But our descendants will perhaps understand our curious
willingness to expend billions of dollars to shoot a sacrificial
victim into planetary orbit, if they realize that our cities are
being destroyed for the same superstitious religious ritual:
the worship of speed and empty space. Lacking sufficient
municipal budgets to deal adequately with all of life's
requirements that can be concentrated in the city, we have
settled for a single function, transportation, or rather for a
single part of an adequate transportation system, locomotion
by private motor car. . . .
The absurd belief that space and rapid locomotion are the
chief ingredients of a good life has been fostered by the
agents of mass suburbia. The reductio ad absurdum of this
myth is, notoriously, Los Angeles. Here the suburban
standards of open space, with free standing houses, often as
few as five houses to the acre, has been maintained: likewise
the private motor car, as the major means of transportation
has supplanted what was only a generation or so ago an
extremely efficient system of public transportation.
Los Angeles has now become an undifferentiated mass of
houses, walled off into sectors by many-laned expressways,
with ramps and viaducts that create special bottlenecks of
their own. These expressways move but a small fraction of
the traffic per hour once carried by public transportation, at a
much lower rate of speed, in an environment befouled by
smog, itself produced by the lethal exhausts of the
technologically backward motor cars. More than a third of the
Los Angeles area is consumed by these grotesque
transportation facilities; two-thirds of central Los Angeles are
occupied by streets, freeways, parking facilities, garages.
This is space-eating with a vengeance. The last stage of the
process already beckons truly progressive minds--to evict
the remaining inhabitants and turn the entire area over to
automatically propelled vehicles, completely emancipated
from any rational human purpose. . . .
Google Self-Driving Car project.
The company predicts you will want one of these by 2020.
As it has worked out under the impact of the present religion
and myth of the machine, mass Suburbia has done away
with most of the freedoms and delights that the original
disciples of Rousseau sought to find through their exodus
from the city. Instead of centering attention on the child in the
garden, we now have the image of 'Families in Space.' For
the wider the scattering of the population, the greater the
isolation of the individual household, and the more effort it
takes to do privately, even with the aid of many machines
and automatic devices, what used to be done in company
often with conversation, song, and the enjoyment of the
physical presence of others.
The town housewife, who half a century ago knew her
butcher, her grocer, her dairyman, her various other local
tradesmen, as individual persons, with histories and
biographies that impinged on her own, in a daily interchange,
now has the benefit of a single weekly expedition to an
impersonal supermarket, where only by accident is she likely
to encounter a neighbor. If she is well-to-do, she is
surrounded with electric or electronic devices that take place
of flesh and blood companions: her real companions, her
friends, her mentors, her lovers, her fillers-up of unlived life,
are shadows on the television screen, or even less embodied
voices. She may answer them, but she cannot make herself
heard: as it has worked out, this is a one-way system. The
greater the area of expansion, the greater the dependence
upon a distant supply center and remote control.
On the fringe of mass Suburbia, even the advantages of the
primary neighborhood group disappear. The cost of this
detachment in space from other men is out of all proportion
to its supposed benefits. The end product is an encapsulated
life, spent more and more either in a motor car or within the
cabin of darkness before a television set: soon, with a little
more automation of traffic, mostly in a motor car, travelling
even greater distances, under remote control, so that the
one-time driver may occupy himself with a television set,
having lost even the freedom of steering wheel. Every part of
this life, indeed, will come through official channels and be
under supervision. Untouched by human hand at one end:
untouched by human spirit at the other. Those who accept
this existence might as well be encased in a rocket hurtling
through space, so narrow are their choices, so limited and
deficient their permitted responses. Here indeed we find 'The
Lonely Crowd.'
Ham the Chimp, the first hominid in space, Jan 1961
study development patterns
of "railroad suburbs"
based around mass transit, not automobile
integration of green space
developed by A. J. Downing
greener suburbs
1. Build smaller. Smaller houses consume less energy.
2. Reduce or eliminate lawn. Explore permaculture.
3. Improve transit.
4. Create mixed use neighborhoods near transit hubs.
build smaller
privatization of public
amenities
home theaters and media rooms
home pool complete with "lazy river"
home arcades, game rooms, even bowling alleys
why leave home?
add compelling shared
spaces
Woods of Net
Designed by Tezuka Architects
Hakone, Japan
The Brumleby Playground
Designed by Monstrum
Copenhagen
Crocheted Jacaré Alligator Playground
Designed by Olek
São Paulo
Crocheted Jacaré Alligator Playground
Designed by Olek
São Paulo
http://newsarchive.medill.no
rthwestern.edu/chicago/ne
ws-172948.html
