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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Mayor Bloomberg at the NYC Big Apps 2.0 awards ceremony, photo: Kristin Artz/Office of the Mayor, via the New York Times.

How do you take the enormous amount of critical information gathered every day by city agencies and make it actually useful to citizens? On the City of New York’s DataMine web site, just looking through the list of datasets generated by the Department of Transportation alone is enough to give you a headache. Enter the annual NYC Big Apps competition – a call to software developers who can mine this data and find ingenious ways to put it at the fingertips, or keyboard clicks, of the average New Yorker. This April, winners received a total of $20,000 in cash, the wide exposure their work deserves, investment meetings with BMW, and a chance to talk to Mayor Bloomberg about their ideas.

Here’s a round-up of this year’s Big Apps:

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Groups of 1950-ish Modernist buildings usually mean Corbusian-style autotopias of heroic proportions (New York’s Empire State Plaza in Albany comes to mind). Plymouth Circle on Madison, Wisconsin’s leafy west side proves the opposite. Here, perched above a sea of generic bi-levels is a collection of, can we say “nifty”, yet modest, Mid-Century Modern homes with a distinctively local pedigree. More than just a collection of rare houses, the neighborhood represents something almost existential: a decades-ago marriage of enlightened consumerism and environmental ethics. So is this suburbanism as it was always meant to be—light on the land, lighter still on the ranch dressing? Read more…

Many developing countries have highly developed cultures of making-do: ingenious strategies that help people work with the realities of economic disparity, growing populations, and rapidly developing cities that put constant pressure on scarce resources. Out of things like old oil tins and discarded car parts, people put together remarkably creative products. In Kenya they call it Jua Kali, in Brazil they call it Gambiarra. The word Indians use is Jugaad.

At the Centre for Architecture, New York, a pioneering exhibition called Jugaad Urbanism is taking a closer look at this rich culture of innovation in India. 22 projects, ranging from a smokeless stove to overhead pedestrian walkways, show how Indian citizens and designers are finding solutions for pressing urban issues.  I spoke to the curator of the exhibition, architect Kanu Agrawal, to find out why this kind of grassroots ingenuity might be important for us to look at, and what designers and architects can learn from it. Read more…

On the Way to the Beach, by Derman Verbakel Architecture. Photo: Yuval Tebol.

The global cycle of recurring architecture exhibitions—biennales, triennales, and expos—has a nearly impossible balance to manage. Installations can be dismissed as too artsy, but technical presentations aren’t exactly crowd pleasers.  To make matters worse, these exhibition programs send projects hurtling through a flash-in-the-pan lifecycle: design, build, exhibit, deconstruct, and, in many cases, discard.  Even works that are now considered iconic—Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion or Le Corbusier’s Pavilion de l’Esprit Nouveau—could not escape the forced obsolescence of this cycle.  

Tel Aviv landscape architect Yael Moria-Klain and cultural theorist Sigal Barnir have short-circuited this dilemma, proposing an alternate model for exhibitions with the  recent International Biennale of Landscape Urbanism in Bat Yam, Israel.  Now in its second year, the program doesn’t ask architects and landscape architects for projects to be displayed temporarily.  Instead, the organizers ask participants to design site-specific installations for the city of Bat Yam with a big caveat: no one takes them down once the Biennale is over.  To layer on added significance, the projects are not meant to remediate challenges facing the city.

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Photos: Bureau for Open Culture

Drivers delayed by the red light on the corner of East Long and North Washington Streets, in downtown Columbus, Ohio, may hear more than just the hum of idling vehicles. If they crack their windows this winter, they are likely to catch a disembodied voice emanating from a nearby parking lot. “Parking lots,” the voice asserts. “It’s what we are. We should preserve them. They’re cultural property.”

This suggestion arrives courtesy of Audible Dwelling, a temporary installation of two houses designed by Learning Site, a collective made up of Denmark’s Rikke Luther and Sweden’s Cecilia Wendt. The capsule-like structures act like an oversize stereo, amplifying a 15-minute-long narrative—written by the British theorist Jaime Stapleton and read by the Berlin-based artist Cassandra Troyan—loudly enough for anyone in about a three-block radius to catch an excerpt.

To understand why the artists would care to broadcast commentary on parking lots to idling commuters, it helps to have some background on the city’s recent history. Read more…

Who dares say what counts as “smart” when neighborhoods evolve? Look no further than the beige-and-black cover of The Smart Growth Manual. That’s the guide to repurposing American land use, not a guide.

Who could claim such authority? Look down the cover for the author credits: this is a volume “from the authors of Suburban Nation,” Andres Duany and Jeff Speck, whose indictment of sprawl in that book inspired legions of citizens to learn mind-numbing public review procedures in order to give their towns a center again. Now Duany and Speck (who is a Metropolis contributing editor) say that this book is a go-to resource for citizens who have enlisted in that fight, complete with rounded corners for easy thumbing. Actually, they say it’s the go-to resource. It situates places along a rural-urban continuum and lays out how people should plan, circulate, live, and work in those places for a healthier life and climate.

Unsurprisingly, the authors easily defend their claims. We caught up with them via conference call with Speck in Washington, D.C., and Duany in Miami. An uninhibited discussion, with stirrings of a sequel, followed.

Who’s the audience?

Andres Duany: This is a response to the empowerment of citizens in planning. The public process has become very broadly based—it’s expected now [that citizens will participate in charettes] and often the outcome is questionable. That has to do with expertise. So this manual is for elected officials and for citizens who participate in the [planning] process.

Jeff Speck: You can read it in the public hearing, while you’re waiting for your project to come up. Read more…

Urban design–conscious New Yorkers looking for an excuse to drink—and, really, who isn’t?—should be sure not to miss tomorrow night’s delightful-sounding Jane Jacobs Pub Crawl, hosted by the Congress for New Urbanism. The CNU’s president, John Norquist, and staffers from the organization’s New York and New Jersey chapters will lead preservation-minded carousers on a three-and-a-half hour jaunt from the Standard Grill onto the High Line and then over to the West Village for drinks at the White Horse Tavern and the Rusty Knot. Granted, only the White Horse was an actual Jacobs haunt (the Standard Grill just started drawing crowds last summer, and the Rusty Knot has been open about 18 months), but we think it’s a safe bet that the late urbanologist would approve of anything that gets people talking passionately about her beloved city. Interested parties should RSVP here.

The town of Ave Maria, in Florida, was planned as a Catholic-based community.

What does it take to make a city accessible to all? How do we foster truly inclusive urban design? These are some of the questions being raised by the 2009 International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam. Founded in 2001, the Biennale has evolved into a worldwide gathering of exhibitions, conferences, lectures, and other activities devoted to themes of architecture and urbanism. The fourth event, which opens in September, is titled “Open City: Designing Coexistence.”  Though the theme sounds fairly warm and fuzzy, the U.S. curators’ response is a provocative one—and they want your help. Read more…