I am intrigued by the human resilience angle that Eric Klinenberg uses in making the case for better urban design in his New Yorker article, Adaptation: How can cities be “climate-proofed?” In it he discusses disaster preparedness in general and describes several large-scale engineering solutions to climate change, solutions that are of necessity government backed. He also writes about the role a resilient civil society can play in increasing an individual’s chance of survival in a disaster. A professor of sociology, public policy, and media, culture, and communications at New York University, Klinenberg writes, “Whether they come from governments or from civil society, the best techniques for safeguarding our cities don’t just mitigate disaster damage; they also strengthen the networks that promote health and prosperity during ordinary times.” He mentions Robert J. Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard, who “has been measuring the strength of social ties, mutual assistance, and nonprofit organizations in Chicago communities for nearly two decades. He has found that the benefits of living in a neighborhood with a robust social infrastructure are significant during ordinary times as well as during disasters.”
He adds that “Alonzo Plough, the director of emergency preparedness and response for the County of Los Angeles, says, ‘But it’s not just engineering that matters. It’s social capital. And what this movement is bringing to the fore is that the social infrastructure matters, too.’”

Enter the urban designer and landscape architect. How social infrastructures are enhanced by landscape infrastructure and open space is the focus of studies by the Landscape and Human Health Laboratory at the University of Illinois, and the subject of an earlier social impact design blog post.

We have an opportunity here step up to the plate and play an important role in enhancing and creating the social capital that makes our communities and our society resilient. While I love and value aesthetics and believe fervently that beauty matters, our work as urban designers and landscape architects is more than a matter of creating artful places. We can, and should, learn to design to increase social connectedness. What would that look like?

For me, this brings us to questions of morality, and of shared societal values. Shared societal values are one of the ways that a group can create cohesion and a sense of mutual responsibility. The lack of a shared moral system tears down the sense of social connectedness. In the entry on morality Wikipedia says “The phenomenon of ‘reciprocity‘ in nature is seen by evolutionary biologists as one way to begin to understand human morality.” Reciprocity as in the Golden Rule; remember that “quaint” idea? Read more…

Parts 1 and 2 of this series of posts introduced the idea of opening up a broader perspective on architecture, landscape, and urban design that I’m calling “a new humanism”.

Parts 3 through 9 outlined the first step – tracing out the evolutionary origins of innate skills, propensities, and motivations that lead us to respond to built environments the ways we do – from the competitive drive for individual security, survival and prosperity to the equally deep-seated cooperative impulses that lead us to settle in communities. They explored our powerful links to the natural world, the continuous search for order and orientation and the creativity that gives us a unique niche in every ecosystem we invade.

Part 10 now starts a series of eight posts that take a deeper look at “experience” itself – what is it like to be there – focusing on how the evolved mind that encounters architecture works in practice.

First though, a note about words:  “Architecture” is simply a brief way to say architecture, landscapes, and urban places – “the built environment.”  And I use the term “designers” as an abbreviated way to say “architects, landscape architects, land planners, urban designers, interior designers, and the decision-making clients and governments who direct them.”  This does not, of course, imply a hierarchy of professions, but the word “architecture” has a general sense of an overall, organized structure of things.  Likewise, I am not implying the common distinction between architecture as “high art” and “mere building”.  We live in both – and mostly in the latter.  The total built environment is the art and science that no one can escape.

“Encounters” is more complex.  The whole body is involved.  Like searchlights, all of the senses are continually seeking out information – promises of pleasure and opportunity, threats and trouble, orientation and aids to navigation.  And forms, light, color, sounds, warmth and movement, become sequences of “cues,” signs and symbols that call up memories and beliefs, magnified by our body-state and linked-in emotions. The searches and these sensations naturally become interlaced, consciously and unconsciously, with other streams of thought and feelings already flowing, “in here”, along channels shaped by our specific role or purposes of the moment. In a sense, it’s like the theater with playwright, director/actors, and audience interacting to create “experience”.

Vierzenheiligen – a Bavarian Baroque church, a blaze of light immediately
engages the whole mind and body – and promises still more

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Experiencing a sense of community – belonging to a successful network of human alliances – is one of the great pleasures of the places we build.  And at village or at city scales we dedicate an enormous share of our resources to accommodate and symbolize the group’s protection, effectiveness, and cohesion.  Facing the propensity for destruction and violence that’s inherent in person-to-person competition, we strengthen bonds and loyalties with places to meet, act out our agreements and shared stories, resolve the inevitable conflicts and plant symbols of our “social contract” – the places to eat together, judge, worship, trade, play, and celebrate with shared movements, ideas, voices. and action – and finally in the burial grounds that record the continuity of the shared gene pools.

“The Greek theater where a city saw and heard itself being a community – sharing its myths, passions and history”

Civil society’s most honored monuments are the places where a community can read the stories of individual competitors surviving and prospering together – stories of victories, resolved conflicts, bonds of loyalty, generosity and philanthropy, and the favor of a deity. It’s seen in the bold, arrogant commercial and town hall towers of medieval Europe’s newly independent cities – with their symbolism of wealth and power that’s inherent in penetrating a skyline. Today we do the same. We announce our stability and pedigree in the neo-classical languages of power – in finance, universities, and governments – or the engineering of grand transportation infrastructure and waterfronts that tell stories of still larger geographical alliances. And the most moving are the places where citizens see – and hear – themselves being a community, sharing the passions stirred by their myths, arts, and on-going history – the Greeks in their intimate theaters or today’s crowds in museums or performing arts venues. And it can happen in parks, plazas, and arenas where spectacles, music, or sports – at small and large scales – evoke feelings of solidarity, working or fighting side-by-side as a team or as a gang, making connections just as binding – at least for the moment – as genetic kinship. These places where we reinforce and celebrate – respond to – our prospering alliances are the settings where we experience what we call “sense-of-place” and “authentic” communities.

Alienation

In any mix of diverse and mobile populations, under any social structure, the built environments, the public faces of places financed and occupied, naturally express the victories, values, religion or status of the winners. When, for better or worse, they also become symbols of exclusion and oppression, they become physical targets for the outsiders – called, naturally, barbarians, rebels or terrorists. They have been throughout history. And in our globalizing, urbanizing settlements we can expect continued destructive responses to the places we build.  The alienation is just as deeply felt as “belonging,” and the winners are responding as they always have, with hardened perimeters and surveillance – refuge and prospect.

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Wrapped into our predilection to explore, and at times our most urgent immediate motivation, is the search for orientation – to know exactly where we are.  Again, what happens in a built environment parallels person-to-person encounters. We want to eliminate unknowns and get-our-bearings in relation to the mental maps that we have constructed over time. Being disoriented – being “lost” – triggers anxiety, fear, and ultimately panic. It is clearly a “peril”, and it can be costly. Though we lack the innate homing skills of other animals, we do have an evolved capability to learn how to navigate; it’s another way we “master” our environment and feel “in control”.

“The classic legibility of a city – geography and the power of the alliances that built Florence”

Maps and legibility

In his pioneering study, The Image of the City, professor Kevin Lynch analyzed mental maps created by many people to orient themselves in a city.  Although each individual’s map was necessarily unique, he found important overlaps – propensities – that he organized into clear, practical, usable ways that we use to make a city “legible”. Many of his insights and much of his vocabulary of  “imageability” and “way finding” have been adopted, built upon, and absorbed into the conventional wisdom of generations of designers because they can be successfully applied in practice – and not only in his field, urban design. It seems likely that he is describing patterns that come naturally and easily into most human minds – a specific genetic preparation for learning.

In any case, we all know that aids to navigation and clues to orientation are integral parts of built environments – whether conscious and intended or not. Lynch focused on the physical form of Boston, but his pattern of thinking also organizes the broader bands of perception that we habitually use in practice to find our way.

• He identified five key elements that continually reappeared in mental maps – edges, paths, districts, nodes, and landmarks – and spelled out common themes that are perceived in each of them, primarily qualities of clarity, continuities, differentiation, and dominance, and the awareness of motion and time – plus, naturally, the recognition that all are then interpreted through filters of culture, personal skills, and associations.
• In addition to distinctive spatial forms, sources and echoes of sounds, aromas or stench, temperatures, wind and light levels are all elements in the maps.
• Sensing distinctive kinds of human presence and action, past, present, and anticipated – the social and cultural clues – can be even more powerful. The energy and excitement of crowds and commerce, a fear of strangers and violence, or the reassurance offered by records of long established human settlement, all tell stories of stability, danger or vitality that define a place – and whether we want to be there or, instead, find a path to escape or explore further.
• Ultimately, of course, the underlying coordinates of a mental map are framed in the context of our own pressing motivations, accumulated memories, and the feelings locked into them.

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Hurricane Sandy has invoked a lot of change. Whether it’s coast lines or politics, we have experienced first-hand what scientists, planners, and architects have been warning about for years, that a storm like Sandy was going to happen.

“Sometime between now and 2100, a storm will dump 18 feet of seawater into lower Manhattan, flooding much of the financial district, Battery Park, and most of the subway stations south of Rector Street. Six hundred oil tanks in Bayonne, New Jersey, will be inundated. And all but a nub of Liberty State Park, the landfill opposite Ellis Island, will disappear into the harbor. That’s the grim forecast for New York.”

The above quote comes from Suzanne LaBarre in her 2010 blog post, Hope Floats, where she describes MoMA’s Rising Currents exhibition “as an optimistic rebuke to the government’s stopgap approach to public infrastructure. Whereas the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers erects concrete dams and levees, these architects favor broad solutions that reconfigure the social, economic, political, and natural landscape.”

An image from the MoMA Rising Currents exhibition,
Courtesy of Scape Landscape Architecture

LaBarre rightly calls out how the Rising Currents exhibition took sustainable and creative approaches to dealing with cataclysmic storms like Sandy. The ideas in the exhibition illustrated concepts that would help create resilient communities; communities that are not only physically safe from the water’s wrath, but stronger socially, economically, and environmentally

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Midtown section of the plan with building labels

Freeways have sliced through the hearts of many communities, creating derelict wastelands that destroy neighborhoods and sever connections. Our cities have buried, covered, or dismantled the massive structures required for high-speed automobile infrastructure. With our virtual vacuum of public finance for such projects going forward, we need to ask: What’s the prognosis for more such transformative, big-budget efforts? And what methods work best to integrate ribbons of concrete into our communities?

Let’s look at some instructive examples. Seattle’s Downtown Freeway Park, designed three decades ago by Lawrence Halprin, bridged Interstate 5 with five acres of green space; the city’s more recent Olympic Sculpture Park by Weiss/Manfredi Architects and Charles Anderson Landscape Architecture, spans a waterfront arterial with an art-filled urban park. In San Francisco, removal of the Embarcadero Freeway after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake produced a grand boulevard, designed by ROMA Design Group, offering transit, bike lanes, promenades, and revitalized real estate. And the nation’s most expensive highway project—Boston’s Big Dig, which rerouted I-93 into a 3.5-mile tunnel through the heart of the city—left behind a 27-acre urban greenway reconnecting city to waterfront, a $15 billion price tag, and a mixed legacy of design flaws, accidents, and cost overruns.

Emerging projects continue to explore ways to tame the freeway. Dallas’ 5.2-acre Klyde Warren Park, designed by James Burnett and Jacobs Engineering Group, Inc. and due to open this fall at a cost of about $100 million, will bridge downtown’s below-grade freeway with new urban green space. Los Angeles is contemplating two plans for capping portions of the 101 Freeway with planted concrete lids—the 44-acre Hollywood Freeway Cap Park and the 80-acre Downtown 101 Freeway Cap Park. Funding is not yet secured. Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Santa Monica are also considering plans.

Atlanta Connector Transformation Project Overall Plan

The Atlanta Connector Transformation Project provides another, less costly approach. Rather than burying, removing or covering up the I-75/85 Connector—a five-mile stretch famous for its snarl of traffic and frequent flooding that brings Atlanta to a standstill—the project acknowledges that the Connector will remain the city’s most significant and visible infrastructural corridor for the foreseeable future. Because of the realities of transportation funding, the project will not seek to make the Connector disappear; rather it will use the Connector as a transformative piece of the city’s open space network.

Read more…

I have two kids, ages almost 6 and 3, and while they love reading books, I enjoy reading their books as much, if not more, than they do. I love the nostalgia and silliness of Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl and the clever stories and terms that Mo Willems churns.

The way my kids respond to books has shown me the power within their pages. One book can spark a new interest that lasts days, months – even years. One book can lead to the insistence that we read tens more on the same topic.

So naturally, I try to select books on topics that are also interesting to me (after all, I’m equally invested in reading these). This prompted an unofficial research project on children’s books about the built environment. With the exception of the immense stock of books about construction, trucks, trains, and planes, there are relatively few stories about the professions and interests of the designers and planners or about the shape and functions of cities, buildings, communities, neighborhoods, and parks themselves.

However disappointed I was by the brevity of my list, books like Iggy Peck, Architect by Andrea Beaty and The Little House by Virginia Burton have been inducted into our nightly favorites. (You can find my assuredly incomplete list of children’s books on landscape, architecture, planning and otherwise urban-related topics at the end of this post.)

A story about a talented little boy who builds architecture out of everything from chalk to dirty diapers

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Valencia’s Green River, Photography by Brian Phelps.

Bold ideas are easy, implementing them is hard. This is particularly true as cities around the world want to use their landscape infrastructure to address the issues they face. How can interventions be woven into the existing urban fabric? Beyond simply mustering the financial resources or political will, one must seek opportunities to carefully insert or adapt landscape systems to the constraints of established urban communities. New York’s High Line, Atlanta’s Beltline, and Madrid’s RIO project all relied on abandoned or superseded rail or highway infrastructure to thread linear landscapes through the hearts of old cities. Valencia, on the other hand, relied on a crisis, and in the words of Rahm Emanuel, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

In 1957, Valencia experienced a devastating flood that forever changed the city’s relationship with the Turia River. Nearly three quarters of the city was inundated by floodwater and over 60 people lost their lives. The following year, the city embraced a plan to divert the river around its western outskirts to the Mediterranean Sea.

1957 Flood in Valencia: Photograph extracted from PereDrak’s Valencia Slideshow.

Re-routing the City’s River..

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Jason Harper, architect and associate principal in the New York office of Perkins+Will and expert hospital and healthcare facility designer.

The 20^th Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) concluded this spring with a rousing speech by Dr. Richard Jackson, a pediatrician and chair of Environmental Health Sciences at the UCLA School of Public Health. You may have seen him hosting the four-part documentary Designing Healthy Communities on PBS, which previewed the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) just released report Weight of the Nation about the epidemic of obesity in America. The report notes that two thirds of adults and one third of children in the U.S. are overweight or obese. How can this be? Where have we gone off the rails?

Dr. Jackson said that the design of the built environment is killing us and threatening the very viability of our society. We are now almost entirely dependent on cars, with fewer and fewer of us walking to work or school (or anywhere for that matter). The statistics in the IOM report are sobering. But what was most interesting to me is the report’s number one strategy for combatting the obesity epidemic in our society: change the design of our built environment to increase physical activity. Not simply changing our eating habits, not exercising more, not drinking less sugary soda. Yes, these things are important but they pale in comparison to the impact that the design of the built environment is having on our bodies.

As an architect and planner of healthcare environments, I’ve been watching with great interest the mushrooming awareness of the impact of the built environment on public health. The Fit City movement is a hot topic in urban design circles. Now, with Dr. Jackson leading the charge, many designers are using the newly available data (including the IOM report) as ammunition in their push towards new models of healthier urban and architectural design.

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I live on St. Charles Avenue, home to the famous New Orleans streetcar line. It’s home also (in addition to some insanely impressive houses) to one of the most unique urban spaces in America. The St. Charles Avenue streetcars run on a tree-lined strip known locally as “the neutral ground.” This is simply a “median” in other cities, but in New Orleans there is—inevitably—a more colorful name, with a whole bunch of history attached. The neutral ground is no exception. As Ann Nungesser writes on About.com:

“The big neutral ground in the middle of Canal Street in downtown New Orleans is apparently the reason all medians are called neutral grounds… . The French Creoles were living in the French Quarter and the new Americans were living on the other side of Canal St… . around the turn of the nineteenth century. There were tensions between the two groups who had different lifestyles, manners, and values, but Canal St was literally the neutral ground where they met. Even the streets that didn’t exist until long after those ethnic tensions [eased] have neutral grounds, never medians in New Orleans.”

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