After our visit to Inspiration Kitchens – Garfield Park in Chicago, our Bruner Foundation team headed south to Kentucky to Louisville Waterfront Park. Submitted by Waterfront Development Corporation Inc. (WDC), the 85-acre riverfront park, which was developed over more than two decades, reconnects the city of Louisville with the Ohio River.

Waterfront Wednesday evening concerts draw crowds to the waterfront park.  Photograph: Wales Hunter, Nfocus Images

We arrived in Louisville to spring-like weather in time to join the city in cheering on the University of Louisville Cardinals men’s and women’s basketball teams in their national championship games. Louisville Waterfront Park is the largest and most established project among the 2013 Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence finalists we’ve visited to date, including Congo Street Initiative, Via Verde and Inspiration Kitchens. We spent two and a half days on site, touring the park and meeting with WDC staff, board members, and consultants, as well as event sponsors and representatives from the design community and mayor’s office.

Festival Plaza and the Great Lawn offer spaces for large events and connect downtown Louisville with the river.  Photograph: Bruner Foundation

Louisville Waterfront Park has transformed industrial land along the Ohio River occupied by an elevated highway, sand and gravel companies, and scrap yards into a new riverside park and gateway to the city. Planning for the park began in 1986 with the creation of the WDC, a quasi-public agency that was incorporated to oversee the development of Louisville’s riverfront. WDC held a series of ten public meetings soliciting input on proposed development of the site that yielded a strong desire for green space. Subsequently, they initiated an international search for a design firm beginning with a Request for Qualifications to which 85 firms responded. Hargreaves Associates, one of four firms invited to Louisville to meet with WDC and city representatives to present its ideas, was ultimately selected to create the master plan and design for the $95 million park. Read more…

Max Zahniser doesn’t usually make house calls. As a leader in sustainability and integrative, systems thinking he lends his expertise to wide ranging building projects and organizations. He promotes green practices on a national level and has been at the inception of advanced thinking in that arena.

Zahniser doesn’t just paint with a broad brush. Son of two psychologists, he knows more than most that “relationships matter.” When it comes to collaborations, he wisely encourages “enlightened self-interest rather than right or wrong.”

To give you a better idea of his philosophy Zahniser will tell you that systems thinking is his foundation for understanding the world. He rejects a fragmented, specialized worldview and ascribes to the dawning “Age of Integration,” anticipated decades ago by Buckminster Fuller and Lewis Mumford. In contrast to healthy interdependence, Zahniser sees Philadelphia as an example of “dispersed environmental initiatives.” His new Sustainability Nexus enterprise aims to pull that all together.

PUTTING THEORY INTO PRACTICE

I asked Zahniser to pack up the best of his design insights and conceptual diagrams into a tool kit he could take to any neighborhood to foster grass roots green initiatives, so to speak. As with the famed “Powers of Ten” illumination of scale by Charles and Ray Eames, presumably, what can heal a neighborhood, can heal a city and so on. Read more…

Reading Peter D. Smith’s latest volume, City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age, is akin to strolling through a contemporary city, wherein broad impressions are punctuated by specific and visceral encounters. The elements that make and shape cities and urban experiences, from the physical contours to the social interaction that takes place within their borders, are all explored in broad chapters such as “Where to Stay” and “Getting Around”. Short narratives highlight these well-researched surveys, topics that deserve their own explication on different elements of the city that we think we understand, but as Smith quickly reveals, we don’t. In the chapter on “Where to Stay”, we are given a brief history of the meaning of wharves then and now in cities such as London, San Francisco, and New York in “On the Waterfront.”  The chapter “Getting Around” is separated into subtopics like “Walking”, in which the author takes us on a short tour of “Mumbai’s Skywalks”. And what would an essay on “Traffic” be without looking at the history of the ever-present “Parking Meter”? Throughout the book Smith references London and New York as points to depart from and return to. It is a book with a large intellectual scope. And clearly, there is much more to say.

With this in mind, Guy Horton and I decided to ask Smith about his thoughts on issues in a time when developing nations are experiencing and experimenting with different development models, and our industrialized urban centers are seeking strategies for renewal and reinvention. We also asked his thoughts on the trajectory of contemporary cities in other parts of the world, including some of the BRIC economies, as well as nations in conflict. This is what he had to say.

Sherin Wing:  Let’s begin with contemporary urban spaces in industrialized nations, what elements do you think are at the forefront of our experiences of city-spaces?

Peter D. Smith: If I think of the cities of the industrialized world and how their spaces influence our experience of them, then I think first of how you get around those cities, of the transport infrastructure: the subways and underground systems especially. You can’t say you really know London until you’ve travelled beneath it. The Tube network is like a vast organism penetrating the substrata beneath the city.

The buying and selling of goods is one of the most ancient aspects of urban life. The Egyptian hieroglyph for a town was a circle with a cross in it – the circle representing defensive walls and the cross the meeting of routes at a marketplace. Today, shopping remains one of the big attractions of the city, even in the age of the Internet, like the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, the largest such market in the world. This is a remarkable, dynamic urban space with its own history and traditions. That’s a very different experience from the sterile streets and shops of Ginza. And a recent poll showed that Londoners placed the capital’s shops top of the list of what they liked most about their city.

Of course, the streets and squares are also important, the open spaces around the city’s structures. There may be broad avenues in some districts – probably choked with cars and trucks – and, in other areas, smaller streets, built on a more human scale where there are less people and where the experience of the city is more intimate.

And we shouldn’t forget urban parks and green spaces – some of them quite small, where the sound of the passing traffic remains a constant reminder of the big city beyond the trees. Others are so large that the city’s towers vanish into the hazy distance and you could be in the countryside. All these spaces contribute to our experience of the city.

Tokyo Sky Tree from Asakusa, courtesy P.D. Smith

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The planning profession has reached something of a critical juncture. This is not, of itself, a particularly interesting revelation; to hear planners talk about it, our profession is pretty much always reaching some sort of critical juncture, crossroads, etc. This time, however, we might be onto something.

I recently finished plodding my way through editor Roger Elwood’s Future City, an early-seventies anthology of “new wave” science fiction takes on (wait for it…) the “Future City.” The contributions were unerringly pessimistic, forecasting a future of out-of-control urbanism roughly on the model of the South Bronx circa 1977, but With Added Fancy Computers. The contributions were also, and again unerringly, wrong. The archetypal City of 2012 hardly resembles the nightmares they envisioned, and the attitudes towards urbanism held by many of the stories’ characters are, if anything, even more distant from the current re-awakening of interest in all things urban.

In previous posts on Landscape Urbanism, I’ve argued that the narrative of urbanism—the one accepted by both the mass media and highbrow magazine monthlies—is up for grabs at the moment. It’s changing, to be sure, but through an international, multi-media conversation the results of which nobody can yet foresee. For as long as this conversation is ongoing, it’s perhaps not beyond reason to propose that we’ve all got a certain moral duty to flag both its best and worst contributors for either praise or derision.

With that said, then: three cheers for Mark C. Childs, and a chorus of raspberries for Boyd Cohen.

Urban Composition: Developing Community through Design is Childs’s contribution to the Architecture Briefs: Foundations in Architecture series published by Princeton Architectural Press. The series, we’re informed, is “designed to address of a variety of single topics of interest… in a user-friendly manner alongside the basics of architectural thought, design and construction.” Though ostensibly written for “architecture students and professionals,” Childs’s Urban Composition could be enjoyed just as easily by the interested layman.

In Urban Composition, Mark C. Childs presents not only an introduction to the practice of conscientious urban design, but also advances an optimistic, collectivist vision of civil composition’s contribution to the commonwealth. Image courtesy Princeton Architecture Press

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Hilary Jay is a dynamo. She presides over DesignPhiladelphia at the University of the Arts,  an impressively democratic array of design events, exhibitions, lectures, open studios, demonstrations, and street happenings, reached by some 200,000 people each fall. Jay thus proudly stakes her claim on “design as destination.”

DesignPhiladelphia follows Philadelphia’s great tradition of free access to many important cultural institutions. Jay notes, “Most of our programs are free and open to the public. I work hard to remove barriers to entry. DesignPhiladelphia is a great equalizer.”

PlayPhilly Big Chalkers, four-foot adult sized ‘sidewalk chalk’ crayons.
Project: Giacomo Ciminello and Kristin Freese   Photo: Jackie Starker

AIGA Pressed: A Hands-on Letterpress Workshop held at Two Paper Dolls (using antique Vandercook press)
Photo: Johanna Austin

Jay, as executive director and one of the founders of DesignPhiladelphia, has seen exponential growth in programming as well as attendance since its 2005 debut. Her goal is to harness the energy of this growing economic engine by facilitating designers’ connections. “We need to get people out of their silos to broaden their experience and increase their income,” she says.

DesignPhiladelphia event (handmade signage)
Photo: Louis Cook

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I’ll admit I was a little skeptical when I cracked open Taras Grescoe’s latest book Straphanger, which is both paean to public transportation and an evisceration of car culture. Living happily car-free in New York, I feared I might be the choir to the Montrealer’s preaching. But while the book—part history, part travelogue, and part manifesto—might not seem terribly radical to city-dwellers, Grescoe makes the argument for mass transit in a way you might not have heard before.

In the course of writing Straphanger, Grescoe visited a dozen cities across the world and spent considerable time getting to know their transit systems, figuring out how and why they work (or don’t). After a short prologue in Shanghai, Grescoe starts his global commute in New York, where the subway system maintains a tetchy coexistence with street-level planning that’s historically favored cars over pedestrians. Subsequent cities each provide a slightly different perspective on transportation: Phoenix gives us a primer on the difficulties of low-density sprawl; Copenhagen is a model of bike-friendly infrastructure; Bogotá’s rapid bus system proves how quickly a mass transit network can be rolled out from scratch.

Despite being one of the most crowded transit systems in the world, Moscow’s Metro is endowed with spacious, luxuriously appointed stations. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

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To get one large point out of the way: In the new book, The Socialist Car: Automobility in the Eastern Bloc, several contributors rapidly acknowledge the oxymoron of the title as well as the practice of owning a car in the former Soviet Empire. The private automobile, that avatar of western individualism, is difficult to square with collectivist notions. And once its owners were at the wheel, these socialist automobiles were often difficult to reconcile with notions of mechanical reliability. More than one contemporary joke appears in the text; the introduction, for instance offers,  “Why does a Trabant have a heated rear window? To keep your hands warm when pushing it.” All that aside, the collection of essays edited by Lewis Siegelbaum, is a fascinating look at automobile use, production, and urban planning behind the Iron Curtain. It reveals a system that, if far from socialist or egalitarian in origin, created a culture of automobile use distinct from the western world.

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Photo: Francesca Pedersen.

The conventional wisdom about New Orleans these days is for the most part positive: an engaged mayor (with the obligatory “60 Minutes” profile under his belt), rebounding neighborhoods, improving schools, young people flocking in.  All of this is true, as far as it goes, but it’s an incomplete accounting. What has gone largely unreported in the mainstream press is the condition of the neighborhood hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina.  Much of the Lower Ninth Ward—despite the heroic efforts of Brad Pitt and Make It Right—remains desolate.

This past weekend I went on a bus tour of the Lower Ninth, sponsored by the local chapter of the AIA and hosted by John Williams, who in addition to his work as executive architect for Make It Right has taken on the role of unofficial master planner for the embattled neighborhood. While there are pockets of hope in the Lower Ninth—the Holy Cross section has seen about half of its residents return—the overall picture is troubling.

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I see Hong Kong as a model of smart growth management and land use planning. It’s a city were policy dictates that development must concentrate on only 25% of the land area, with the remaining 75% preserved as open space. This policy ensures that the region’s lush green spaces remain intact. It also maintains scarcity and high land values in developable areas. This is crucial to the local government because its primary source of income is land leasing.

Looking at development in Hong Kong through Western eyes, I noticed another impact of the city’s tightly concentrated density: the compact clustering of residential and working populations supports a diverse, competitive, and often ingenious retail community.

My first up-close encounter with the retail streetscape occurred in Tsim Sha Tsui, an upscale neighborhood on the Kowloon side of Victoria Harbor (map). What struck me most was the extreme permeability at the pedestrian level. Few storefronts at the ground floor, save a handful of banks and higher-end boutiques, have full walls. Separated from the sidewalk by only a few inches of floor height, merchants do business in cheerful cubicle-sized spaces under fluorescent lights while people flow past, around, in and out. Read more…

Hong Kong Island (view from Kowloon), photo: wired-destinations.com.

Our interdisciplinary team, supported by the Runstad Center at the University of Washington, recently went on a research trip to Hong Kong. We were there to view the city through a multifaceted lens, looking to identify success metrics and their outcomes within the built environment. This led us to interview a diverse array of government decision-makers, private developers, investors, consultants, planners, policy-makers, and community representatives. The themes that emerged from our conversations were not quite what we expected in this intensely capitalistic city containing the most skyscrapers in the world. The glittering towers and pulsing streetscapes are on a foundation that is not quite what it seems. Hong Kong, from what we could tell, is at a monumental tipping point. Read more…