Category: The Public Realm

Articles Australia Bring Data City Planners / Urban Designers Meet the Urbanists: 21st Century Smart Cities Talks The Public Realm

Can our Tweets help us build better cities?

ARTICLE

Poppy Johnston, The Fifth Estate, 4 September 2018

By pooling publicly-available data from social media and other unconventional information sources – such as reviews and ratings sites, travel wikis, mapping sites, and event promotion pages – the company is able to depict in real-time the unique social fabric of a neighbourhood.

“We have memories and thoughts about spaces, and it’s that intangible stuff that makes somewhere sticky,” Ms Hartley, who is also the company’s chief innovation officer, told The Fifth Estate.

“It’s traditionally been hard to put data behind this and hard to put a value to it. Determining social value has also been hard because neighbourhoods are in a constant state of change,” she said

To visit Lucinda Hartley and co-founder Jessica Christiansen-Franks’s social analytics platform Neighbourlytics click here. To visit their placemaking consultancy Co-Design Studio click here.

Urban design is really the language of the city. When you walk down the street everything you see has been designed.

Amanda Burden, urban planner

FeaturedArticles Cities for People Journalists Living in the City Meet the Urbanists: 21st Century Social & Economic Inequalities Talks The Public Realm Urban Activism USA

Designing a more inclusive city

ARTICLE

Allison Alrieff, The New York Times, 20 October 2017

“The Arsenal of Exclusion and Inclusion,” a forthcoming book by Tobias Armborst, Daniel D’Oca and Georgeen Theodore, who lead the architecture, planning and research collective Interboro, refers to such things — which include cul-de-sacs, cold water, “No Loitering” signs, the Fair Housing Act — as “weapons.” They are the policies, practices and physical artifacts used by planners, policy makers, developers, real estate brokers, community activists and others to draw, redraw or erase the lines that divide us.

Allison Arieff is the Editorial Director at SPUR and is a columnist for the New York Times.

For Allison Arieff’s twitter feed click here, for her New York Time option piece ‘Automated Vehicles Can’t Save Cities’ click here, and for a New York Times panel discussion on Tactical Urbanism where she was the moderator click here.

For Interboro’s Arsenal of Exclusion and Inclusion click here.

(New) Traditional Cities City Planners / Urban Designers City Solutions Meet the Urbanists: 21st Century Streets, Roads & Mobility Sustainable Cities Talks The Public Realm

7 principles for building better cities

TALK

Peter Calthorpe, TED, April 2017

So there are seven principles that have now been adopted by the highest levels in the Chinese government, and they’re moving to implement them. And they’re simple, and they are globally, I think, universal principles.

One is to preserve the natural environment, the history and the critical agriculture.

Second is mix. Mixed use is popular, but when I say mixed, I mean mixed incomes, mixed age groups as well as mixed-land use.

Walk. There’s no great city that you don’t enjoy walking in. You don’t go there. The places you go on vacation are places you can walk. Why not make it everywhere?

Bike is the most efficient means of transportation we know. China has now adopted policies that put six meters of bike lane on every street. They’re serious about getting back to their biking history.

Complicated planner-ese here: connect. It’s a street network that allows many routes instead of singular routes and provides many kinds of streets instead of just one.

Ride. We have to invest more in transit. There’s no silver bullet. Autonomous vehicles are not going to solve this for us. As a matter of fact, they’re going to generate more traffic, more VMT, than the alternative.

And focus. We have a hierarchy of the city based on transit rather than the old armature of freeways.

It’s a big paradigm shift, but those two things have to get reconnected in ways that really shape the structure of the city.

To visit Calthorpe Associates website click here.

First life, then spaces, then buildings – the other way around never works. 

Jan Gehl, architect

Streets and their sidewalks – the main public places of a city – are its most vital organs.

Jane Jacobs, journalist

If anybody at any time wanted to pay professionals to make a city planning idea which would kill city life, it could not have done better than what the modernists accomplished.

Jan Gehl, architect

Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.

Jane Jacobs, journalist

Architecture & Engineering Developers Short Films The Public Realm UK

King’s Cross: urban transformation

SHORT FILM

Pauline den Hartog Jager, Monocle, 12 May 2016

It is expected that this year around 30,000 people will be visiting King’s Cross every day, for that we have to thank its developers Argent, who have focused just as much on a manifesto of good living, as they have on a bottom line. “Once we had been confirmed, one of our first jobs was to write this first document called, ‘Principles for a Human City’ which was published in July 2001, and we set out 10 principles for what we though should be a fantastic piece of this world city.”

Colombia Government Agencies Short Films The Public Realm Transit Urbanisation

Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize 2016 Laureate: Medellín

SHORT FILM

Lee Kwan Yew World City Prize, 2016

We live in a time when billions of people are moving into cities. Many of these cities, especially the new mega cities, are very dangerous and disorganised. Many of them are getting worse, and many of them are are looking for role models of cities which have transformed themselves, and no city has done as great a job as Medellín has.

For more about the Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize, click here.

Cities for People Housing Philosophers Short Films The Public Realm Urban Activism

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.

Cities / Countries Cities for People City Planners / Urban Designers Denmark Film Makers Global Meet the Urbanists: 21st Century Ranked Cities Streets, Roads & Mobility Talks The Public Realm

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.

Activists Articles Cities for People City Planners / Urban Designers City Solutions Meet the Urbanists: 21st Century The Public Realm Tools Urban Activism USA

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).

Cities for People City Planners / Urban Designers Community Meet the Urbanists: 21st Century Talks The Public Realm USA

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.