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Salma El-Banna Urban Design October 24, 2011
Research on: Understanding the Quality of Urban Life
Quality of Life: The term quality of life is used to evaluate
the general well-being of individuals and
societies. The term is used in a wide range of contexts,
including the fields of international
development, healthcare, and politics. Quality of life should
not be confused with the concept of
standard of living, which is based primarily on income. Instead,
standard indicators of the quality of
life include not only wealth and employment, but also the built
environment, physical and mental
health, education, recreation and leisure time, and social
belonging. From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopaedia.
Transport and its effect on the quality of Urban Life: If we
look at cities over the past century, we
can see that each transformation in urban form has been linked
with
some type of transportation revolution: electric streetcars
spawned
the early suburban towns; elevators begat tall buildings. And
the
automobile, of course, burst all boundaries, scattering new,
low-
density development across the countryside. Whether national
orinternational new industries forming on the basis of this new
revolution of transport, the world is easily globalised. But,
like many
revolutions, the causes and certainly the effects of this
transformation have been poorly understood.
Today, ideas about the relationship of transportation systems to
cities and suburbs, urban form,
organization, and building types remain vague and out-dated. We
continue to formulate policy and
generate technology based on lifestyles and concepts of the
built environment that are already
many decades old, never to be regained. As we continue to build
and shape our cities, the question
must be asked, what might the next transportation revolution be,
and how will it affect our lives?
Universal Dispersal: There is a consensus today that our cities
are not well. Toward the end of the
twentieth century, they are inundated with problems -- physical,
social, and economic. Urban
transportation is deficient; inner city problems have deepened;
violent crime remains a serious
threat in vast areas of the historic city centres.
Today's indiscriminate dispersal: the spatial separation of
almost every type of new construction - is
the product of the better part of a century's policy of
laissez-faire land-use planning. In an era when
market forces have been trusted to satisfy all worthwhile
considerations, dispersed development
has appeared not merely inevitable, but efficient and responsive
to society's will. Yet our current
environment clearly fails to satisfy many of our most urgent and
basic needs. Never in recent history
have we heard in the popular press so many calls to rebuild
"community"; to create neighbourhoods
in which we can walk; to control car-related pollution; and to
conserve our dwindling stretches of
natural landscape. But any proposal to create sustained, vital
urbanism today cannot be achieved for
the majority of urban dwellers without an understanding of, and
a confrontation with, the real,
complex, and competing forces that have for decades so
universally threatened our cities.
Examples: In almost every city today, apartments and hotels are
packed along particular alignments.
In Boston, prime housing lines the Public Garden and the Common;
in Miami and Tel Aviv, hotels and
apartments cluster, wall-like, by the shore; in Rio, the
Copacabana apartment blocks and hotels
curve, massive and solid, to line the beach. Development along
rivers, large parks, and permanentundeveloped land manifests the
widespread desire for openness within cities, but typically, the
built
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Salma El-Banna Urban Design October 24, 2011
result effectively denies this valued feature to all but the
relatively few who can afford to "buy" it.
Thus, for the privileged who live along Lake Shore Drive there
is the pleasure of Lake Michigan, but
for those behind, a substantial wall against the lake.
This effect is not new; city planners have long struggled to
find ways of keeping urban edges visibly
and physically accessible to the population at large. When urban
buildings were restricted to theheight people could climb
("walk-up" buildings, as in Rome along the Tiber or Paris along the
Seine),
the challenges related to circulation: moving pedestrians and
vehicles both along and toward the
desirable edge. But the advent of urban towers (which was recent
in term of urban history)
complicated the problem further: because of their height and
girth, skyscrapers and superblocks
shut out views and access to desirable edges much more
completely than buildings ever had before.
The traditional technique for arranging tall buildings with
respect to an edge has been to preserve a
"view corridor" an open vista down the length of streets from
the interior toward the edge. For
those moving along street level, these slices of tight and space
quite effectively open views, but in
between these "corridors," long, continuous walls of buildings
block the edge.
Toward the Future: Today, we build at new scales. We live in
regional
mega-cities of many millions. If we are to evolve, invent, and
design our
future built environment to function effectively and satisfy
emerging
needs, we must collaborate on all fronts to join our
personalized
patterns of car travel with fixed, planned corridors of
public
transportation so seamlessly as to create a singular system of
mobility.
With a unified transportation plan, we must guide the growth of
open,
green, and thinly populated suburbs, as well as dense
concentrations
where diversified transportation lines intersect. Weaving the
old and the
new into a single organism, we should strive in our cities for
the delicate
balance between the desire to disperse and the need to
concentrate; theneed to maintain the civic meeting places vital to
an enlightened society
and the desire to possess the vastness and freedom of the open
road.
Reference: The City After the Automobile
by, Moshe Safdie with Wendy Kohn
