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It's baaaack.

Blogedanken Public Poll

Here are my favorite entries from each of the six Blogedanken participants who submitted full responses. Take a quick read-through, pick the one you think is the most interesting, and vote in the public poll at the bottom of the post. One-two-three, and by April 10th we'll have a winner! That person will then recieve a copy of Hyperborder, courtesy of PA Press.

Patrixbanx
(Portland, Maine, USA)
It sure would be nice to have a suburban commuter rail network in southern Maine. It would be even nicer if the commuter rail stations weren’t sited in the middle of vast parking lots, especially closer to the urban core. So why not allow development to cluster around those stops, like say Morrill’s Corner? And by development, I mean dense development. We’ll need to reform our zoning to encourage such growth, of course – not just by creating incentives for density but by creating disincentives for sprawl as well. Oh, and remember – this is Maine, a land that get’s pretty damn cold over the course of our long winters, and global warming hasn’t turned us into South Carolina just yet. Yet I hear tell of other cities even further north that are colder and get more snow than us, yet still manage to have a vibrant street life even in depressing old February. We gots to have that. I don’t know how exactly but if we’re going to discourage driving so we can have more walkable and transit oriented neighborhoods, we might as well make the streets of Portland a pleasant place to be in the depths of winter – bike and pedestrian friendly snow clearance, warm transit shelters, fun festivals, whatever it takes.

Medea
(Medellin, Colombia)
24 hour public transportation makes shifts easier to stagger, so bus drivers are not competing with each other in hazardous maneuvers. Every bus and taxi driver will receive mandatory drivers ed and courses on politeness and good manners. If they are rude or customers complain, their punishment won´t be a fine, but they´ll have to do public service hours cleaning the riverbanks.

M.B.
(Mexico City, DF, Mexico)
As a way of improving safety and bridging the gap between the city core and the bulging periphery, the city has launched a Defense of Modern Ruins program, stringing together blighted sights that range from industrial sights to downtrodden art-déco buildings to bureaucratic baroque whales. The program includes low-rent housing schemes, urban wilderness tours and itinerant party circuits.

T H Rive
(Victoria, BC, Canada)
Wireless capable crosswalks.
Edit: *apologies for the absolute shortness of mine. explanation: The crosswalk I was requesting was the ones that go green on ALL sides so that diagonal crossing is validated. It's quicker. The wireless part was more outdoor, cafe oriented Etc green wireless spaces. The result of the mixup?>> Wireless Crosswalks. Still a good idea. (4/1/08 5:38 PM)

Dan Lorentz
(Lexington, Kentucky, USA)
Organize a strong city-wide neighborhood group to promote mixed-use planning that supports street-level vitality, and make the first priority of that group the reweaving of the city's street web to create more corners for mixed-use development.

Petersigrist
(Cambridge, England, UK)
Hovering leisure boats with transparent roofs and floors, which hover about twenty feet in the air and provide lifts around town above underwater gardens with glass walls at street level as well as terraces, balconies, shops, and restaurants that open onto the streets and river



Remember: vote or die! (Hah. Always wanted to use that in context).

Mixed-Use Infrastructure

Cities are extremely complex organisms made up of hundreds of independent and interdependent systems. The most basic and oft-overlooked of these systems are some of the most vital. Sewers, which remove waste and excess water, keep our streets clean and dry. They do this out of sight. Canals, rivers, bridges, and roadways allow for the transportation of goods and people within densely populated urban centers. We take them for granted. We have many large facilities for cleaning our water, recycling our trash, and producing our energy, and we hate it when we have to look at them. We so often forget to appreciate the importance of having a strong network of well-maintained public and green spaces. We get so involved in our own social systems that we forget that the larger framework of the city is there, making it all possible. We forget that cities themselves are living things, and that, ours are just tiny parts of a huge, interconnected process -- of creation, of destruction, of life.

What if more of the overlooked nerves and veins could be brought out into the open, or highlighted in some way? What if we had to interact with filtration systems and electric grids in a more direct way? What if we had to live on and in our bridges and tunnels instead of just passing over and through them. What might our cities look like if none of the processes that supported its existence went overlooked? How could we create an urban environment that helped citizens to better understand how their city works, and how they work within that system?

Bridges like the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy, and the Chateau de Chenonceaux in France are evidence of the fact that bridges can be made into livable, functioning parts of the city. But what of the tunnels? In a twist of radical genius, a firm in Amsterdam recently proposed that the Dutch capital drain its canals and build an entire subcity of public, commercial, and parking (which, hopefully, could later be converted to other uses) under the canal system before re-filling the canals with water. No traffic topside would need to be disturbed, and a huge amount of space would be created, seemingly from scratch. There could be subterranean cafes dappled in light dancing through a glass ceiling open to the canal water overhead, movie theaters buried beneath bustling public plazas, perhaps even underground extensions of the city's many wonderful museums. No need for Renzo or Zaha; just dig down.

If these tunnels were to be dug, and another physical layer added to the fabric of Amsterdam, it would change the way that the canals were experienced by the public. Topside, they would remain serene, almost pastoral. But there would be the new knowledge that, once again, these canals were serving as a major thoroughfare, moving thousands of people through the city. Perhaps a public elevator system could be designed to access the tunnels using canal water in a hydraulic system, even more tightly tying the tunnels, the people, and the waterways together.

Speaking of water, Pruned recently took a detailed look at the work of Kevin Robert Perry, whose project on NE Siskiyou Street in Portland, Oregon, uses a system of landscaped "cells" reclaimed from parking space alongside the road. Water flows downhill into the landscaped areas, which use a series of checkdams to distribute water to the cells and prevent overflow, retaining and cleaning stormwater runoff on-site. While Perry's award-winning system only serves a small corner of the city, imagine the possibilities presented by a city-wide system. Much as Frederick Law Olmsted connected his parks with broad greenways, all of a city's streets could be lined with water retention gardens, with a hierarchical system designed to send all overflow, eventually, to parks specifically re-configured to collect and clean runoff. Think of Urbanlab's winning City of the Future entry, taken even further.

And what of our parks? While we take them for granted as part of the city's infrastructure, we certainly don't forget that parks exist like we sometimes forget about water treatment facilities. But couldn't parks be more than just gathering places? Couldn't -- and shouldn't -- they also be used as teaching tools? These public spaces provide a unique opportunity for showing urbanites how they impact their surroundings, and how their city works. In addition to cleaning wastewater and runoff, what other roles could re-imagined parks serve?

A contest was announced on February 15th by the Design Trust for Public Space and the Grand Army Plaza Coalition to generate ideas as to how Brooklyn's severely underused Grand Army Plaza, at the northern entrance to Prospect Park (which many, this blogger included, consider to be Olmsted's greatest park) could be redesigned as a more lively, energetic public space. The plaza, which sits atop a subway station, provides an excellent platform for any designer interested in creating a space that more clearly and fluidly emphasizes and integrates the transit system with the public space at street level. How do the public (park) and semi-public (subway station) interact, and how can design make this not only more enjoyable, but more informative?

Infrastructure could be an intriguing new frontier for the mixed-use movement. While inhabitable bridges seem long-overdue, there must be a thousand different ways of re-thinking infrastructure. Any ideas?

(Photo from Flickr user Rita Crane. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)


Links:
Gallery of Bridges in ArchitectureWeek (Civic Nature)

Amsterdam Subcity (BLDGBLOG)

Hyperlocalizing Hydrology in the Post-Industrial Urban Landscape (Pruned)

Growing Water (Urbanlab)

Reinventing Grand Army Plaza (Design Trust for Public Space)

WEEKEND READING: February 9-15, 2008

Good stuff, good stuff, good stuff. Enjoy some reading this weekend, folks. There's something here for everyone...

ITEM ONE: Deputydog explores Portland's Dignity Village, the "most organized shanty town on earth."

ITEM TWO: Creative class guru Richard Florida, MIT Department of Architecture head Yung Ho Chang, and Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybek are just a few of the experts to which Architect Magazine posed the question: "How Would You Spend $1.6 Trillion on Infrastructure in the US?"

ITEM THREE: A pleasingly astute assesment of the Gentrifyer's Guilt from the blog Believe in the Greatest City that Reads in America (which is Baltimore, apparently).

ITEM FOUR: Landscape Urbanism with a great (and well-illustrated) profile of Jean Nouvel as part of the Veg.itect series. (Also check out this review of the Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes exhibit, which opened this week in Minneapolis). (Photo credit)

ITEM FIVE: WorldChanging on how peak population -- and the inevitable decline to follow -- should frame the current discussion of susatinability.

ITEM SIX: Guest blogger Dave Atkins reviews Suburban Transformations over at All About Cities. Where featured a review of this book last month, and if you missed that, make sure to check out Mr. Atkins' post.

ITEM SEVEN: In case you missed it, Science just put out a special issue focusing on cities and the "urban planet" phenom.

See you Sunday for Urbanffffinds!

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Questioning the Creative Class Logic

Sometimes I can't help but wonder if maybe the whole Creative Class phenomenon is doing more to harm cities than it does to help them. Not in all cases, of course...certainly many cities are benfitting from the investment in their artistic and recreational infrastructure. But the primary purpose of a city is to provide high-quality services to all of its citizens, and at times it seems like this responsibility falls by the wayside as civic governments try to focus on building Creative Class-friendly amenities.

Gentrification happens because neighborhoods throughout a given city are unequally supported. And while this isn't the fault of the Creative Classmates, they appear to be exacerbating the problem by attracting a disproportionate amount of attention -- and funding -- from mayors who think of their presence as a silver bullet. With rich creative people comes an increased tax base, and with an increased tax base, more problems can be solved in less privileged areas, right?

Portland, Oregon, is seen as one of the capitals of the Creative Class. The city's arts and cultural scenes are thriving, with artists flocking to the once-granola metropolis to be a part of the scene. As a recent article in Slate pointed out, "it's rare to meet a young, creative Portlander who's from Portland." Its success in drawing talent from other cities is, in fact, one of the reasons that Portland is held up as model of the Creative Class metropolis. The CC is all about migration, after all; it could not exist without the internet, which allows for artists to live in cheaper cities while still participating in the larger artistic fields in which they are interested and/or employed.

Jump to the other side of both the country and the spectrum, to New York City. Manhattan and Brooklyn (and, to some extent, Queens) have become inordinately expensive. The city -- or The City, with caps, as it's known Stateside -- has become what airoots recently described as "a networking platform and marketplace for established creative people from all around the world, [but not] much of a place for emerging artistic production within the city." NYC is a popular city with the Creative Class as well; in fact, it is the sun to their universe, around which all things (in some way) orbit. In effect, New York has become the City of Art, while the artists have fled to the hinterland.

But what has made Portland -- or Boston, or Boise for that matter -- a hub of activity for those who have fled New York's rising rents? One of the things that a large chunk of the Creative Class' centers of production share is a strong public services network that pre-dates the city's popularity. They are cities with well-maintained parks, strong transit systems, and clean and affordable utilities (water, electricity, etc.) Cheap space must be available -- again from airoots, the new creative cities "are open and messy enough to provide artists with interstitial spaces they can takeover and make their own."

Walkability, density, urban character -- all of these things are supposedly important to the Creative Class. Yet there are cities much closer to New York (aka the Center) than Portland that offer all of these things in larger helpings yet have failed to tap into the Creative Class boom as effectively as the Rose City. To name a few: Philly (which is starting to benefit from NY's overflow but is still limping considerably), Washington DC, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Richmond. It seems to me that the advantage that Portland had over these places was strong, well-maintained infrastructure. After all, if you don't want to live in New York but you can live pretty much anywhere else, you're going to choose a city that can provide you with the most comfortable life with the lowest amount of stress.

Milwaukee is a perfect illustration of the benefits of maintaining strong basic urban infrastructure -- and what happens when that maintenance falls by the wayside. The city managed, against all odds, to remain in the black into the 1930s while other cities across the US struggled with the Great Depression. This was largely due to the civic integrity of the city government (socialists, for the record) and the fact that they had not been extravagant in their spending during the Roaring Twenties. Milwaukee eventually suffered from the depression like the rest of the country, but anyone who has followed the history of the Midwest can tell you that the Brew City never suffered the kinds of blows sustained (or not) by Saint Louis, Detroit, and Cleveland. After the depression passed, the industrial city roared, and its services remained strong and well-maintained until the 1980s. Slowly over the past twenty-five years, the city and county have been chipping away at Milwaukee's utilities, infrastructure, and once-legendary bus and parks systems. Even with the Creative Class leading a renaissance in parts of the city, crime is at an all-time high and the racial segregation is some of the worst in the nation.

The importance of creativity in the modern economy is nothing to sneeze at. While basic services are something that cities need to focus more heavily on, it is important that they bolster the creativity of their populace. But it seems to me that spending city funds on cultural amenities, building artist housing, and hosting snazzy (and pricey) festivals might not be the best way to go about incubating a culture of innovation and artistic aspiration. If anything, they seem likely to create a dangerous "us and them" tension between the Creative Class and their fellow city-dwellers. In a way, this could even be seen as the institutionalization of the overprofessionalization of art.

So how can cities create a dynamic, creative culture without overreaching? I have some ideas, but this post is starting to get long, so I'll save them for tomorrow.

(Photos from Flickr users gonebiking and Digital Trav.)


Links:
The Indie City (Slate) (via Brand Avenue)

New York Rollercoaster City (airoots)

Urban Fictions: The Toolhouse (airoots)

Conscious Urbanism and City Repair

I've decided that the term "Compassionate Urbanism" doesn't really capture what I'm trying to showcase in the series. Compassion suggests people who are well off--or at least better off--helping those in need. What it does not suggest is the inclusion of those in need into creating a solution to their problems. While initiatives that help those in poverty to survive or make their lives more comfortable are hugely important, the more aptly-described "Conscious Urbanism" is about seeing impoverished members of a community as equal and active, and working to improve their quality of life through community integration. In the end, this integration not only benefits those being helped; Conscious Urbanism lifts up the entire neighborhood through the respect and inclusion of all of its members.

That being said, I recently learned (through this post at On the Commons) about a Portland, OR, project called City Repair...I don't think there could be a better project to kick off the Conscious Urbanism series. City Repair describes itself as a "group of citizen activists creating public gathering places and helping others to creatively transform the places where they live." The group transforms intersections, which currently serve auto, not pedestrian, traffic, into beautiful public spaces. More importantly, they transform the communities around these intersections by bringing together neighbors who had never met and getting whole neighborhoods involved in the creation, together, of quality public space.

The On the Commons post also highlights what City Repair is doing to help build community for those living in poverty in Portland: "[City Repair] helped to create Dignity Village...a community of formerly homeless people. People there have built straw bale houses, a kitchen, solar/gas showers, and a garden. Lakeman says it costs three dollars a day for someone to live there, as opposed to sixty a day at a typical shelter."

What I find particularly inspiring about this project is that it can be so easily replicated. The concept does not require much more than community initiative and creative thinking, and as the post and City Repair's website show, the benefits to urban neighborhoods are great. Be sure to check out City Repair's website, and don't miss the video on the About CR page.


Links:
City Repair