Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.
Category: Cities for People
Those who can, build. Those who can’t, criticize.
Robert Moses, public official
On how to make an attractive city
SHORT FILM
School of Life, 26 Jan 2015
Cities are a big deal. We pretty much all have to live in them. We should try hard to get them right. So few cities are nice, very few out of many thousands are really beautiful; embarrassingly the more appealing ones tend to be old, which is weird because we’re mostly much better at making things now.
For a related articles and short films by The School of Life on Ugliness and the Housing Crisis click here and on Relativism and Urban Planning click here.
The Life-Sized City
TALK
Mikael Colville-Andersen, TED TALK, 27 Oct 2015
It’s all about the people in the Life-Sized City. The people are the main priority, not the machines, not the cult of big, the people. Everything else is secondary. Amazing people populate our cities, like The Lulu. The Lulu is not a consumer, she’s not a statistic, she’s not a number. She’s an amazing little human. Don’t measure her, don’t calculate how much money we’re going to make off of her in the course of her life. How much the cult of big is going to earn of this little statistical person. No. You know what you do? You design the city around her as your baseline. You reduce the number of cars, you reduce pollution, you create more green spaces, you build bicycle infrastructure, safe bicycle infrastructure, so that she can ride her bike, because that is all this kids wants to do. (Apart from eating ice-cream … ) You design for her, for the The Lulus of our world. You design for the citizens of the city, every single one of them, all of them apply here. It’s time to hack it back.
For more from Mikael Colville-Andersen, visit his urban design company Copenhagenize click here, for their ‘Bicycle Friendly City Index’ click here, for their short film series ‘Top Ten Design Elements That Make Copenhagen Bicycle-Friendly’ click here and for The Guardian article ‘Copenhagenize your city: the case for urban cycling in 12 graphs’ click here.
What ‘Tactical Urbanism’ Can (and Can’t) Do for Your City
ARTICLE
Sarah Goodyear, CityLab, 20 Mar 2015
The phrase “tactical urbanism” came into use just a few short years ago, coined by a group of young planners and activists and popularized by an online guide to phenomena such as guerrilla wayfinding, pop-up markets, and DIY traffic-calming.
Many of those nimble urban-improvement techniques, which often originated in the activist community, have since gone mainstream. Cities such as San Francisco and Philadelphia, for instance, have been rapidly installing parklets where parking spaces used to go, a practice that originated with an annual grassroots action called Park(ing) Day.
To listen to a panel discussion about Tactical Urbanism, hosted by the New York Times and including Mike Lydon, click here.
To find out more about Mike Lydon and his Street Plans practice click here, for links to Street Plan’s books click here, and to download their guides to Tactical Urbanism click here. Several of these guides have been co-authored with similar placemaking firms around the world including Co-Design Studio (Australia), Ciudad Emergente (Chile), and TaMaLaCà (Italy).
Charles Montgomery talks “Happy City” with Mark Gorton
TALK
Mark Gorton, Street Films, 22 April 2014
We know that for much of the history of urban planning and architecture the people who build our cities, who build public spaces, who create buildings and city systems, often they will tell us they are building for our happiness, it’s the end goal of everything all of us do anyway, except they rarely provide evidence to demonstrate that they are making us happier with their creations. So I found this very curious, and looking at the last couple of decades of terrific work being done in neuroscience, behavioural economics and psychology, we’re actually starting to gain some evidence that tells us a little bit of the effect of the urban system on our our own well being, on how we feel and how we treat other people.
For see Charles Montgomery’s book Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design on Good Reads click here.
The Human Scale
FILM
Andreas Dalsgaard, Final Cut for Real, 2013
I guess there is this very difficult tradition, which comes from the way we teach architecture and planning, the idea that one person can solve everything. And we even have this term ‘The Masterplan’, like ‘I’m going to do The Masterplan’, which will answer all questions. And of course we know it’s impossible, cities are unbelievably complex, so even the idea of a masterplan is really crazy. All we can do is make a kind of a framework, we came make a very robust framework which allows life to take place.
The evolution of urban planning in 10 diagrams
ARTICLE
City Lab, Emily Badger, 9 Nov 2012
The exhibition’s title – Grand Reductions – suggests the simple illustration’s power to encapsulate complex ideas. And for that reason the medium has always been suited to the city, an intricate organism that has been re-imagined (with satellite towns! in rural grids! in megaregions!) by generations of architects, planners and idealists. In the urban context, diagrams can be powerful precisely because they make weighty questions of land use and design digestible in a single sweep of the eye. But as Le Corbusier’s plan illustrates, they can also seductively oversimplify the problems of cities. These 10 diagrams have been tremendously influential – not always for the good.
For more about SPUR and their work in the San Francisco Bay Area click here.
Cities for People
BOOK
Jan Gehl, Island Press, 2010
Now, after many years, a great deal of knowledge has been amassed on the connection between physical form and human behavior. We have extensive information about what can and should be done. At the same time cities and their residents have become very active in crying out for people-oriented city planning. In recent years many cities in all parts of the world have made a serious effort to realize the dream of better cities for people. Many inspiring projects and visionary city strategies point in new directions after years of neglect.
Master Planner – Jan Gehl
SHORT FILM
Monocle Flims, 30 June 2010
Danish architect Jan Gehl is improving quality of life in cities across the globe, taking the focus away from the car and putting it back on people, with pedestrianised streets and improved cycling infrastructure. Calling itself “consultants in urban quality”, Gehl Architects works to return a human scale to public spaces.
The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
DOCUMENTARY
William H. Whyte, Project for Public Spaces, 1980
One major finding began to shine through, and I’ll now share it with you. ‘People tend sit where there are places to sit.’ This may not strike you as an intellectual bombshell, but this simple lesson is one that very few cities have ever heeded – they’re tough places to sit in.
This documentary is not available on line at this time of writing, but if you can get hold if it, it is a great watch.
The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
BOOK
William H. Whyte, Project for Public Spaces, 1980
It is often assumed that children play in the street because they lack playground space. But many children play in the streets because they like to. One of the best play areas we came across was a block on 101st Street in East Harlem. It had its problems, but it worked. The street itself was the play area. Adjoining stoops and fire escapes provided prime viewing across the street and were highly functional for mothers and older people. There are other factors at work, too, and had we been more prescient, we could have saved ourselves a lot of time spent later looking at plazas. Though we did not know it then, this block had within it all the basic elements of a successful urban place.
For more from Project for Public Spaces, the nonprofit organisation founded by William H. Whyte, and the work they are doing around placemaking, click here.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
BOOK
Jane Jacobs, Vintage, 1961
Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations.