URBAN DESIGN
UPDATE
Newsletter of the Institute for Urban Design November/December 2006 Vol. 22 No. 6 INSTITUTE SUSTAINABLE CITIES: URBAN DESIGN CONFERENCE ON OCTOBER 18 CONTRASTED SHRINKING WITH EXPANDING CITIES William Gibson’s phrase, "The future is here, it is just not evenly distributed," is a worthy introduction to the "Sustainable Cities: Urban Design” conference held on October 18 at the United Nations in New York. Audience members discovered that the future is here - at least in terms of sustainable development - and Architects, Landscape Architects, Urban Designers and even Politicians are creating it. The task ahead is to distribute that future and make the systemic changes that will preserve the environment. Mexico City
What are designers doing to create sustainable cities in a market the Economist calls the greatest wealth-generating activity the 21st Century will offer? Some, like Mario Schjetnan, of Mexico City, are re-imagining the role parks play in a livable city. Anyone who has traveled to Mexico City knows that it faces population and pollution problems U.S. cities hope never to encounter. Officially, it is home to 20,000,000 people. Unofficial counts add as many as 10,000,000 to that number. In spite of near overwhelming challenges – Schjetnan says that the worlds of Cortez and Montezuma constantly clash here – his parks provide a retreat from the city’s chaos. From a sustainability perspective, the parks are also waste-processing systems that cleanse local water and air. Imagine a modern version of Olmstead's Central Park. Now combine it with integrated water purification systems and you have an idea of how important Schjetnan's designs are. They improve the quality of life for the inhabitants of Mexico City. Dr. Suha Ozkan, former Secretary General of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, has spent much of his career exploring how tradition can inform architectural innovation. To Dr. Ozkan, today’s sustainable development echoes some architectural practices of the past. He sites Saudi Arabia's "Tuwaiq Palace" as an example. There, in a hot and arid environment, traditional forms improve the energy efficiency of a complex, modern building.
Sandbag Cities?
Sustainability is not only for big budget projects though. The Aga Khan Award has also gone to relatively simple designs that save lives in the world’s poorer communities. Examples of that work include Nadar Khalili’s “Sandbag Shelters.” Khalili designs emergency habitations that do not require costly materials to build. Instead, they use simple cotton bags filled with sand. The sandbags are the basic building modules for traditional single and double curved walls held in place by wire mesh. The resulting shelters resist hurricane force winds, earthquakes, and floods. Simple. Cheap. Effective.
Tokyo
Dr. Tomonori Matsuo, Toyo University and Junichrio Okata of Tokyo University showed what Tokyo, the world’s biggest urban aggregation at some 35,000,000 inhabitants, is doing to reduce the city’s environmental impact. Appropriating sports arena roofs to capture rainwater is one effort and redesigning typical Tokyo neighborhoods so they are eco-friendly is another. One fact they shared had a profound effect on the assembled audience: Japan has retained about 67 percent of its original forest coverage for the past 200 years. Take a moment to comprehend this. Two centuries ago, the Japanese decided to retain their forests as a legacy for future generations. Since then, the percentage of the land’s original forests has remained constant. How many other nations can make that claim?
St. Paul
Closer to home, Mayor Christopher Coleman of St. Paul, Minnesota, is leading an initiative to green that city. He described something that I call the St. Paul paradox: Making that city more urban has also made it more natural. For Coleman, good urban design equals a greener city. Many of us believe that human activity – especially related to major cities – is precipitating a global environmental crisis. What is less clear and does not receive nearly as much attention is that contemporary designers have workable solutions to many environmental problems. Our job now, and it is a big one, is to distribute them. You can help. Report by Robert Ouellette, National Post, Toronto.
NEW PROJECTS
New Orleans, on Rollercoaster, May Learn From Kansas City? Some 11,000 families may get FEMA financed housing aid as the result of a suit brought by Acorn, a housing advocacy set up that runs the Katrina Survivors Association. Houston Mayor Bill White sent housing inspectors to New Orleans to certify damage to housing of New Orleans evacuees still stranded, due in part, to FEMA’s slow provision of aid. Advocates seek next to make HUD’s Section 8 program vouchers available to evacuees so that they can seek available housing.
Rockefeller Foundation Funds New Orleans Plans
Meanwhile, The Rockefeller Foundation investment in Parish plans for New Orleans is both courageous and correct, says David Dixon, whose firm, Goody/Clancy, Boston, is working a plan for the French Quarter. The Rockefeller program, says Dixon, involves both a citywide plan to address flood-management and repopulation, among other issues. They are also funding a bottom-up program to plan for each of the city's nine Parishes. Out of the plans may come an effort to create strong neighborhood associations that could buy up, rehabilitate and sell back rehab housing to original owners. The neighborhood plans should also encourage economic planning and even health-care planning for the city and for its citizens. Finally, as described in Nicolai Ouroussoff’s New York Times story of November 19, the city owns a valuable stock of public housing. This should be rehabilitated. In addition, New Orleans should develop a new public hosing strategy and build more of it concludes Dixon.
Kauffman Foundation Funds Jazz District Marketing in Kansas City
Kansas City, with its 18th and Vine Jazz District, may provide some ideas for New Orleans to boost tourism through its own jazz culture. Recently the Jazz District Redevelopment Corp sought to develop a marketing brochure with IDEO, a California consultancy known for designing the Palm Pilot. The decision to commission a marketing study was innovative. IDEO, formerly an industrial design office, has expanded to provide a Smart Space practice, led by Fred Dust. This practice, which includes anthropologists, filmmakers and graphic designers as well as architects, has produced What Do We Need to Do to Revitalize 18th & Vine? Darrell Williams, in charge of a minority entrepreneurship program at Kauffman Foundation, is among those, beyond JDRC, providing the report to developers who may be interested in investment in the district. CONFERENCES Pratt
Manhattan
Bauhaus Dessau
Shrinking Cities through February 17 Pratt Manhattan Gallery. A related event featured a conversation around the question: The Bronx: Shrinking with Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion and Michael Sorkin on December 12 at the Van Alen Institute. On January 30 at Pratt Manhattan Center, room 213. New Orleans: A Shrinking City? Deborah Gans, School of Architecture, Pratt and Frederic Schwartz, architect will be among speakers. Icon of Modernism: The 80th Anniversary of Bauhaus Building in Dessau. December 2nd opening by Dr. Omar Akbar of an exhibition that will continue through the winter. A symposium on Modern Internationalism/Global World Culture was held in conjunction with the opening. Among those attending: Gyan Prakash, Princeton; Sibel Bozdogan, Harvard; and representatives from Liverpool, Cambridge and ETA Zurich.
Arizona State
School of Sustainability
ACSA Philadelphia
EXHIBITIONS
Mending Modernism: Upgrading Modernist Buildings While Retaining Value topic of a December 14 program in London will be covered in a forthcoming edition of The Architectural Review, sponsors of the event. The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education holding its inaugural meeting October 4-6 at Arizona State University was the setting for the announcement of a new School of Sustainability at Arizona State. Chuck Redman, Director, Global Institute of Sustainability, ASU, believes that the new school, with its emphasis on environmental studies – including climate and post-occupancy assessments of Leed certified buildings, will not impinge on curriculum at the College of Design which is composed of Schools of Architecture and Landscape Architecture as well as a School of Planning. March 8-11, 2007 – Education for Urban Design, a panel at ACSA meeting, Philadelphia. Lance Brown, CUNY, Chair and Moderator; Johannesburg urban designer Lindsay Bermner, Temple University; Fred Steiner, University of Texas, Austin; Douglas Kelbaugh, University of Michigan. New planned cities – Shanghai and Celebration – spring up overnight! Informal cities, in Pakistan, provide selfbuilt shelter, for more than a million. What changes have the urban design panelists made in curriculum in last year? For registration information: www.acsa-arch.org. Rotterdam 2007: City of Architecture will feature: April 2007 – Sites and Stories, an exhibition of 40 buildings accessible via audio tour. Keumeestek Revisited – April 1-October 31. Three international architecture critics will evaluate 20 buildings from the last 30 years. May 14 – Fire Limits commemorates the 1940 bombardment of Rotterdam and the conflagration that followed. The outer limit of the fire constitutes the boundary between old and new Rotterdam. For more information visit: www.rotterdam2007.nl.
BOOKS Ljubljana
Formula New Ljubljana. By Sadar Vuga. 200 color illustrations. 280 pages. Actar, 158 Lafayette Street, New York. $47.00. This 4-by-6 inch book, with a poster as a cover, brings the armchair traveler in touch with one of Central Europe’s most attractive town. As represented in the work of Sadar Vuga, a firm whose partners have projects in Austria as well as Slovenia. In an opening essay they contrast their work with that of Josep Plesznik. In the 1920s and 1930s the center of Ljubljana was brightened up with bridges, monuments and squares by Josep Plesznik. With the arrival of a Russian influenced government in 1945, Slovenia became off limits for visitors from the West. Today’s visitor will find himself in “The Paris of the East” with a vibrant culture of education, fashion and design.
BOOKS
Cities: Architecture and Society. Tenth International Architecture Exhibition. Richard Burden, Director, Venice Biennale.
Mumbai
What can one say about this book? If one attended The Venice Biennale in September, then it is a souvenir. If one did not, it is too heavy to read. In two volumes, it must weigh 12 pounds. However, readers who persist will be richly rewarded. Suketa Mehta, author of Maximum City: Mumbai Lost, reports in the Cities book that when rain hit on July 27, 2005, “There was no breakdown of civic order, even though the police were absent . . . This was because Mumbauites were busy helping each other. Slum dwellers in whas was formerly called Bombay took stranded motorists into their homes . . . Mumbaites helped each other because they had lost faith in the government helping them. One a planet of city dwellers, this is how most human beings are going to cope in the 21st Century.” Urban designers working in Mexico City, Shanghai, New York or Los Angeles – among the sixteen cities profiled in three volumes – would be ahead to include self-help strategies in their plans. Graphics are the best part of the book. Mumbai, Tokyo, Mexico City and Sao Paulo are the fastest growing cities according to a beautifully designed chart.
Montreal
New Design Cities: Antwerp, Glasgow, Lisbon, Montreal, Sant-Etienne, Stockholm, Times Square. By Marie-Josee Lacroix. 328 pages. $32.00. Commerce Design Montreal. What actions and events helped five mid-sized cities to become “design cities?” This question was posed at an October 2004 conference in Montreal. Answers to this question are provided in a book now available from Montreal. Striking to an American reader is the degree to which design is part of the public sector in St. Etienne, where French culture, has been incorporated into the Government since the time of Napoleon.
NEW FELLOWS
Meta Brunzema, Meta Brunzema Architects P.C., New York, NY; Wids DeLaCour, Principal, DeLaCour & Ferrara Architects, Brooklyn, NY; Mark Francis, Professor of Landscape Design & Architecture, U.C. Davis, Davis, CA; Whasoon Lisa Lee, Principal Architect, Capital Management Program, MTA, NYC Transit, New York, NY; Steven Rugare, Urban Design Center of Northern Ohio, Kent State University, Cleveland, OH.
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