Building 4 humanity Design competition Paper

TEAM CODE

B4H-DC3156.

THE URBAN STRUCTURE AS A GENERATOR OF DYNAMIC AND TRANSFORMABLE SPACES Key words: Sustainable Mobility, Environmental Pollution, Urban Pedestrian Experiences, Transdisciplinarity, Stakeholders Exchange. Scalability Processes, Heritage value In our field of study, the answer from architecture to the public space should consider hybrid spaces that offer increased urban experiences through the mix between the physic existing information and the overprinted virtual one. The urban transformations ahead place us in front of a challenge, which incite us to elaborate new concepts and notions towards thinking the city and to create innovative tools and resilient solutions on how to project it.

Under these circumstances, the academic proposals to solve city problems, understood as concrete urban experiments, could become future projects implemented in the real urban context. Besides, agreements between governmental entities and universities ease the approximation to these urban problems from different social perspectives, through the management of communicational resources that represent an information canal between government proposals and local neighbors and stakeholders.

Intervention area Latin America, Argentina, Buenos Aires City, Palermo Neighborhood.

Argentina has a high Human Developed index of 0.875 ranking 47 in the world, above most Latin American countries, but 30% of population are poor. Buenos Aires is Argentina´s main Capital City. It’s a city of high economic contrasts where poor neighborhoods are left aside by infrastructure investing due to low budget.

Monthly, almost 180 million travels are made using urban and suburban transport; of which 23 million by the underground, 27 million by train and the rest by the use of buses and Metrobus transport system. On the other hand, every day, private vehicles saturate the main driveways and access axes, worsening the environmental pollution existing levels. The City receives around 3 million people a day, from which around a third passes through the underground and train stations located in Palermo neighborhood. Besides, whilst Palermo as a whole has one of the city´s highest population density, its parks and urban open spaces are completely void and disconnected from the main connectivity arteries.

B4H-DC3156

B4H-DC31561

The Masterplan is developed over a polygon of the Buenos Aires map corresponding to several sectors of Palermo neighborhood, a high economy neighborhood which is a strategic and dynamic area that links the West-East and North-South axes of the city. This area, reached by ongoing transformations, mostly linked to public transport systems, offers the opportunity to modify the boundaries of the main node where Santa Fe Avenue and Juan B. Justo corridor intersect in a conflictive way. Therefore, the intervention area starts around the Juan B. Justo Avenue corridor and later on, expands itself because of the students` proposition after identifying common problems in different sectors.

Problem detection and Solution proposal The urban diagnosis of this highly complex area is proposed due to its privileged location, the degraded mass transport infrastructure and its high social impact locally and country scale duo to a self-sustainable economic principle intended. A key factor to consider is the presence of significant green spaces, many with heritage value and large government owned land. The intention is to articulate urban spaces in terms of pedestrian experience and mobility. All of these are common challenges to solve in the definition of the sustainable city.

Within the polygon of diagnosis and analysis indicated, sub-sectors are detected as susceptible to intervention, at a building level as well as tackling both infrastructure and landscape. Some possible programs are defined regarding: • Responses to demands arising from the site analysis; • Mixture of uses to ensure a continuous animation of the intervention places; • Commercial activities concentrated on the main transport axes; • Situations of networks transfer regarding complex transport system; • Peripheral green spaces disconnected to the intervention areas Students arrived to concrete proposals that offer solution to the basic problems detected: • Pragmatic, reflective and performative interaction spaces; • Interaction programs designed to regulate and prolong the use of space; • Actors positioning: operators, strategic observers or designers; • Effective articulation of existing green spaces and heritage buildings with infrastructure networks, integrating the concept of urban landscape.

Economic Sustainability Regarding the cost-benefit analysis of the project, and after receiving advice from a member of the local government, we understand that efforts in the management of land ownership and financing strategies are to be made in order to raise both place and node value. The fundraising from increased land value due to the public investment on the transport system, contributes to the cost sharing of urban development between the private and the public sector. In addition, value capture from land near transit stations can be reinvested in urban infrastructure.

Moreover, the private sector participates in the demand raise over the new buildings, both housing and offices buildings, projected on the northern sector of the area. Nowadays, it constitutes a large scale public park and lots with no program and lack of accessibility in terms of public transport. After public investment on transport infrastructure, node value and consequently place value increase causing private investors and population to move over to new office and residential lots generated in government unused land.

Therefore, the project itself is economically feasible while public expenditure is no longer considered a loss but an investment, shared with the private realm, and followed by captured value.

Example of North sector Economic Balance:

B4H-DC3156

B4H-DC31562

Sustainable mobility The opening of new streets, the transfer of the existing Palermo station, the creation of a new train station near Jorge Newbery Airport and the integration of existing and new bicycle lanes, are actions to be carried out by the public sector and which raise node value. This initial investment on transport infrastructure reaches the following objectives: • Guarantee connections between different areas through the elimination of barriers, • Transfer the existing Palermo station in order to relief existing condensation and conflictive intersection of different transport modes –train, underground, buses, cars, bicycles• Creation of a new train station which connects Jorge Newbery Airport to the City center, • Encouragement of bicycle system These objectives are directly associated to a main environmental concern: the reduction of pollution levels through the implementation of increasing sustainable mobility.

Social sustainability The idea of public spaces reinforces the concept of social integration. Making mobility and accessibility better contributes to the homogenization of opportunities for all inhabitants. In fact, the new buildings comply with the high demand for housing and offices. The distribution of population density will be modified as demand is increased for these previously disconnected and void areas of the city, after buildings and transport infrastructure are built.

The realization of urban acupuncture, meaning the specific interventions inserted on an integrated urban network, enhance place value, as the proposals tackle the reinforcement of the site`s imagery, cultural and social values through the creation of public spaces prone to develop flexible programs. Integration between heritage buildings and green urban spaces raise the population`s life quality.

On a larger scale, the possible impact could be huge, if the government repeats the self economic sustainability of this proposal to every infrastructure made in developed neighborhoods, they would have huge budget savings that could drastically accelerate infrastructure projects on poor areas of the country.

Methodology The project hypothesis is based on the evolution of the learning process, implementing the PBL (Problem Based Learning) methodology for the resolution of urban sustainable problematics, addressed from the capitalization and accumulation of trans-disciplinary and integrative experiences throughout the educational program. (Fig. 2) The project stages are organized according to an urban morphology analysis sequence, base confection of the geo-referenced data and project practices oriented to formulate concrete replies to the raised conflicts.

Students and professors from the following study areas integrate the teamwork: Form and Communication, Urbanism and Territorial Planning and Final Project.

In the study field of Urban Morphology, through the approach, recognition and integration of the urban space, the pragmatic dimension is incorporated. Once the intervention area is defined, the sensitive perceptual analysis focuses on the architectural dialogue between the morphology and its context. Therefore, the generator of dynamic and transformable spaces is the urban fabric, on which the detection of articulations, continuities and ruptures, in relation to its functions and uses, permits its morphological exploration.

The Urbanism and Urban and Territorial Planning area focuses on addressing urban problems with an emphasis on mobility and sustainable transport. The most frequently involved sectors of urban planning are land use, transport, housing, land development, and environment. In this scenario, the application of Geographic Information Systems as a technological variable contributes to the analysis of the intervention area, its diagnosis stages and allows the simulation and highly precise verification of the projected morphological proposals in the

B4H-DC3156

B4H-DC31563

real geographical space. Brief, this technological approach facilitates and revalues the sensory and perceptual diagnosis of the problem, identifying node functions in the area of study such as the relation between the intermodal center and its urban local impacts.

The Final Degree Project is a graduation work that integrates the three main areas on which the academic curricula is based: Project and Form, History and Urbanism, Technical and Practical Training. It deepens on the notion of sustainability applied to the design of urban proposals, which give response to the urban problems detected throughout the previous stages; recognition and diagnosis.

Lastly, the students of the Public and Institutional Relations course, within the framework of the subject Communication in Crisis Situations, made a diagnosis of the situation based on the information provided by the students of the Architecture course. The results collaborated with the development of the Masterplan that proposed possible answers to the detected problems. Mainly, the communication strategy design helps to establish relationships between the different social actors involved in a real urban intervention. It is important to interact with local stakeholders and offer correct information about future projects to the community.

Findings The interventions are understood as full appropriation of the urban space accomplishing sustainability principles, taken in a complex sense; environmental, social, economic, technical and communicational. This overall sustainability is focused on long term growth that allows the government to spend budget on emergency neighborhoods instead of investing in developed ones, helping the local administration to focus on underprivileged communities at risk.

Bibliographic references Some titles in original language: Spanish Autores varios, Instituciones Académicas (2014). Realidades virtuales aumentadas para el desarrollo social, Experiencias entre Europa y Latinoamérica.

Buenos Aires: Proyecto ALFA GAVIOTA, Universidad de Belgrano.

Bardon, K. S., Elliot, C. J. & Stothers, N. (1984). Computer applications in local authority planning departments 1984: a review. Birmingham: Department of Planning and Landscape, City of Birmingham Polytechnic.

Barnett, R. (1997). Higher Education: A Critical Business. Open University Press.

Baker, T.R. (2002). The effects of Geographic Information System (GIS) technologies on students' attitudes, self-efficacy, and achievement in middle school science classrooms. Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Kansas, School of Education.

Bednarz, S.W. (2000). Problem based learning. In Audet R. & Luwig G. (Eds), GIS in Schools. Redland, CA: ESRI Press.

Boden, M. A. (2011). La mente creativa: Mitos y mecanismos (Digital ed.). (J.A. Álvarez, Trans.) Barcelona, España: Gedisa.

Boud, D. & Feletti, G. (1991). The Challenge of Problem-Based Learning. New York: St.Martin’s Press.

Bullivant, L. (2005). 4dspace: Interactive Architecture (Architectural Design). London: Ed. John Wiley & Sons.

Campbell, H. J. (1994). How effective are GIS in practice? A case study of British local government. International Journal of Geographical Information Systems 8: (pp.309–25).

Christiansen, E. T., Kuure, L., Mørch, A. & Lindström, B. (2013). Problem-based learning for the 21st century: new practices and learning environments.

Aalborg: Aalborg Universitetsforlag.

French S. P. & Wiggins, L. L. (1990). California planning agency experiences with automated mapping and geographic information systems. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 17 (pp.441–50).

Hixson, N., English, M., Mergendoller, J., Raviz, & Ravitz, J. (2012). Using project-based learning to teach 21st century skills: findings from a statewide initiative.

Presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Educational Research Association.

Martínez, J. (2016). Los Millennials, la generación que reta la educación. In Revista Educación Virtual, https://revistaeducacionvirtual.com/archives/2188 .Reyes, C., Baraona Pohl, E. & Pinillo, C. (2007) Arquitectura sostenible (A. Giménez; C. Monzonis Eds.) Alboraya, Valencia: Pensil S.L. Royal Town Planning Institute (1992). Geographic information systems: a planner’s introductory guide prepared by the Institute’s GIS Panel. London: The Royal Town Planning Institute.

B4H-DC3156

B4H-DC31564