Institute for Urban Design - Sustainable Cities

Fellows Proceedings

10.17.2006

Institute for Urban Design

Mexico City/ Istanbul/

Sustainable Cities:

10.18.2006

New Orleans/ St.Paul/ Johannesburg/ Atlanta/ Tokyo

Fellows Proceedings

10.17.2006

Institute for Urban Design

Mexico City/ Istanbul/

Sustainable Cities:

10.18.2006

New Orleans/ St.Paul/ Johannesburg/ Atlanta/ Tokyo

Institute for Urban Design

Sustainable Cities: Urban Design

Fellows Proceedings

October 17, 2006 The Century Association New York October 18, 2006 United Nations UN-Habitat New York

2

Conference Program

Sustainable Cities: Urban Design

Institute for Urban Design in cooperation with: United Nations Human Settlements Program (UN-Habitat) Toyo University BSHF Rockefeller Foundation

3

October 17, 2006

October 18, 2006

The Century Association 7 West 43rd Street New York, NY

United Nations Dag Hammarskjold Auditorium New York, NY

Welcome

Overview

Ann Ferebee Founding Director Institute for Urban Design Guide for Tomorrow’s Cites

Dr. Axumite Gebre-Egziabher Director UN-Habitat New York Office Welcome

Aliye Celik Managing Director Institute for Urban Design Achieving Sustainability Lance Jay Brown ACSA Distinguished Professor School of Architecture CUNY Themes and Issues Panelists Mario Schjetnan Grupo de Desino Urbano Mexico City Democratic Open Space Dr. Suha Ozkan Competition Advisor Istanbul Metropolitan Planning Competitions to Guide Development of Two New City Centers in Istanbul Respondents Robert Ouellette The National Post Toronto Charles McKinney Chief of Design City of New York Parks & Recreation

Ann Ferebee Founding Director Institute for Urban Design Program Goals

Mario Schjetnan Mexico City (Repeat of speech from previous day) Dr. Suha Ozkan Chairman World Architecture Community The Aga Khan Awards: Tradition vs Innovation Diane Diacon President Building and Social Housing Foundation Leicestershire, U.K. Foundation Award Program Encourages Better Housing For The Poor

Panel 1 Panel 3 Moderator Michael Sorkin Director Urban Design Program CUNY Panelists Darren Walker Vice President Foundation Initiatives Rockefeller Foundation Nine Plans Will Provide Foundation for Rebuilding in New Orleans Mayor Chris Coleman St. Paul, MN Urban Design Center as Vehicle for Policy Implementation Respondents Lisa Chamberlain The New York Times Steve Rugare Urban Design Center of Northern Ohio Kent State University Cleveland, Ohio Panel 2 Chair HE. Mr. Christopher F. Hackett Permanent Representative of Barbados to the United Nations Panelists Dr. Axumite Gebre-Egziabher Director UN-Habitat New York Office Urban Design and Human Settlements

Chair HE. Ms. Judith Bahemuka Ambassador from Kenya to Canada

Contents

Sustainable Cities: Urban Design

October 18, 2006 Overview

Welcome Guide for Tomorrow’s Cities Ann Ferebee Achieving Sustainability Aliye Celik Themes and Issues Lance Jay Brown

4

Welcome Dr. Axumite Gebre-Egziabher Program Goals Ann Ferebee

5

Panel 1

4

October 17, 2006 Democratic Open Space Mario Schjetnan Competitions to Guide Development of Two New City Centers in Istanbul Dr. Suha Ozkan Exchange Response

Moderator Lance Jay Brown ACSA Distinguished Professor School of Architecture CUNY

7 12

21 21

Nine Plans Will Provide Foundation for Rebuilding in New Orleans Darren Walker Urban Design Center as Vehicle for Policy Implementation Mayor Chris Coleman Exchange Response

23

24

28

31 32

Panel 2 Urban Design and Human Settlements Dr. Axumite Gebre-Egziabher The Aga Khan Awards: Tradition vs Innovation Dr. Suha Ozkan Foundation Award Program Encourages Better Housing For The Poor Diane Diacon Response

Professor Tonomori Matsuo President Toyo University Tokyo, Japan Water Conservation Through Reuse in Tokyo

23

34 36 38

41

Panel 3

Dr. Junichiro Okata Urban Planning Tokyo University Tokyo, Japan Community Based Improvement of Informal Urban Space

Water Conservation Through Reuse in Tokyo Tonomori Matsuo Community Based Improvement of Informal Urban Space Dr. Junichiro Okata

Conclusion Professor Michael Sorkin Director Urban Design Program CUNY Formulary for a Sustainable Urbanism

43 44

Conclusion

To learn more about the Institute for Urban Design, future programs and publications, please see: www.instituteforurbandesign.org To mail proposals for future publication, please send to: Ann Ferebee Director Institute for Urban Design 47 Barrow Street New York, NY 10014 Phone: 212-741-2041 Fax: 212-633-0125 E-mail: annferebee@aol.com

Formulary for a Sustainable Urbanism Michael Sorkin

47

Speaker Biographies / Sponsors

54

2

Conference Program

Sustainable Cities: Urban Design

Institute for Urban Design in cooperation with: United Nations Human Settlements Program (UN-Habitat) Toyo University BSHF Rockefeller Foundation

3

October 17, 2006

October 18, 2006

The Century Association 7 West 43rd Street New York, NY

United Nations Dag Hammarskjold Auditorium New York, NY

Welcome

Overview

Ann Ferebee Founding Director Institute for Urban Design Guide for Tomorrow’s Cites

Dr. Axumite Gebre-Egziabher Director UN-Habitat New York Office Welcome

Aliye Celik Managing Director Institute for Urban Design Achieving Sustainability Lance Jay Brown ACSA Distinguished Professor School of Architecture CUNY Themes and Issues Panelists Mario Schjetnan Grupo de Desino Urbano Mexico City Democratic Open Space Dr. Suha Ozkan Competition Advisor Istanbul Metropolitan Planning Competitions to Guide Development of Two New City Centers in Istanbul Respondents Robert Ouellette The National Post Toronto Charles McKinney Chief of Design City of New York Parks & Recreation

Ann Ferebee Founding Director Institute for Urban Design Program Goals

Mario Schjetnan Mexico City (Repeat of speech from previous day) Dr. Suha Ozkan Chairman World Architecture Community The Aga Khan Awards: Tradition vs Innovation Diane Diacon President Building and Social Housing Foundation Leicestershire, U.K. Foundation Award Program Encourages Better Housing For The Poor

Panel 1 Panel 3 Moderator Michael Sorkin Director Urban Design Program CUNY Panelists Darren Walker Vice President Foundation Initiatives Rockefeller Foundation Nine Plans Will Provide Foundation for Rebuilding in New Orleans Mayor Chris Coleman St. Paul, MN Urban Design Center as Vehicle for Policy Implementation Respondents Lisa Chamberlain The New York Times Steve Rugare Urban Design Center of Northern Ohio Kent State University Cleveland, Ohio Panel 2 Chair HE. Mr. Christopher F. Hackett Permanent Representative of Barbados to the United Nations Panelists Dr. Axumite Gebre-Egziabher Director UN-Habitat New York Office Urban Design and Human Settlements

Chair HE. Ms. Judith Bahemuka Ambassador from Kenya to Canada

Contents

Sustainable Cities: Urban Design

October 18, 2006 Overview

Welcome Guide for Tomorrow’s Cities Ann Ferebee Achieving Sustainability Aliye Celik Themes and Issues Lance Jay Brown

4

Welcome Dr. Axumite Gebre-Egziabher Program Goals Ann Ferebee

5

Panel 1

4

October 17, 2006 Democratic Open Space Mario Schjetnan Competitions to Guide Development of Two New City Centers in Istanbul Dr. Suha Ozkan Exchange Response

Moderator Lance Jay Brown ACSA Distinguished Professor School of Architecture CUNY

7 12

21 21

Nine Plans Will Provide Foundation for Rebuilding in New Orleans Darren Walker Urban Design Center as Vehicle for Policy Implementation Mayor Chris Coleman Exchange Response

23

24

28

31 32

Panel 2 Urban Design and Human Settlements Dr. Axumite Gebre-Egziabher The Aga Khan Awards: Tradition vs Innovation Dr. Suha Ozkan Foundation Award Program Encourages Better Housing For The Poor Diane Diacon Response

Professor Tonomori Matsuo President Toyo University Tokyo, Japan Water Conservation Through Reuse in Tokyo

23

34 36 38

41

Panel 3

Dr. Junichiro Okata Urban Planning Tokyo University Tokyo, Japan Community Based Improvement of Informal Urban Space

Water Conservation Through Reuse in Tokyo Tonomori Matsuo Community Based Improvement of Informal Urban Space Dr. Junichiro Okata

Conclusion Professor Michael Sorkin Director Urban Design Program CUNY Formulary for a Sustainable Urbanism

43 44

Conclusion

To learn more about the Institute for Urban Design, future programs and publications, please see: www.instituteforurbandesign.org To mail proposals for future publication, please send to: Ann Ferebee Director Institute for Urban Design 47 Barrow Street New York, NY 10014 Phone: 212-741-2041 Fax: 212-633-0125 E-mail: annferebee@aol.com

Formulary for a Sustainable Urbanism Michael Sorkin

47

Speaker Biographies / Sponsors

54

4

Welcome

Guide for Tomorrow’s Cities?

Ann Ferebee Founding Director Institute for Urban Design Sustainable Cities: Urban Design was the Institute’s largest and most challenging program. Representatives from six foreign cities addressed more than 200 registrants at the Dag Hammarskjold Auditorium of the United Nations in New York.

To hear within a single hour that Lagos was the fastest growing city in the world while also absorbing that New Orleans had lost, in Hurricane Katrina, 60 percent of its population was, indeed, a shock.

To learn, at the same time, that designers are preparing plans for the nine parishes of New Orleans, while Pakistan’s Orangee project has provided toilets for 100,000, was exhilarating.

In less than 24 hours, registrants for the two-day program learned about:

• Tokyo’s water saving policy.

• Mexico City’s rehabilitated parks, the lungs for a population of 19 million.

• Istanbul’s competition process to provide plans —

•

by Zaha Hadid, Kisho Kurokawa and Ken Yeang — for conversion of two industrial areas into new community centers.

Eutopia, a green utopia outlined by Michael Sorkin to provide a guide, which urban designers can consider, in mapping tomorrow’s cities.

5

Achieving Sustainability Aliye P. Celik Managing Director Institute for Urban Design The rapid growth of the world population is one of the most striking demographic trends today. Most of this increase in population will have to be settled in urban areas because of pressures on rural areas. In developing countries in particular, 59 million new dwellers are added to the urban populations annually. Currently, Africa has the lowest urbanization level; but has the fastest urban population growth. Asia’s prospects are especially daunting given the anticipated rapid population increases in India and China.

Thus, rapid urbanization will be the dominant feature in human settlements in the coming decades. These developments will call for the better planning of urban growth and development, design and the better management of existing urban centers to cope with the demands of increasing number of urban citizens, to protect them from natural and man made hazards, to deal with the challenges of poverty equity and equality. The challenges of developed countries are different from the challenges of developing countries but there are lessons to be learnt from the experience of each country in order to achieve a sustainable built environment.

In 1976 United Nations decided to organize Habitat Conference, which was held in Vancouver to find solutions to the rapid urbanization the world was facing. In 1996, Habitat II Conference was organized in Istanbul to deal with the increasing poverty in the urban areas. The Istanbul Declaration adopted at the Habitat II said that a solution can be found only by the cooperation of different stake holders.

In 2000, The United Nations adopted the Millennium Declaration and Millennium Development Goals where 191 Member states of the United Nation made a commitment to improve the living conditions of the 2.5 billion poor in the world. Goal 7 of the Millennium Development Goals commits Member States of the United Nations to ensure environmental sustainability by integrating the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programs, to reduce by half by 2015 the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation and, as well as to achieve by 2020 significant improvement in the lives of 100 million slum-dwellers.

The development and design of new buildings, open spaces, parks, cities, and urban growth call for environmental planning and management capacities, as well as the capacity to take note of social and political changes that can undermine traditional social networks and result in increased inequity and exclusion.

Cities, especially new cities, can support larger populations while limiting their adverse impacts on the natural environment and therefore hold promise for sustainable human settlement. It is important to ensure that resources are used effectively, paying particular attention to the following factors:

Institute for Urban Design

• Ensuring that urban design is guided by suitable • •

• • • • •

planning that redirect internal and external migration so that they support sustainable development Promoting energy efficiency, that incorporates emissions standards, pollution-controls and monitor related problems by urban design Promoting the greater use of renewable materials and the incorporation of new techniques in traditional building methods, thus supporting the local economy and ensuring affordability through design Increasing reliance on water recycling designs to reduce network losses and cut costs Ensuring effective, efficient, and affordable mobility in the city Improving sustainability of urban design through local authorities Promoting public private alliance in sustainable urban design Providing affordable housing and good living conditions to the poor of the cities

The real challenge in sustainable urban design is to combine local capacity building and urban policy reforms in order to efficiently plan and manage the urban growth process and to turn urban risks into urban opportunities.

Including sustainable buildings and urban design in the sustainability dialogue is one emerging tool for considering new urban developments in a coherent and integrated manner.

We hope that sustainability of urban design stays in the agenda of the United Nations as well as governments, local authorities, private sector, and around the world in the years and decades to come.

Themes and Issues Lance Jay Brown ACSA Distinguished Professor School of Architecture CUNY Institute for Urban Design Moderator October 17 and 18 panels The world is at a crossroads. At a November meeting of architecture school administrators in Denver, the message came back that “unless we stop using coal, anywhere in the energy chain, it’s curtains for the world as we know it.

Buildings are the worst energy consumers (construction plus HVAC systems), far worse than SUVs. How fast the icecaps melt and the seas rise depends on when we hit the level of no return. Students must be educated with the zero carbon objective writ large. Dense cities like New York, thriving on public mass transport, may be as green as currently possible. But other cities are repositories of the world’s poorest and populations. How do architects, landscape architects, and urban designers help reconcile these discrepancies? The potential for the “planet of slums” and the ever widening gap between rich and poor, loomed large at the start of a multi-sponsored Urban Design and Sustainability symposium at the United Nations on October 18.

We now meet at a time when more is known about the effects of how we live on the earth than at any other time in history. The rate of the development and accelerated delivery of new information is staggering.

However, the miraculous recovery of St. Paul and the desperate needs of New Orleans, in the end give more hope than despair. There was nothing Pollyanna-ish about the work offered by the speakers on October 18. All pulled together, loosely networked, to explain current issues.

Depletion of pure water resources and deforestation were described in terms of Tokyo. Gender challenges were highlighted in terms of Lagos and other African cities.

There was an undercurrent of “when worlds collide”.

How to resolve the growing divide between rich and poor, the discrepancies in resource consumption, the lack of universal health care and education all were addressed.

Even before the symposium ran out of time, one presentation offered a new term to describe those that would fail to respond to the obvious calls to action …the “depleters.” While the future is more uncertain than ever.

Perhaps the most important aspect of this meeting was that designers and policy makers co-mingled as representatives from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas found common ground for exploring these critical issues of mutual concern.

4

Welcome

Guide for Tomorrow’s Cities?

Ann Ferebee Founding Director Institute for Urban Design Sustainable Cities: Urban Design was the Institute’s largest and most challenging program. Representatives from six foreign cities addressed more than 200 registrants at the Dag Hammarskjold Auditorium of the United Nations in New York.

To hear within a single hour that Lagos was the fastest growing city in the world while also absorbing that New Orleans had lost, in Hurricane Katrina, 60 percent of its population was, indeed, a shock.

To learn, at the same time, that designers are preparing plans for the nine parishes of New Orleans, while Pakistan’s Orangee project has provided toilets for 100,000, was exhilarating.

In less than 24 hours, registrants for the two-day program learned about:

• Tokyo’s water saving policy.

• Mexico City’s rehabilitated parks, the lungs for a population of 19 million.

• Istanbul’s competition process to provide plans —

•

by Zaha Hadid, Kisho Kurokawa and Ken Yeang — for conversion of two industrial areas into new community centers.

Eutopia, a green utopia outlined by Michael Sorkin to provide a guide, which urban designers can consider, in mapping tomorrow’s cities.

5

Achieving Sustainability Aliye P. Celik Managing Director Institute for Urban Design The rapid growth of the world population is one of the most striking demographic trends today. Most of this increase in population will have to be settled in urban areas because of pressures on rural areas. In developing countries in particular, 59 million new dwellers are added to the urban populations annually. Currently, Africa has the lowest urbanization level; but has the fastest urban population growth. Asia’s prospects are especially daunting given the anticipated rapid population increases in India and China.

Thus, rapid urbanization will be the dominant feature in human settlements in the coming decades. These developments will call for the better planning of urban growth and development, design and the better management of existing urban centers to cope with the demands of increasing number of urban citizens, to protect them from natural and man made hazards, to deal with the challenges of poverty equity and equality. The challenges of developed countries are different from the challenges of developing countries but there are lessons to be learnt from the experience of each country in order to achieve a sustainable built environment.

In 1976 United Nations decided to organize Habitat Conference, which was held in Vancouver to find solutions to the rapid urbanization the world was facing. In 1996, Habitat II Conference was organized in Istanbul to deal with the increasing poverty in the urban areas. The Istanbul Declaration adopted at the Habitat II said that a solution can be found only by the cooperation of different stake holders.

In 2000, The United Nations adopted the Millennium Declaration and Millennium Development Goals where 191 Member states of the United Nation made a commitment to improve the living conditions of the 2.5 billion poor in the world. Goal 7 of the Millennium Development Goals commits Member States of the United Nations to ensure environmental sustainability by integrating the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programs, to reduce by half by 2015 the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation and, as well as to achieve by 2020 significant improvement in the lives of 100 million slum-dwellers.

The development and design of new buildings, open spaces, parks, cities, and urban growth call for environmental planning and management capacities, as well as the capacity to take note of social and political changes that can undermine traditional social networks and result in increased inequity and exclusion.

Cities, especially new cities, can support larger populations while limiting their adverse impacts on the natural environment and therefore hold promise for sustainable human settlement. It is important to ensure that resources are used effectively, paying particular attention to the following factors:

Institute for Urban Design

• Ensuring that urban design is guided by suitable • •

• • • • •

planning that redirect internal and external migration so that they support sustainable development Promoting energy efficiency, that incorporates emissions standards, pollution-controls and monitor related problems by urban design Promoting the greater use of renewable materials and the incorporation of new techniques in traditional building methods, thus supporting the local economy and ensuring affordability through design Increasing reliance on water recycling designs to reduce network losses and cut costs Ensuring effective, efficient, and affordable mobility in the city Improving sustainability of urban design through local authorities Promoting public private alliance in sustainable urban design Providing affordable housing and good living conditions to the poor of the cities

The real challenge in sustainable urban design is to combine local capacity building and urban policy reforms in order to efficiently plan and manage the urban growth process and to turn urban risks into urban opportunities.

Including sustainable buildings and urban design in the sustainability dialogue is one emerging tool for considering new urban developments in a coherent and integrated manner.

We hope that sustainability of urban design stays in the agenda of the United Nations as well as governments, local authorities, private sector, and around the world in the years and decades to come.

Themes and Issues Lance Jay Brown ACSA Distinguished Professor School of Architecture CUNY Institute for Urban Design Moderator October 17 and 18 panels The world is at a crossroads. At a November meeting of architecture school administrators in Denver, the message came back that “unless we stop using coal, anywhere in the energy chain, it’s curtains for the world as we know it.

Buildings are the worst energy consumers (construction plus HVAC systems), far worse than SUVs. How fast the icecaps melt and the seas rise depends on when we hit the level of no return. Students must be educated with the zero carbon objective writ large. Dense cities like New York, thriving on public mass transport, may be as green as currently possible. But other cities are repositories of the world’s poorest and populations. How do architects, landscape architects, and urban designers help reconcile these discrepancies? The potential for the “planet of slums” and the ever widening gap between rich and poor, loomed large at the start of a multi-sponsored Urban Design and Sustainability symposium at the United Nations on October 18.

We now meet at a time when more is known about the effects of how we live on the earth than at any other time in history. The rate of the development and accelerated delivery of new information is staggering.

However, the miraculous recovery of St. Paul and the desperate needs of New Orleans, in the end give more hope than despair. There was nothing Pollyanna-ish about the work offered by the speakers on October 18. All pulled together, loosely networked, to explain current issues.

Depletion of pure water resources and deforestation were described in terms of Tokyo. Gender challenges were highlighted in terms of Lagos and other African cities.

There was an undercurrent of “when worlds collide”.

How to resolve the growing divide between rich and poor, the discrepancies in resource consumption, the lack of universal health care and education all were addressed.

Even before the symposium ran out of time, one presentation offered a new term to describe those that would fail to respond to the obvious calls to action …the “depleters.” While the future is more uncertain than ever.

Perhaps the most important aspect of this meeting was that designers and policy makers co-mingled as representatives from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas found common ground for exploring these critical issues of mutual concern.

6

Sustainable Cities

10.17.2006

Three Parks Provide Lungs for Mexico City Istanbul Follows Competition Plans

By Architects for Redeveloping Two Industrial Areas The Century Association New York

7

Institute for Urban Design

Mario Schjetnan Grupo de Desino Urbano Mexico City Democratic Open Space

I’m going to show tonight three metropolitan parks in Mexico City that we have been participating in over the last twelve or fifteen years. The issues are related to open space. We conceive open space as a system of structuring equality of public space, an important question of democracy in Mexico.

The second issue that we have been working on for the last thirty years is water: water capture, water recycling, water infiltration, water management, storm water and the restoration of historical water landscapes. Mexico City is a city of two cultures. As Octavio Paz, the Mexican philosopher and poet used to say, in every corner of Mexico City Cortes and Montezuma clash. So in continuously unearthing the city’s remnants, we live with culture. Finally, this chaotic city has grown from half a million to 22 million today. The issue of governance, of planning, of work, of providing accessibility to open space is what we are dealing with.

When the Spaniards came in the early 16 th century to Mexico City, they found a city which was in the middle of a system of lakes. It took four hundred years to work against those lakes, and finally they almost dried out. In the 20 th century there are only two remaining lakes. So it’s a case study of a city against its own water. Up to the 20 th century, Mexico City still had channels and connections to water systems. With the explosion of population, the water has completely dried out. Most of the new growing areas have no parks. Most of the cultural and recreation centers are in Mexico City.

Xochimilco Park

The islands in Xochimilco Park were used for farming. Aztec engineers erected the canals.

This park is called Xochimilco, the last remnant of the lacustrine, or lake-oriented culture, of Mexico City. It’s an area which was developed by the pre-Hispanic people in the 8 th century, turning it into agricultural land. In 1989, it was declared a world heritage site by UNESCO, and an integral plan of recovering and re-establishing the area was launched by the city. We were selected to design a major metropolitan park. The whole program for the restoration of the Chinampa, or agricultural island system, was 3,000 hectares, and we designed this specific park of 300 hectares. The park was planned to save the historical area by containing urbanization.

The project is about recycling water from the south part of the city and thereby recovering these cultural and agricultural landscapes, a magnificent invention from the pre-Hispanic cultures. The islands produced up to three harvests a year, and therefore the Aztecs were able to conquer the central part of Mexico, or Mesoamerica. The park was accomplished in five years. It has been maintained from 1994 to the present. Many jobs were recreated here in sports and an agricultural tourism program.

The park also helped recover incoming birds from North America. A new sports park was also created for the city. Finally, a 14-hectare plant and flower market was designed in the center.

In addition, a ring road that goes around Mexico City was built and interconnected in this last stage. It could not

6

Sustainable Cities

10.17.2006

Three Parks Provide Lungs for Mexico City Istanbul Follows Competition Plans

By Architects for Redeveloping Two Industrial Areas The Century Association New York

7

Institute for Urban Design

Mario Schjetnan Grupo de Desino Urbano Mexico City Democratic Open Space

I’m going to show tonight three metropolitan parks in Mexico City that we have been participating in over the last twelve or fifteen years. The issues are related to open space. We conceive open space as a system of structuring equality of public space, an important question of democracy in Mexico.

The second issue that we have been working on for the last thirty years is water: water capture, water recycling, water infiltration, water management, storm water and the restoration of historical water landscapes. Mexico City is a city of two cultures. As Octavio Paz, the Mexican philosopher and poet used to say, in every corner of Mexico City Cortes and Montezuma clash. So in continuously unearthing the city’s remnants, we live with culture. Finally, this chaotic city has grown from half a million to 22 million today. The issue of governance, of planning, of work, of providing accessibility to open space is what we are dealing with.

When the Spaniards came in the early 16 th century to Mexico City, they found a city which was in the middle of a system of lakes. It took four hundred years to work against those lakes, and finally they almost dried out. In the 20 th century there are only two remaining lakes. So it’s a case study of a city against its own water. Up to the 20 th century, Mexico City still had channels and connections to water systems. With the explosion of population, the water has completely dried out. Most of the new growing areas have no parks. Most of the cultural and recreation centers are in Mexico City.

Xochimilco Park

The islands in Xochimilco Park were used for farming. Aztec engineers erected the canals.

This park is called Xochimilco, the last remnant of the lacustrine, or lake-oriented culture, of Mexico City. It’s an area which was developed by the pre-Hispanic people in the 8 th century, turning it into agricultural land. In 1989, it was declared a world heritage site by UNESCO, and an integral plan of recovering and re-establishing the area was launched by the city. We were selected to design a major metropolitan park. The whole program for the restoration of the Chinampa, or agricultural island system, was 3,000 hectares, and we designed this specific park of 300 hectares. The park was planned to save the historical area by containing urbanization.

The project is about recycling water from the south part of the city and thereby recovering these cultural and agricultural landscapes, a magnificent invention from the pre-Hispanic cultures. The islands produced up to three harvests a year, and therefore the Aztecs were able to conquer the central part of Mexico, or Mesoamerica. The park was accomplished in five years. It has been maintained from 1994 to the present. Many jobs were recreated here in sports and an agricultural tourism program.

The park also helped recover incoming birds from North America. A new sports park was also created for the city. Finally, a 14-hectare plant and flower market was designed in the center.

In addition, a ring road that goes around Mexico City was built and interconnected in this last stage. It could not

8

Mario Schjetnan

The lakes and canals collecting them to one another were first prepared by the Aztecs, but had become filled with silt by the mid-20th Century. The canals were restored, a flower market and reception

center prepared

by Landscape Architect Mario Schjetnan.

For this work Harvard awarded him their Green Prize in Urban Design.

9

Aqueducts carry water into a new lake.

Institute for Urban Design

Boats in Xochimilco Park have been used for fishing for centuries.

8

Mario Schjetnan

The lakes and canals collecting them to one another were first prepared by the Aztecs, but had become filled with silt by the mid-20th Century. The canals were restored, a flower market and reception

center prepared

by Landscape Architect Mario Schjetnan.

For this work Harvard awarded him their Green Prize in Urban Design.

9

Aqueducts carry water into a new lake.

Institute for Urban Design

Boats in Xochimilco Park have been used for fishing for centuries.

10

Mario Schjetnan

11

be built before due to flooding. The park establishes connections on a regional basis. We did a thorough history in terms of paintings from the 18 th and 19 th centuries. On the right hand side of the Mexico City freeway you have these aqueducts which inject water into a new lake. Eventually this water is pushed into the agricultural areas.

There is also a nature park called Parque Ecologico Xochimilco. On the lefthand side, you can see the recycling waters now being injected through the water treatment plants into the lake system. It’s a park that was designed through conventions with Canada and the United States in order to have these flying bird paths from North America and re-establish a wetlands to protect the birds. More than twenty species of birds have been visiting. We work closely with the National University of Mexico to re-establish different types of wetlands.

Institute for Urban Design

below) established fifteen zones and a structure of pedestrian movement systems. The project required rehabilitation of the water system, including lakes and the canals.

The park that was designed in 1907 is the same today.

Of course, it was also changed by Maximilian, the emperor who invaded Mexico in 1860. A fountain connects the major museums and a botanical garden.

Pemex Proposal We are presently working on the Pemex refinery site.

It’s a brownfield where water is important. It was closed in 1995. This plan for the park (below) will require water recycling, water cleaning, and capturing water from the rain.

Plant and Flower Market The community, which wanted to go back to agriculture, said let’s build a market to sell plants and flowers, which is what Xochimilco means in the pre-Hispanic language. It means ‘place to grow flowers’. Plant and Flower Markets boost the economy.

The park goes through a pergola through a system of plazas. Then you can enter an embarcadero at the end of the park. An arboretum contains the plants and flowers, the trees and water plants common to the landscape. Some canals were dug out and planted with some fifty thousand trees. The project created jobs, tourism, agriculture, recreation, and then connected the city through its ring road.

Chapultepec Park

Bridge from Chapultapec Park leads pedestrians over highway and into center of Mexico City.

At the present moment, we are working in Chapultepec Park. It dates from 1460. It was created by a landscape architect for King Montezuma. Chapultepec Park is like Central Park, the Mall in Washington, and also a battlefield, because this is where the last battle with the United States was fought in 1847. It’s the central open space in Mexico City.

Chapultepec receives some seventeen million people a year. With three metro stations, it connects to the metropolitan area. You can come for five pennies from anywhere in the metropolitan area to this park. It is a recreational center, has a major zoo, and three national museums.

The rehabilitation of Chapultapec is led by the Citizens Council, a board of donors and the government of Mexico City. It is a trilogy that has been able to gather $12 million in donations. So we have been able to match one peso from each donation to one peso given by the government.

Central Park in New York is 340 hectares. Chapultepec has 300 hectares of forest and another 300 hectares of park itself, plus the museums and the President’s house. Fiftyfive percent of the people in Chapultepec Park come by metro.

After some 150 presentations with citizens, in 2003 a master plan was devised. The plan for the park (shown

Left: Mexican President Fox approved the proposal to convert the Pemex site to include new lakes, an aquatic museum and moderateincome housing.

Below: The Pemex site, one of the largest brownfields in Mexico City, will be cleaned under the supervision of some 50 soil engineers from ANAM, The Autonomous University of Mexico City.

10

Mario Schjetnan

11

be built before due to flooding. The park establishes connections on a regional basis. We did a thorough history in terms of paintings from the 18 th and 19 th centuries. On the right hand side of the Mexico City freeway you have these aqueducts which inject water into a new lake. Eventually this water is pushed into the agricultural areas.

There is also a nature park called Parque Ecologico Xochimilco. On the lefthand side, you can see the recycling waters now being injected through the water treatment plants into the lake system. It’s a park that was designed through conventions with Canada and the United States in order to have these flying bird paths from North America and re-establish a wetlands to protect the birds. More than twenty species of birds have been visiting. We work closely with the National University of Mexico to re-establish different types of wetlands.

Institute for Urban Design

below) established fifteen zones and a structure of pedestrian movement systems. The project required rehabilitation of the water system, including lakes and the canals.

The park that was designed in 1907 is the same today.

Of course, it was also changed by Maximilian, the emperor who invaded Mexico in 1860. A fountain connects the major museums and a botanical garden.

Pemex Proposal We are presently working on the Pemex refinery site.

It’s a brownfield where water is important. It was closed in 1995. This plan for the park (below) will require water recycling, water cleaning, and capturing water from the rain.

Plant and Flower Market The community, which wanted to go back to agriculture, said let’s build a market to sell plants and flowers, which is what Xochimilco means in the pre-Hispanic language. It means ‘place to grow flowers’. Plant and Flower Markets boost the economy.

The park goes through a pergola through a system of plazas. Then you can enter an embarcadero at the end of the park. An arboretum contains the plants and flowers, the trees and water plants common to the landscape. Some canals were dug out and planted with some fifty thousand trees. The project created jobs, tourism, agriculture, recreation, and then connected the city through its ring road.

Chapultepec Park

Bridge from Chapultapec Park leads pedestrians over highway and into center of Mexico City.

At the present moment, we are working in Chapultepec Park. It dates from 1460. It was created by a landscape architect for King Montezuma. Chapultepec Park is like Central Park, the Mall in Washington, and also a battlefield, because this is where the last battle with the United States was fought in 1847. It’s the central open space in Mexico City.

Chapultepec receives some seventeen million people a year. With three metro stations, it connects to the metropolitan area. You can come for five pennies from anywhere in the metropolitan area to this park. It is a recreational center, has a major zoo, and three national museums.

The rehabilitation of Chapultapec is led by the Citizens Council, a board of donors and the government of Mexico City. It is a trilogy that has been able to gather $12 million in donations. So we have been able to match one peso from each donation to one peso given by the government.

Central Park in New York is 340 hectares. Chapultepec has 300 hectares of forest and another 300 hectares of park itself, plus the museums and the President’s house. Fiftyfive percent of the people in Chapultepec Park come by metro.

After some 150 presentations with citizens, in 2003 a master plan was devised. The plan for the park (shown

Left: Mexican President Fox approved the proposal to convert the Pemex site to include new lakes, an aquatic museum and moderateincome housing.

Below: The Pemex site, one of the largest brownfields in Mexico City, will be cleaned under the supervision of some 50 soil engineers from ANAM, The Autonomous University of Mexico City.

12

Suha Ozkan

Dr. Suha Ozkan Competition Advisor Istanbul Metropolitan Planning Competitions to Guide Development of Two New City Centers in Instanbul

13

Institute for Urban Design

Although Istanbul now has a mayor who is an architect, the city didn’t have a planning office for twenty years before that. It was planned by Napoleonic rules of self-interest.

When Istanbul hosted the International Congress of Architects last year, the mayor got excited about what he saw. He invited me to help to conduct competitions for two neighborhoods.

Istanbul connects two continents. The inhabitants of the city do intercontinental travel every day. They cross the Bosphorus. The city center overlooks the water which connects Asia and Europe. In the last 15 years the population doubled to 14 million. So I, with the help of the Metropolitan Planning Office and the mayor, created competitions for two new centers of development. One area, called Kartal, is fifteen kilometers away from Istanbul, but it’s still in the metropolitan district, just opposite the Princess Islands. It was occupied by industries which have become obsolete.

People own the land here in large patches. They have capital in their pocket, but there was no guidance for them to invest. The design competitions provide a set of plans to guide development. This was the mission.

The Kartal Competition We invited three architects for the Kartal competition: Zaha Hadid, Massimiliano Fuksas and Kushio Kurokawa. The eastern airport of Istanbul is adjacent to the project area. The empty area Hadid chose to transform. She connected and meshed the east and the west of the site with three patterns, to be reformed and regained.

In other words, she respected whatever existed there as property lines. She created different land-uses.

Massimiliano Fuksas from Milan, created a competition entry for the same area a north-south progression of the land use, with increasing densities and changing landuse patterns. Massimiliano’s project requires, in order to get those green in the west, a heavy land-swap or expropriation. He also proposed heavy urban structures around the crater in the north and more cultural uses in the south.

A Marine Museum is central to his proposal. At the northern area around the lake, he wants to have major urban functions. We like this plan because it can generate funds for the public sector. It would inject a substantial amount of life in the city. The new metro line will serve it.

Kushio Kurokawa proposed one major superstructure.

It is a snake-like form.There is an artificial river in between, and there are more high-rise buildings on the eastern side.

This powerful proposal was selected by a jury that included Michael Sorkin, here with us tonight.The main handicap of this proposal was that it would monopolize ownership of land so that it could be developed. If it were done in fragments, it would take ages.

Kartal:

winners Zaha Hadid, Kartal is an Massimiliano industrial site Fuksas, and on the edge Kisho Kurokawa. of Istanbul.

The aim is to Istanbul transform an Metropolitan industrial Planning area into a 555 includes an hectare central urban design business and competitions district with group that offices, homes, remains in shopping, and charge of plans a marina. by competition

12

Suha Ozkan

Dr. Suha Ozkan Competition Advisor Istanbul Metropolitan Planning Competitions to Guide Development of Two New City Centers in Instanbul

13

Institute for Urban Design

Although Istanbul now has a mayor who is an architect, the city didn’t have a planning office for twenty years before that. It was planned by Napoleonic rules of self-interest.

When Istanbul hosted the International Congress of Architects last year, the mayor got excited about what he saw. He invited me to help to conduct competitions for two neighborhoods.

Istanbul connects two continents. The inhabitants of the city do intercontinental travel every day. They cross the Bosphorus. The city center overlooks the water which connects Asia and Europe. In the last 15 years the population doubled to 14 million. So I, with the help of the Metropolitan Planning Office and the mayor, created competitions for two new centers of development. One area, called Kartal, is fifteen kilometers away from Istanbul, but it’s still in the metropolitan district, just opposite the Princess Islands. It was occupied by industries which have become obsolete.

People own the land here in large patches. They have capital in their pocket, but there was no guidance for them to invest. The design competitions provide a set of plans to guide development. This was the mission.

The Kartal Competition We invited three architects for the Kartal competition: Zaha Hadid, Massimiliano Fuksas and Kushio Kurokawa. The eastern airport of Istanbul is adjacent to the project area. The empty area Hadid chose to transform. She connected and meshed the east and the west of the site with three patterns, to be reformed and regained.

In other words, she respected whatever existed there as property lines. She created different land-uses.

Massimiliano Fuksas from Milan, created a competition entry for the same area a north-south progression of the land use, with increasing densities and changing landuse patterns. Massimiliano’s project requires, in order to get those green in the west, a heavy land-swap or expropriation. He also proposed heavy urban structures around the crater in the north and more cultural uses in the south.

A Marine Museum is central to his proposal. At the northern area around the lake, he wants to have major urban functions. We like this plan because it can generate funds for the public sector. It would inject a substantial amount of life in the city. The new metro line will serve it.

Kushio Kurokawa proposed one major superstructure.

It is a snake-like form.There is an artificial river in between, and there are more high-rise buildings on the eastern side.

This powerful proposal was selected by a jury that included Michael Sorkin, here with us tonight.The main handicap of this proposal was that it would monopolize ownership of land so that it could be developed. If it were done in fragments, it would take ages.

Kartal:

winners Zaha Hadid, Kartal is an Massimiliano industrial site Fuksas, and on the edge Kisho Kurokawa. of Istanbul.

The aim is to Istanbul transform an Metropolitan industrial Planning area into a 555 includes an hectare central urban design business and competitions district with group that offices, homes, remains in shopping, and charge of plans a marina. by competition

14

Suha Ozkan

15

Institute for Urban Design

Fuksas Architects plan for Kartal: Kartal, former industrial area of Istanbul, was selected as competition site in order to create a new business center for the city with hotels, shopping and a marina. The Massimilano Fuksas proposal includes high rise offices in the North, a marina in the South and, in the middle, a residential area. Now an association of landowners has been incorporated.

In December the city began discussion with land owners and other community representatives.

Early in 2007 discussion with Zaha Hadid will resume.

Kurokawa Architect and Associates plan for Kartal: Above: Kartal area site plan by Kisho Kurokawa is organized around a north-south axis running to the coast. The axis is also an eco-corridor for which a park is proposed. To the east a commercial center is proposed and to the west a pedestrian axis. A marina and parks line the coast.

Left: The sunken quarry lake above connects to the transportation center below which is the proposed marina.

14

Suha Ozkan

15

Institute for Urban Design

Fuksas Architects plan for Kartal: Kartal, former industrial area of Istanbul, was selected as competition site in order to create a new business center for the city with hotels, shopping and a marina. The Massimilano Fuksas proposal includes high rise offices in the North, a marina in the South and, in the middle, a residential area. Now an association of landowners has been incorporated.

In December the city began discussion with land owners and other community representatives.

Early in 2007 discussion with Zaha Hadid will resume.

Kurokawa Architect and Associates plan for Kartal: Above: Kartal area site plan by Kisho Kurokawa is organized around a north-south axis running to the coast. The axis is also an eco-corridor for which a park is proposed. To the east a commercial center is proposed and to the west a pedestrian axis. A marina and parks line the coast.

Left: The sunken quarry lake above connects to the transportation center below which is the proposed marina.

16

Suha Ozkan

17

Zaha Hadid Architects plan for Kartal: “At the Grand Buildings scheme for Trafalgar Square in London, I used the concept of carving as a way of introducing multiple events at the ground plane,” Zaha Hadid has said.

Her scheme for a new city center in Kartal suggests the same earth-carving approach. The plan, prepared

by Hadid with Patrick Schumacher, for the Greater Istanbul Municipality is being closely followed by Mayor Kadik Topbas, an architect.

Institute for Urban Design

“Urban Geometry can actually dictate activity on the street” says Hadid, and this perception is reflected in the proposal for Kartal in Istanbul.

Americans can visit Hadid’s Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati and in 2012 visit her Aquatic Center for 2012 Olympics in London.

16

Suha Ozkan

17

Zaha Hadid Architects plan for Kartal: “At the Grand Buildings scheme for Trafalgar Square in London, I used the concept of carving as a way of introducing multiple events at the ground plane,” Zaha Hadid has said.

Her scheme for a new city center in Kartal suggests the same earth-carving approach. The plan, prepared

by Hadid with Patrick Schumacher, for the Greater Istanbul Municipality is being closely followed by Mayor Kadik Topbas, an architect.

Institute for Urban Design

“Urban Geometry can actually dictate activity on the street” says Hadid, and this perception is reflected in the proposal for Kartal in Istanbul.

Americans can visit Hadid’s Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati and in 2012 visit her Aquatic Center for 2012 Olympics in London.

18

Suha Ozkan

The Kucukcekmece Competition The site for the second competition, in western Istanbul, is a fragile piece of land. It connects the sweet water lake, no longer sweet, but polluted — with the Sea of Marmara. And for this competition site, we indicated it could be urbanized because land is owned by the public. We invited to enter the competition Ken Yeang from Malaysia, Kengo Kuma from Japan and Winy Maas from Holland.

Ken Yeang proposed an eco-structure. It’s a loose urban structure, embellished with green. He put museums and theaters, and an 8-story hotel on the shore. Factories and industrial buildings he protected. He provided some overflow of the green from over the highways, so that ecological continuity would be maintained by flora and fauna.

He also connected the lake and the sea. These connections would provide the cleaning of the lake from pollution.

Kenga Kuma has proposed a marina at the place that the engineers said it should be built. But he brought to it as a reminder of Venice by providing housing with canals for sea transport. Investors love this idea because they could sell houses for millions of dollars.

19

The proposal was a couple of sizes too large for the Turkish imagination. We liked it, but more as a utopia than the reality. This is Kuma’s proposed Venice of Istanbul, even with the Rialto Bridge.

Lagoon City was the proposal of Winy Maas. We had a hard time digesting the lagoon, the area that we wanted to protect as a landscape. He proposed the marina. So the whole idea was to first dig it up, make it a marina, then build into that. So that took us by surprise. However, since the area was being so intensively built the investors liked and lobbied for this project.

These competitions were a first for Turkey. The plans of the architects were open to the public. We had an auditorium of people where the audience could respond.

The evaluation was done only by the jury. We turned the competition into a symposium. We let people voice their ideas to the jury.

Kucukcekmece: Opposite: The Kucukcekmece waterfront competition site of 181 hectares is being planned to integrate architecture into a hugescale ecosystem.

Llewelyn Davis Yeang plan for Kucukcekmece: Left: Ken Yeung, Llewelyn Davis Yeang competition plan envisions an eco-park, aquarium and marina.

Institute for Urban Design

18

Suha Ozkan

The Kucukcekmece Competition The site for the second competition, in western Istanbul, is a fragile piece of land. It connects the sweet water lake, no longer sweet, but polluted — with the Sea of Marmara. And for this competition site, we indicated it could be urbanized because land is owned by the public. We invited to enter the competition Ken Yeang from Malaysia, Kengo Kuma from Japan and Winy Maas from Holland.

Ken Yeang proposed an eco-structure. It’s a loose urban structure, embellished with green. He put museums and theaters, and an 8-story hotel on the shore. Factories and industrial buildings he protected. He provided some overflow of the green from over the highways, so that ecological continuity would be maintained by flora and fauna.

He also connected the lake and the sea. These connections would provide the cleaning of the lake from pollution.

Kenga Kuma has proposed a marina at the place that the engineers said it should be built. But he brought to it as a reminder of Venice by providing housing with canals for sea transport. Investors love this idea because they could sell houses for millions of dollars.

19

The proposal was a couple of sizes too large for the Turkish imagination. We liked it, but more as a utopia than the reality. This is Kuma’s proposed Venice of Istanbul, even with the Rialto Bridge.

Lagoon City was the proposal of Winy Maas. We had a hard time digesting the lagoon, the area that we wanted to protect as a landscape. He proposed the marina. So the whole idea was to first dig it up, make it a marina, then build into that. So that took us by surprise. However, since the area was being so intensively built the investors liked and lobbied for this project.

These competitions were a first for Turkey. The plans of the architects were open to the public. We had an auditorium of people where the audience could respond.

The evaluation was done only by the jury. We turned the competition into a symposium. We let people voice their ideas to the jury.

Kucukcekmece: Opposite: The Kucukcekmece waterfront competition site of 181 hectares is being planned to integrate architecture into a hugescale ecosystem.

Llewelyn Davis Yeang plan for Kucukcekmece: Left: Ken Yeung, Llewelyn Davis Yeang competition plan envisions an eco-park, aquarium and marina.

Institute for Urban Design

20

Suha Ozkan

21

Institute for Urban Design

Exchange

Response

Lance Jay Brown Mexico City, which is in the middle of a land mass, has a water issue. Everything we’re going to talk about tonight, will be about how we deal with land and water interfaces. With that, does Mario have a question for Suha, or does Suha have a question for Mario?

Robert Ouellette The National Post Toronto

Suha Ozkan I want to know about the financial aspects of Mario’s parks. The larger project I had is 550 hectares, the other one is 180 hectares of land.

Mario Schjetnan The Xochimilco Park is a major rehabilitation of 3,000 hectares, and the park itself was 300.

The project was financed for $500 million. It was financed by selling precious land in the ’90s, and through a World Bank loan. So overall, half a billion dollars was small for Mexico City.

Suha Ozkan I left my real job after twenty-five years with the Aga Khan Awards to induce some positive changes in Istanbul. We are talking about 550 hectares of land, which is now occupied 40 percent by industries. We are thinking of it, because it is a land speculation in construction.

In the end, we thought that we should make it an association, which gives free access to every individual to become a member. It was the most democratic way of doing it. The association becomes the client. Whereas in the landscape project, we expect the public to generate the funds, and do it with limited developments for certain pinpointed areas where there’s precious land and some kind of profit, like the 5-star or as Ken calls it, 8-star hotels to be built. That would be the way to do it.

Mario Schjetnan The Pemex project is the former Pemex refinery of Mexico City. Now we have convinced Pemex to remediate the site. They have set aside $15 million in the first stage to remediate it.

The government has promised to do the park itself, which costs some $10 million. Then other investors will come. A major aquarium will be privately and publicly financed. It’s a project that’s going to go on for the next six or ten years.

Kengo Kuma and Associates plan for Kucukcekmece: Kengo Kuma, said to have been influenced

by Bruno Taut, called Istanbul a bridge between the east and west. His plan

calls for seven canals together with raised green areas to enhance pedestrian circulation.

MVRDV plan for Kucukcekmece: Winy Maas of MVRDV proposes two new canals between the Marmara Sea and Kucukcekmece Lake. A marina, convention center and hotel are envisioned.

Three projects tonight are indicative of a positive trend in opposition to the overwhelming negative environmental news. Every day we hear that the seas are rising, the ozone is being depleted. When I look at projects like these, the fact that they’re being implemented by such capable designers makes me realize that if there is something that’s going to save us, it is the process of design. We have the tools that allow us to understand complex situations in ways we could never do before. Mario’s collision of Cortes and Montezuma was a nice metaphor.

It’s also a good metaphor for understanding the complexity of the environment and how we can solve those issues with design. Today what we see is designers taking complex technical solutions and recreating nature in ways that nature never conceived of. Dr. Ozkan mentioned how you finance complex programs like these.

Without understanding those, the macroeconomic systems, these design solutions can’t take place.

Charles McKinney Chief of Design City of New York Parks & Recreation As Chief of Design for New York City Parks Department, I believe that landscape architecture is the most important career path of this century, that the future of the world depends on landscape architecture. It depends on the creative reverence for the in-between.

The men who have spoken to us tonight have demonstrated that they're not professionals interested in what things look like, they are interested in creating a world worth living in.

Right now the person who’s doing the most for New York City’s urban environment is our mayor. If it wasn’t for the mayor, there would be no interest in design at the level of the city.

New York City is spending $300 million a year now on open space. We are spending $300 million knitting our urban fabric back together.

20

Suha Ozkan

21

Institute for Urban Design

Exchange

Response

Lance Jay Brown Mexico City, which is in the middle of a land mass, has a water issue. Everything we’re going to talk about tonight, will be about how we deal with land and water interfaces. With that, does Mario have a question for Suha, or does Suha have a question for Mario?

Robert Ouellette The National Post Toronto

Suha Ozkan I want to know about the financial aspects of Mario’s parks. The larger project I had is 550 hectares, the other one is 180 hectares of land.

Mario Schjetnan The Xochimilco Park is a major rehabilitation of 3,000 hectares, and the park itself was 300.

The project was financed for $500 million. It was financed by selling precious land in the ’90s, and through a World Bank loan. So overall, half a billion dollars was small for Mexico City.

Suha Ozkan I left my real job after twenty-five years with the Aga Khan Awards to induce some positive changes in Istanbul. We are talking about 550 hectares of land, which is now occupied 40 percent by industries. We are thinking of it, because it is a land speculation in construction.

In the end, we thought that we should make it an association, which gives free access to every individual to become a member. It was the most democratic way of doing it. The association becomes the client. Whereas in the landscape project, we expect the public to generate the funds, and do it with limited developments for certain pinpointed areas where there’s precious land and some kind of profit, like the 5-star or as Ken calls it, 8-star hotels to be built. That would be the way to do it.

Mario Schjetnan The Pemex project is the former Pemex refinery of Mexico City. Now we have convinced Pemex to remediate the site. They have set aside $15 million in the first stage to remediate it.

The government has promised to do the park itself, which costs some $10 million. Then other investors will come. A major aquarium will be privately and publicly financed. It’s a project that’s going to go on for the next six or ten years.

Kengo Kuma and Associates plan for Kucukcekmece: Kengo Kuma, said to have been influenced

by Bruno Taut, called Istanbul a bridge between the east and west. His plan

calls for seven canals together with raised green areas to enhance pedestrian circulation.

MVRDV plan for Kucukcekmece: Winy Maas of MVRDV proposes two new canals between the Marmara Sea and Kucukcekmece Lake. A marina, convention center and hotel are envisioned.

Three projects tonight are indicative of a positive trend in opposition to the overwhelming negative environmental news. Every day we hear that the seas are rising, the ozone is being depleted. When I look at projects like these, the fact that they’re being implemented by such capable designers makes me realize that if there is something that’s going to save us, it is the process of design. We have the tools that allow us to understand complex situations in ways we could never do before. Mario’s collision of Cortes and Montezuma was a nice metaphor.

It’s also a good metaphor for understanding the complexity of the environment and how we can solve those issues with design. Today what we see is designers taking complex technical solutions and recreating nature in ways that nature never conceived of. Dr. Ozkan mentioned how you finance complex programs like these.

Without understanding those, the macroeconomic systems, these design solutions can’t take place.

Charles McKinney Chief of Design City of New York Parks & Recreation As Chief of Design for New York City Parks Department, I believe that landscape architecture is the most important career path of this century, that the future of the world depends on landscape architecture. It depends on the creative reverence for the in-between.

The men who have spoken to us tonight have demonstrated that they're not professionals interested in what things look like, they are interested in creating a world worth living in.

Right now the person who’s doing the most for New York City’s urban environment is our mayor. If it wasn’t for the mayor, there would be no interest in design at the level of the city.

New York City is spending $300 million a year now on open space. We are spending $300 million knitting our urban fabric back together.

22

Sustainable Cities

23

Overview

Welcome

10.18.2006

Panel 1 New Orleans Rebuilds While St.Paul Expands; Both Along the Mississippi

United Nations UN-Habitat New York

Dr. Axumite Gebre-Egziabher Director UN-Habitat New York Office Excellencies, distinguished guests, United Nations colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the executive director of UN-Habitat, Mrs. Anna Tibajuka, it’s an honor and pleasure for me to welcome you here at the United Nations headquarters. I would like to take this opportunity to express my appreciation to the representatives of permanent missions to the United Nations, and to Ambassador Judith Bahemuka from Kenya to Canada. We are delighted to have her here.

We have also special guests from Japan, the United Kingdom, and Mexico. I welcome you all. My sincere gratitude also goes to the organizers, the Institute for Urban Design, Toyo University, Building & Social Housing Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

I would like to congratulate the Institute and, particularly Ann Ferebee, founding director, Lance Brown, together with my friend Aliye Celik, who have been instrumental in putting this event together with us. I welcome you to the United Nations Human Settlements program, UN-Habitat, the city agency of the United Nations.

The year 2007 marks a turning point in history. One out of every two people will be living in a city. Whereas Europe, North America and Latin America experienced intense urbanization and rapid growth through the mid-20th century, the trend has now shifted to Asia and Africa. Annual urban growth rates are highest in Sub-Saharan Africa, averaging about 4.58 percent, while the developed world’s cities are growing at a slower pace, averaging about 0.7 percent per year.

Cities are centers of economic growth and cultural creativity. People move for a better life. However, one out of three city dwellers, a total of one billion people, are living in slums and half of them are women. In many countries, immigrants constitute a growing group of urban residents that are victims of exclusion. They are often denied access to housing and urban services, and have no voice in decision-making.

Urban design and urban planning are essential in addressing some of these challenges. Much of the thinking about sustainable development and planning is in flux. It is important to seize this opportunity to develop a clearer vision for the future. In UN-Habitat, we believe that holding this conference is an important step. I hope that we will be able to explore the nature of challenges and what we can do about them. Implications of migration at the urban level must be assessed. While UN-Habitat, within its mandate, assists local authorities to adopt more inclusive governance and management, there is an urgent need for a coordinated approach across all spheres of government to overcome inconsistencies in policies and practices. If we want to build inclusive cities, we have to pay much more attention.

We hope that the presentation today will enable us to develop the right policy options, to implement more effective strategies and to learn from each other and to be able to celebrate the true sense of our humanity, our cultural diversity.

Program Goals Ann Ferebee Founding Director Institute for Urban Design Thank you, madam. This meeting is a culmination of my work at the Institute. I’ve been director for twenty-five years, but I never thought I would be here at the United Nations. I wish my mother were here. Thanks to our sponsors from overseas and our sponsors here in New York.

A British author from the late 1950s, C.P. Snow, the novelist and scientist, gave us the term “the two cultures”.

In the post-war London situation it seemed to him that historians, poets and novelists sat on one side of the city and the mathematicians and scientists sat on the other.

The two cultures never interacted, said C.P. Snow. Today’s event is unique in providing an opportunity for those from the world of policy and diplomacy to teach those of us in the world of landscape architecture, planning and urban design about the policy issues. We really have existed in two separate worlds. Today is our opportunity to exchange with one another.

Last night Mario Schjetnan reminded us of the enormous predicted population growth in Mexico City, Tokyo, and New York. Nairobi and other cities in Africa will be growing even more rapidly. But New Orleans which has, since Katrina, lost 60 percent of its population, is shrinking. Cities along the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal, like Youngstown, have also lost 50 percent or more of their population. Darren Walker will report on New Orleans.

22

Sustainable Cities

23

Overview

Welcome

10.18.2006

Panel 1 New Orleans Rebuilds While St.Paul Expands; Both Along the Mississippi

United Nations UN-Habitat New York

Dr. Axumite Gebre-Egziabher Director UN-Habitat New York Office Excellencies, distinguished guests, United Nations colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the executive director of UN-Habitat, Mrs. Anna Tibajuka, it’s an honor and pleasure for me to welcome you here at the United Nations headquarters. I would like to take this opportunity to express my appreciation to the representatives of permanent missions to the United Nations, and to Ambassador Judith Bahemuka from Kenya to Canada. We are delighted to have her here.

We have also special guests from Japan, the United Kingdom, and Mexico. I welcome you all. My sincere gratitude also goes to the organizers, the Institute for Urban Design, Toyo University, Building & Social Housing Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

I would like to congratulate the Institute and, particularly Ann Ferebee, founding director, Lance Brown, together with my friend Aliye Celik, who have been instrumental in putting this event together with us. I welcome you to the United Nations Human Settlements program, UN-Habitat, the city agency of the United Nations.

The year 2007 marks a turning point in history. One out of every two people will be living in a city. Whereas Europe, North America and Latin America experienced intense urbanization and rapid growth through the mid-20th century, the trend has now shifted to Asia and Africa. Annual urban growth rates are highest in Sub-Saharan Africa, averaging about 4.58 percent, while the developed world’s cities are growing at a slower pace, averaging about 0.7 percent per year.

Cities are centers of economic growth and cultural creativity. People move for a better life. However, one out of three city dwellers, a total of one billion people, are living in slums and half of them are women. In many countries, immigrants constitute a growing group of urban residents that are victims of exclusion. They are often denied access to housing and urban services, and have no voice in decision-making.

Urban design and urban planning are essential in addressing some of these challenges. Much of the thinking about sustainable development and planning is in flux. It is important to seize this opportunity to develop a clearer vision for the future. In UN-Habitat, we believe that holding this conference is an important step. I hope that we will be able to explore the nature of challenges and what we can do about them. Implications of migration at the urban level must be assessed. While UN-Habitat, within its mandate, assists local authorities to adopt more inclusive governance and management, there is an urgent need for a coordinated approach across all spheres of government to overcome inconsistencies in policies and practices. If we want to build inclusive cities, we have to pay much more attention.

We hope that the presentation today will enable us to develop the right policy options, to implement more effective strategies and to learn from each other and to be able to celebrate the true sense of our humanity, our cultural diversity.

Program Goals Ann Ferebee Founding Director Institute for Urban Design Thank you, madam. This meeting is a culmination of my work at the Institute. I’ve been director for twenty-five years, but I never thought I would be here at the United Nations. I wish my mother were here. Thanks to our sponsors from overseas and our sponsors here in New York.

A British author from the late 1950s, C.P. Snow, the novelist and scientist, gave us the term “the two cultures”.

In the post-war London situation it seemed to him that historians, poets and novelists sat on one side of the city and the mathematicians and scientists sat on the other.

The two cultures never interacted, said C.P. Snow. Today’s event is unique in providing an opportunity for those from the world of policy and diplomacy to teach those of us in the world of landscape architecture, planning and urban design about the policy issues. We really have existed in two separate worlds. Today is our opportunity to exchange with one another.

Last night Mario Schjetnan reminded us of the enormous predicted population growth in Mexico City, Tokyo, and New York. Nairobi and other cities in Africa will be growing even more rapidly. But New Orleans which has, since Katrina, lost 60 percent of its population, is shrinking. Cities along the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal, like Youngstown, have also lost 50 percent or more of their population. Darren Walker will report on New Orleans.

24

Darren Walker

Panel 1 Darren Walker Vice President Foundation Initiatives Rockefeller Foundation Nine Plans Will Provide Foundation for Rebuilding in New Orleans

25

I am honored to be here today representing the Rockefeller Foundation. I was born in Louisiana, and although I grew up a Texan, I always had a great affinity for Louisiana and, of course, New Orleans. When the horrible tragedy of Katrina and its aftermath hit, I immediately resonated to what I saw because, as an American, as an African-American, as someone who believes in our values as a country, I was deeply disturbed. For the Rockefeller Foundation, the question of New Orleans was straightforward in terms of a decision to support efforts to rebuild. We have worked on urban poverty in the United States for more than forty years, and on reducing the poverty that we have found in New Orleans, although New Orleans represents a rather acute circumstance. The elements that were present in New Orleans before Katrina are present in many cities in this country.

Race, Class, Democracy We also were moved after Katrina because what’s happening in that region is a narrative about this country.

It is about the intersection of race, class, democracy, the built environment and social justice. It’s quite complex.

For many people when they look at a city like New Orleans today, they’re overwhelmed by the complexity of the challenge. We believe that, as a philanthropic organization, we should embrace that complexity, recognize that there are risks associated with investing in New Orleans, and work to mitigate and anticipate those risks. But at the end of the day, we must be committed.

What happened in New Orleans revealed so much about our nation, and it revealed it to the world. People were shocked and appalled by what they saw. My colleagues in our office in Nairobi, many of whom had never visited America, were unsettled by what they saw because they’d always heard us lecture them about the atrocities of poverty and governance in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet in our own backyard was revealed an extraordinary level of deprivation and marginalization of people.

So, New Orleans is not just about America taking care of Americans for the sake of America. During this difficult time internationally, it is also about America demonstrating to the world that we can solve our problems at home no matter how intractable they may appear.

I want to talk about New Orleans and what we’re trying to do to help. In fact, this isn’t a story about the Rockefeller Foundation. It’s a story about incredible resilience on the part of so many people who are determined to rebuild their city. I want to talk about the context for planning, the planning process and some of the emerging designs. They illuminate a way forward for the city.

The challenging context for planning in New Orleans has to be acknowledged. Architects and planners are quite focused on the environment. But New Orleans is a complex ecology. It’s complex because there are real issues of governance. The role of government, at the federal, state and local level, has come into question as a result of Katrina.

The local political condition can be confounding. There is little tradition of constructive collaboration across lines

Institute for Urban Design

of governance, race and class. It is not easy to reconcile the different constituents and stakeholders in the city.

Differences have developed along race and class lines.

In order to move forward in New Orleans we must confront the impact of two centuries of marginalization of African-Americans, who live in the region. When one looks at the way in which the city has emerged over time, you see the manifestation of those decades of racial marginalization, and marginalization based upon class.

Population Loss Of course, talking about New Orleans’ future brings into question how many people will ultimately return to New Orleans.Beginning in the 1960s, New Orleans, like most U.S. cities, experienced what we call “white flight”, middle class flight, out of the city. New Orleans, like Detroit at one time, had a population of more than 800,000 people. Now it finds itself, at least by the census count in August, at 160,000 people. It is certain that there will be more people returning to New Orleans, but it’s not likely that in the near term New Orleans is going to return to its pre-Katrina population of 400,000 residents.

The matter of returning residents is difficult for people to talk about. It’s difficult because it’s integrally related to the issues of race and class. When you talk to African-American citizens, particularly poor AfricanAmerican citizens, there is not much belief that there is going to be a place for them in the new New Orleans. When one looks at vulnerable neighborhoods, like the Lower Ninth Ward that was populated by African-Americans, fairminded people have argued that it and similarly situated neighborhoods shouldn’t be rebuilt. Others vehemently disagree. This is all a part of the local discourse, and it makes it hard to have a planning process when the fundamental question of “Is your neighborhood going to be rebuilt?” is on the table.

Darren Walker emphasizes the challenge of racial separation as illustrated

by New Orleans planning meetings for the Lower 9th Ward (left) and the French Quarter (below).

Finally, we have to also discuss the challenge of capacity. I can speak for our Foundation when I say New Orleans was a difficult place for a number of years to work.

We ultimately made the decision that we would not invest in New Orleans — this was more than a decade ago — because it was a difficult environment and the capacitybuilding that we attempted to invest in simply wasn’t taking hold. Given limited resources and given the fact that there are other cities where those investments were taking hold, we made a determination to not invest in New Orleans.

We also have to take responsibility for the reality today, not necessarily saying that we should have continued to invest, but recognizing that capacity and infrastructure matter. In a city like New Orleans, at this point in time, there isn’t the absorptive capacity to execute on the unified plan when it is complete. That’s something that we are thinking about, because we have to be positioned, once this plan is completed, to advance it, execute it, monitor it, and ensure its success.

Planning Process The planning process is called the Unified New Orleans Plan (UNOP). Before I get into the plan, it’s important to understand why a foundation is paying for what appears to be something that the government should fund.

This is a fundamental question that is at the heart of New Orleans and at the heart of much of the debate going on in this country about the role of government. The planning process for New Orleans is part of a state-wide planning process that, as a part of the federal legislation, has been mandated to be completed in order for the city to receive infrastructure funding and other investments from the federal government. A plan is required.The state was mandated by the federal government to create a state-wide plan for all of the distressed parishes. The governor put in place a funding program for those plans in the other parishes.

When the governor and mayor discussed Orleans Parish, the mayor demurred and said that he would rather take the lead in the funding and planning for his parish.

So it is important to understand that there are structural issues at play, there are political issues at play, and there are personal issues at play. When the mayor demurred, the governor went forward with the planning process for the other distressed parishes. In fact, every parish in the state of Louisiana that was deemed distressed by the federal government, does have a plan now. Orleans does not. The mayor was under the mistaken belief that FEMA would underwrite the planning process. FEMA ultimately declined.

Because the city was bankrupt, it had no capacity, as most cities do, to access the municipal finance markets. And the federal government had already given instructions to the state to generate a plan. So, in fairness, the federal government actually thought the state and city would come together.

We were approached at the eleventh hour, because the mayor realized that he had no money to plan, and the city was insolvent. They’d laid off 90 percent of the staff

24

Darren Walker

Panel 1 Darren Walker Vice President Foundation Initiatives Rockefeller Foundation Nine Plans Will Provide Foundation for Rebuilding in New Orleans

25

I am honored to be here today representing the Rockefeller Foundation. I was born in Louisiana, and although I grew up a Texan, I always had a great affinity for Louisiana and, of course, New Orleans. When the horrible tragedy of Katrina and its aftermath hit, I immediately resonated to what I saw because, as an American, as an African-American, as someone who believes in our values as a country, I was deeply disturbed. For the Rockefeller Foundation, the question of New Orleans was straightforward in terms of a decision to support efforts to rebuild. We have worked on urban poverty in the United States for more than forty years, and on reducing the poverty that we have found in New Orleans, although New Orleans represents a rather acute circumstance. The elements that were present in New Orleans before Katrina are present in many cities in this country.

Race, Class, Democracy We also were moved after Katrina because what’s happening in that region is a narrative about this country.

It is about the intersection of race, class, democracy, the built environment and social justice. It’s quite complex.

For many people when they look at a city like New Orleans today, they’re overwhelmed by the complexity of the challenge. We believe that, as a philanthropic organization, we should embrace that complexity, recognize that there are risks associated with investing in New Orleans, and work to mitigate and anticipate those risks. But at the end of the day, we must be committed.

What happened in New Orleans revealed so much about our nation, and it revealed it to the world. People were shocked and appalled by what they saw. My colleagues in our office in Nairobi, many of whom had never visited America, were unsettled by what they saw because they’d always heard us lecture them about the atrocities of poverty and governance in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet in our own backyard was revealed an extraordinary level of deprivation and marginalization of people.

So, New Orleans is not just about America taking care of Americans for the sake of America. During this difficult time internationally, it is also about America demonstrating to the world that we can solve our problems at home no matter how intractable they may appear.

I want to talk about New Orleans and what we’re trying to do to help. In fact, this isn’t a story about the Rockefeller Foundation. It’s a story about incredible resilience on the part of so many people who are determined to rebuild their city. I want to talk about the context for planning, the planning process and some of the emerging designs. They illuminate a way forward for the city.

The challenging context for planning in New Orleans has to be acknowledged. Architects and planners are quite focused on the environment. But New Orleans is a complex ecology. It’s complex because there are real issues of governance. The role of government, at the federal, state and local level, has come into question as a result of Katrina.

The local political condition can be confounding. There is little tradition of constructive collaboration across lines

Institute for Urban Design

of governance, race and class. It is not easy to reconcile the different constituents and stakeholders in the city.

Differences have developed along race and class lines.

In order to move forward in New Orleans we must confront the impact of two centuries of marginalization of African-Americans, who live in the region. When one looks at the way in which the city has emerged over time, you see the manifestation of those decades of racial marginalization, and marginalization based upon class.

Population Loss Of course, talking about New Orleans’ future brings into question how many people will ultimately return to New Orleans.Beginning in the 1960s, New Orleans, like most U.S. cities, experienced what we call “white flight”, middle class flight, out of the city. New Orleans, like Detroit at one time, had a population of more than 800,000 people. Now it finds itself, at least by the census count in August, at 160,000 people. It is certain that there will be more people returning to New Orleans, but it’s not likely that in the near term New Orleans is going to return to its pre-Katrina population of 400,000 residents.

The matter of returning residents is difficult for people to talk about. It’s difficult because it’s integrally related to the issues of race and class. When you talk to African-American citizens, particularly poor AfricanAmerican citizens, there is not much belief that there is going to be a place for them in the new New Orleans. When one looks at vulnerable neighborhoods, like the Lower Ninth Ward that was populated by African-Americans, fairminded people have argued that it and similarly situated neighborhoods shouldn’t be rebuilt. Others vehemently disagree. This is all a part of the local discourse, and it makes it hard to have a planning process when the fundamental question of “Is your neighborhood going to be rebuilt?” is on the table.

Darren Walker emphasizes the challenge of racial separation as illustrated

by New Orleans planning meetings for the Lower 9th Ward (left) and the French Quarter (below).

Finally, we have to also discuss the challenge of capacity. I can speak for our Foundation when I say New Orleans was a difficult place for a number of years to work.

We ultimately made the decision that we would not invest in New Orleans — this was more than a decade ago — because it was a difficult environment and the capacitybuilding that we attempted to invest in simply wasn’t taking hold. Given limited resources and given the fact that there are other cities where those investments were taking hold, we made a determination to not invest in New Orleans.

We also have to take responsibility for the reality today, not necessarily saying that we should have continued to invest, but recognizing that capacity and infrastructure matter. In a city like New Orleans, at this point in time, there isn’t the absorptive capacity to execute on the unified plan when it is complete. That’s something that we are thinking about, because we have to be positioned, once this plan is completed, to advance it, execute it, monitor it, and ensure its success.

Planning Process The planning process is called the Unified New Orleans Plan (UNOP). Before I get into the plan, it’s important to understand why a foundation is paying for what appears to be something that the government should fund.

This is a fundamental question that is at the heart of New Orleans and at the heart of much of the debate going on in this country about the role of government. The planning process for New Orleans is part of a state-wide planning process that, as a part of the federal legislation, has been mandated to be completed in order for the city to receive infrastructure funding and other investments from the federal government. A plan is required.The state was mandated by the federal government to create a state-wide plan for all of the distressed parishes. The governor put in place a funding program for those plans in the other parishes.

When the governor and mayor discussed Orleans Parish, the mayor demurred and said that he would rather take the lead in the funding and planning for his parish.

So it is important to understand that there are structural issues at play, there are political issues at play, and there are personal issues at play. When the mayor demurred, the governor went forward with the planning process for the other distressed parishes. In fact, every parish in the state of Louisiana that was deemed distressed by the federal government, does have a plan now. Orleans does not. The mayor was under the mistaken belief that FEMA would underwrite the planning process. FEMA ultimately declined.

Because the city was bankrupt, it had no capacity, as most cities do, to access the municipal finance markets. And the federal government had already given instructions to the state to generate a plan. So, in fairness, the federal government actually thought the state and city would come together.

We were approached at the eleventh hour, because the mayor realized that he had no money to plan, and the city was insolvent. They’d laid off 90 percent of the staff

26

Darren Walker

of city government. The planning agency was down to two staff members. I asked the same question. Why are you calling the Foundation to pay for something that ought to be paid for by city government? It became clear that there was a bottleneck, and that the city itself had paid for some planning to go on in some of the neighborhoods. So the Mayor and City Council actually did attempt, with the limited resources they had, but it was disparate, not comprehensive and ultimately insufficient.

We wanted to galvanize the local planning effort, because over time many people, including many of you in this room and at universities across the country, descended upon New Orleans to offer help. So there were many disparate planning activities underway, many of which were high-quality and creative.

Unified New Orleans Plan UNOP, as it is currently called, has as its goal to bring together neighborhood planning efforts, as well as a citywide plan, which will be presented to the City Council and the Louisiana Recovery Authority (LRA), as required by law.

When that plan is approved, the LRA will begin to disperse infrastructure dollars. The important thing here to understand is that there has to be a coordinated master plan.

We felt that rather than giving the money to government, the best way to do that would be to create a partnership among government, private architects and planners and local philanthropy to move the process forward as quickly as possible.

Planning Charettes In our original conversations with the city and with local leaders, we came up with goals that were based on development principles that will help ensure that we don’t repeat past mistakes. The first is to have a process that is equitable and inclusive. Far too often policy decisions are made in ways that exclude low-income people. One of the ways in which we have encouraged this is to ensure that local community representatives are part of the UNOP management; they are a part of the oversight, and they are participating at the neighborhood level where the planning charettes are occurring and where they’re interacting and making it clear what their priorities are. UNOP is also holding charettes in diaspora cities of Houston, Dallas, Atlanta and Baton Rouge.

HOPE VI Mixed-income development, in some circles in this country, is a contested area of housing policy. In the 1990s, the federal government initiated a program called HOPE VI, which was meant to remove distressed public housing from inner cities across America. Probably the most potent example is in Chicago, where about two-thirds of public housing is being torn down.The theory underlying this was based on the work of a group of housing advocates and

27

lawyers in Chicago who successfully brought a class action lawsuit on behalf of a Ms. Gautreaux and other residents in the 1980s against the City of Chicago Public Housing Authority. As a part of the settlement, Ms. Gautreaux and a number of other plaintiffs were relocated into economically mixed, primarily white neighborhoods around Chicago.

There was a longitudinal study of the impact of that move on this cohort of public housing residents. The study indicated that the impacts of relocation were positive. Around a host of issues, from access to jobs to security and safety, people felt less at risk and more secure.

In the 1990s, then Secretary of HUD, Henry Cisneros, and President Clinton became intrigued by this idea, and House Speaker Newt Gingrich also liked the program.

They put in place a multi-billion dollar program that is reshaping much of housing for the poor in U.S. cities. The problem is that this is not a one-for-one replacement program where if you have a hundred units in a development, a hundred units are going to be rebuilt for poor people.

This requires that poor people be dispersed into a regional housing marketplace, and there are some problems associated with this strategy.

HOPE VI is also about investing equitably in amenities. We all know in many urban areas, particularly where poor people live, there is insufficient space and not wellmaintained public amenities. One has to walk or drive a greater distance to get basic services. We want to make sure that when the infrastructure plan for New Orleans is done, that this issue is addressed. It also has to leverage the opportunity for creating jobs. The irony of what’s going on in Louisiana is that many people thought that Louisiana was going to be broke by the end of this year. In fact, the Louisiana State Treasury has a surplus because of a federal transfer of funds and its impact on spurring economic development and tax receipts. This transfer has had an amazing impact on the local economy. The reality is there are capacity challenges in the construction industry and in the housing industry to actually utilize this money effectively.

Building Local Capacity Finally, we have to build local capacity, both of people and of institutions, to sustain this effort once it’s completed. The program was quite fragmented. UNOP has brought together the local neighborhood and the citywide planners. We have a terrific group of national architects, planners and designers engaged. There are thirteen planning districts all working feverishly with design professionals to develop a plan to be reviewed ultimately by the Louisiana Recovery Authority.That will be in February ’07.

My colleague, Margot Brandenburg, found the pictures (page 25) that are both a visual of the planning process and a visual of the challenge. When you look on the top in the district planning meeting of the Lower Ninth Ward, you see all African-Americans, and when you look at the district planning meeting in the French Quarter, you see all whites. This is a challenge. As the city plans for the future,

Institute for Urban Design

are we going to have black people planning for the black neighborhoods and white people planning for the white neighborhoods?

There are some interesting emerging plans as the architects and planners have been fantastic in their creativity and engagement with local people. This Gentilly neighborhood was an historically African-American,middleclass neighborhood that was built after the Second World War, and it’s mostly beautiful bungalows and very nice midcentury modern houses. What came out of the charette that Andres Duany did with the residents of Gentilly was the idea of this town center for the neighborhood, with a public space in the middle, then mixed-use development around the periphery of the public space. It’s inventive and reflects the work of community people saying to a talented architect and planning team, this is our vision for our community.

Ray Gindroz of Urban Design Associates is doing terrific work in reconceptualizing public housing. It’s important to understand that as a part of the rebuilding of New Orleans, the federal government has made the decision to tear down five of the seven large public housing projects in the city. This is a controversial move. It begs the question that I raised before — where are the poor people going to go? Projects such as Lafitte are mixed-income, and there will be a cap on the number of poor residents who can live there. That cap exceeds the number of poor people who are currently living in these projects. So, we have to ask hard questions to ensure that poor residents, who live in these formerly highly-concentrated neighborhoods, will have the opportunity to live in another part of town.

This rendering envisions the transformation in Lafitte.

You can see at the top what it looks like now and the vision.

The proposal is one of my favorites. The Katrina cottage, a wonderful design by Marianne Cusato, is a small structure that initially was thought of as temporary, but it actually was designed to be added on to and be habitable, utilitarian and culturally consistent with New Orleans vernacular.

As we consider the next few months of planning, it’s going to be incumbent upon us to monitor the progress, to ask ourselves: Is this process inclusive? Are we replicating patterns of the past that will ensure more segregated housing and neighborhoods? Will there be sustainability of the public and private investments? Finally, we have to evaluate this. We want to learn from this process whether or not the kinds of interventions that are being implemented are effective, whether or not they are sustainable, and whether or not they ultimately have a positive impact on people’s lives. We’re prepared to say we don’t know the answer to that. But we do believe that we have to try new approaches, we have to experiment in different ways, because doing what’s been done in the past will yield what we had in New Orleans before Katrina, and that’s not acceptable.

Top: Andres Duany has provided a classic new urbanist master plan for the Gentilly district.

Above: Ray Gindroz, Urban Design Associates, Pittsburg, has provided a plan for a still devastated neighborhood.

Center: The photo shows the street from same neighborhood today.

Left: Katrina Cottage is designed to be added onto. Designer Marianne Cusato is currently preparing new variations on the original model.

26

Darren Walker

of city government. The planning agency was down to two staff members. I asked the same question. Why are you calling the Foundation to pay for something that ought to be paid for by city government? It became clear that there was a bottleneck, and that the city itself had paid for some planning to go on in some of the neighborhoods. So the Mayor and City Council actually did attempt, with the limited resources they had, but it was disparate, not comprehensive and ultimately insufficient.

We wanted to galvanize the local planning effort, because over time many people, including many of you in this room and at universities across the country, descended upon New Orleans to offer help. So there were many disparate planning activities underway, many of which were high-quality and creative.

Unified New Orleans Plan UNOP, as it is currently called, has as its goal to bring together neighborhood planning efforts, as well as a citywide plan, which will be presented to the City Council and the Louisiana Recovery Authority (LRA), as required by law.

When that plan is approved, the LRA will begin to disperse infrastructure dollars. The important thing here to understand is that there has to be a coordinated master plan.

We felt that rather than giving the money to government, the best way to do that would be to create a partnership among government, private architects and planners and local philanthropy to move the process forward as quickly as possible.

Planning Charettes In our original conversations with the city and with local leaders, we came up with goals that were based on development principles that will help ensure that we don’t repeat past mistakes. The first is to have a process that is equitable and inclusive. Far too often policy decisions are made in ways that exclude low-income people. One of the ways in which we have encouraged this is to ensure that local community representatives are part of the UNOP management; they are a part of the oversight, and they are participating at the neighborhood level where the planning charettes are occurring and where they’re interacting and making it clear what their priorities are. UNOP is also holding charettes in diaspora cities of Houston, Dallas, Atlanta and Baton Rouge.

HOPE VI Mixed-income development, in some circles in this country, is a contested area of housing policy. In the 1990s, the federal government initiated a program called HOPE VI, which was meant to remove distressed public housing from inner cities across America. Probably the most potent example is in Chicago, where about two-thirds of public housing is being torn down.The theory underlying this was based on the work of a group of housing advocates and

27

lawyers in Chicago who successfully brought a class action lawsuit on behalf of a Ms. Gautreaux and other residents in the 1980s against the City of Chicago Public Housing Authority. As a part of the settlement, Ms. Gautreaux and a number of other plaintiffs were relocated into economically mixed, primarily white neighborhoods around Chicago.

There was a longitudinal study of the impact of that move on this cohort of public housing residents. The study indicated that the impacts of relocation were positive. Around a host of issues, from access to jobs to security and safety, people felt less at risk and more secure.

In the 1990s, then Secretary of HUD, Henry Cisneros, and President Clinton became intrigued by this idea, and House Speaker Newt Gingrich also liked the program.

They put in place a multi-billion dollar program that is reshaping much of housing for the poor in U.S. cities. The problem is that this is not a one-for-one replacement program where if you have a hundred units in a development, a hundred units are going to be rebuilt for poor people.

This requires that poor people be dispersed into a regional housing marketplace, and there are some problems associated with this strategy.

HOPE VI is also about investing equitably in amenities. We all know in many urban areas, particularly where poor people live, there is insufficient space and not wellmaintained public amenities. One has to walk or drive a greater distance to get basic services. We want to make sure that when the infrastructure plan for New Orleans is done, that this issue is addressed. It also has to leverage the opportunity for creating jobs. The irony of what’s going on in Louisiana is that many people thought that Louisiana was going to be broke by the end of this year. In fact, the Louisiana State Treasury has a surplus because of a federal transfer of funds and its impact on spurring economic development and tax receipts. This transfer has had an amazing impact on the local economy. The reality is there are capacity challenges in the construction industry and in the housing industry to actually utilize this money effectively.

Building Local Capacity Finally, we have to build local capacity, both of people and of institutions, to sustain this effort once it’s completed. The program was quite fragmented. UNOP has brought together the local neighborhood and the citywide planners. We have a terrific group of national architects, planners and designers engaged. There are thirteen planning districts all working feverishly with design professionals to develop a plan to be reviewed ultimately by the Louisiana Recovery Authority.That will be in February ’07.

My colleague, Margot Brandenburg, found the pictures (page 25) that are both a visual of the planning process and a visual of the challenge. When you look on the top in the district planning meeting of the Lower Ninth Ward, you see all African-Americans, and when you look at the district planning meeting in the French Quarter, you see all whites. This is a challenge. As the city plans for the future,

Institute for Urban Design

are we going to have black people planning for the black neighborhoods and white people planning for the white neighborhoods?

There are some interesting emerging plans as the architects and planners have been fantastic in their creativity and engagement with local people. This Gentilly neighborhood was an historically African-American,middleclass neighborhood that was built after the Second World War, and it’s mostly beautiful bungalows and very nice midcentury modern houses. What came out of the charette that Andres Duany did with the residents of Gentilly was the idea of this town center for the neighborhood, with a public space in the middle, then mixed-use development around the periphery of the public space. It’s inventive and reflects the work of community people saying to a talented architect and planning team, this is our vision for our community.

Ray Gindroz of Urban Design Associates is doing terrific work in reconceptualizing public housing. It’s important to understand that as a part of the rebuilding of New Orleans, the federal government has made the decision to tear down five of the seven large public housing projects in the city. This is a controversial move. It begs the question that I raised before — where are the poor people going to go? Projects such as Lafitte are mixed-income, and there will be a cap on the number of poor residents who can live there. That cap exceeds the number of poor people who are currently living in these projects. So, we have to ask hard questions to ensure that poor residents, who live in these formerly highly-concentrated neighborhoods, will have the opportunity to live in another part of town.

This rendering envisions the transformation in Lafitte.

You can see at the top what it looks like now and the vision.

The proposal is one of my favorites. The Katrina cottage, a wonderful design by Marianne Cusato, is a small structure that initially was thought of as temporary, but it actually was designed to be added on to and be habitable, utilitarian and culturally consistent with New Orleans vernacular.

As we consider the next few months of planning, it’s going to be incumbent upon us to monitor the progress, to ask ourselves: Is this process inclusive? Are we replicating patterns of the past that will ensure more segregated housing and neighborhoods? Will there be sustainability of the public and private investments? Finally, we have to evaluate this. We want to learn from this process whether or not the kinds of interventions that are being implemented are effective, whether or not they are sustainable, and whether or not they ultimately have a positive impact on people’s lives. We’re prepared to say we don’t know the answer to that. But we do believe that we have to try new approaches, we have to experiment in different ways, because doing what’s been done in the past will yield what we had in New Orleans before Katrina, and that’s not acceptable.

Top: Andres Duany has provided a classic new urbanist master plan for the Gentilly district.

Above: Ray Gindroz, Urban Design Associates, Pittsburg, has provided a plan for a still devastated neighborhood.

Center: The photo shows the street from same neighborhood today.

Left: Katrina Cottage is designed to be added onto. Designer Marianne Cusato is currently preparing new variations on the original model.

28

Chris Coleman

Panel 1 Mayor Chris Coleman St. Paul Minnesota Urban Design Center as Vehicle for Policy Implementation

29

I am pleased to join this distinguished group of speakers from around the world to discuss a global issue: how to create healthy, sustainable environments to enable people to thrive. Saint Paul, Minnesota is often considered “flyover” country by people from the East or West coast.

But elsewhere in the world, we are recognized for being situated on the headwaters of one of the greatest rivers in the world, the Mississippi River. In fact, as the capital city of the headwaters state, we in Saint Paul believe we have an obligation to lead the national discourse about citybuilding on rivers.

The Mississippi River Like most of the world’s great cities, Saint Paul was born of its relationship to the water. The Mississippi River was the source of sustenance for native people, the pathway for European explorers, and the trade route and transportation corridor for 19 th and 20 th century settlement.

However, the river was at its nadir in the 1960s when its banks were lined with railroad tracks, highways and manufacturing. The river itself was fouled with industrial discharge, sewage and street run-off.

After decades of fits and starts surrounding efforts to reclaim the Mississippi River, a big breakthrough occurred in the early 1990s with the establishment of the Saint Paul on the Mississippi Development Framework and the Design Center.

Lead with a Vision

Light rail system will be used to increase mixed use density along new transit corridors.

Nothing is more important in city-building than to have a community-embraced vision that becomes the backdrop against which all decisions are made. Saint Paul had the benefit of drawing on the expertise of four great urban planners. First, in 1992, native son Ben Thompson was called on to help create a river vision. After much study and analysis, Thompson came back to the city with a single image. His rendering, in which he coined the phase, Great River Park, illustrates a city where its urban environment meets the river’s edge and the natural environment reaches into the core of the city. Many of his report’s recipients expected him to recommend a festival marketplace, like Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. Instead, in his oral report, he said simply this: “Saint Paul is a river city… it just hasn’t behaved as one for many years.”

Thompson’s seminal work was followed by Bill Morrish and Catherine Brown, a husband and wife team who led the University of Minnesota’s urban landscape design program. They added depth to Great River Park concept and the notion of Saint Paul being “of the Mississippi River.”

Ken Greenberg, a Toronto-based urban planner, built off these studies and led Saint Paul through a twoyear planning exercise resulting in the Saint Paul on the Mississippi Development Framework. The Framework focused on the downtown segment of the river and was intentionally focused on the idea of connecting downtown investments and river revitalization efforts. This award-

Institute for Urban Design

winning plan was completed in 1997, with the communitywide support and the endorsement of the City Council and Mayor. The moral of the story is that a city must start with a vision, it must be embraced by the community and be flexible to respond to changing market conditions.

Ten Principles of City Building The fatal flaw in many city plans is that they are overly prescriptive, relying on a series of steps that are unrealistic over time. The Saint Paul on the Mississippi Development Framework is guided by a set of principles, none of which are unique. The uniqueness is that the entire Framework is founded on these principles. They are its enduring feature.

St. Paul Design Center The most important thing we did in Saint Paul to ensure the ongoing realization of the vision was to establish the Saint Paul on the Mississippi Design Center. The Design Center is a joint program of the not-for-profit Saint Paul Riverfront Corporation and the City of St. Paul.

It is led by an architect/urban planner and staffed by city design, planning and economic development staff.The staff come from city agencies, including Parks, Public Works, Planning and Economic Development; they work part-time in the Design Center. The Design Center’s role is to provide design guidance on new projects, lead community planning efforts for future projects, create tools and technologies to aid public policy decision making, and ensure the community has an opportunity to stay engaged with the city’s development agenda.

A Vital City Center The Design Center has been instrumental in shaping the development of the downtown core, encouraging investment along key growth corridors and advancing environmental stewardship practices. With respect to the St. Paul riverfront at site of former Ford Factory, is being redeveloped as a residential community.

downtown, the Design Center leads the precinct planning process, champions investment in the public realm, and ensures that new developments have a connection to the Mississippi River.

Commercial corridors, typically along the historic street-car lines, have been the focus of recent development pressure as inner city investment has become more attractive. A new light rail transit system, connecting downtown Saint Paul to downtown Minneapolis, has especially increased the pressure in one such corridor. The Design Center assists neighborhood organizations in applying principles of density and economic viability to neighborhood planning.

Environmental stewardship has become an essential ingredient in sustainable city development. The Design Center has been a champion of clean energy systems, brownfield redevelopment, use of green building standards and restoration of natural habitat.

West Side Flats In the 1960s, after several years of being flooded out, the West Side Flats neighborhood was relocated to higher ground. Families who had been there for generations were displaced; some under order by the Sheriff. Shortly thereafter a flood wall was built and industrial uses moved in.

Twenty five years later the industries left, leaving a vacant riverfront. However, the painful memories of neighborhood relocation remained. This manifested itself as community resistance to nearly any proposed reuse of this land.

The Design Center was called on to facilitate a community process to better understand the goals and desires of the community. The resulting product was the West Side Flats Master Plan, which described a redevelopment vision embraced by the community. This plan was then used to attract a corporation looking for a new location for its satellite office headquarters.Rather than resist this development proposal, the neighborhood became its chief champion.

The West Side Flats Master Plan has become the source document against which to review other project proposals.

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Chris Coleman

Panel 1 Mayor Chris Coleman St. Paul Minnesota Urban Design Center as Vehicle for Policy Implementation

29

I am pleased to join this distinguished group of speakers from around the world to discuss a global issue: how to create healthy, sustainable environments to enable people to thrive. Saint Paul, Minnesota is often considered “flyover” country by people from the East or West coast.

But elsewhere in the world, we are recognized for being situated on the headwaters of one of the greatest rivers in the world, the Mississippi River. In fact, as the capital city of the headwaters state, we in Saint Paul believe we have an obligation to lead the national discourse about citybuilding on rivers.

The Mississippi River Like most of the world’s great cities, Saint Paul was born of its relationship to the water. The Mississippi River was the source of sustenance for native people, the pathway for European explorers, and the trade route and transportation corridor for 19 th and 20 th century settlement.

However, the river was at its nadir in the 1960s when its banks were lined with railroad tracks, highways and manufacturing. The river itself was fouled with industrial discharge, sewage and street run-off.

After decades of fits and starts surrounding efforts to reclaim the Mississippi River, a big breakthrough occurred in the early 1990s with the establishment of the Saint Paul on the Mississippi Development Framework and the Design Center.

Lead with a Vision

Light rail system will be used to increase mixed use density along new transit corridors.

Nothing is more important in city-building than to have a community-embraced vision that becomes the backdrop against which all decisions are made. Saint Paul had the benefit of drawing on the expertise of four great urban planners. First, in 1992, native son Ben Thompson was called on to help create a river vision. After much study and analysis, Thompson came back to the city with a single image. His rendering, in which he coined the phase, Great River Park, illustrates a city where its urban environment meets the river’s edge and the natural environment reaches into the core of the city. Many of his report’s recipients expected him to recommend a festival marketplace, like Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. Instead, in his oral report, he said simply this: “Saint Paul is a river city… it just hasn’t behaved as one for many years.”

Thompson’s seminal work was followed by Bill Morrish and Catherine Brown, a husband and wife team who led the University of Minnesota’s urban landscape design program. They added depth to Great River Park concept and the notion of Saint Paul being “of the Mississippi River.”

Ken Greenberg, a Toronto-based urban planner, built off these studies and led Saint Paul through a twoyear planning exercise resulting in the Saint Paul on the Mississippi Development Framework. The Framework focused on the downtown segment of the river and was intentionally focused on the idea of connecting downtown investments and river revitalization efforts. This award-

Institute for Urban Design

winning plan was completed in 1997, with the communitywide support and the endorsement of the City Council and Mayor. The moral of the story is that a city must start with a vision, it must be embraced by the community and be flexible to respond to changing market conditions.

Ten Principles of City Building The fatal flaw in many city plans is that they are overly prescriptive, relying on a series of steps that are unrealistic over time. The Saint Paul on the Mississippi Development Framework is guided by a set of principles, none of which are unique. The uniqueness is that the entire Framework is founded on these principles. They are its enduring feature.

St. Paul Design Center The most important thing we did in Saint Paul to ensure the ongoing realization of the vision was to establish the Saint Paul on the Mississippi Design Center. The Design Center is a joint program of the not-for-profit Saint Paul Riverfront Corporation and the City of St. Paul.

It is led by an architect/urban planner and staffed by city design, planning and economic development staff.The staff come from city agencies, including Parks, Public Works, Planning and Economic Development; they work part-time in the Design Center. The Design Center’s role is to provide design guidance on new projects, lead community planning efforts for future projects, create tools and technologies to aid public policy decision making, and ensure the community has an opportunity to stay engaged with the city’s development agenda.

A Vital City Center The Design Center has been instrumental in shaping the development of the downtown core, encouraging investment along key growth corridors and advancing environmental stewardship practices. With respect to the St. Paul riverfront at site of former Ford Factory, is being redeveloped as a residential community.

downtown, the Design Center leads the precinct planning process, champions investment in the public realm, and ensures that new developments have a connection to the Mississippi River.

Commercial corridors, typically along the historic street-car lines, have been the focus of recent development pressure as inner city investment has become more attractive. A new light rail transit system, connecting downtown Saint Paul to downtown Minneapolis, has especially increased the pressure in one such corridor. The Design Center assists neighborhood organizations in applying principles of density and economic viability to neighborhood planning.

Environmental stewardship has become an essential ingredient in sustainable city development. The Design Center has been a champion of clean energy systems, brownfield redevelopment, use of green building standards and restoration of natural habitat.

West Side Flats In the 1960s, after several years of being flooded out, the West Side Flats neighborhood was relocated to higher ground. Families who had been there for generations were displaced; some under order by the Sheriff. Shortly thereafter a flood wall was built and industrial uses moved in.

Twenty five years later the industries left, leaving a vacant riverfront. However, the painful memories of neighborhood relocation remained. This manifested itself as community resistance to nearly any proposed reuse of this land.

The Design Center was called on to facilitate a community process to better understand the goals and desires of the community. The resulting product was the West Side Flats Master Plan, which described a redevelopment vision embraced by the community. This plan was then used to attract a corporation looking for a new location for its satellite office headquarters.Rather than resist this development proposal, the neighborhood became its chief champion.

The West Side Flats Master Plan has become the source document against which to review other project proposals.

30

Chris Coleman

Holman Field Floodwall Enhancement

31

Institute for Urban Design

Highland Park Ford Plant Exchange

Not far from the West Side Flats and near the downtown is a city airport. It is a reliever airport to the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and is used largely by the National Guard and for air service for corporate clients. This airport was built in the flood plain some 75 years ago. Again, due to periodic flooding, the airport was occasionally out of service. To increase its reliability, the Metropolitan Airports Commission proposed the construction of a floodwall. This proposal was welcomed by the business community and opposed by neighborhood groups.

The necessary variance was voted down by the City Council.

The Design Center was called in to lead a design process involving city staff and airport staff. The challenge was to design a floodwall that would be less offensive and intrusive than originally approved while meeting the basic cost parameters of the Airports Commission. Ultimately a new design was advanced and met approval of the City Council and the Mayor.

The National Great River Park will help connect St. Paul’s 26 mile waterfront along the Mississippi.

The goal is to attract some $2 billion in investments over 10 years.

Recently, Ford Motor Company announced that it would be closing a long-standing production plant along the river in the Highland Park neighborhood. This will vacate 140 acres of prime real estate while eliminating 2000 jobs. The Design Center will assist the city and Ford Motor Company in its decision-making process about the ultimate disposition of their land.

Upcoming Assignments Saint Paul has an agenda for revitalizing the city, using the Mississippi River as an engine. The river will inspire a new generation of thinking, where the natural environment will be embraced as a resource. Through the Design Center, we have a team that ensures the community vision is realized and responds to changing market conditions. The Saint Paul on the Mississippi Development Framework has become a living, breathing document rather than a plan that collects dust on the shelf of the city’s planning department.

Lisa Chamberlain The New York Times What I try to do is shoehorn design and architecture into what is otherwise the real estate section of the paper. I want to make a comparison between the World Trade Center site and New Orleans. They’re not comparable.

Sixteen acres that’s surrounded by wealth is much different from however many New Orleans acres that are not surrounded by wealth. At the World Trade Center site, a lack of planning results in disaster.

What’s happened at the World Trade Center site is that a formal plan was finally approved just a couple of weeks ago. Meanwhile, the foundation is being laid for the Freedom Tower, and 7 World Trade Center is open and looking for tenants. Larry Silverstein, who signed a lease for the Twin Towers six or so weeks before 9/11, is moving forward with plans with three different architects whose plans were recently unveiled.

I was glad to hear that the federal government has said New Orleans has to have a plan before the dollars are going to flow. That’s good news.

The question is: Who is making the decisions at the end of the day in New Orleans? Usually it’s the person bringing the money in who’s making the decisions, and that’s what the World Trade Center site is all about. Since you’re bringing the money in, I’m hoping you can tell us when the plans are laid, who says that this is actually going to stick? This is the blueprint, you cannot do this here, but you can do that there?

Who says that?

Darren Walker You have identified a core challenge in a democracy. When you have New Orleans or you have Lower Manhattan, what you essentially have is contested space. You have contested space because different people view what ought to be done differently. In a democracy, that’s problematic because you don’t have someone who comes in and says, actually, this is not the number one priority, and this is where the housing is going. You don’t have Robert Moses. So we, on the one hand, celebrate the participatory process. We celebrate engagement, civic participation, but it also requires patience to work things through.

That’s very difficult. In terms of New Orleans, the plan itself will have to be presented to the state, which has the ultimate authority. The State of Louisiana will determine, and already has, what will be done in other parishes.

In terms of the development plan for New Orleans, it is truly bubbling up from the neighborhoods. But there will be tension and conflict around resolving what are the priority areas for re-building. What are the priority infrastructure investments? Who gets to stay in

the neighborhoods they currently live in, and who has to be relocated? Recommendations will be made, but ultimately the state has the authority to give thumbs up or thumbs down.

Lisa Chamberlain So that’s primarily because the money is flowing through the state?

Darren Walker It’s primarily because, under federal legislation, the federal government says to the state, you are the governmental unit with authority to spend this money based upon guidelines in the federal legislation which are quite broad. Mississippi is interpreting things differently from Louisiana, because the Mississippi governor has a different point of view about priorities than does the Louisiana governor. Under our federal system, that is acceptable.

30

Chris Coleman

Holman Field Floodwall Enhancement

31

Institute for Urban Design

Highland Park Ford Plant Exchange

Not far from the West Side Flats and near the downtown is a city airport. It is a reliever airport to the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and is used largely by the National Guard and for air service for corporate clients. This airport was built in the flood plain some 75 years ago. Again, due to periodic flooding, the airport was occasionally out of service. To increase its reliability, the Metropolitan Airports Commission proposed the construction of a floodwall. This proposal was welcomed by the business community and opposed by neighborhood groups.

The necessary variance was voted down by the City Council.

The Design Center was called in to lead a design process involving city staff and airport staff. The challenge was to design a floodwall that would be less offensive and intrusive than originally approved while meeting the basic cost parameters of the Airports Commission. Ultimately a new design was advanced and met approval of the City Council and the Mayor.

The National Great River Park will help connect St. Paul’s 26 mile waterfront along the Mississippi.

The goal is to attract some $2 billion in investments over 10 years.

Recently, Ford Motor Company announced that it would be closing a long-standing production plant along the river in the Highland Park neighborhood. This will vacate 140 acres of prime real estate while eliminating 2000 jobs. The Design Center will assist the city and Ford Motor Company in its decision-making process about the ultimate disposition of their land.

Upcoming Assignments Saint Paul has an agenda for revitalizing the city, using the Mississippi River as an engine. The river will inspire a new generation of thinking, where the natural environment will be embraced as a resource. Through the Design Center, we have a team that ensures the community vision is realized and responds to changing market conditions. The Saint Paul on the Mississippi Development Framework has become a living, breathing document rather than a plan that collects dust on the shelf of the city’s planning department.

Lisa Chamberlain The New York Times What I try to do is shoehorn design and architecture into what is otherwise the real estate section of the paper. I want to make a comparison between the World Trade Center site and New Orleans. They’re not comparable.

Sixteen acres that’s surrounded by wealth is much different from however many New Orleans acres that are not surrounded by wealth. At the World Trade Center site, a lack of planning results in disaster.

What’s happened at the World Trade Center site is that a formal plan was finally approved just a couple of weeks ago. Meanwhile, the foundation is being laid for the Freedom Tower, and 7 World Trade Center is open and looking for tenants. Larry Silverstein, who signed a lease for the Twin Towers six or so weeks before 9/11, is moving forward with plans with three different architects whose plans were recently unveiled.

I was glad to hear that the federal government has said New Orleans has to have a plan before the dollars are going to flow. That’s good news.

The question is: Who is making the decisions at the end of the day in New Orleans? Usually it’s the person bringing the money in who’s making the decisions, and that’s what the World Trade Center site is all about. Since you’re bringing the money in, I’m hoping you can tell us when the plans are laid, who says that this is actually going to stick? This is the blueprint, you cannot do this here, but you can do that there?

Who says that?

Darren Walker You have identified a core challenge in a democracy. When you have New Orleans or you have Lower Manhattan, what you essentially have is contested space. You have contested space because different people view what ought to be done differently. In a democracy, that’s problematic because you don’t have someone who comes in and says, actually, this is not the number one priority, and this is where the housing is going. You don’t have Robert Moses. So we, on the one hand, celebrate the participatory process. We celebrate engagement, civic participation, but it also requires patience to work things through.

That’s very difficult. In terms of New Orleans, the plan itself will have to be presented to the state, which has the ultimate authority. The State of Louisiana will determine, and already has, what will be done in other parishes.

In terms of the development plan for New Orleans, it is truly bubbling up from the neighborhoods. But there will be tension and conflict around resolving what are the priority areas for re-building. What are the priority infrastructure investments? Who gets to stay in

the neighborhoods they currently live in, and who has to be relocated? Recommendations will be made, but ultimately the state has the authority to give thumbs up or thumbs down.

Lisa Chamberlain So that’s primarily because the money is flowing through the state?

Darren Walker It’s primarily because, under federal legislation, the federal government says to the state, you are the governmental unit with authority to spend this money based upon guidelines in the federal legislation which are quite broad. Mississippi is interpreting things differently from Louisiana, because the Mississippi governor has a different point of view about priorities than does the Louisiana governor. Under our federal system, that is acceptable.

32

Institute for Urban Design

33

Response to Darren Walker

Response to Mayor Chris Coleman

Steve Rugare Community Design Center Kent State University

Jane Thompson Thompson Design Group Cambridge, MA

Darren Walker’s discussion of New Orleans rightly focuses on the complexity of race and class issues as they affect the planning process, and almost all of what he said is relevant to the large number of American cities with chronic population loss and concentrated poverty.

This should be no surprise, since New Orleans was one of these “shrinking cities” even before the flooding.

Walker’s description of the New Orleans process certainly resonates with our experience working in Cleveland and Youngstown. Given very real day-to-day struggles and a history of political dysfunction, it’s difficult to go to a disadvantaged community with the message that the pie as a whole is shrinking, even though we suspect acknowledging that reality might lead to a better design and planning outcome.

What we’ve found is that, even when people are ready to acknowledge that their city is shrinking, they tend to think that their neighborhood is the place that can buck the trend and grow.

I suspect this will be a problem in New Orleans as well. When all the individual neighborhood plans are collated, it will turn out that they anticipate far more development than the city as a whole can support.

This leads me to a final observation. Some of the neighborhood plans developed for New Orleans by the protagonists of new urbanism (DPZ, UDA etc.) show a kind of routine densification that, I fear, may be more the result of design prejudice than of community process.

Our admittedly limited experience suggests that solutions for areas with high vacancy rates need to be far less dependent on continuity of fabric and more dependent on programming and stewardship of “banked” land. This approach, which might be related to “landscape urbanism,” was something we got from the people on the ground in places like Youngstown. Time will tell whether the charrette process in New Orleans really offered residents more than a one-sizefits-all urban design solution.

Mayor Coleman is right, and very kind, to mention Ben’s significant contribution in initiating the whole city’s interest in restoring the city’s Mississippi waterfront and Harriet Island. We did the waterfront plan concept as a vision drawing made by Ben based on his memories as a child—the greening of St. Paul.

We made a presentation to the usual supportive friends/activists who backed it, and it resulted in the St. Paul Riverfront Corporation. And they did it, with implementation by Greenberg and others over time.

Ken Greenberg Greenberg Consultants Inc. Toronto Canada In terms of the Design Center I would suggest the following: The Saint Paul on the Mississippi Design Center has become a unique institution for successful formulation and implementation of city-scale design concepts by providing a broadly respected forum and ‘space’ for interaction—simultaneously in and out of government, responsive to many communities and able to operate across the broad array of disciplines involved in city-building.

Sustainable Cities

10.18.2006

Panel 2 Immigration to African Cities Outpaces Provision of Affordable Housing

United Nations UN-Habitat New York

32

Institute for Urban Design

33

Response to Darren Walker

Response to Mayor Chris Coleman

Steve Rugare Community Design Center Kent State University

Jane Thompson Thompson Design Group Cambridge, MA

Darren Walker’s discussion of New Orleans rightly focuses on the complexity of race and class issues as they affect the planning process, and almost all of what he said is relevant to the large number of American cities with chronic population loss and concentrated poverty.

This should be no surprise, since New Orleans was one of these “shrinking cities” even before the flooding.

Walker’s description of the New Orleans process certainly resonates with our experience working in Cleveland and Youngstown. Given very real day-to-day struggles and a history of political dysfunction, it’s difficult to go to a disadvantaged community with the message that the pie as a whole is shrinking, even though we suspect acknowledging that reality might lead to a better design and planning outcome.

What we’ve found is that, even when people are ready to acknowledge that their city is shrinking, they tend to think that their neighborhood is the place that can buck the trend and grow.

I suspect this will be a problem in New Orleans as well. When all the individual neighborhood plans are collated, it will turn out that they anticipate far more development than the city as a whole can support.

This leads me to a final observation. Some of the neighborhood plans developed for New Orleans by the protagonists of new urbanism (DPZ, UDA etc.) show a kind of routine densification that, I fear, may be more the result of design prejudice than of community process.

Our admittedly limited experience suggests that solutions for areas with high vacancy rates need to be far less dependent on continuity of fabric and more dependent on programming and stewardship of “banked” land. This approach, which might be related to “landscape urbanism,” was something we got from the people on the ground in places like Youngstown. Time will tell whether the charrette process in New Orleans really offered residents more than a one-sizefits-all urban design solution.

Mayor Coleman is right, and very kind, to mention Ben’s significant contribution in initiating the whole city’s interest in restoring the city’s Mississippi waterfront and Harriet Island. We did the waterfront plan concept as a vision drawing made by Ben based on his memories as a child—the greening of St. Paul.

We made a presentation to the usual supportive friends/activists who backed it, and it resulted in the St. Paul Riverfront Corporation. And they did it, with implementation by Greenberg and others over time.

Ken Greenberg Greenberg Consultants Inc. Toronto Canada In terms of the Design Center I would suggest the following: The Saint Paul on the Mississippi Design Center has become a unique institution for successful formulation and implementation of city-scale design concepts by providing a broadly respected forum and ‘space’ for interaction—simultaneously in and out of government, responsive to many communities and able to operate across the broad array of disciplines involved in city-building.

Sustainable Cities

10.18.2006

Panel 2 Immigration to African Cities Outpaces Provision of Affordable Housing

United Nations UN-Habitat New York

34

Axumite Gebre-Egziabher

Panel 2 Dr. Axumite Gebre-Egziabher Director UN-Habitat New York Office Urban Design and Human Settlements

35

This is a follow-up from my remarks in the morning, and I now emphasize the challenge of urban design. As of 2007, the majority of people in the world will live in urban areas.

Most of the increase is going to be in the developing world.

12 Asian Mega-Cities

Institute for Urban Design

We are looking at density, housing, sanitation and garbage. There is also a program on water and sanitation, for example, around Lake Victoria. We have projects now in Cambodia, Bangladesh and Somalia. We the people need to help themselves, because if we do not look at the social, economic and environmental issues within a city, then there is no sustainability.

People move from rural to urban areas, from urban areas to the capital cities. Then they go international where they are called international migrants by the time they reach New York or Johannesburg. There is also southsouth migration. A high birth rate adds to expanding city populations. Improvements, nevertheless, have taken place in health facilities. Most of the expansion will occur in some 12 mega-cities in Asia. What do they impose in the developing world? Here we are overstretching the capacity of the local authorities, of the planners who manage the cities. But the demographic transformation is unstoppable.

So planners need to work together with policy makers.

One Million in Slums The migration creates a trend towards the urbanization of poverty. Currently one million people live in slums.

In Sub-Saharan Africa almost 72 percent of the urban population live in slums. In the developed world, 6 percent live in slum-like conditions. How do we define slums? We call it a slum if it has no access to improved water or improved sanitation, or no living area, or durability of the housing.

We see also the feminization of poverty. Half of people living in the slums are women. What do we do for the future?

There are related problems: crime, and violence.

We have seen what has happened with Hurricane Katrina. It’s the poor who are most affected by natural disasters. We need to take into account social equity and human rights. We have to look at the economic prospects.

If there are no jobs, then there is poverty. In Nairobi, the home of UN-Habitat, 75 percent of the population lives on 5 percent of the land. We have to deal with that reality.

Habitat has the Millennium Development Goals.

We are the focal point for slum improvements. If we look at the development goals, we see each one of them has an implication at the local level, where we as planners and urban designers bring everything together. Because implementation is at the local level, education has to be localized. In terms of intensity of exclusion, are planners considering where the majority live?

At UN-Habitat, we now have a global campaign on urban good governance. Also, we are looking at credit mechanisms. We are talking about slum upgrading and, in the long term, to come up with sustainable urban development planning. We start from scratch and we try to replicate. We do have best practices. We do have a sustainable cities program. But at the end of the day, we are looking at how to bring community-based infrastructure and services, including water and sanitation, to the communities.

We include the citizens of the city in participatory planning. The people provide solutions.

Above: UN-Habitat work in Cambodia.

Left, top: Fresh drinking water is still carried by women to their families in many Bangladesh cities.

Left, bottom: An outdoor shower is a welcomed luxury for those housed in many African cities.

34

Axumite Gebre-Egziabher

Panel 2 Dr. Axumite Gebre-Egziabher Director UN-Habitat New York Office Urban Design and Human Settlements

35

This is a follow-up from my remarks in the morning, and I now emphasize the challenge of urban design. As of 2007, the majority of people in the world will live in urban areas.

Most of the increase is going to be in the developing world.

12 Asian Mega-Cities

Institute for Urban Design

We are looking at density, housing, sanitation and garbage. There is also a program on water and sanitation, for example, around Lake Victoria. We have projects now in Cambodia, Bangladesh and Somalia. We the people need to help themselves, because if we do not look at the social, economic and environmental issues within a city, then there is no sustainability.

People move from rural to urban areas, from urban areas to the capital cities. Then they go international where they are called international migrants by the time they reach New York or Johannesburg. There is also southsouth migration. A high birth rate adds to expanding city populations. Improvements, nevertheless, have taken place in health facilities. Most of the expansion will occur in some 12 mega-cities in Asia. What do they impose in the developing world? Here we are overstretching the capacity of the local authorities, of the planners who manage the cities. But the demographic transformation is unstoppable.

So planners need to work together with policy makers.

One Million in Slums The migration creates a trend towards the urbanization of poverty. Currently one million people live in slums.

In Sub-Saharan Africa almost 72 percent of the urban population live in slums. In the developed world, 6 percent live in slum-like conditions. How do we define slums? We call it a slum if it has no access to improved water or improved sanitation, or no living area, or durability of the housing.

We see also the feminization of poverty. Half of people living in the slums are women. What do we do for the future?

There are related problems: crime, and violence.

We have seen what has happened with Hurricane Katrina. It’s the poor who are most affected by natural disasters. We need to take into account social equity and human rights. We have to look at the economic prospects.

If there are no jobs, then there is poverty. In Nairobi, the home of UN-Habitat, 75 percent of the population lives on 5 percent of the land. We have to deal with that reality.

Habitat has the Millennium Development Goals.

We are the focal point for slum improvements. If we look at the development goals, we see each one of them has an implication at the local level, where we as planners and urban designers bring everything together. Because implementation is at the local level, education has to be localized. In terms of intensity of exclusion, are planners considering where the majority live?

At UN-Habitat, we now have a global campaign on urban good governance. Also, we are looking at credit mechanisms. We are talking about slum upgrading and, in the long term, to come up with sustainable urban development planning. We start from scratch and we try to replicate. We do have best practices. We do have a sustainable cities program. But at the end of the day, we are looking at how to bring community-based infrastructure and services, including water and sanitation, to the communities.

We include the citizens of the city in participatory planning. The people provide solutions.

Above: UN-Habitat work in Cambodia.

Left, top: Fresh drinking water is still carried by women to their families in many Bangladesh cities.

Left, bottom: An outdoor shower is a welcomed luxury for those housed in many African cities.

36

Suha Ozkan

Panel 2 Dr. Suha Ozkan Chairman World Architecture Community The Aga Khan Awards: Tradition vs Innovation

37

I shall be talking about the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, where I spent twenty-five years as the executive of this award. Among values for selection are cultural identity, climate, public participation and co-existence of cultures, races, faiths. Recycling of resources, protection of the environment, regeneration of nature, poverty alleviation and more equitable distribution of financial resources are values reflected in winning projects.

100 Projects in 30 Years Around these values we have selected, over the last thirty years, one hundred projects. I shall give you an anthology of projects that highlight sustainability.

Landscapes are where most of the damage to the environment has been done. The first project is from one of the most prosperous countries, Saudi Arabia. They were building a new diplomatic quarter. The client said that in order to stop the dust and the sand, you don’t do lawns.You use boulders. As they were pushing water into the sand to make it green, he said that’s not sustainable. German consultants persuaded the client that plants don’t die. They can be regenerated. They saved tons of desert sand from different places to the finest grain. They put the finest grain into incubators. In the course of a year, they regenerated two hundred unknown species. These species were the species which resisted desertification over centuries, as the desert was flowing in. They have proliferated these plants and used them as landscaping. For the intensive support of landscaping, they used recycled water.

Institute for Urban Design

Another project came from Mauritania in SubSaharan Africa. The Kaedi Hospital was formed from the values of the culture itself. In societies in the south, the patients don’t die from the disease that they have, they die from the excessive care of visitors. This particular hospital allowed only doctors and patients. Visitors camp and stay there as long as they want, but the hospital is a sterile space only for caregivers and patients.

Fabrizio Carola This was also done with the technology of casting half-baked bricks with pressurized equipment. The architect, Fabrizio Carola, also used his architectural mastery to generate the novel expressions of architecture under these limited conditions. It was a real hospital, not a clinic.

This UNESCO project is for an agricultural training center in Senegal, where the desert sand is made into bricks and, in turn, into architecture. This is a school which was designed by the only educated person in the village, the son of the chief who then became an architect.

Everything that happened in his life was due to his education. His simple school has three bands: one protects the building from the flood; the other protects the building from rain, and the elevated roof provides insulation. The roof also acts as a sound barrier against rainfall. In the middle, there are classrooms and in the garden kids learn how to grow plants. The simple plan allows three classrooms, and the common space in between can be used for recesses. It has double-shell seating system which allows the building to be cooled by natural forces.

Frei Otto Sand Architects began to recognize this new concept of landscaping. A palace housing the diplomatic club was where architects encapsulated an oasis. The rest of the desert was left as it had been before. Tents by Frei Otto, a German architect, provided gathering places.

Midwest Technical University is the second project.

A vast land, it was given to establish the first American university in Turkey. The government at that time allocated the land, which was larger than the settlement area of Ankara. The president of the university planted thirtythree million trees as guards to protect the land.

Hasan Fathy Sustainability is a technology that comes from within. Hasan Fathy said, “You don’t build on a site; you build of the site.” From Arctic regions to the deserts, there were always materials for people to build habitats, whether igloos, mud or bricks.

Recycling of the resources of the building were by two Norwegian architects.They were second-year students.

They volunteered to the Christian missionaries to build a hospital for lepers in India. Material was recuperated by demolishing buildings.They built a hospital for a population which was outcast by society.

Nader Khalili said that sand is the most available material. He said that if we can put the sand into tubes of either jute or plastic (photos right), then we can roll it around and build. These were seismic-proof shelters. They were built by students in California and tested as the prototypes in Siberia, Africa, and Iran. They’re covered with plaster from inside and outside. It’s labor intensive but the material cost is nil.

Balkrishna Doshi, an associate of Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, gave his heart to the poor. Doshy said if we can give whatever is needed in the most deprived conditions, then people can do their shelters as they like. The jury said that the world-class architect lending his signature to the poorest of the poor was on its own applaudable. Doshy’s project is a multi-cultural, multi-faith community. This neighborhood will become a major part of the city.

Muhammad Yunus Three days ago the leader of this project, Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize. It was in 1987 when I heard that someone, by providing micro-credit, built 70,000 rural houses which were cyclone-proof. I went to see it with my own eyes. It was true. The maximum credit

given was $300, just to get them to have six columns and top sheeting material against rain. The rest of the material was local. Muhammad Yunus, with the micro-credit process, accomplished this. We gave him the award in 1989, and he said if you ask for credit, if you ask for collateral, that’s not credit. How can you give credit to people for being human beings? He established a mechanism where ten people write for each other. They get the credit and they pay collectively.

In Hyderabad, Pakistan, the land is owned by the public.The government agency calls it Incremental Housing.

All they want is for the people to make their commitment to urban life. They come with their belongings, their family.

They camp here for two weeks.They see if they’re genuinely committed to urban life or not. Then they are given a plot of land and the facilities to do weaving or tailoring or carpentry. Then they improve their shacks into houses.

The Aga Khan Award, previously administered by Suha Ozkan, sometimes highlights Muslim vernacular architecture. The sand houses were actually designed

by Nader Khalili from Cal-Earth Institute.

36

Suha Ozkan

Panel 2 Dr. Suha Ozkan Chairman World Architecture Community The Aga Khan Awards: Tradition vs Innovation

37

I shall be talking about the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, where I spent twenty-five years as the executive of this award. Among values for selection are cultural identity, climate, public participation and co-existence of cultures, races, faiths. Recycling of resources, protection of the environment, regeneration of nature, poverty alleviation and more equitable distribution of financial resources are values reflected in winning projects.

100 Projects in 30 Years Around these values we have selected, over the last thirty years, one hundred projects. I shall give you an anthology of projects that highlight sustainability.

Landscapes are where most of the damage to the environment has been done. The first project is from one of the most prosperous countries, Saudi Arabia. They were building a new diplomatic quarter. The client said that in order to stop the dust and the sand, you don’t do lawns.You use boulders. As they were pushing water into the sand to make it green, he said that’s not sustainable. German consultants persuaded the client that plants don’t die. They can be regenerated. They saved tons of desert sand from different places to the finest grain. They put the finest grain into incubators. In the course of a year, they regenerated two hundred unknown species. These species were the species which resisted desertification over centuries, as the desert was flowing in. They have proliferated these plants and used them as landscaping. For the intensive support of landscaping, they used recycled water.

Institute for Urban Design

Another project came from Mauritania in SubSaharan Africa. The Kaedi Hospital was formed from the values of the culture itself. In societies in the south, the patients don’t die from the disease that they have, they die from the excessive care of visitors. This particular hospital allowed only doctors and patients. Visitors camp and stay there as long as they want, but the hospital is a sterile space only for caregivers and patients.

Fabrizio Carola This was also done with the technology of casting half-baked bricks with pressurized equipment. The architect, Fabrizio Carola, also used his architectural mastery to generate the novel expressions of architecture under these limited conditions. It was a real hospital, not a clinic.

This UNESCO project is for an agricultural training center in Senegal, where the desert sand is made into bricks and, in turn, into architecture. This is a school which was designed by the only educated person in the village, the son of the chief who then became an architect.

Everything that happened in his life was due to his education. His simple school has three bands: one protects the building from the flood; the other protects the building from rain, and the elevated roof provides insulation. The roof also acts as a sound barrier against rainfall. In the middle, there are classrooms and in the garden kids learn how to grow plants. The simple plan allows three classrooms, and the common space in between can be used for recesses. It has double-shell seating system which allows the building to be cooled by natural forces.

Frei Otto Sand Architects began to recognize this new concept of landscaping. A palace housing the diplomatic club was where architects encapsulated an oasis. The rest of the desert was left as it had been before. Tents by Frei Otto, a German architect, provided gathering places.

Midwest Technical University is the second project.

A vast land, it was given to establish the first American university in Turkey. The government at that time allocated the land, which was larger than the settlement area of Ankara. The president of the university planted thirtythree million trees as guards to protect the land.

Hasan Fathy Sustainability is a technology that comes from within. Hasan Fathy said, “You don’t build on a site; you build of the site.” From Arctic regions to the deserts, there were always materials for people to build habitats, whether igloos, mud or bricks.

Recycling of the resources of the building were by two Norwegian architects.They were second-year students.

They volunteered to the Christian missionaries to build a hospital for lepers in India. Material was recuperated by demolishing buildings.They built a hospital for a population which was outcast by society.

Nader Khalili said that sand is the most available material. He said that if we can put the sand into tubes of either jute or plastic (photos right), then we can roll it around and build. These were seismic-proof shelters. They were built by students in California and tested as the prototypes in Siberia, Africa, and Iran. They’re covered with plaster from inside and outside. It’s labor intensive but the material cost is nil.

Balkrishna Doshi, an associate of Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, gave his heart to the poor. Doshy said if we can give whatever is needed in the most deprived conditions, then people can do their shelters as they like. The jury said that the world-class architect lending his signature to the poorest of the poor was on its own applaudable. Doshy’s project is a multi-cultural, multi-faith community. This neighborhood will become a major part of the city.

Muhammad Yunus Three days ago the leader of this project, Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize. It was in 1987 when I heard that someone, by providing micro-credit, built 70,000 rural houses which were cyclone-proof. I went to see it with my own eyes. It was true. The maximum credit

given was $300, just to get them to have six columns and top sheeting material against rain. The rest of the material was local. Muhammad Yunus, with the micro-credit process, accomplished this. We gave him the award in 1989, and he said if you ask for credit, if you ask for collateral, that’s not credit. How can you give credit to people for being human beings? He established a mechanism where ten people write for each other. They get the credit and they pay collectively.

In Hyderabad, Pakistan, the land is owned by the public.The government agency calls it Incremental Housing.

All they want is for the people to make their commitment to urban life. They come with their belongings, their family.

They camp here for two weeks.They see if they’re genuinely committed to urban life or not. Then they are given a plot of land and the facilities to do weaving or tailoring or carpentry. Then they improve their shacks into houses.

The Aga Khan Award, previously administered by Suha Ozkan, sometimes highlights Muslim vernacular architecture. The sand houses were actually designed

by Nader Khalili from Cal-Earth Institute.

38

Diane Diacon

39

Panel 2 Diane Diacon President Building and Social Housing Foundation Leicestershire U.K. Foundation Award Program Encourages Better Housing For The Poor

Inner city areas in Johannesburg are revitalized with new buildings on brownfield sites.

Some 3,000 affordable homes for 9,000 lowincome residents utilize energy conservation measures and renewable energy systems.

I’ve been asked to talk about sustainable urban projects the B.S.H.F. has identified through our World Habitat Award competition. Four projects around the world illustrate different contexts and settings. Those projects are in South Africa, Sweden, the United States and Pakistan.

The three key elements of urban sustainability include management of existing areas, limiting environmental footprints, and reducing poverty. It is about making the urban environment more livable for the poor because they haven’t got the money to make choices.

Johannesburg: Crime and Grime The World Habitat Awards are now in their 21st year, and they continue to identify housing projects that are innovative, sustainable and capable of being transferred.

The first project is the Johannesburg Housing Company, established in 1995 at the start of the post-Apartheid government. Prior to this, in all the cities of South Africa, there has been spiraling decline in the city center, as people and business fled to the suburbs. Empty buildings in the city center were taken over by slum landlords. They became centers of extortion, crime, and widespread urban dereliction. “Crime and grime” they call it.

The company purchases and renovates abandoned buildings and builds new developments on brownfield sites.

Today they provide over 3,000 apartments. That’s home for 9,000 people of very low income. They have a good management and maintenance record. Their buildings are clean, well managed, and above all safe.

Institute for Urban Design

In some instances, they’ve now got twenty or twentyfive urban blocks redeveloped. Some of those are located in very similar areas. In those areas, they’re able to work together with other property owners to help transform the whole urban area, not just their individual blocks. The houses here are from Hillborough where there has been a 50 percent increase in the price of property in the last two years. Business is coming back. It’s possible to walk down the street.

They’re also concerned to minimize the environmental footprint of the properties. All the refurbished properties have strong energy conservation measures.The property, built on brownfield sites, is built to high environmental standards, and in some cases have solar panels.

With homes close to the city center, low-income workers no longer have to make long journeys in from the townships outside of the city. That’s saving time, transportation costs, and reducing pollution. Just because you’re poor, you don’t have to live in poor-quality housing.

The organization also challenges poverty and inequality, giving children a chance to catch up and improve their education. That’s important in addressing the Apartheid geography in South Africa. Setting up soccer leagues for young people, competitions between the different apartment blocks. Small children play football or soccer. They run around like bees, here, there and everywhere. But the older youngsters are learning a wide range of skills. It’s about team playing, it’s about strategy, tactics, coordinating. What’s happening now, particularly in this city, is that life has been brought back into it. People are living here. Businesses are returning. Tax income is going up. The city is beginning to reinvest. The crime and grime are being addressed.The Johannesburg Housing Company’s only regret is that it didn’t buy more property when it was dirt cheap.

Gothenberg The second project is different. We’re in Sweden now, a large estate on the edge of Gothenberg, altogether 2700 properties, large-scale, built in the 1970s using a concrete-panel construction system. Within a few years, it was suffering urban decay, high levels of crime, alienation, poor maintenance, high unemployment. The dwellings were expensive to heat because of their construction method, and it became used as a sink estate, providing home for immigrants, as the local people no longer wanted to live there.The housing company had wanted to demolish it. But they worked with an architect who was convinced that refurbishment of those properties would be more sustainable.

They started with improving the physical environment, the buildings, and transportation links to the city center, in-filling of void spaces on the ground floor for large blocks to provide community greenhouses. Not only community greenhouses — these became like community centers.

Because it’s in Sweden, a cold climate, and a strong ethos around environmental improvement, an important

element was minimizing the environmental footprint. High levels of insulation were included and heat recirculation systems. There’s been a 40 percent reduction in energy and a 60 percent reduction in water usage during the last five years since the refurbishment was completed. It includes composting and waste recycling. The tenants understand exactly what’s happening.

Equally important was bringing about social sustainability. A third of the properties have been empty, and the other two-thirds no one wanted to live in. Now they’ve got a waiting list. Existing residents were involved throughout the process in the redesign of the estate and the redesign of their apartments. There’s now a 50/50 balance of local people and immigrant people, with good relations.

Atlanta This third project is in a low-income area three miles from downtown Atlanta. This was a greenfield site of about 18 hectares. It had planning permission for 62 dwellings, but a progressive developer and architect came together to pioneer a much more sustainable urban form of development, rather than have the low-density urban sprawl typical of Atlanta. Instead of using the whole amount of land for housing, they allocated under half of it for housing, and the remainder was kept for community agriculture, green open space and woodland. They were building to a much higher density. The project met six of the seven of Atlanta Regional Commission’s Smart Growth criteria: green space preservation, compact design, walkability, range of housing opportunities, growth in existing communities, and transportation choices. It was a mixed income scheme, and it’s part of a much larger urban renewal program involving unprecedented cooperation between the government, private enterprise, and neighborhood associations. The Community Agriculture group runs a vegetable-growing program. There are links with the neighborhood, and these are treasured. This project shows how you can do things differently on a greenfield site, in the American context.

The UK’s Building and Social Housing Foundation issued a citation for East Lake Commons, a low-income site

three miles outside Atlanta, Georgia in part because more than half of the site is devoted to community agriculture.

38

Diane Diacon

39

Panel 2 Diane Diacon President Building and Social Housing Foundation Leicestershire U.K. Foundation Award Program Encourages Better Housing For The Poor

Inner city areas in Johannesburg are revitalized with new buildings on brownfield sites.

Some 3,000 affordable homes for 9,000 lowincome residents utilize energy conservation measures and renewable energy systems.

I’ve been asked to talk about sustainable urban projects the B.S.H.F. has identified through our World Habitat Award competition. Four projects around the world illustrate different contexts and settings. Those projects are in South Africa, Sweden, the United States and Pakistan.

The three key elements of urban sustainability include management of existing areas, limiting environmental footprints, and reducing poverty. It is about making the urban environment more livable for the poor because they haven’t got the money to make choices.

Johannesburg: Crime and Grime The World Habitat Awards are now in their 21st year, and they continue to identify housing projects that are innovative, sustainable and capable of being transferred.

The first project is the Johannesburg Housing Company, established in 1995 at the start of the post-Apartheid government. Prior to this, in all the cities of South Africa, there has been spiraling decline in the city center, as people and business fled to the suburbs. Empty buildings in the city center were taken over by slum landlords. They became centers of extortion, crime, and widespread urban dereliction. “Crime and grime” they call it.

The company purchases and renovates abandoned buildings and builds new developments on brownfield sites.

Today they provide over 3,000 apartments. That’s home for 9,000 people of very low income. They have a good management and maintenance record. Their buildings are clean, well managed, and above all safe.

Institute for Urban Design

In some instances, they’ve now got twenty or twentyfive urban blocks redeveloped. Some of those are located in very similar areas. In those areas, they’re able to work together with other property owners to help transform the whole urban area, not just their individual blocks. The houses here are from Hillborough where there has been a 50 percent increase in the price of property in the last two years. Business is coming back. It’s possible to walk down the street.

They’re also concerned to minimize the environmental footprint of the properties. All the refurbished properties have strong energy conservation measures.The property, built on brownfield sites, is built to high environmental standards, and in some cases have solar panels.

With homes close to the city center, low-income workers no longer have to make long journeys in from the townships outside of the city. That’s saving time, transportation costs, and reducing pollution. Just because you’re poor, you don’t have to live in poor-quality housing.

The organization also challenges poverty and inequality, giving children a chance to catch up and improve their education. That’s important in addressing the Apartheid geography in South Africa. Setting up soccer leagues for young people, competitions between the different apartment blocks. Small children play football or soccer. They run around like bees, here, there and everywhere. But the older youngsters are learning a wide range of skills. It’s about team playing, it’s about strategy, tactics, coordinating. What’s happening now, particularly in this city, is that life has been brought back into it. People are living here. Businesses are returning. Tax income is going up. The city is beginning to reinvest. The crime and grime are being addressed.The Johannesburg Housing Company’s only regret is that it didn’t buy more property when it was dirt cheap.

Gothenberg The second project is different. We’re in Sweden now, a large estate on the edge of Gothenberg, altogether 2700 properties, large-scale, built in the 1970s using a concrete-panel construction system. Within a few years, it was suffering urban decay, high levels of crime, alienation, poor maintenance, high unemployment. The dwellings were expensive to heat because of their construction method, and it became used as a sink estate, providing home for immigrants, as the local people no longer wanted to live there.The housing company had wanted to demolish it. But they worked with an architect who was convinced that refurbishment of those properties would be more sustainable.

They started with improving the physical environment, the buildings, and transportation links to the city center, in-filling of void spaces on the ground floor for large blocks to provide community greenhouses. Not only community greenhouses — these became like community centers.

Because it’s in Sweden, a cold climate, and a strong ethos around environmental improvement, an important

element was minimizing the environmental footprint. High levels of insulation were included and heat recirculation systems. There’s been a 40 percent reduction in energy and a 60 percent reduction in water usage during the last five years since the refurbishment was completed. It includes composting and waste recycling. The tenants understand exactly what’s happening.

Equally important was bringing about social sustainability. A third of the properties have been empty, and the other two-thirds no one wanted to live in. Now they’ve got a waiting list. Existing residents were involved throughout the process in the redesign of the estate and the redesign of their apartments. There’s now a 50/50 balance of local people and immigrant people, with good relations.

Atlanta This third project is in a low-income area three miles from downtown Atlanta. This was a greenfield site of about 18 hectares. It had planning permission for 62 dwellings, but a progressive developer and architect came together to pioneer a much more sustainable urban form of development, rather than have the low-density urban sprawl typical of Atlanta. Instead of using the whole amount of land for housing, they allocated under half of it for housing, and the remainder was kept for community agriculture, green open space and woodland. They were building to a much higher density. The project met six of the seven of Atlanta Regional Commission’s Smart Growth criteria: green space preservation, compact design, walkability, range of housing opportunities, growth in existing communities, and transportation choices. It was a mixed income scheme, and it’s part of a much larger urban renewal program involving unprecedented cooperation between the government, private enterprise, and neighborhood associations. The Community Agriculture group runs a vegetable-growing program. There are links with the neighborhood, and these are treasured. This project shows how you can do things differently on a greenfield site, in the American context.

The UK’s Building and Social Housing Foundation issued a citation for East Lake Commons, a low-income site

three miles outside Atlanta, Georgia in part because more than half of the site is devoted to community agriculture.

40

Diane Diacon

Pakistan’s Home to One Million My last project, from Pakistan, is a large informal settlement — home to over a million people. It’s been there for thirty years but had no physical infrastructure.

This project is an example of how a local community was mobilized to improve the urban environment. No one else was going to do it for them, or pay for it for them. These are typical problems of informal settlements that have grown up on the edge of cities in countries in the global south.

One in three people in the world live in places like this.

Sanitation is lacking, roads hardly exist, poor water supply, no solid waste collection at all.

Orangi Pilot Project What the Orangi Pilot Project did was talk to the communities. It found out what they wanted. What they found it wanted was good sanitation. It provided training in how to lay piped water and sewage systems. Although it provided the training, the work and the cost was met by the local communities themselves. Altogether five hundred kilometers of underground sanitation have been laid.

Over 100,000 homes have an indoor toilet, and people are proud of these toilets. It makes a very real difference to the way they live. It’s a cleaner and healthier environment.

People are now investing in their homes.

41

They’re planting trees. They’re installing electric lights. They’re clearing away the solid waste, all on their own initiative and at their own expenses. So the reputation of the area has improved. Having an indoor toilet now appears on marriage lists, and that’s a real indicator that what you’re doing has gone into the culture of society and expectations are raised. There’s a future for this place now, and for the people living in it.

Barefoot Architects Giving people an opportunity to earn an income is crucial to addressing inequalities. Training is given in building methods and design so that local people have the skills to address some of their problems. Young men are trained as “barefoot architects”. They can provide low-cost advice to people wanting to improve their homes. Training is given in how to build better and more efficient blocks, so the houses don’t crack and degenerate. The lesson here is that the residents are a resource in any process of urban regeneration. It can only be sustainable if it puts people at the center of that process. It’s important for urban designers to recognize the value of that resource and to draw upon it.

East Lake Commons Conservation Community, located 3 miles from downtown Atlanta, is a new development for mixed tenure and income groups.

It utilizes compact design, community agriculture and greenspace to reduce its ecological footprint.

Institute for Urban Design

Response Andrew Whalley Grimshaw Architects, NY I lead the Grimshaw practice here in New York as well as write for Architecture on sustainability.

In a few generations we are going from a rural planet to a deeply urbanized planet where the majority in another generation will be living in cities. At the moment that’s a great problem, because they’re unsustainable, using vast amounts of the world’s resources. Yet it should be an opportunity for a solution. If these cities are only occupying two percent of the planet’s surface, it should be a great design opportunity.

The challenge is how do you create a lifeenriching urban fabric, yet dense and efficient?

Forty percent of the population are in China and India, so these services have to be tackled quite early on. Yet in a way it’s an easier solution because it’s set against a background of rampant economic and technological advance.

Perhaps designing a new type of city in China, outside Shanghai, is an easier task than doing it in Africa, a much tougher economic climate.

40

Diane Diacon

Pakistan’s Home to One Million My last project, from Pakistan, is a large informal settlement — home to over a million people. It’s been there for thirty years but had no physical infrastructure.

This project is an example of how a local community was mobilized to improve the urban environment. No one else was going to do it for them, or pay for it for them. These are typical problems of informal settlements that have grown up on the edge of cities in countries in the global south.

One in three people in the world live in places like this.

Sanitation is lacking, roads hardly exist, poor water supply, no solid waste collection at all.

Orangi Pilot Project What the Orangi Pilot Project did was talk to the communities. It found out what they wanted. What they found it wanted was good sanitation. It provided training in how to lay piped water and sewage systems. Although it provided the training, the work and the cost was met by the local communities themselves. Altogether five hundred kilometers of underground sanitation have been laid.

Over 100,000 homes have an indoor toilet, and people are proud of these toilets. It makes a very real difference to the way they live. It’s a cleaner and healthier environment.

People are now investing in their homes.

41

They’re planting trees. They’re installing electric lights. They’re clearing away the solid waste, all on their own initiative and at their own expenses. So the reputation of the area has improved. Having an indoor toilet now appears on marriage lists, and that’s a real indicator that what you’re doing has gone into the culture of society and expectations are raised. There’s a future for this place now, and for the people living in it.

Barefoot Architects Giving people an opportunity to earn an income is crucial to addressing inequalities. Training is given in building methods and design so that local people have the skills to address some of their problems. Young men are trained as “barefoot architects”. They can provide low-cost advice to people wanting to improve their homes. Training is given in how to build better and more efficient blocks, so the houses don’t crack and degenerate. The lesson here is that the residents are a resource in any process of urban regeneration. It can only be sustainable if it puts people at the center of that process. It’s important for urban designers to recognize the value of that resource and to draw upon it.

East Lake Commons Conservation Community, located 3 miles from downtown Atlanta, is a new development for mixed tenure and income groups.

It utilizes compact design, community agriculture and greenspace to reduce its ecological footprint.

Institute for Urban Design

Response Andrew Whalley Grimshaw Architects, NY I lead the Grimshaw practice here in New York as well as write for Architecture on sustainability.

In a few generations we are going from a rural planet to a deeply urbanized planet where the majority in another generation will be living in cities. At the moment that’s a great problem, because they’re unsustainable, using vast amounts of the world’s resources. Yet it should be an opportunity for a solution. If these cities are only occupying two percent of the planet’s surface, it should be a great design opportunity.

The challenge is how do you create a lifeenriching urban fabric, yet dense and efficient?

Forty percent of the population are in China and India, so these services have to be tackled quite early on. Yet in a way it’s an easier solution because it’s set against a background of rampant economic and technological advance.

Perhaps designing a new type of city in China, outside Shanghai, is an easier task than doing it in Africa, a much tougher economic climate.

42

Sustainable Cities

10.18.2006

Panel 3 Tokyo Leads in Water Conservation and Neighborhood Design

43

Institute for Urban Design

Panel 3 Tonomori Matsuo President Toyo University Tokyo Water Conservation Through Reuse in Tokyo

The Shiodome district in Tokyo uses reclaimed water in all of its toilets.

United Nations UN-Habitat New York

The definition of sustainable development was first given in the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) of United Nations in 1987. The report said that sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

The concept of sustainable development is characterized by time-dependent characteristics and timedependent changes in population and economic growth.

Deterioration of living and global environments come to be essential factors to be considered. Japanese experiences in GDP growth, energy consumption, CO2 emission for 50 years and in wastewater reuse systems for preservation of river basins in the Tokyo Metropolitan area provide lessons for other cities.

After the world oil crises in 1973, the Japanese economy experienced GDP growth without any increase in primary energy consumption and CO2 emission. This showed that the energy efficiency of Japanese society in total was well improved very rapidly by the advancement of energy efficiency in industries and in people’s life style. In spite of these experiences, Japanese energy consumption and CO2 emission are now increasing again.

Tokyo Metropolitan government introduced treated wastewater reuse systems in 1964 to compensate the industrial water supply from underground water, and to stop over pumping of underground water. The treated wastewater reused for toilets in high rise office and governmental buildings has progressed to reduce the unnecessary development of large dams in the mountain area and to preserve natural ecosystems. Now many purposes of treated wastewater reuse systems have been introduced in the Tokyo Metropolitan area.

42

Sustainable Cities

10.18.2006

Panel 3 Tokyo Leads in Water Conservation and Neighborhood Design

43

Institute for Urban Design

Panel 3 Tonomori Matsuo President Toyo University Tokyo Water Conservation Through Reuse in Tokyo

The Shiodome district in Tokyo uses reclaimed water in all of its toilets.

United Nations UN-Habitat New York

The definition of sustainable development was first given in the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) of United Nations in 1987. The report said that sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

The concept of sustainable development is characterized by time-dependent characteristics and timedependent changes in population and economic growth.

Deterioration of living and global environments come to be essential factors to be considered. Japanese experiences in GDP growth, energy consumption, CO2 emission for 50 years and in wastewater reuse systems for preservation of river basins in the Tokyo Metropolitan area provide lessons for other cities.

After the world oil crises in 1973, the Japanese economy experienced GDP growth without any increase in primary energy consumption and CO2 emission. This showed that the energy efficiency of Japanese society in total was well improved very rapidly by the advancement of energy efficiency in industries and in people’s life style. In spite of these experiences, Japanese energy consumption and CO2 emission are now increasing again.

Tokyo Metropolitan government introduced treated wastewater reuse systems in 1964 to compensate the industrial water supply from underground water, and to stop over pumping of underground water. The treated wastewater reused for toilets in high rise office and governmental buildings has progressed to reduce the unnecessary development of large dams in the mountain area and to preserve natural ecosystems. Now many purposes of treated wastewater reuse systems have been introduced in the Tokyo Metropolitan area.

44

Junichiro Okata

Panel 3 Dr. Junichiro Okata Urban Planning Tokyo University Tokyo Community Based Improvement of Informal Urban Space

45

Institute for Urban Design

In Tokyo, around a half of the inner urban area is informally developed vulnerable urban space. As so-called ‘scrap and build redevelopment’ could not be introduced for various reasons, local municipalities and local residents started an incremental environmental improvement program that was fiscally supported by national and prefecture governments.

The local community association established a ‘Machi-Zukuri’ (community based urban improvement) plan. The local government controls development in the area by a consultation procedure. It supports cooperative rebuilding of small apartment houses, renovation of existing housing, and improved public spaces including widening of narrow streets and creation of pocket parks.

The effectiveness of this approach depends on the location and the basic characteristics of each district. In a residential infrastructure changed the image of the district, attracted new young residents, and stimulated an area located at the western part of Tokyo called Taishido district.

The improvement of public space changed the image of the district, attracted new young residents, and stimulated a development market for apartment houses. Thus a gentrification process moved on. On the other hand, in a residential— industrial mixed-use area, such as the Kyo-Jima district, the improvement of public space and the development of public housing did not attract new residents nor private investment for rebuilding. In these districts, another approach is necessary that promotes social activities and local culture, demonstrates that another urban life style is emerging, and thus promote the vitality of the community and attracts new residents and investments. Not only the urban design of public space but also the design of social activities is important for the improvement of vulnerable urban areas.

Left: The rebirth of pedestrian and stream sidewalks.

Below: Wooden houses, narrow roads and insufficient open space make Tokyo vulnerable to fire spread.

A typical urban renewal program based on the land readjustment system: Studied for the reconstruction of an area devastated by an earthquake.

44

Junichiro Okata

Panel 3 Dr. Junichiro Okata Urban Planning Tokyo University Tokyo Community Based Improvement of Informal Urban Space

45

Institute for Urban Design

In Tokyo, around a half of the inner urban area is informally developed vulnerable urban space. As so-called ‘scrap and build redevelopment’ could not be introduced for various reasons, local municipalities and local residents started an incremental environmental improvement program that was fiscally supported by national and prefecture governments.

The local community association established a ‘Machi-Zukuri’ (community based urban improvement) plan. The local government controls development in the area by a consultation procedure. It supports cooperative rebuilding of small apartment houses, renovation of existing housing, and improved public spaces including widening of narrow streets and creation of pocket parks.

The effectiveness of this approach depends on the location and the basic characteristics of each district. In a residential infrastructure changed the image of the district, attracted new young residents, and stimulated an area located at the western part of Tokyo called Taishido district.

The improvement of public space changed the image of the district, attracted new young residents, and stimulated a development market for apartment houses. Thus a gentrification process moved on. On the other hand, in a residential— industrial mixed-use area, such as the Kyo-Jima district, the improvement of public space and the development of public housing did not attract new residents nor private investment for rebuilding. In these districts, another approach is necessary that promotes social activities and local culture, demonstrates that another urban life style is emerging, and thus promote the vitality of the community and attracts new residents and investments. Not only the urban design of public space but also the design of social activities is important for the improvement of vulnerable urban areas.

Left: The rebirth of pedestrian and stream sidewalks.

Below: Wooden houses, narrow roads and insufficient open space make Tokyo vulnerable to fire spread.

A typical urban renewal program based on the land readjustment system: Studied for the reconstruction of an area devastated by an earthquake.

46

Sustainable Cities

10.18.2006

Conclusion Green Urbanism

47

Institute for Urban Design

Michael Sorkin Director Urban Design Program CUNY Formulary for a Sustainable Urbanism

The vitality of the city is crucial to the success of democracy itself: the city remains a pre-eminent medium of community, interaction, difference and accountancy.

Although it seems counter-intuitive, New York State has been ranked second in the U.S. (after balmy Hawaii) in its efficient use of energy. This situation is due to a single circumstance: the high rates of public transportation use in New York City, greater by far than anyplace else in the country. That such a single factor should — in a place of demanding climate and profligate consumption — be so influential is hugely suggestive. Urban sustainability requires acting at appropriate scales.

This doesn’t come easily. Voluntarism is endemic, the result of national policies that are unconcerned with the fate of the planet. The stupidity and selfishness of the U.S. regime is a special embarrassment: we lead the world both in producing greenhouse gasses and in refusing to do anything about them. This bizarre state of denial is not simply the result of triumphant neo-liberal political economy or the more direct corruptions of Bush family coziness with the petroleum industry but speaks to larger cultural divides in America. These can, at least in part, be traced to the origins of the environmental movement as an element of the counter-cultural coalescence of the sixties, itself strongly figured historically by both a spiritualized idea of the natural that favored an attitude of sublime withdrawal and by the sense of boundlessness inculcated by the apparent infinity of the frontier. The national psyche remains unequipped to deal with the idea of scarcity and our imperial affect is a direct result.

Drastic Measures The small is beautiful position that logically characterizes so much of the discourse of environment has, as a result, meant that the movement for green architecture and urbanism has, true to its origins, been largely preoccupied with the power of individuals, with thinking modestly.

The literature — and to a lesser degree, the environment — abounds with examples of buildings that seek to conserve energy and to achieve higher levels of environmental autonomy, with indispensable models of modesty. The paradox is that although we must all cultivate such styles of behavior, the problems are absolutely massive. It has, for example, been estimated that an immediate 70 percent reduction in greenhouse emissions would simply stabilize the global warming process at present elevated levels. Drastic measures are required and we must act locally and globally.

Ecological Footprint: Los Angeles / Peru

United Nations UN-Habitat New York

One of the most succinct measures of the place of cities in the global environment and of their self-reliance is the so-called “ecological footprint.” This is no more than a convention for calculating the area of a city (or a building or a person) in terms of the totality of the resources it consumes, but — in its representational directness — it has the power to dramatically change normative conceptual-

46

Sustainable Cities

10.18.2006

Conclusion Green Urbanism

47

Institute for Urban Design

Michael Sorkin Director Urban Design Program CUNY Formulary for a Sustainable Urbanism

The vitality of the city is crucial to the success of democracy itself: the city remains a pre-eminent medium of community, interaction, difference and accountancy.

Although it seems counter-intuitive, New York State has been ranked second in the U.S. (after balmy Hawaii) in its efficient use of energy. This situation is due to a single circumstance: the high rates of public transportation use in New York City, greater by far than anyplace else in the country. That such a single factor should — in a place of demanding climate and profligate consumption — be so influential is hugely suggestive. Urban sustainability requires acting at appropriate scales.

This doesn’t come easily. Voluntarism is endemic, the result of national policies that are unconcerned with the fate of the planet. The stupidity and selfishness of the U.S. regime is a special embarrassment: we lead the world both in producing greenhouse gasses and in refusing to do anything about them. This bizarre state of denial is not simply the result of triumphant neo-liberal political economy or the more direct corruptions of Bush family coziness with the petroleum industry but speaks to larger cultural divides in America. These can, at least in part, be traced to the origins of the environmental movement as an element of the counter-cultural coalescence of the sixties, itself strongly figured historically by both a spiritualized idea of the natural that favored an attitude of sublime withdrawal and by the sense of boundlessness inculcated by the apparent infinity of the frontier. The national psyche remains unequipped to deal with the idea of scarcity and our imperial affect is a direct result.

Drastic Measures The small is beautiful position that logically characterizes so much of the discourse of environment has, as a result, meant that the movement for green architecture and urbanism has, true to its origins, been largely preoccupied with the power of individuals, with thinking modestly.

The literature — and to a lesser degree, the environment — abounds with examples of buildings that seek to conserve energy and to achieve higher levels of environmental autonomy, with indispensable models of modesty. The paradox is that although we must all cultivate such styles of behavior, the problems are absolutely massive. It has, for example, been estimated that an immediate 70 percent reduction in greenhouse emissions would simply stabilize the global warming process at present elevated levels. Drastic measures are required and we must act locally and globally.

Ecological Footprint: Los Angeles / Peru

United Nations UN-Habitat New York

One of the most succinct measures of the place of cities in the global environment and of their self-reliance is the so-called “ecological footprint.” This is no more than a convention for calculating the area of a city (or a building or a person) in terms of the totality of the resources it consumes, but — in its representational directness — it has the power to dramatically change normative conceptual-

48

Michael Sorkin

izations of the urban. Unlike a political boundary or even a standard metropolitan statistical area, an ecological footprint does not simply measure the extent of contiguous conurbation or administrative control. Rather, it seeks to quantify just how much of the earth a city requires to sustain itself. This includes inventories of such resources as food, oxygen, water, CO2 uptake, energy and raw materials.

A variety of more or less credible algorithms are available to convert these quantities into areas and the results can be mind-bending. By one set of calculations, the ecological footprint of Los Angeles is equivalent to the total area of Peru!

This has a number of deep implications for urbanism.

First, footprinting suggests that we must think of cities in a way that exceeds their immediate territories. Footprinting vividly reveals how cities function globally, given the long distances their resources are obliged to travel and the distant victims of urban effluent. To cite one tiny example, moving a kiwi from New Zealand to London produces five times the weight of the kiwi in greenhouse gasses, an exchange that might give one pause at breakfast time. The calories consumed in transporting a head of lettuce from California to New York are about thirty-six times those available nutritionally eating the head.

Clearly, if all cities shared the habits of consumption typical of Los Angeles (or New York or Tokyo), the surface of the planet today would be insufficient to supply them all with the means of life. According to a 1997 calculation

by Matthias Wackernagl, the United States as a whole has a capacity of around 18 million square miles but a total footprint of close to 50 million.This is the very definition of the unsustainable: if the entire world consumed at the US rate, two additional planets would be required to support it. This seems unlikely in the short term.

Half at $1 A Day The disproportion is rendered even more grotesque by the fact that huge numbers of the world’s population (of which half — three billion — now live in cities) do not have even the minimum necessities of life. Close to one and a half billion people live on less than one dollar a day. More than a billion people lack safe drinking water and three billion do not have access to adequate sanitation. Life expectancy rates — and the other components of human development —vary appallingly between the rich and the poor. Capitalism — now the planetary economic system — argues that only the neo-liberal engine of “free” trade and fiscal bondage to the global banking regime — will— in its rising tide — lift all boats. In practice, this has abundantly been proved not to be the case as agri-business has wiped out “inefficient” local farming and onerous debt service has crippled the ability of governments to provide basic services. NAFTA, vaunted by its advocates as Mexico’s road out of poverty has — by swamping the market with cheap American corporate corn—crushed the historic small-scale village corn-growing economy. As a result, thousands have been forced off the land and into the cities — which,

49

Institute for Urban Design

unable to cope, grow more miserable by the day. Millions more flee across the border to assume shadowy roles as America’s new lumpen proletariat. Indeed, economic and cultural globalization — with its skein of distorted interdependencies — has helped thwart the possibility for local autonomy and, by extension, self-sufficiency.

Mathematics of Equity What this suggests is that only a radical reduction in either population or rates of consumption can save us.

Of course, such a retrenchment can happen — as it generally does — on the backs of the poor, made even more miserable to protect the appetites of the privileged. This crisis confronts us directly with the mathematics of equity.

Every baby that dies of malnutrition or dirty water in the developing world is, in fact, the victim of our own failures of generosity and justice, of a human eco-system we have designed to rob billions of their lives and chances. And, the focus of so much of the environmental and aid communities on strategies for the lowest cost technologies, while urgent on an emergency basis, can also be a bandage for a system that thrives on inequity. As with the old modernist grail of the minimum dwelling, thinking about the least we can do for the “other” is also a way of protecting our right to the maximum. What is needed, rather, is for us to learn to do with less. The presumption that those of us who are so rapidly robbing the planet of its future have no sacrifices to make, that the transfer of technology and knowledge of how to live should proceed from us to “them” is backwards. Although we may prefer not to frame it this way, the planet is suffering a crisis of overdevelopment.

The kind of strategic thinking that focuses on equity rather than on making the imbalance a little more tolerable can resonate in a wide variety of ways. For instance, if the world were to go vegetarian, footprints would be dramatically reduced. Beef — the nutritional gold standard — is the most inefficient imaginable protein delivery system from a planetary perspective. First world piggishness is reaching new levels of grotesquery in the US which, as many of you know, is plagued by an obesity epidemic in a population increasingly force-fed by corporate nutrition-delivery systems. This is just one symptom of a larger complex of behaviors in which our will to consume is the driver behind what is approaching cultural suicide, something we are all too eager to encourage others to join.

Our cultural profligacy is also reflected in our styles of mobility. We Americans are wedded to our motorcars which generate a tremendous range of problems, reflected in the recent hysteria over rising gasoline prices.

The American automobile industry has become virtually psychotic, pursuing an agenda that is not just completely inimical to planetary health but which defies the most basic logic of competition. As our cars, like our people — and our houses — grow ever fatter— with lower and lower mileage—the automakers find themselves in an ever more parlous state, slashing wages and benefits, laying off tens of thousand of workers, and teetering on the brink of

Arverne Rockaways, New York City, Michael Sorkin Studio.

bankruptcy. For their part, corporate officials demonize workers for the modest expectation that they will be provided with pensions and healthcare but are seemingly unable to reflect on the stupid and lethal product they produce. This lethality is not simply legible in a movement system that kills hundreds of thousands of people a year around the world in accidents but which is also a root cause of that obesity and diabetes epidemic, now clearly identified by the US Centers for Disease Control with the sedentary lifestyles that result from the urbanism of sprawl. But that is another story.

Rise of Mega Cities The economic model that most closely describes the mechanism of urban self-sufficiency is that of import substitution or import replacement as Jane Jacobs calls it. In her classic The Economy of Cities, Jacobs argues that this process has been the historic driver of rapid urban

growth and differentiation, from the earliest days of cities and that cities, in essence, invented the countryside as their footprints spread rather than the other way around.

Although generally used to describe a strictly economic dynamic, the idea also contains a teleological component.

It begs the question of why cities grow and, implicitly, contains a notion about the limits of growth. If there is a single phenomenon today that marks the contemporary stage of urbanism, it is the rise of the so-called mega-cities, cities with populations in excess of ten million. Although cities of a million have been know for millennia, the predominance of these places is of much more recent origin. At present there are well over 500 such cities of a million or more, among them, about thirty cities of ten million or more, at least twenty-three of which are in the developing world.

The difficulty with such places lies in both their unsustainability in environmental terms and their political and social apraxia. Like systems and organisms of many other types, cities too can reach a scale at which they are

48

Michael Sorkin

izations of the urban. Unlike a political boundary or even a standard metropolitan statistical area, an ecological footprint does not simply measure the extent of contiguous conurbation or administrative control. Rather, it seeks to quantify just how much of the earth a city requires to sustain itself. This includes inventories of such resources as food, oxygen, water, CO2 uptake, energy and raw materials.

A variety of more or less credible algorithms are available to convert these quantities into areas and the results can be mind-bending. By one set of calculations, the ecological footprint of Los Angeles is equivalent to the total area of Peru!

This has a number of deep implications for urbanism.

First, footprinting suggests that we must think of cities in a way that exceeds their immediate territories. Footprinting vividly reveals how cities function globally, given the long distances their resources are obliged to travel and the distant victims of urban effluent. To cite one tiny example, moving a kiwi from New Zealand to London produces five times the weight of the kiwi in greenhouse gasses, an exchange that might give one pause at breakfast time. The calories consumed in transporting a head of lettuce from California to New York are about thirty-six times those available nutritionally eating the head.

Clearly, if all cities shared the habits of consumption typical of Los Angeles (or New York or Tokyo), the surface of the planet today would be insufficient to supply them all with the means of life. According to a 1997 calculation

by Matthias Wackernagl, the United States as a whole has a capacity of around 18 million square miles but a total footprint of close to 50 million.This is the very definition of the unsustainable: if the entire world consumed at the US rate, two additional planets would be required to support it. This seems unlikely in the short term.

Half at $1 A Day The disproportion is rendered even more grotesque by the fact that huge numbers of the world’s population (of which half — three billion — now live in cities) do not have even the minimum necessities of life. Close to one and a half billion people live on less than one dollar a day. More than a billion people lack safe drinking water and three billion do not have access to adequate sanitation. Life expectancy rates — and the other components of human development —vary appallingly between the rich and the poor. Capitalism — now the planetary economic system — argues that only the neo-liberal engine of “free” trade and fiscal bondage to the global banking regime — will— in its rising tide — lift all boats. In practice, this has abundantly been proved not to be the case as agri-business has wiped out “inefficient” local farming and onerous debt service has crippled the ability of governments to provide basic services. NAFTA, vaunted by its advocates as Mexico’s road out of poverty has — by swamping the market with cheap American corporate corn—crushed the historic small-scale village corn-growing economy. As a result, thousands have been forced off the land and into the cities — which,

49

Institute for Urban Design

unable to cope, grow more miserable by the day. Millions more flee across the border to assume shadowy roles as America’s new lumpen proletariat. Indeed, economic and cultural globalization — with its skein of distorted interdependencies — has helped thwart the possibility for local autonomy and, by extension, self-sufficiency.

Mathematics of Equity What this suggests is that only a radical reduction in either population or rates of consumption can save us.

Of course, such a retrenchment can happen — as it generally does — on the backs of the poor, made even more miserable to protect the appetites of the privileged. This crisis confronts us directly with the mathematics of equity.

Every baby that dies of malnutrition or dirty water in the developing world is, in fact, the victim of our own failures of generosity and justice, of a human eco-system we have designed to rob billions of their lives and chances. And, the focus of so much of the environmental and aid communities on strategies for the lowest cost technologies, while urgent on an emergency basis, can also be a bandage for a system that thrives on inequity. As with the old modernist grail of the minimum dwelling, thinking about the least we can do for the “other” is also a way of protecting our right to the maximum. What is needed, rather, is for us to learn to do with less. The presumption that those of us who are so rapidly robbing the planet of its future have no sacrifices to make, that the transfer of technology and knowledge of how to live should proceed from us to “them” is backwards. Although we may prefer not to frame it this way, the planet is suffering a crisis of overdevelopment.

The kind of strategic thinking that focuses on equity rather than on making the imbalance a little more tolerable can resonate in a wide variety of ways. For instance, if the world were to go vegetarian, footprints would be dramatically reduced. Beef — the nutritional gold standard — is the most inefficient imaginable protein delivery system from a planetary perspective. First world piggishness is reaching new levels of grotesquery in the US which, as many of you know, is plagued by an obesity epidemic in a population increasingly force-fed by corporate nutrition-delivery systems. This is just one symptom of a larger complex of behaviors in which our will to consume is the driver behind what is approaching cultural suicide, something we are all too eager to encourage others to join.

Our cultural profligacy is also reflected in our styles of mobility. We Americans are wedded to our motorcars which generate a tremendous range of problems, reflected in the recent hysteria over rising gasoline prices.

The American automobile industry has become virtually psychotic, pursuing an agenda that is not just completely inimical to planetary health but which defies the most basic logic of competition. As our cars, like our people — and our houses — grow ever fatter— with lower and lower mileage—the automakers find themselves in an ever more parlous state, slashing wages and benefits, laying off tens of thousand of workers, and teetering on the brink of

Arverne Rockaways, New York City, Michael Sorkin Studio.

bankruptcy. For their part, corporate officials demonize workers for the modest expectation that they will be provided with pensions and healthcare but are seemingly unable to reflect on the stupid and lethal product they produce. This lethality is not simply legible in a movement system that kills hundreds of thousands of people a year around the world in accidents but which is also a root cause of that obesity and diabetes epidemic, now clearly identified by the US Centers for Disease Control with the sedentary lifestyles that result from the urbanism of sprawl. But that is another story.

Rise of Mega Cities The economic model that most closely describes the mechanism of urban self-sufficiency is that of import substitution or import replacement as Jane Jacobs calls it. In her classic The Economy of Cities, Jacobs argues that this process has been the historic driver of rapid urban

growth and differentiation, from the earliest days of cities and that cities, in essence, invented the countryside as their footprints spread rather than the other way around.

Although generally used to describe a strictly economic dynamic, the idea also contains a teleological component.

It begs the question of why cities grow and, implicitly, contains a notion about the limits of growth. If there is a single phenomenon today that marks the contemporary stage of urbanism, it is the rise of the so-called mega-cities, cities with populations in excess of ten million. Although cities of a million have been know for millennia, the predominance of these places is of much more recent origin. At present there are well over 500 such cities of a million or more, among them, about thirty cities of ten million or more, at least twenty-three of which are in the developing world.

The difficulty with such places lies in both their unsustainability in environmental terms and their political and social apraxia. Like systems and organisms of many other types, cities too can reach a scale at which they are

50

Michael Sorkin

Company Town, Hen Heup, Laos, Michael Sorkin Studio.

simply unable to perform coordinated movements. Beyond a certain size, cities become both inaccessible and beyond management. Services are undeliverable and politics — which must be rooted in the local to be truly democratic — cease to be a meaningful element in everyday life.

Moreover, since these cities are increasingly the product of the in-migration of the poor, they become factories of despair, forcing their inhabitants into ever more desperate margins in which any hope of individual autonomy becomes an impossible dream. And yet, as Jane Jacobs and so many others have so eloquently pointed out, large cities are — in their multiplication of useful margins — the indispensable settings for freedom and choice.

New Cities Needed This balance between political autonomy and environmental self-sufficiency has a clear component of scale.

Thinking about the future of the city, it is evident that the

51

only reasonable formula is to create new cities and lots of them. Of course, this process is taking place all the time, but the degree to which urban creation proceeds without anything that might properly be called environmental planning is astonishing. The vast majority of our cities are simply accidents, the undisciplined growth of existing towns or— most characteristically — the global spread of the interstitial ooze commonly called the “edge city” or simply sprawl. Again, America leads the way: our economy directs the major portion of our urban investment and development not to traditional urban areas but to the endless periphery of the multi-national globopolis.

Unfortunately, this unbridled growth has also acquired a large cadre of enthusiasts, ranging from laissez-faire creeps to mindless architectural exponents of bigness, eager to be caught up in hyper-growth.

As I’ve already suggested, one of the cultural resistances that must be overcome by a sustainable urbanism is our own inclination to think in terms of technical solutions to environmental problems. This is not to slight the importance of technology — one need only think about the revolution that might ensue from the invention of truly cheap photo-voltaics or desalination — rather to point out the potential conflict between the idea of technology as the medium for overcoming difference and the predication of the sustainable in the idea of locality. Products of western-style cultural universalism, our leading building and environmental technologies have long sought to offer a homogeneity of possibilities in the construction of buildings and cities. Air-conditioning secures a constant indoor temperature everywhere. Fertilizers and genetic engineering bring local diets into conformity with multi-national nutritional norms. Automobile ownership assures territorial smoothness. Electronic technology throws body-based styles of adjacency into radical doubt.

The corrective is to think of technology not as an autonomous force that seeks solutions measured only by internal standards of “efficiency” and uniformity but as an instrumentality that can found and secure the benefits of the local— mid-wife to difference. This means that particularity must be valued for itself, that the paradigm of uniformity must be resisted at all levels, from the technical to the cultural. The fight for diversity is not simply sentimental, nostalgia for vanishing habits of life that technology has rendered obsolete. Rather, as we know from genetics and social biology, diversity is crucial to renewal and health. This is also true in the political and social registers.

Freedom is the byproduct of authentic choices and a uniform — Starbucks on every corner— environment is the enemy of both our rights and our opportunities.

Dialectic of Difference Devising urban practices and morphologies to produce this dialectic of difference is the task of green urbanism. To state such principles is to beg their inflection — the argument for a consistent agenda is very different from arguing for a uniform collection of forms. Indeed, as

Institute for Urban Design

global culture increasingly assaults the authenticity of difference, our task as architects and urbanists is to find — through research, invention, and leaps of the imagination — the new structures of difference that will produce and support an ever-unfolding array of local forms, habits, and meanings. This said, what might be the elements of a sustainable urbanism that have widespread application, practices that are both protective and stimulating? If the goal is to promote urbanism that is just, beautiful, and sustainable, allow me to suggest a halfdozen crucial qualities: 1 The Green City Will Be Delimited The debate over compact cities has been especially fervid in Europe, less so in the United States. Nevertheless, one of the primary agendas for urban growth is the retention of the difference between what is urban and what is not, a proposition about both character and edges. While we may prefer to think of nature as an artifact, an artificial construction, a remnant of 18 th century rationalist ideology, we all know that, as a practical matter, the continued existence of the “natural” environment is crucial for both our psychical self-construction and for our physical survival.

The only cure for sprawl is to call a halt to it, to build cities in which boundaries are clear and which are able to continuously inventory the means of their own survival, differentiation, hospitality, and assets. This will produce a double cycle of growth. The first phase — that of enlargement — will limn the expanded territorial requirements of the city. The second — characteristic of “historic” cities — will be an on-going differentiation in place.

2 The Green City Will Be Body-Based Sustainable urbanism is the recognition that cities are habitats. This implies a radical re-description of what it means to measure urban success and what exactly it means to live in the city. The city, treated as an ecology or collection of ecologies, must conduce both the mental and physical health of its inhabitants and structure itself — in the first instance — to the capacities and needs of the human body. The wave of tele- and cyborg technologies — well reflected in our chosen contemporary forms of paranoia — tend toward a disembodied subjectivity, the bio-political winnowing of citizenship. Freedom of movement — the basis of freedom of assembly — is the root expression of democracy in space and the sustainable city will privilege a particular means — human locomotion.

Mobility — If walking is the alpha means of urban circulation, then the basic construct of urban organization — the neighborhood — will be both sized and differenced to accommodate people on foot.This suggests that neighborhoods be highly mixed in use, supporting the range of daily necessities — employment, education, commerce, conviviality — that are crucial to full and active life. The walking city also ramifies in its architecture. If the test of regular accessibility by foot is applied to urban building, it will tend to generate an architecture that is low — five or six stories high. Unless walking is restored, architecture is dead.

Penang Peaks, Michael Sorkin Studio.

Propinquity —Throughout the world the green agenda has displaced or merged with the red as the focus of political activity. This is not simply a distraction from what might seem more pressing principles but a reformulation of the terms of the struggle for a world arriving at the “end of history,” a re-articulation of the terms of political argument for a globalizing culture.

Global Commons To the degree that the ownership of the environment — and America and its ideological allies are pressing for the rapid devolution of the global commons into private hands — marks the world distribution of wealth, its stewardship becomes the marker of what once was called class struggle. However, equally crucial to the character of the green city — which I understand as conceptually fully interchangeable with the idea of the just city — is the way in which it fulfills the primal role of democratic space,

50

Michael Sorkin

Company Town, Hen Heup, Laos, Michael Sorkin Studio.

simply unable to perform coordinated movements. Beyond a certain size, cities become both inaccessible and beyond management. Services are undeliverable and politics — which must be rooted in the local to be truly democratic — cease to be a meaningful element in everyday life.

Moreover, since these cities are increasingly the product of the in-migration of the poor, they become factories of despair, forcing their inhabitants into ever more desperate margins in which any hope of individual autonomy becomes an impossible dream. And yet, as Jane Jacobs and so many others have so eloquently pointed out, large cities are — in their multiplication of useful margins — the indispensable settings for freedom and choice.

New Cities Needed This balance between political autonomy and environmental self-sufficiency has a clear component of scale.

Thinking about the future of the city, it is evident that the

51

only reasonable formula is to create new cities and lots of them. Of course, this process is taking place all the time, but the degree to which urban creation proceeds without anything that might properly be called environmental planning is astonishing. The vast majority of our cities are simply accidents, the undisciplined growth of existing towns or— most characteristically — the global spread of the interstitial ooze commonly called the “edge city” or simply sprawl. Again, America leads the way: our economy directs the major portion of our urban investment and development not to traditional urban areas but to the endless periphery of the multi-national globopolis.

Unfortunately, this unbridled growth has also acquired a large cadre of enthusiasts, ranging from laissez-faire creeps to mindless architectural exponents of bigness, eager to be caught up in hyper-growth.

As I’ve already suggested, one of the cultural resistances that must be overcome by a sustainable urbanism is our own inclination to think in terms of technical solutions to environmental problems. This is not to slight the importance of technology — one need only think about the revolution that might ensue from the invention of truly cheap photo-voltaics or desalination — rather to point out the potential conflict between the idea of technology as the medium for overcoming difference and the predication of the sustainable in the idea of locality. Products of western-style cultural universalism, our leading building and environmental technologies have long sought to offer a homogeneity of possibilities in the construction of buildings and cities. Air-conditioning secures a constant indoor temperature everywhere. Fertilizers and genetic engineering bring local diets into conformity with multi-national nutritional norms. Automobile ownership assures territorial smoothness. Electronic technology throws body-based styles of adjacency into radical doubt.

The corrective is to think of technology not as an autonomous force that seeks solutions measured only by internal standards of “efficiency” and uniformity but as an instrumentality that can found and secure the benefits of the local— mid-wife to difference. This means that particularity must be valued for itself, that the paradigm of uniformity must be resisted at all levels, from the technical to the cultural. The fight for diversity is not simply sentimental, nostalgia for vanishing habits of life that technology has rendered obsolete. Rather, as we know from genetics and social biology, diversity is crucial to renewal and health. This is also true in the political and social registers.

Freedom is the byproduct of authentic choices and a uniform — Starbucks on every corner— environment is the enemy of both our rights and our opportunities.

Dialectic of Difference Devising urban practices and morphologies to produce this dialectic of difference is the task of green urbanism. To state such principles is to beg their inflection — the argument for a consistent agenda is very different from arguing for a uniform collection of forms. Indeed, as

Institute for Urban Design

global culture increasingly assaults the authenticity of difference, our task as architects and urbanists is to find — through research, invention, and leaps of the imagination — the new structures of difference that will produce and support an ever-unfolding array of local forms, habits, and meanings. This said, what might be the elements of a sustainable urbanism that have widespread application, practices that are both protective and stimulating? If the goal is to promote urbanism that is just, beautiful, and sustainable, allow me to suggest a halfdozen crucial qualities: 1 The Green City Will Be Delimited The debate over compact cities has been especially fervid in Europe, less so in the United States. Nevertheless, one of the primary agendas for urban growth is the retention of the difference between what is urban and what is not, a proposition about both character and edges. While we may prefer to think of nature as an artifact, an artificial construction, a remnant of 18 th century rationalist ideology, we all know that, as a practical matter, the continued existence of the “natural” environment is crucial for both our psychical self-construction and for our physical survival.

The only cure for sprawl is to call a halt to it, to build cities in which boundaries are clear and which are able to continuously inventory the means of their own survival, differentiation, hospitality, and assets. This will produce a double cycle of growth. The first phase — that of enlargement — will limn the expanded territorial requirements of the city. The second — characteristic of “historic” cities — will be an on-going differentiation in place.

2 The Green City Will Be Body-Based Sustainable urbanism is the recognition that cities are habitats. This implies a radical re-description of what it means to measure urban success and what exactly it means to live in the city. The city, treated as an ecology or collection of ecologies, must conduce both the mental and physical health of its inhabitants and structure itself — in the first instance — to the capacities and needs of the human body. The wave of tele- and cyborg technologies — well reflected in our chosen contemporary forms of paranoia — tend toward a disembodied subjectivity, the bio-political winnowing of citizenship. Freedom of movement — the basis of freedom of assembly — is the root expression of democracy in space and the sustainable city will privilege a particular means — human locomotion.

Mobility — If walking is the alpha means of urban circulation, then the basic construct of urban organization — the neighborhood — will be both sized and differenced to accommodate people on foot.This suggests that neighborhoods be highly mixed in use, supporting the range of daily necessities — employment, education, commerce, conviviality — that are crucial to full and active life. The walking city also ramifies in its architecture. If the test of regular accessibility by foot is applied to urban building, it will tend to generate an architecture that is low — five or six stories high. Unless walking is restored, architecture is dead.

Penang Peaks, Michael Sorkin Studio.

Propinquity —Throughout the world the green agenda has displaced or merged with the red as the focus of political activity. This is not simply a distraction from what might seem more pressing principles but a reformulation of the terms of the struggle for a world arriving at the “end of history,” a re-articulation of the terms of political argument for a globalizing culture.

Global Commons To the degree that the ownership of the environment — and America and its ideological allies are pressing for the rapid devolution of the global commons into private hands — marks the world distribution of wealth, its stewardship becomes the marker of what once was called class struggle. However, equally crucial to the character of the green city — which I understand as conceptually fully interchangeable with the idea of the just city — is the way in which it fulfills the primal role of democratic space,

52

Michael Sorkin

providing the setting for both the deliberate and the accidental meeting of bodies. The facilitation of this interaction is perhaps our most critical task.

Sun, Space, Greenery Respiration — Le Corbusier’s famed formulation of a trinity of architectural desires — sun, space, and greenery — is a good enough mantra for the tectonics of bodybased architecture. Although this seems basic, its implications are ever more deeply ignored. Faith will not assure breathable air, cross-ventilation, comfortable insulation, the reduction of the urban heat island, or room for the necessary pleasures of physical culture. Green urbanism, at its roots, is a strategy for survival. In the immortal and indisputable motto of the Hanseatic League, Stadt Luft macht frei — city air makes you free.

3 The Green City Will Be Self-Sufficient The idea of the self-sufficient city is by no means meant to deny the fundamental value of cooperation.

Indeed, such cooperation is the precondition of selfsufficiency. Nor should the idea of self-sufficiency suggest the elimination of specialization and exchange, whether economic, social, cultural, or biological. Rather, the goal of self-sufficiency is to provide a primary measure of a city’s responsiveness to the biosphere and an inventory of global economic and environmental justice. A city striving to support itself will— via this predicate of economy — find — as suggested above — a more meaningful and defensible place in a world community increasingly characterized by weak states and powerful corporations.

4 The Green City Will Be Local Given the rapid evisceration of locality by the onslaught of multinational culture, new strategies must emerge for authenticating the individuality of place and for fighting the spread of the generic city. A green and selfsufficient city will be closely attuned to the particulars of its bio-climate, culture, and resource base. There are three potential sources for such differentiations of form. First, the weight of culture and history — the fabric of memory and of consent — must be served.

Second, appropriate technologies of sustainability — however simple — will be foundational in the disposition of the elements of the city and in their particular configurations. The repertoire of shading, insulating, the management of wind, the use of indigenous materials, the careful consideration of life-cycle from “cradle to cradle”, the reduction of embodied energy in construction, the use of renewable means of producing energy, all will contribute to the formulation of an architecture of particularity and suitability within the larger context of local wishes and memories. Finally, the true signature of cultural locality lies in both functional and expressive singularity. Such singularities — whether those of Venice or Fez, Madrid or New York, Istanbul or Bangkok — are not automatic or “natural.”

53

Garden City, Broadacre City 5 The Green City Will Be Green I mean this literally. It isn’t an accident that modernity’s “classic” proposals for new forms for the city — whether the Garden City, the Radiant City, Broadacre City, or simply the suburbs — have all been predicated on a rebalancing of built space and green space. This makes sense: all of these propositions were responding to the nineteenth century predecessors of the dysfunctional urbanism of today.

It seems self-evident that the only answer to the problem of a planet urbanizing at the rate of a million people a week is the creation of many new cities, cities that are radically sustainable.

If one can make a blanketing statement about the formal character of these cities, it is that they will literally teem with green. This proposition might seem both too obvious and too simple. But an abundance of greenery in cities will mark their efficiency and progress in the future.

“E” for Utopia 6 Eutopian Although the idea of utopia is one that has fallen into disrepute, demonized as the source of a deadly rationalism that has ethnic cleansing and the concentration camp as its highest achievements, it remains vital that we architects be able to project our dreams and our research into the space of the imaginary. Utopia has always been a vital form of propaganda for the idea of the best and I believe that we give up our commitment to healing the planet at our— and everyone’s — peril. I’ve added that “e” to utopia to change its meaning from no place to a better place and to suggest that the construction of such places must be collective and their forms shifting and mysterious. The idea of a better earth means, at root, a more democratic one. This means that a Eutopian urbanism is inescapably political. Whether this takes the form of squandered resources, labor exploitation, downstream pollution, or the symbolic consolidation of undeserved power, our urbanism must define itself in constant opposition to the forms and practices of inequality and exploitation.

Eutopia is captured in Emerald City of Oz poster.

Image courtesy Randy Souders.

Institute for Urban Design

52

Michael Sorkin

providing the setting for both the deliberate and the accidental meeting of bodies. The facilitation of this interaction is perhaps our most critical task.

Sun, Space, Greenery Respiration — Le Corbusier’s famed formulation of a trinity of architectural desires — sun, space, and greenery — is a good enough mantra for the tectonics of bodybased architecture. Although this seems basic, its implications are ever more deeply ignored. Faith will not assure breathable air, cross-ventilation, comfortable insulation, the reduction of the urban heat island, or room for the necessary pleasures of physical culture. Green urbanism, at its roots, is a strategy for survival. In the immortal and indisputable motto of the Hanseatic League, Stadt Luft macht frei — city air makes you free.

3 The Green City Will Be Self-Sufficient The idea of the self-sufficient city is by no means meant to deny the fundamental value of cooperation.

Indeed, such cooperation is the precondition of selfsufficiency. Nor should the idea of self-sufficiency suggest the elimination of specialization and exchange, whether economic, social, cultural, or biological. Rather, the goal of self-sufficiency is to provide a primary measure of a city’s responsiveness to the biosphere and an inventory of global economic and environmental justice. A city striving to support itself will— via this predicate of economy — find — as suggested above — a more meaningful and defensible place in a world community increasingly characterized by weak states and powerful corporations.

4 The Green City Will Be Local Given the rapid evisceration of locality by the onslaught of multinational culture, new strategies must emerge for authenticating the individuality of place and for fighting the spread of the generic city. A green and selfsufficient city will be closely attuned to the particulars of its bio-climate, culture, and resource base. There are three potential sources for such differentiations of form. First, the weight of culture and history — the fabric of memory and of consent — must be served.

Second, appropriate technologies of sustainability — however simple — will be foundational in the disposition of the elements of the city and in their particular configurations. The repertoire of shading, insulating, the management of wind, the use of indigenous materials, the careful consideration of life-cycle from “cradle to cradle”, the reduction of embodied energy in construction, the use of renewable means of producing energy, all will contribute to the formulation of an architecture of particularity and suitability within the larger context of local wishes and memories. Finally, the true signature of cultural locality lies in both functional and expressive singularity. Such singularities — whether those of Venice or Fez, Madrid or New York, Istanbul or Bangkok — are not automatic or “natural.”

53

Garden City, Broadacre City 5 The Green City Will Be Green I mean this literally. It isn’t an accident that modernity’s “classic” proposals for new forms for the city — whether the Garden City, the Radiant City, Broadacre City, or simply the suburbs — have all been predicated on a rebalancing of built space and green space. This makes sense: all of these propositions were responding to the nineteenth century predecessors of the dysfunctional urbanism of today.

It seems self-evident that the only answer to the problem of a planet urbanizing at the rate of a million people a week is the creation of many new cities, cities that are radically sustainable.

If one can make a blanketing statement about the formal character of these cities, it is that they will literally teem with green. This proposition might seem both too obvious and too simple. But an abundance of greenery in cities will mark their efficiency and progress in the future.

“E” for Utopia 6 Eutopian Although the idea of utopia is one that has fallen into disrepute, demonized as the source of a deadly rationalism that has ethnic cleansing and the concentration camp as its highest achievements, it remains vital that we architects be able to project our dreams and our research into the space of the imaginary. Utopia has always been a vital form of propaganda for the idea of the best and I believe that we give up our commitment to healing the planet at our— and everyone’s — peril. I’ve added that “e” to utopia to change its meaning from no place to a better place and to suggest that the construction of such places must be collective and their forms shifting and mysterious. The idea of a better earth means, at root, a more democratic one. This means that a Eutopian urbanism is inescapably political. Whether this takes the form of squandered resources, labor exploitation, downstream pollution, or the symbolic consolidation of undeserved power, our urbanism must define itself in constant opposition to the forms and practices of inequality and exploitation.

Eutopia is captured in Emerald City of Oz poster.

Image courtesy Randy Souders.

Institute for Urban Design

54

Speakers / Sponsors

Sustainable Cities Speakers / Sponsors

55

Speakers Judith Bahemuka Judith Bahemuka was the Permanent Representative of Kenya to the United Nations before moving to Canada. She was the Chairman of the Social and Human Sciences National Committee at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) National Commission.

Since 1998, Ms. Bahemuka served as Director of the University of Nairobi’s International Learning Centre, which she established. Between 1994 and 1998, she was professor and Chairman of the University’s Department of Sociology. A trained sociologist, whose specialization is rural development, Ms. Bahemuka is the author of a number of books.

Lance Jay Brown Lance Jay Brown served two terms as elected Chair, School of Architecture, Urban Design and Landscape Architecture at the City College of New York/CUNY where he is now Coordinator for Design. Principal of Lance Jay Brown, Architecture + Urban Design, Brown served as Assistant Director, Design Arts Program, and National Endowment for the Arts and served as Director, Design Excellence in Non-traditional Architecture, the 2003 ACSA Distinguished Professorship for Life; 2003 Fellowship, American Institute of Architects and was elected two terms as Board Member for Educational Affairs, AIA New York Chapter. He is Program Advisor to the Institute for Urban Design.

Aliye P. Celik Aliye P. Celik, Ph.D, is a Senior Advisor at the Global Alliance for Information and Development at DESA and developed the October 17 and 18 program for the Institute for Urban Design. As the Chief of ECOSOC and Interorganizational Cooperation Branch/DESA, Celik strengthened the United Nations through innovative participatory mechanisms. She joined the United Nations Programme for Human Settlements in 1981 and served the organization first in Nairobi then as the head of the New York office up to 2000. Dr. Celik has degrees in architecture from Middle East Technical University, Princeton University, and Instanbul Technical University.

Chris Coleman Chris Coleman was elected by the people of Saint Paul and became the 45th Mayor of the City of Saint Paul upon taking office in January 2006.

Mayor Colman’s roots in Saint Paul run deep. He is a lifelong Saint Paul resident, born in 1961 as one of six kids in a classic Saint Paul, Irish American Democratic family. Growing up, Mayor Coleman attended St. Luke’s, graduated from Cretin in 1979, attended undergrad at the University of Minnesota and graduated from the U of M law school in 1987. In his free time, Mayor Coleman enjoys camping, hiking, coaching his kids’ sports, running along trails in Saint Paul’s parks, listening to music and playing the bagpipes. His passions are his kids, Connie and public services.

Diane Diacon Diane Diacon is Director of the Building and Social Housing Foundation, an independent research organization that promotes sustainable development and innovation in housing through collaborative research and knowledge transfer both in the UK and internationally. She has published widely in the field of innovative housing solutions and lectures on sustainable housing issues in a range of academic institutions. She is a Non-Executive Director of both a regional and national housing provider and represents the United Kingdom on the European Liaison Committee for Social Housing.

Ann Ferebee Ann Ferebee is Founding Director of the Institute for Urban Design.

Launched in 1979 with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Institute held its first program at the University of Pennsylvania and later programs with Harvard, University of Toronto and Pompidou Center, Paris. Ann is a design journalist whose History of Modern Design was recognized as among best 100 illustrated texts of 1970. Ann is working on a 2nd edition to her book on modern design and will launch an Institute Archives Project in 2007.

Her son, John, is a student at Stony Brook University.

Axumite Gebre-Egziabher Axumite Gebre-Egziabher is presently the Director of UN-HABITAT New York Office. Born in Axum, Ethiopia, she holds a Doctrate (PhD) in Development Planning, from the DPU, University of London, U.K. Prior to her present post, she worked as Coordinator of the Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly for the review and appraisal of the implementation of the Habitat Agenda (Istanbul + 5), from May 1999 – June 2002.

Christopher F. Hackett Christopher F. Hackett is the Permanent Representative of Barbados. He has been Chief of the Caribbean Division, Regional Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean, of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Mr. Hackett holds a PhD in public administration from New York University, a Master of Arts in international relations from Carlton University, among other degrees.

Tonomori Matsuo Professor Tonomori Matsuo graduated from Department of Civil Engineering, University of Tokyo in 1963. He was elected President of Toyo University in September 2003. The research group, headed by him, at the Graduate School of Regional Development Studies, was selected as an Open Research Center

by Ministry on Education of Japanese Government in 2001. Dr. Matsuo’s major research fields are biological wastewater treatment, metabolic and energy systems in urban areas.

He recently started a new research field called “Environmentics” for sustainable development of global societies through the 21st century.

Junichiro Okata Professor Okata joined the University of Tokyo in 1996 as an associate professor for urban planning at the Department of Urban Engineering, School of Engineering. He has taught at the Department of Urban Engineering as a professor for urban planning since 1999 and has been the Secretary General at the Center for Sustainable Urban Regeneration (cSUR) since 2003. His experiences cover planning and housing policy in Japan, Korea, China, Great Britain, Germany, United States, Canada and Colombia. He has chaired committees on municipal planning in Yokohama, Kamakura and Atsugi. Currently, he is the director of cSUR research team on Sustainability of Mega-Cities.

Institute for Urban Design

Suha Ozkan Dr. Ozkan has done research on the theory and history of architecture, design, vernacular form and emergency housing. At Middle East Technical University, Istanbul he taught architectural design and design theory for fifteen years, became Associate Dean of the Faculty of Architecture in 1978, and was appointed VicePresident of the University in 1979.

He has lectured in North America, Europe, Central-, South-, and SouthEast Asia, including at the Schools of Architecture at the Universities of Paris, Lausanne, York and Trondheim.

With the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in Geneva, Dr. Ozkan served as Deputy Secretary General from 1983 to 1990, and was made the Secretary General in 1991. On behalf of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, he has organized international architectural competitions. He has received the Golden Award for global contribution in architecture by the Indian monthly, Architecture and Design. His most recent project is called World Architecture Community.

Mario Schjetnan Mario Schjetnan obtained a degree in Architecture from the National University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1968 and proceeded to obtain a Master Degree in Landscape Architecture with emphasis in urban design at the University of California, Berkeley in 1970. In 1984 he was selected for a Loeb Fellowship at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University.

In 1977, he started his own firm, Grupo de Diseño Urbano / GDU, together with José Luis Pérez. The Green Prize in Urban Design from Harvard University for Parque Ecológico Xochimilco in 1996; the Latin American Grand Prix from the Biennial in Architecture in Buenos Aires, Argentina for the Museum of the Northern Cultures of Mexico in Paquimé, Chihuahua in 1995. The President´s Award of Excellence from the American Society of Landscape Architecture for Parque Tezozomoc in 1989. He will lecture at the University of Virginia in 2007.

Michael Sorkin The Michael Sorkin Studio is a New York-based architectural practice whose recent projects include planning and design for a sustainable 5,000-unit community in Penang, Malaysia, master planning for Hamburg, Leipzig, and Schwerin, Germany, planning for a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, campus planning at the University of Chicago and CCNY. Michael Sorkin is the Director of the Graduate Urban Design Program at the City College of New York. From 1993 to 2000 he was Professor of Urbanism and Director of the Institute of Urbanism at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

Darren Walker Darren Walker is Vice President, Foundation Initiatives at the Rockefeller Foundation. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin and his law degree from the University of Texas School of Law. Previously, he was chief operating officer of the Abyssinian Development Corporation in Harlem. He has also held several finance positions in the for-profit world, including associate for capital markets at the Union Bank of Switzerland in New York. Mr. Walker spent a year as a full-time volunteer at the Children’s Storefront School in Harlem, a private school that offers education tuition-free for local children. He donates financially to the Hetrick Martin Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on the needs of gay and lesbian youth in New York.

Sponsors Institute for Urban Design Since 1979, the Institute for Urban Design has provided Fall and Spring programs to debate existing problems in urban design and to include urban design professionals to share ideas for new solutions. We study the experiments urban design professional are making in various cities and use them to formulate possible applications in other cities. Journalists Talk About Cities, an 8-year-old program was reflected in the October 2006 conference to which journalists from Toronto and New York contributed. Fellows are elected by the Board of the Institute in recognition of their contribution to the design of cities. Publications include Urban Design Update (bimonthly), Urban Design Case Study (Quarterly), Membership Directory (yearly), and Proceedings for each symposium.

An Archive of publications since 1979, will begin to be posted on the website in January 2007.

UN-Habitat UN-Habitat’s June program drew more than 10,000 attendees and showcased Vancouver as perhaps the best designed city in North America.

Following that the organization convened meetings in Florence on energy, in Oslo on private public partnerships for a green revolution in Africa and in Geneva on tourism in Africa. A focus for 2007 will be water for African cities.

Rockefeller Foundation The Rockefeller Foundation was established in 1913 by John D. Rockefeller, Sr. to promote the “wellbeing” of humanity by addressing the root causes of serious problems.

With assets of more than $3 billion, it is one of the nation’s largest private foundations. The Foundation works internationally to expand opportunities for poor and vulnerable people and to help ensure that the benefits of glabalization are shared more widely.

Two recently launched Rockefeller Foundation initiatives include the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) and lead funding and other support for the Unified New Orleans Plan for rebuilding in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Toyo University The aims of the Faculty of Regional Development and the Graduate School of Regional Development are to teach sustainable development and finance in order to develop villages and towns in Japan and abroad. It is the aim of the Faculty of Regional Development Studies to enable students to be able to solve the piling-up problems of the world, contribute to the sustainable creation of regional societies and bear the tasks of the 21st century.

BSHF The Building and Social Housing Foundation (BSHF) is an independent research organization that promotes sustainable development in housing through collaborative research and knowledge transfer. Established in 1976, BSHF works both in the UK and internationally to identify innovative housing solutions and to foster the exchange of information and good practice.

Acknowledgements Thanks to The Rockefeller Foundation for supporting production and printing of The Proceedings. The Proceedings was edited by Ann Ferebee and designed by Martin Perrin, Perrin Studio. The staff included Joyce Batterton, Associate for Text and Roberta Korcz, Picture Associate.

54

Speakers / Sponsors

Sustainable Cities Speakers / Sponsors

55

Speakers Judith Bahemuka Judith Bahemuka was the Permanent Representative of Kenya to the United Nations before moving to Canada. She was the Chairman of the Social and Human Sciences National Committee at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) National Commission.

Since 1998, Ms. Bahemuka served as Director of the University of Nairobi’s International Learning Centre, which she established. Between 1994 and 1998, she was professor and Chairman of the University’s Department of Sociology. A trained sociologist, whose specialization is rural development, Ms. Bahemuka is the author of a number of books.

Lance Jay Brown Lance Jay Brown served two terms as elected Chair, School of Architecture, Urban Design and Landscape Architecture at the City College of New York/CUNY where he is now Coordinator for Design. Principal of Lance Jay Brown, Architecture + Urban Design, Brown served as Assistant Director, Design Arts Program, and National Endowment for the Arts and served as Director, Design Excellence in Non-traditional Architecture, the 2003 ACSA Distinguished Professorship for Life; 2003 Fellowship, American Institute of Architects and was elected two terms as Board Member for Educational Affairs, AIA New York Chapter. He is Program Advisor to the Institute for Urban Design.

Aliye P. Celik Aliye P. Celik, Ph.D, is a Senior Advisor at the Global Alliance for Information and Development at DESA and developed the October 17 and 18 program for the Institute for Urban Design. As the Chief of ECOSOC and Interorganizational Cooperation Branch/DESA, Celik strengthened the United Nations through innovative participatory mechanisms. She joined the United Nations Programme for Human Settlements in 1981 and served the organization first in Nairobi then as the head of the New York office up to 2000. Dr. Celik has degrees in architecture from Middle East Technical University, Princeton University, and Instanbul Technical University.

Chris Coleman Chris Coleman was elected by the people of Saint Paul and became the 45th Mayor of the City of Saint Paul upon taking office in January 2006.

Mayor Colman’s roots in Saint Paul run deep. He is a lifelong Saint Paul resident, born in 1961 as one of six kids in a classic Saint Paul, Irish American Democratic family. Growing up, Mayor Coleman attended St. Luke’s, graduated from Cretin in 1979, attended undergrad at the University of Minnesota and graduated from the U of M law school in 1987. In his free time, Mayor Coleman enjoys camping, hiking, coaching his kids’ sports, running along trails in Saint Paul’s parks, listening to music and playing the bagpipes. His passions are his kids, Connie and public services.

Diane Diacon Diane Diacon is Director of the Building and Social Housing Foundation, an independent research organization that promotes sustainable development and innovation in housing through collaborative research and knowledge transfer both in the UK and internationally. She has published widely in the field of innovative housing solutions and lectures on sustainable housing issues in a range of academic institutions. She is a Non-Executive Director of both a regional and national housing provider and represents the United Kingdom on the European Liaison Committee for Social Housing.

Ann Ferebee Ann Ferebee is Founding Director of the Institute for Urban Design.

Launched in 1979 with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Institute held its first program at the University of Pennsylvania and later programs with Harvard, University of Toronto and Pompidou Center, Paris. Ann is a design journalist whose History of Modern Design was recognized as among best 100 illustrated texts of 1970. Ann is working on a 2nd edition to her book on modern design and will launch an Institute Archives Project in 2007.

Her son, John, is a student at Stony Brook University.

Axumite Gebre-Egziabher Axumite Gebre-Egziabher is presently the Director of UN-HABITAT New York Office. Born in Axum, Ethiopia, she holds a Doctrate (PhD) in Development Planning, from the DPU, University of London, U.K. Prior to her present post, she worked as Coordinator of the Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly for the review and appraisal of the implementation of the Habitat Agenda (Istanbul + 5), from May 1999 – June 2002.

Christopher F. Hackett Christopher F. Hackett is the Permanent Representative of Barbados. He has been Chief of the Caribbean Division, Regional Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean, of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Mr. Hackett holds a PhD in public administration from New York University, a Master of Arts in international relations from Carlton University, among other degrees.

Tonomori Matsuo Professor Tonomori Matsuo graduated from Department of Civil Engineering, University of Tokyo in 1963. He was elected President of Toyo University in September 2003. The research group, headed by him, at the Graduate School of Regional Development Studies, was selected as an Open Research Center

by Ministry on Education of Japanese Government in 2001. Dr. Matsuo’s major research fields are biological wastewater treatment, metabolic and energy systems in urban areas.

He recently started a new research field called “Environmentics” for sustainable development of global societies through the 21st century.

Junichiro Okata Professor Okata joined the University of Tokyo in 1996 as an associate professor for urban planning at the Department of Urban Engineering, School of Engineering. He has taught at the Department of Urban Engineering as a professor for urban planning since 1999 and has been the Secretary General at the Center for Sustainable Urban Regeneration (cSUR) since 2003. His experiences cover planning and housing policy in Japan, Korea, China, Great Britain, Germany, United States, Canada and Colombia. He has chaired committees on municipal planning in Yokohama, Kamakura and Atsugi. Currently, he is the director of cSUR research team on Sustainability of Mega-Cities.

Institute for Urban Design

Suha Ozkan Dr. Ozkan has done research on the theory and history of architecture, design, vernacular form and emergency housing. At Middle East Technical University, Istanbul he taught architectural design and design theory for fifteen years, became Associate Dean of the Faculty of Architecture in 1978, and was appointed VicePresident of the University in 1979.

He has lectured in North America, Europe, Central-, South-, and SouthEast Asia, including at the Schools of Architecture at the Universities of Paris, Lausanne, York and Trondheim.

With the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in Geneva, Dr. Ozkan served as Deputy Secretary General from 1983 to 1990, and was made the Secretary General in 1991. On behalf of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, he has organized international architectural competitions. He has received the Golden Award for global contribution in architecture by the Indian monthly, Architecture and Design. His most recent project is called World Architecture Community.

Mario Schjetnan Mario Schjetnan obtained a degree in Architecture from the National University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1968 and proceeded to obtain a Master Degree in Landscape Architecture with emphasis in urban design at the University of California, Berkeley in 1970. In 1984 he was selected for a Loeb Fellowship at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University.

In 1977, he started his own firm, Grupo de Diseño Urbano / GDU, together with José Luis Pérez. The Green Prize in Urban Design from Harvard University for Parque Ecológico Xochimilco in 1996; the Latin American Grand Prix from the Biennial in Architecture in Buenos Aires, Argentina for the Museum of the Northern Cultures of Mexico in Paquimé, Chihuahua in 1995. The President´s Award of Excellence from the American Society of Landscape Architecture for Parque Tezozomoc in 1989. He will lecture at the University of Virginia in 2007.

Michael Sorkin The Michael Sorkin Studio is a New York-based architectural practice whose recent projects include planning and design for a sustainable 5,000-unit community in Penang, Malaysia, master planning for Hamburg, Leipzig, and Schwerin, Germany, planning for a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, campus planning at the University of Chicago and CCNY. Michael Sorkin is the Director of the Graduate Urban Design Program at the City College of New York. From 1993 to 2000 he was Professor of Urbanism and Director of the Institute of Urbanism at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

Darren Walker Darren Walker is Vice President, Foundation Initiatives at the Rockefeller Foundation. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin and his law degree from the University of Texas School of Law. Previously, he was chief operating officer of the Abyssinian Development Corporation in Harlem. He has also held several finance positions in the for-profit world, including associate for capital markets at the Union Bank of Switzerland in New York. Mr. Walker spent a year as a full-time volunteer at the Children’s Storefront School in Harlem, a private school that offers education tuition-free for local children. He donates financially to the Hetrick Martin Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on the needs of gay and lesbian youth in New York.

Sponsors Institute for Urban Design Since 1979, the Institute for Urban Design has provided Fall and Spring programs to debate existing problems in urban design and to include urban design professionals to share ideas for new solutions. We study the experiments urban design professional are making in various cities and use them to formulate possible applications in other cities. Journalists Talk About Cities, an 8-year-old program was reflected in the October 2006 conference to which journalists from Toronto and New York contributed. Fellows are elected by the Board of the Institute in recognition of their contribution to the design of cities. Publications include Urban Design Update (bimonthly), Urban Design Case Study (Quarterly), Membership Directory (yearly), and Proceedings for each symposium.

An Archive of publications since 1979, will begin to be posted on the website in January 2007.

UN-Habitat UN-Habitat’s June program drew more than 10,000 attendees and showcased Vancouver as perhaps the best designed city in North America.

Following that the organization convened meetings in Florence on energy, in Oslo on private public partnerships for a green revolution in Africa and in Geneva on tourism in Africa. A focus for 2007 will be water for African cities.

Rockefeller Foundation The Rockefeller Foundation was established in 1913 by John D. Rockefeller, Sr. to promote the “wellbeing” of humanity by addressing the root causes of serious problems.

With assets of more than $3 billion, it is one of the nation’s largest private foundations. The Foundation works internationally to expand opportunities for poor and vulnerable people and to help ensure that the benefits of glabalization are shared more widely.

Two recently launched Rockefeller Foundation initiatives include the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) and lead funding and other support for the Unified New Orleans Plan for rebuilding in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Toyo University The aims of the Faculty of Regional Development and the Graduate School of Regional Development are to teach sustainable development and finance in order to develop villages and towns in Japan and abroad. It is the aim of the Faculty of Regional Development Studies to enable students to be able to solve the piling-up problems of the world, contribute to the sustainable creation of regional societies and bear the tasks of the 21st century.

BSHF The Building and Social Housing Foundation (BSHF) is an independent research organization that promotes sustainable development in housing through collaborative research and knowledge transfer. Established in 1976, BSHF works both in the UK and internationally to identify innovative housing solutions and to foster the exchange of information and good practice.

Acknowledgements Thanks to The Rockefeller Foundation for supporting production and printing of The Proceedings. The Proceedings was edited by Ann Ferebee and designed by Martin Perrin, Perrin Studio. The staff included Joyce Batterton, Associate for Text and Roberta Korcz, Picture Associate.

56

Institute for Urban Design

Design: Perrin Studio

56

Institute for Urban Design

Design: Perrin Studio

Institute for Urban Design

Sustainable Cities: Urban Design

Fellows Proceedings

October 17, 2006 The Century Association New York October 18, 2006 United Nations UN-Habitat New York