Infrastructure and Public Life in the Extensive City

Infrastructure and Public Life in the Extensive City

M. P. Knapik

Infrastructure and Public Life in the Extensive City Matthew P. Knapik

Prepared in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Master of Architecture in the Faculty of Environmental Design, University of Calgary.

Supervisor: Dr. Graham Livesey May 24, 2013

Abstract Suburban space is closely tied to the prosperity of cities, urban regions, and global-scale ecologies. The increasingly extreme and unpredictable demands of the next century will necessitate new urban systems (both physical and social) that acknowledge and embrace, rather than deny and combat, disturbance. The world needs an appreciative and pragmatic reconsideration of suburban composition, form, and performance.

The present project examines a portion of Silver Springs, a suburban neighbourhood in Calgary, Alberta, with the aim of intervening in two “plot holes” in the suburban story: infrastructure and public life. It first identifies and renovates three linear conditions (roadway, laneway, and promenade), reweaving flows of water, energy, and people in the study area’s public spaces. It then identifies ten small sites, comprised of pairs of existing private lots, in which it can introduce new form and program to the suburban fabric.

The project proposes ten thematic pavilions (employment, carbon, recreation, making, community, information, energy, food, sanitation, and education) that might inhabit these sites; each one engages the renovated linear infrastructures and supports the daily practice of public life for the neighbourhood’s residents and guests. One of these pavilions is brought to a more detailed architectural resolution in the project’s final section, exploring the constraints and opportunities that arise in the context of site, structure, and materiality.

Keywords Suburbs, Space, Architecture, Urban Design, Urban Infrastructure, Retrofit, Resilience, Urban Ecology, Antifragile, Pavilion

Acknowledgements This project owes its existence to a great number of people. Whether the support came through direct critique, rambling conversation, or simply a patient smile, the people surrounding me throughout this process made it both meaningful and bearable. I extend my sincerest gratitute to you all.

To my supervisor, Dr. Graham Livesey, for his keen guidance and critique, idle threats, and, above all, patience with my long and winding process.

To my external advisor, Thomas Debicki, for many long conversations spent connecting the dots between biodiversity, bylaws, and barbeque specifications.

To Dr. Larissa Muller, for offering meaningful contributions to the final project and remaining enthusiastic even after reading the entire document.

To Dr. Mary-Ellen Tyler, Dr. Branko Kolarevic, and Dr. Bev Sandalack, for their advocacy and encouragement.

To the EVDS Staff, for being helpful and kind.

To the Faculty of Environmental Design, for providing funding, community, shelter, and creative challenges over the past six years.

To CafĂŠ Beano and CafĂŠ Kawa in Calgary, for the caffeine and tables upon which much of the project was completed.

To my family, for their love and encouragement, and for instilling in me a curiosity that endured from Grade 1 to Grade 22.

To my friends, and particularly the GDB, who offer a constant reminder to pursue good food, good wine, and meaningul work.

And to Genevieve, whose love has for three years endured late nights, stacks of messy paper, and a boyfriend without a real job.

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Table of Contents

Prologue 9 Chapter One: Architecture and the Antifragile Suburb

13

Chapter Two: The Study Area

77

Chapter Three: Three Lines, Ten Points

123

Chapter Four: A Theatre and Library

165

References 195

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P

Prologue

Part Two in a Series This project builds on work completed in a related Urban Design Masters Degree Project completed in the Spring of 2012. That work, entitled Searching for Ecological Connectivity in Calgary’s Suburbs, explored the opportunity to embed ecological corridors through a large area of suburban space, resulting in a green network with a range of ecological and urban performances.

The present project also takes the suburbs as its setting. However, in contrast to the multi-neighbourhood scale of its predecessor, this project’s interventions will focus on a small portion of a single neighbourhood. This finer scale unearths a new set of opportunities embedded in the architecture, parcel fabric, and daily life of suburban space. It also sponsors architectural design that can respond to a particular place rather than to the suburbs as a generality.

Although there is some cross-over between the two documents, each is designed to stand on its own; any reference to ideas developed in the previous project will be described in full in the following text.

This MDP will renovate a portion of suburban Calgary with the aim of making it a better piece of urban fabric: re-weaving its relationship with natural ecologies and equipping it to better address the challenges and opportunities of an unpredictable future.

The document is broken into four chapters. The first chapter is an essay that sets out the project’s position on city change and the future of suburban space.

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Prologue

It creates a conceptual framework to guide the project, identifies the aspirations and perils present when crafting a new suburban story, and explores the role of architecture as a contributing author to this story.

The second chapter introduces and analyzes the project’s study area. The study area is a portion of Silver Springs: a suburban neighbourhood located in the city of Calgary. Chapter Two is predominantly comprised of maps, photographs, and diagrams, and it explores the aesthetic and political lineage that led to the study area’s current spatial presence.

The third chapter begins with a real challenge and an artificial constraint. How could the study area explored in Chapter Two be renovated to align it with the aspirations presented in the opening essay? And how could this renovation occur while limiting intervention to existing public space and ten pairs of private lots? Chapter Three presents a range of design gestures that intervene in both infrastructure and public life, introducing three linear gestures (infrastructural re-weaving) and ten point gestures (infrastructural + public programs).

The fourth and final chapter explores one of the ten point gestures presented in Chapter Three, bringing it to an architectural resolution. By focusing on a single site, this section unearths the particular constraints and opportunities offered by the suburban parcel, and demonstrates the contribution that such an intervention can offer to the form, texture, and evolution of the study area.

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Prologue

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1

Chapter One: Architecture and the Antifragile Suburb

Interconnection Cities and towns are now the dominant pattern of human settlement for most of the world (Knox & Taylor, 1995). The systems that comprise urban space, and the manner in which they are inhabited, play a principal role in the destiny of people and the earth. As the world continues its transition toward a postindustrial economy, cities have attracted flows of people, information, and capital1, becoming nodes in a complex web that stretches its influence over the entire planet. Most projections suggests that these links will only become more influential as the world’s population continues to grow and concentrate in urban environments (United Nations, 2011).

Alongside the rise of cities, a growing body of evidence is describing the interdependence of earth’s natural systems. Local disturbances of natural systems have demonstrated effects at a global scale, which in turn can cause dramatic disturbances at a local level (Grimm et al., 2008). While notions that describe ecological connectivity have been present for decades (see Carson, 1962), only recently have these ideas drawn themselves into popular conversation; it is now commonly understood that humanity will not thrive on a degraded planet.

1

See, for example, the varied strength of business ties between cities (Vancouver-Toyko vs.

Vancouver-Toronto), economic disparity between cities within the same nation (Calgary vs. St. John’s), the emergence of city-based musical sub-genres (London Dub-step or Moscow Electro Style), and the rise of local government groups (such as the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives or the Local Government Coalition).

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The destiny of each urban region is tied in some way to the destiny of many others.

endogenous imperatives

exogenous imperatives

Endogenous and exogenous imperatives. | 16 |

Chapter 1: Antifragile Suburbs

As a result of this interconnection in both urban and natural domains, cities and their regions now sit in a state of constant flux. They pull, and are pulled by, strands in a global network. The destiny of each city region is tied in some way to the destiny of every other (Marcotuillio & McGranahan, 2007).

New Imperatives for City Design The property of interconnection brings to bear new imperatives for the design of cities. These can be broadly divided into two categories: endogenous imperatives, which are concerned with a city’s effect on the world (including itself), and exogenous imperatives, which are concerned with the way that a city reacts to the effects brought on by the world (in which it is included). For example, strategies that seek to reduce vehicle emissions or delimit urban growth would be considered endogenous, because they are concerned with the outward disturbances caused by emissions and sprawl. On the other hand, strategies to manage increased flooding or accommodate a rapid influx of population would be called exogenous, because they react to inbound disturbances of excess water and people.

Within each of these two categories exists a range of responses to disturbance (both inward and outward). These responses are split into four ‘orders’ that capture points in a spectrum of control and uncertainty. The purpose of this framework is to categorize current approaches to the design of urban space along a spectrum that accounts for the interconnectedness of urban and natural space.

This categorization will be employed throughout the present project as a caution and a compass as the project explores the more specific question of the role of suburban space in the future city.

Weak/Lacking Responses [ignored; fragile] The first type of response is not really a response at all, but its presence here is important because it offers a counterpoint to the rest of the orders. It is perhaps the most insidious and perilous manner of orienting to disturbance, because it presents a willful ignorance and, in doing so, allows human and natural systems to come to harm. Systems that present no response to potentially harmful disturbance are a unique product of humans; in the natural world, the dynamics of change tend to proliferate systems that thrive rather than collapse (McHarg,

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Chapter 1: Antifragile Suburbs

1969). Weak/lacking responses are driven by confirmation bias, expectation, and convention, and are so threatened by the idea of impending change that they pretend it does not exist. Examples of such structures in the modern world are not difficult to find; common red flags include absolutism, top-down structures, dogma, and certainty. Ignoring disturbance (both endogenous and exogenous) can lead to harm, fragility, waste, excess cost, oppression, and build up to catastrophic collapse (Taleb, 2012).

First-Order Responses [controlled; robust] The first step up on this spectrum is home to control-based responses — referred to in this project as first-order. First-order responses seek top-down, outcomebased solutions to both exogenous and endogenous imperatives. They tend to align with prevailing norms, and seek out predictability and consistency. Firstorder responses are the “dominant but dead”2 practice in cities today. For example, a first-order response to the endogenous imperative of reducing vehicle emissions would be characterized by policies that control behaviour: through tolls or other peak-time penalties, legislation that places restrictions on vehicles of a certain age, or no-idling bylaws. Likewise, a typical first-order response to the exogenous effect of increased flooding is literally and metaphorically captured in the act of building higher, stronger dykes and wider drainage pipes. An increase in control is often the first indicator of a first-order approach.

Second-Order Responses [responsible; resilient] Toward the middle of the spectrum sit a class of neutralizing responses referred to here as second-order. Second-order responses seek to conserve and rebound. They are similar to first-order responses in that they are concerned with protecting the status quo, but they are different in the way they orient to disturbance. Rather than control or ignore disturbances, second-order approaches will seek out prevention and stability. In second-order responses, endogenous imperatives could be understood as “responsibility”, and exogenous imperatives as “resilience”. While second-order responses are by no means dominant in the way that cities presently handle either type of imperative, the last century has seen them gradually begin to challenge first-order approaches (Beatley, 2000; Farr, 2008). For example, a 2

To borrow a term from Neil Smith’s appraisal of neo-liberalism (2008).

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(the world’s inward impact on the city)

exogenous imperatives

(the city’s outward impact on the world)

endogenous imperatives

(disturbance has negative consequences)

fragile

(controlling, fights disturbance)

robust

(penalizes behaviour, overwrites ecologies)

controlled

ignored (disturbance disregarded, science ‘monitored’)

first order response

weak/lacking response

(rebounds against disturbance)

resilient

(incentivizes behaviour, protects/ conserves natural ecologies)

responsible

second order response

(requires and thrives in disturbance)

antifragile

(’savours’ ecologies, connects human/ natural ecologies)

imperative

third order response

Chapter 1: Antifragile Suburbs

second-order response to reducing vehicle emissions would be characterized by investment in technologies that reduce the amount of emission per kilometre travelled, urban design strategies that reduce reliance on personal automobiles, or expansion of a public transit network. In the example of increasing flooding, second-order responses could include creating incentives that draw development away from flood plains, building river-bank pathways that are easier to reclaim or rebuild following a flood, or digging runoff ponds to which peak-load water may be diverted. The “re-” prefix is often a good indicator that a second-order approach has been employed: reclaim, restore, reduce, reuse, rebound, recycle, readapt, redirect.

Third-Order Responses [integrated; antifragile] At the far end of the spectrum sit third-order responses. Third-order responses engage the complex and unpredictable nature of systemic change by structuring themselves such that they create and are fuelled by disturbance — they not only anticipate and propagate disruption but gain net benefit from its presence.

Third-order responses are an important addition to the spectrum because they hold the greatest capacity to challenge conventional practices. Unlike first-order responses, which maintain through control, or second-order responses, which sustain through resilience, a third-order approach makes evolution, change, and improvement a prerequisite of the system.

In endogenous terms, a third-order response aligns well with the idea of “integrated ecology”, wherein human and natural systems are drawn through each other in a manner that encourages exchange, filtration, habitat, and other collisions that produce benefit to all participating systems (Forman, 1995; Breuste et al., 2008; Collins et al., 2000). The related urban design project mentioned in the prologue explored at a multi-neighbourhood scale a landscape patterning that could provide a broad base to allow such collisions. To carry forward the examples used above, a third-order strategy to deal with emissions could look to find a

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First order river treatment. The Los Angeles River has been completely channelized through the city.

Second order river treatment. Large, stones called “rip rap” replace half of a riparian ecology near Bear Canyon in British Columbia. This maintains some of the river’s ecological function, but its ultimate purpose is to prevent the erosion of the roadway.

Third order river treament. At the Calgary Bird Sanctuary, a back-channel of the Bow River forms wetlands that serve a range of ecological functions while hosting a low-intensity park for the city’s citizens.

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Chapter 1: Antifragile Suburbs

ways that the particular outputs of vehicles could become the input for another process3. In this way, a synthetic fuel system is created that aids a broader energy transition while turning vehicle emissions into a resource.

In exogenous terms, third-order responses seek to build systems that improve when they are disturbed. The stock-trader-turned-philosopher Nasim Taleb has coined the term “antifragility�4 to describe such systems (2012). Thirdorder systems are ever-present in the natural world, but are quite rare in urban systems. In the flooding example, third-order responses would manage flooding events by creating rain gardens and other water-holding landscapes that thrive in unusual water events (drought or flood). By deploying and augmenting preurban landscape functions (including topography, soil types, and vegetation) in configurations that utilize their natural reaction to such events, systems emerge that not only reduce the negative impacts of a flood, but actually prosper in a flood. A one-hundred year flood becomes an important ingredient in the city, rather than an abstract probability.

Beyond Sustainability The purpose of the framework outlined above, while skewed in favour of the higher orders, is not to advocate that every urban system push toward the third-order.

Neither does it intend to suggest that the people who live in cities need to develop an affection for all of the things that cause them stress. It does, however, naturally call for a shift in the manner that we think about change in the interconnected city.

In this framework, the notion of sustainability does not form the core aspiration.

The introduction of the third-order describes approaches with the real capacity to change dominant structures, systems, and expectations. This begins to address a common blind spot in sustainability discourse — which typically does a poor

3

There is technology currently under development that captures carbon from CO2 in the air and combines it with hydrogen molecules to fashion synthetic hydrocarbon fuels.

(Carbon Engineering, 2013).

4

In his book Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, Taleb explores the idea of antifragility in a broad range of domains. Sections of the framework presented here, particularly relating to the distinction between antifragility and resilience, owe much to his writings.

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The “edge” of Calgary in the city’s northwest.

A New Network of Capital. This satellite image of North America at night endorses the idea that human systems form a continuous web punctuated by urban centres. | 23 |

Chapter 1: Antifragile Suburbs

job describing how or why it might do anything to grow or evolve, rather than sustain (for a critical evaluation of the proprietary LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program, see Solomon, 2005).

The next section of the chapter will focus on suburban space, exploring the ways in which the suburbs might be particularly implicated in the imperatives and approaches introduced above. It will begin by proposing a series of principles and cautions that should inform the crafting of a new suburban mythology. It will then explore two predominant fragilities faced by suburban space: infrastructure and public life. It will conclude by making a case to move toward third-order approaches for these fragilities.

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Plan for Vienna. The city edge patterned for defence.

Copenhagan Finger Plan. The city edge patterned for regional transportation.

The Portland Growth Boundary. The city edge patterned for conservation. For discussion see Jun, 2004.

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Michelangelo’s Last Judgement (1541). Mythological image capturing Catholic ideology.

Suburban Newspaper Ad (1971). Mythological image capturing suburban ideology. From the Calgary Herald, the same year that houses in Silver Springs went on sale. | 26 |

Chapter 1: Antifragile Suburbs

Intervening in Suburban Mythology Kids wanna be so hard But in my dreams we’re still screamin’ and runnin’ through the yard And all of the walls that they built in the seventies finally fall And all of the houses they build in the seventies finally fall Meant nothin’ at all Meant nothin’ at all - “The Suburbs”, Arcade Fire (2010)

The Messy ‘Burbs The previous section argued that the destiny of both human and natural systems is closely tied to the structure of the world’s urban spaces, and that the patterning of any urban space has tremendous influence on both its outward effects and its ability to respond to inbound disturbances. It also established a conceptual gradient along which responses to urban change could be located and evaluated, advocating for responses that form a dependent, rather than obstructive, relationship with disturbance. The following section will more specifically explore suburban space: how are the suburbs defined, and what influence do they exert over a city’s relationship to disturbance?

From high above the ground, the diagram of an interconnected urban network forms a crisp web of points and lines. When you zoom in to any node in this web, however, a messier picture emerges. Urban settlements quickly transcend their explicit territorial limits, integrated smoothly with their surrounding regions through influence and reliance (Friedmann, 1965).

The manners in which towns and cities have engaged their natural and rural settings have varied through time and place, and the perimeters of cities — as

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Chapter 1: Antifragile Suburbs

frontiers of growth, exchange, defence, and conquest — have remained an issue throughout urban history (for a contemporary example, see McDonnel & Pickett, 1990). The last seventy years, which saw suburban-style development grow to become the prevailing edge condition for many cities, has entrenched the relevance of the urban perimeter as a physical, social, and psychological human habitat. More Canadians live in suburbs today than any other neighbourhood type, urban or rural (Statistics Canada, 2006).

“Suburban” space is difficult to consistently define according to standardized metrics. Existing delineations of suburbs typically draw on density and housing types, relationship to a central business district, municipal boundaries, or peripheral patterning (Turcotte, 2008), all of which can vary greatly between cities.

This lack of consistent properties has not, however, precluded the average person from “knowing a suburb when they see one”5. Part of what drives this subjective clarity is the complicating (and enriching) fact that suburbs are much more than a ‘density’, ‘style’, or ‘form’. Suburban space is the subject of a complex social and spatial story distilled from a medley of emotion, ideology, economy, rationality, nostalgia, subsidy, exceptionalism, and prosperity (for a detailed analysis of the breadth of forces that created the suburbs, see K. Jackson, 1987). Many of these ingredients reach deep into the psyches of not just suburban dwellers, but everyone who has participated in the last seventy years of post-industrial growth.

The present project will therefore seek to treat the suburbs as a mythology, rather than a tightly defined type of urban space sitting within the thresholds of some form of metric.

Defining Mythology Traditional definitions of mythology are characteristically concerned with their function, referred to by scholar Bruce Lincoln as collections of stories that together carry “ideology in narrative form” (2006). In the last decades particularly in light of new digital modes of story telling and sharing, the term has grown to encompass the growing body of narratives (formal and otherwise) that allow people to continuously make sense of the world. Creation myths, in particular, are concerned with how the world gained its current form; it is not difficult to build 5

A term borrowed from Justice Potter Stewart’s now-famous reference to hard-core pornography (1964).

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The financial attainability of the suburbs was a product of both public and private gestures that reduced risk throughout the system (Calgary Herald, 1971).

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land-value dynamics A. urban land value cross-section total valu

e

value of accessibility conversion cost expected future value base agricultural value

B. calgary 1950s to present 1. suburban highways flatten accessibility

3. federal housing policies reduce lending risk, increasing accessibility of mortgages 4. municipal development policies subsidize conversion cost

6. outward wave of suburban development

5. increase in speculative land values at edge

2. globalizing food system erodes value of local agriculture

C. intensity trends 1. rising fuel prices re-inject accessibility value at core and around transit nodes

3. global banking instability increases barriers to lending 6. outward growth slowed 4. municipalities shift long-term infrastructure costs to land developers 5. reduced profit-margin for green-field development

2. local food trend increases perimeter agricultural value

Suburban economic geography (in section). This classic land-value model illustrates how varying forces on the elements of land value impact suburban growth. (Top diagram adapted from Capozza et al., 1989).

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A column-wrapper catalogue.

The Calgary Home and Garden Show. A key example of the consumptive expression of the suburban mythology. | 32 |

Chapter 1: Antifragile Suburbs

a bridge between mythological narrative and the complex socio-spatial form of the modern city. Understood through this lens, the suburbs could be considered ideology in form.

When the term “suburban mythology” is used in this essay, it is referring to two things. First, it refers to the collection of narratives that have transformed (and continue to transform) parts of the world into suburbs. Second, it includes the growing collections of material artifacts that are emerging from the ongoing performance of suburbia. These collections include everything from mortgage policy documents and municipal density spreadsheets to vinyl siding, lawn furniture, and soccer schedules.

The existing suburban mythology presents a notorious and divisive character.

To some a symbol of freedom and democracy (see Oliver, 2001), to others an icon of excess and waste (Brueckner, 2000), the suburbs have had a polarizing effect on urban — and popular — discourse since their widespread proliferation after World War Two. The median tone of this discourse has tended toward the antagonistic, painting the suburbs as a villain set directly against the ideals (both social and spatial) of a more metropolitan urbanism rooted in the 19thCentury European city (see Fishman, 1987). In recent years, however, new voices have emerged to challenge this portraiture (see, in particular, Ingersoll, 2006); , pulling new narratives into the myth: the tragedy and redemption of the suburban antihero (for discussion of the emergence of antiheroes in popular culture see Jonason et al., 2012).

A New Muse: The Opportunity For Redemption The opportunities driving the quest for a suburban redemption story find their source in both exogenous and endogenous imperatives. The endogenous effects of cities (those effects that find their origin within the urban system and act outward on the world) are augmented by suburbs in manners both territorialized and deterritorialized. In a territorialized (and highly observable) sense, suburbs grow outward into the surrounding natural/agricultural matrix. In a less conspicuous de-territorialized sense, they augment the outward impact of a city through their demand for fuel, goods, materials, and information. The endogenous effects of the suburbs could be understood like a teenager going through a growth spurt; they take up more space and demand more food.

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Chapter 1: Antifragile Suburbs

The suburbs also impact the way that cities are able to engage with exogenous forces (those inbound effects to which the city must react). This finds a territorial expression in the membrane-like way that the suburbs encircle the city, as well as in the buffering potentials offered by their size. These are not inherently positive or negative attributes; in the pattern of membrane there exists the potential for protection as well as entrapment, in size the potential for both dilution and diffusion. In non-territorial terms, suburban space is indebted to extensive, complex systems of speculation and exchange. Mortgage insurance, land subdivision, energy development, and food distribution (among many other systems) have all been subsidized in service of the suburban mythology. This again does not carry any specific positive or negative connotation; it does suggest that outward indebtedness links the susceptibility of localities to the susceptibility of their creditors. The external systems upon which suburbs rely impact the entire city’s ability to react to change.

The suburbs are clearly and significantly implicated in any city’s response to the inward and outward imperatives of interconnectedness. The varied and often unique performances of the suburbs endow them with tremendous capacity for change, and this is augmented in almost every case by their tremendous spatial footprint. Strategies seeking meaningful urban change omit the suburbs at great peril.

The Fragile Hero: The Demand For Change Along with the inspiration to harness the potential of the suburbs comes a tremendous demand for change. The suburban myth carries a great deal of momentum, and this inertia has sustained the movement beyond the carrying capacity of its benefactors. This has rendered it one of the most fragile settlement types; conventional suburban development threatens the prosperity of the entire urban system (Dodson & Sipe, 2007). While the general stressors of the future can be anticipated to a degree — broadly captured by the notions of energy transition (Newman et al., 2009; Roberts, 2004), population growth (United Nations Population Division, 2011), and shifts in global ecology (Grimm, 2008) the specifics are far from clear. In fact, the specifics are by their complex nature entirely unpredictable. And the interconnected city-network only suggests an

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Chapter 1: Antifragile Suburbs

increase in the presence of what Taleb refers to as the “extended disorder family” (2012): uncertainty, variability, chance, chaos, volatility, disorder, entropy, time, randomness, turmoil, error. For this reason, city-builders must shift their attention away from attempts to anticipate specific stressors and instead turn their focus toward the patterns and performances of the existing city. That is, they must begin to craft more innovative, risky, challenging, integrated, mistake-loving suburbs that build novel, productive relationships with disorder. Without such adaptation, suburban space will experience the wasteful and damaging consequences of trying to sustain its status-quo in an uncertain future.

As city-builders set out into the liminal world in which this redemption narrative dwells, they must prepare themselves for the space’s endemic potentials and perils.

As certainty, tangibility, and linearity fade, a new ethos must assert itself with some intention. The section below will briefly discuss the importance of approaching the present project with appreciation over negativity, pragmatism over paralysis, mythology over ideology, subversion over traditionalism, and heterotopia over utopia. These opportunities and perils are present whenever one engages a liminal space: that tenuous condition in which dominant systems can be disrupted and true novelty can thrive.

Appreciation over Negativity “This man beside us also has a hard fight with an unfavouring world, with strong temptations, with doubts and fears, with wounds of the past which have skinned over, but which smart when they are touched [...]And when this occurs to us we are moved to deal kindly with him.”

- John Watson 1903 (in Buckley, 1989) The most common and insidious risk in approaching suburban change is to begin the story with an overly dark portrait. Endless books could be filled with the ways in which power-centres will cast civilization into the brimstone abyss.

Even if such accounts are viscerally earned and vindictively satisfying, even if they are true, they make a counter-productive stepping-off point. The suburbs are a complex mechanism, and to speak of them in such terms reduces their emergence to false straight-line causes. The aspiration of complexity should preclude such extrapolation. A more productive alternative can be found in appreciative inquiry

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Chapter 1: Antifragile Suburbs

— a method drawn from organizational theory that seeks out the “miracles and mysteries” in a complex assembly (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987). Productive traction will be found in quests that seek out the things that suburban space does really well, or that give it a natural advantage. Some see a dirty peeling barn that should be demolished; others see a set of sturdy beams that can be bought in 1912 dollars. One of those two viewpoints gains a foothold in a renovation project — its perspective sets out a productive path from day one. The appreciative approach is also the strongest defence (in the manner of a pre-emptive strike) against the ever-present risk of crippling fatalism.

Pragmatism Over Paralysis The second peril of approaching suburban change is to become overwhelmed by the scale and consequence of the project. The suburbs are entrenched physically and psychologically — they are easy to write off as beyond repair. The institutional structures that built and support the suburbs have created intimidating power structures that naturally self-propagate, further reducing any incentive for intrusion. So how does one eat an elephant? Paralysis can be averted by keeping two things in mind: first, each change, no matter its scale, holds relevance to the broader issue; second, no single approach or solution will ever capture the diversity of the problem. Any approach that purports to transcend the issue’s complexity by reverting to a simple set of factors (or some spatial metric such as street width or entrance spacing), is peddling a false future. This redemption must be earned.

Policy-based approaches are, in their own way, a form of paralysis. Policy in itself requires little ‘street’ risk, and is extremely fragile in its susceptibility to interpretation, change, and specificity. For this reason, design over policy might fit itself within the pragmatism/paralysis umbrella, as it enacts itself in the risky and productive space of making in the city.

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Chapter 1: Antifragile Suburbs

Mythology Over Ideology “They thought that it would be a disgrace to go forth as a group. Each entered the forest at a point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path. If there is a path it is someone else’s path and you are not on the adventure.”

- Joseph Campbell (1990) The third risk in the project of suburban change is found in suburbia’s susceptibility to being over-written by a dominant school of thought. Any process of reform will attract agendas that seek to super-pose an entirely new order (the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2010, with all of its initial optimism and the dampening effect of its resultant ideological power-struggles and civil wars, provides a powerful recent example (Ayadi & Sessa, 2011)). In suburban space, these agendas — often under the umbrellas of a range of urbanisms (landscape-, ecological-, everyday-, new- to name a few) — each seek a range of beneficial performances in their own right.

The aim here is not to diminish their intention. It rather seeks to acknowledge that any such approach, which ultimately replaces one homogenous with another, is bound to develop its own systemic pathologies. Part of the key to suburban renovation will be the application of localized solutions; no single approach or particular school of thought will be capable of responding to the sheer size of the question. Mythology offers one way around this dilemma. Myths are a type of story that doesn’t stand, like science or ideology, on the ever-present possibility of being undermined by a single point of new information. They rather rely and thrive on their flexibility in embracing changing circumstance, interpretation, and representation (Taleb, 2012). Looking back at the development of the suburbs, its it clear that they did not come to prosper under the banner of a singular ideology.

The medium of myth, rather than principle, must therefore be employed in recrafting suburban space.

Subversion Over Traditionalism “Coloring outside your guidelines, I was passing out when you were passing out your rules/ One, two, three, four. Who’s punk? What’s the score?”

- from “Boxcar”, by Jawbreaker (1994)

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Change in urban space risks of falling prey to the imposition of formal models from the past (Livesey, 2004). Such traditional methods are commonly driven by a kind of nostalgia, where the prosperity of the future city is sacrificed in a futile attempt to heal some kind of a psychological grievance. Such approaches are often justified on the false supposition that the demands of the last century broadly overlap with the demands of the next century. While there are performances sought for today’s urban space that in practice look similar to those seen in the 19th century city (increased walkability and localized production, for example), formal models that seek to rebuild these past visions have little capacity (outside of their most basic patterning) to construct city space that will actually thrive into the future. The inward and outward imperatives of city-design discussed earlier have been present in various ways throughout urban history, and it is easy to look back and falsely assume that established methods and traditions (especially those that would be considered “successful”) were born from foresight, or that they created the attractive conditions of the past that inhabit modern imaginations.

Traditionalist approaches are, by their very reliance on the regulating forces of convention and expectation, unable to equip urban space with the capacity to evolve in any organic, subversive, or emergent manner. In the words of Bernard Tschumi, “Architecture only survives where it negates the form that society expects of it. Where it negates itself by transgressing the limits that history has set for it” (1976). A good deal of contemporary urbanism does the opposite of negate expectation. It takes a play-mobile approach (working from an atomistic set of building blocks) that relies on the expected as the foundation of its place-scheme (see, for example, Carmona et al., 2003). Kevin Lynch’s (1960) seminal work on urban structure in the early 1960s was decidedly brilliant, but the “image” of the city, and the way we identify, orient to, and establish affective relationships with that image, has changed tremendously since his work was published6. The next evolution of the suburban mythology should — must — embrace the subverted and unexpected.

6

Even in the last five years, the proliferation of GPS-enabled devices that offer automatic route mapping, information about traffic flow, location identification, and photographed ‘street view’, present evidence to support such a break.

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Classic Fan Fiction. A graphic artist has created a composite combining characters from both Star Trek and Star Wars “universes�.

Architectural Fan Fiction. What if? | 39 |

Flooding Along the Bow River at Bowness Park, Calgary AB (June 2005).

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Heterotopia Over Utopia No, I’m not a pessimist. At some point the world shits on everybody. Pretending it ain’t shit makes you an idiot, not an optimist.

- Samual Halpern, via @shitmydadsays (2010) Projects that seek to re-imagine the future, or re-craft the stories of human environments, have a tendency toward utopian colouration (see Cook, 2003; Le Corbusier, 1929), which risks both over-simplicity and stagnation. First, utopia tends to mash the rich and messy layering of everyday life into an idealized, uncomplicated flatness. Translations of this represented realm into an everyday form then derail as they fail to capture the necessary gnarliness and unpredictability of lived and representational space (de Certeau, 1984; Lefebvre 1974). Foucault’s (1984a) notion of the heterotopia presents a potential transcendence, where escape from oppression and expectation is offered through multiplicity and difference. Here, the layering of mythology, representation, and every-day practice presents the productive counterpoint to utopia’s flatness. Those re-crafting suburban mythology must not create in the image of perfection, but rather invite and sponsor the infinite possible expressions of perfect and imperfect that produce the everyday world.

The intimidating translation gap inherent to utopian approaches can incubate a risky character referred to here as the devious distopian. Devious distopians advocate a form of inaction (or intentionally destructive action) justified by a reliance on catastrophe, crisis, and revolution to enact change. While a major collapse may offer the (often false) promise of a more approachable canvas on which to author the future, in pragmatic terms, biding one’s time until such an event occurs is a cowardly strategy (if, indeed, it can be considered a strategy at all). In crafting new mythology for suburban space, the seduction of the violent renewal process must be actively circumvented by the messier, sloggier — but ultimately buildable — promise of heterotopic space.

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Fragility In The Suburbs: Infrastructure and Public Life Up to this point, the present project has (i) speculated a framework that offers more productive approaches and aspirations for the imperatives facing the interconnected city, (ii) introduced the suburbs as a relevant urban participant that requires systemic change, and (iii) proposed and discussed the opportunities and perils of constructing a new mythology for suburban space. This line of inquiry naturally proceeds with the following collection of questions: in what ways does the present suburban narrative not achieve its highest aspirations? Where in the suburban story are the greatest opportunities to intervene and re-craft? And, in the terms set out in the opening section, what makes the suburbs unresponsive, over-controlled, dis-integrated, and fragile?

While there are many potential entry points that could serve as the foci for such an exploration, this project will turn its attention to two particular narrative entrypoints that stand out in the suburban story: infrastructure and public life. These entry points do not claim, in and of themselves, to form a comprehensive strategy.

Instead, they take advantage of ‘plot-holes’ or ‘discontinuities’ in the suburban narrative; moments that prompt questions about the motivations, actions, and reactions of the protagonist7. In this way, the present project’s quest to find branches and adaptations to a popular story is a kind of suburban “fan-fiction”.

Suburban Infrastructure The first entry point addressed by this project is the infrastructure of the suburbs.

The patterns, materials, flows, and artifacts of suburban infrastructure (including those carrying water, waste, materials, animals, energy, nutrients, people, and information), were built in a bubble of prosperity and subsidization that has negated any imperative for fitness. Because of this, they present increasing costs, lower availability, increased waste, and wide-scale ecological damage (Boyer, 7

There is a growing hobby, supported by a broad and interconnected internet audience, that openly re-appropriates and re-imagines elements of popular stories. In a manner that supports the ideas presented here, this “branching” usually occurs at a moment of particular strife, dissatisfaction, or discontinuity. Such moments form natural gateways for reinterpretation (like the end of Inception), augmentation (like a new ending for Harry Potter), or deletion (like Jar-Jar Binks from the second Star Wars trilogy). These types of exercises also seem to occur more frequently with stories that have richer, messier mythologies.

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1983), all of which impair the city’s ability to thrive in the presence of disturbance and change. For purposes of illustration, this project will explore two particular infrastructures in greater detail: water and energy.

Flows of Water Water infrastructure is taken as the first example in this project because of its significance and tremendous embedded opportunity. Many of the flows present in suburban space are either derived from water flows (in time-scales ranging from glacial to gallons-per-second), or actively influence the present structure of water systems (both human-controlled and natural). Water infrastructure also offers, in its potential shift from waste to abundance, one of the clearest and most intuitive illustrations of the potentials that lie within all suburban infrastructures.

Pre-development natural systems relied on the constant and unpredictable stresses of the water-cycle. With the help of the sun, water held in the landscape (in water bodies, soil, vegetation, and animals) underwent evapotranspiration and rose into the atmosphere, eventually returning to the surface in the form of precipitation.

This precipitation was drawn over, under, and through the landscape along a range of channelized and diffuse pathways, carrying with it energy and nutrients. Along with glacial soil deposits and solar aspect, water defined the landscape’s vegetation profiles and habitats (L. E. Jackson, 1987). Among these three influences, water was least predictable in both distribution and intensity, and it therefore drove the finest scale of landscape and microclimate variability. The complex systems of flora and fauna that came to thrive in pre-urban environments succeeded because they accepted and indeed required this inconsistency. In the terminology of the present project, the cyclical variability of the water system sponsored antifragility within the natural system. Riparian environments didn’t ignore, resist, or simply ‘bounce-back’ from a flood or drought, they rather relied on peaks and troughs in water flow as part of the broader functions of short-term regulation and longterm evolution.

As cities grew over these landscapes, a set of human-driven priorities took precedence over natural processes. In particular, the post-war era that gave birth to the suburbs was dominated by engineered, control-driven responses to nature.

Modernist water infrastructures championed consistency and reliability, seeking everywhere to reduce unpredictability, stifle variability, and build robustness in

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the face of disturbance. In this ethos, “urban” water systems (the water used by humans for irrigation, cleaning, waste, fire-response, and hydration) became physically and conceptually divorced from their natural sources. Urban water was centrally gathered, filtered, and distributed throughout urban networks via energy-subsidized systems that maintained consistent pressure, quality, and availability. At the same time, diffuse natural flows were named and categorized as distinct landscape elements (“this river”, “that wetland”) and taken to exhibit not natural variability but discrete and probabilistic events (“stormwater”, “100year flood”). The response to such “events” was decidedly control-based and adversarial. Mineralized, water-tight ground-covers (mostly from pavement and buildings) necessitated extensive stormwater systems that moved water quickly away from its landing point. To prevent flood damage and erosion, citybuilders constructed retaining walls and dams, infilled flood plains, re-engineered coastlines and riverbanks, and, in extreme cases, completely channelized or overwrote hydrological systems (McHarg, 1969).

This approach to water infrastructure has had far-reaching negative effects (Guo, 1997; Hey, 1995). In material terms, obstructed and fragmented natural flows have failed to deliver hydration and nutrients to reliant habitats; at the same time, channelized stormwater has failed to dissipate energy and settle particulates before being delivered to downstream systems. Flood prevention systems have been costly and not always sufficiently robust, resulting in ever-increasing waterbased insurance claims (Sherlock, 2012). Centralized fresh-water systems are maintenance-heavy, costly, energy-reliant, and remain highly vulnerable from a security standpoint (Ezell et al., 2000). In conceptual terms, the disconnect between human and natural water systems has created a range of counter-intuitive practices that include fresh, drinkable toilet-water and irrigation (the average sprinkler uses a staggering 900 litres per hour of operation (City of Charlotte, 2010)).

Suburban water infrastructure was born in a first-order era, and it has offered countless tangible illustrations of the problems of control-based approaches.

These failings have not been lost on city-builders, who, driven by increasing freshwater constraints (Marsalek & Chocat, 2002) have begun a slow evolution toward second-order infrastructure. Constructed wetlands, diversion ponds, permeable paving, green roofs, rain-water collection, and water-sensitive landscaping have

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all played a role in this broader shift (Breuste et al., 2008). These technologies and strategies all seek in some way to better manage the natural variability of water systems, and reduce some of the more glaring contradictions of firstorder infrastructures. Although second-order approaches do have the ability to reduce systemic waste and restore some ecological function in suburban water infrastructure, such methods do not carry within their DNA any form of inherent reinvention. If cities install constructed wetlands near the outfalls of their stormwater systems and consider the task complete, they have missed a significant opportunity. Sometimes, resilience is truly open and offers the capacity for the emergence of new structures; at other times, it can simply be a form of veiled sturdiness. How, then, to move beyond this sticking point? What type of questions/challenges lead to a water infrastructure that not only manages, but loves mistakes, variability, and unpredictability? The questions listed below do not intend to offer any kind of comprehensive survey; rather, they offer examples of the types of inquiry that could lead to antifragile, ecologically-integrated systems.

How could potable and stormwater infrastructure be designed as one system?

How can flood/drought pulses actually make the water infrastructure more effective and easier to live with? Do these events clear out deadfall? Flush channels? Provide periodic opportunity to repair, improve, or reroute?

How can the hard-surfaces of roads and buildings become a water-system asset?

Can the varied tastes of rainwater become a source of local pride and identity?

Can the systems that direct water through urban space create opportunities for program, habitat, and public space?

How can the structures of existing stormwater infrastructure become an asset in suburban renovation?

How can the demand for water in urban environments benefit the natural systems that exist in urban spaces?

How can snow-days become part of a mental-health strategy?

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Flows of Energy Energy offers a second productive illustration of the issues and potentials of suburban infrastructure. Like water, energy cycles pre-dated urban systems in every landscape, and have undergone significant transformations that have resulted in problematic top-down systems. Energy also forms the second example because of its relevance in current discourse: the tremendous expenditure of energy in urban systems has become the focus of debate in manners both endogenous (i.e. air pollution) and exogenous (i.e. dependence on non-renewable sources). The following section will explore the pre-urban energy systems active in landscapes, discuss the demands created by suburban development, and finally pose a series of questions that help direct thinking toward third-order approaches.

In a pre-urban landscape, energy was expended and transferred through a range of phenomena. The first and most important was incident solar energy. Without this energy, there would be no life, no myth, no suburb (“and no problem�, the devious distopian might say). Without incident solar radiation, there would also be no wind energy, no precipitation, and no water flow. Other sources of preurban energy included tidal forces (driven by gravity), and geothermal forces (driven by the insulated core of the planet). With no means of directly controlling, focusing, or redirecting any of these forms of energy, expenditure was variable and highly localized: natural systems evolved to use the energy that was available at any give time or place (Worster, 1979). This meant that if trees could only grow on the portion of a hill that shaded their roots from the sun, then that is where they would grow. If an animal got too cold at night, it would move or perish.

Seeds that started growing somewhere without sufficient sunlight would die. Such examples may sound overly obvious, but it is easy to forget or underestimate the fierce fitness of natural process (Worster, 1979), especially as one examines the tremendous extent to which urban spaces have subsidized their own obese energy systems.

As suburban development spread over natural landscapes, it drew an entirely different energy profile. It presupposed an energy infrastructure that included fuelled transportation, centralized electricity and natural gas networks, heating and cooling systems for buildings, and a suite of gas/electric household appliances.

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Such networks qualitatively transformed (and ultimately flattened) access to energy across the landscape, allowing urban systems to become dissociated from the natural availability and expenditure of energy. A quantitative comparison is possible here, as energy is a common currency between human and natural systems (Odum, 1997). When one compares total expenditure in a year, a typical pre-urban landscape expended around 10,000 kilocalories per square metre. The very lowest-intensity suburban development quickly drove this up an order of magnitude to 100,000 kilocalories per square metre, and peaks in the implicated urban system (including the surfaces of supporting highways and industrial spaces) ran as high as 3,000,000 kilocalories per square metre (ibid). That 10- to 300fold bump suggests that the energy profile of suburban systems was remarkably distinct from pre-urban energy systems in both pattern and proportion.

The leap in expenditure is explained by the importation, re-distribution, and use of fuel throughout urban systems. In most cases, coal, oil, and gas were drawn from below the ground, converted into usable forms, and distributed through transmission lines, pipes, and service station networks. Suburban development was born in an era that did not consider the finite source of this resource; its mythology was heavily entrenched in the notion of inexpensive access to energy.

Today, there exists a much broader understanding of the difference between the oddly-named8 “non-renewable” and “renewable” energy sources. There is also increasing awareness of the impending shift toward the latter that will be driven by, if nothing else, simple economics. However, in the face of this new knowledge and forecasting, the momentum of suburban mythology has driven status-quo extensions of an energy system that is not materially different from its seventyyear-old predecessor.

A range of negative consequences have emerged from the predominant patterns and proportions of suburban energy infrastructure. Most obviously, the widespread use of hydrocarbon-based fuels has throttled, shifted, or otherwise damaged natural functions in its extraction (i.e. the open pit operations in Alberta’s oil sands (Timoney & Lee, 2009)), transmission (i.e. the straight-line right-of-ways and support roads of high-power electrical transmission lines that bisect natural 8

What strange, anthropocentric terms we chose to refer to systems that propagate without human intervention. Perhaps even “renewing” and “non-renewing” would be an improvement.

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energy expenditure per year

0

500000

1000000

1500000

2000000

2500000

3000000

ocean surface

low-intensity agricultural

increasing urbanization

grassland

Energy expenditure profile in urban and non-urban environments. (Adapted from Odum 1997).

kW/m2

typical urban uses

high-intensity urban uses

Native Grassland at Nose Hill Park, Calgary: 10,000 kcal/m2/year. (Photo: David Ketchup)

Low-intensity suburban coverage: 100,000+ kcal/m2/year. (Photo: Author)

High intensity industrial coverage: 3,000,000+ kcal/m2/year. (Photo: Remotely Boris)

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habitats (Bevanger, 1995)), and expenditure (i.e. the pollutants emitted from personal vehicles (Solomon et al., 2009)). Because urban energy infrastructure has been driven by the expectation of consistency, it has grown without question to accommodate new development. Growth in any system that is driven entirely from the demand side will always present tremendous and unpredictable costs.

And while this investment has generally created a robust system, its centralized nature remains highly susceptible to disturbance (Arico, 2007). The northeast blackout of 2003, which was caused by a software bug at a single facility and impacted fifty-five million people, revealed the extent to which heavy reliance on energy access can turn a two-day failure into a major emergency (Anderson et al., 2007). The phrase “addicted to cheap energy” is tossed around frequently in critical conversations about energy — but what is this really saying? Such a comment is really digging into the idea that the current system is propagated as much by daily practice as it is by the rationality and constraint that exists at the systemic level. Energy use is not just another system; it is a foundational element of suburban myth.

Described in the terms of the present project, current suburban energy infrastructure is decidedly first-order. It is highly controlled, centralized, regulated, and predictable. However, as in the water system, imperatives that push toward second-order approaches are rapidly gaining momentum. Events like the northeast blackout have accelerated a push toward “smart” grids in the electrical system, concern over emissions and fuel prices have driven growth in the hybrid vehicle sector, and a range of forces have propelled ever-increasing investment in “self-renewing” sources of energy. Such strategies highlight a range of aspirations, from veiled robustness, to technology that subtly supports the status-quo, to real interest in changing the qualitative and quantitative profile of energy use. At a certain point, any formidable reconsideration of existing energy infrastructure will require not only a shift in mode or delivery, but shift in expectations and an acceptance of the variability and localization of energy. To help gain entry into the liminal space that sponsors such shifts, this project will now present a range of questions that aspire to the third-order goals of ecological integration and antifragility in suburban energy infrastructure.

How could the natural variability of incident solar and other forms of non-subsidized energy drive the re-distribution of urban settlement?

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Monoculture; vast scale. (Photo: Andy Fogg)

Monoculture; vast scale. (Photo: Boston Library Archives)

Permaculture; human scale. (Photo: milkwooders)

Multiculture; human scale. (Photo: Jaysin Trevino)

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Bored. Are the suburbs like a bored outfielder? (Photo: Lewis Riley)

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What suburban forms will not only weather the volatility of the impending energy transition, but actually benefit from it?

How can urban-level intensities of energy be generated in space that is not distinct from the place it is expended?

How can the variation of electricity use throughout the day and evening inform local public space and programming?

In what ways does the low-density nature of the suburbs afford them particular advantage in the use of incident solar energy?

Can everyday practices accommodate shifts in the availability of energy in ways that also improve personal well-being?

The Fragility of Suburban Infrastructure The two example infrastructures outlined here — energy and water — reveal a collection of common issues that, to varying degrees, capture the issues embedded in the entire range of suburban infrastructures. In general terms, it could be said that suburban infrastructure has transformed natural ecologies, presented rising costs, built structures that are robust but not fail-proof, alienated users from sources, and exhibited fragility in its reliance on top-down structures (Mirza, 2007). Infrastructure systems are also a tremendously entrenched part of the suburban story that must be challenged with a type of thinking that pushes citybuilders into riskier, less-predictable, more liminal spaces of exploration. The first step then, is to aspiring to third-order approaches by asking the central question: how can human and natural infrastructures benefit from each other, and thrive in volatility?

The Suburbs and Public Life As the world grows more interconnected, and decision-making processes shift under the forces of centralization, localization, and new imperatives, the public will be presented with increasingly challenging and consequential conversations (Glendon, 2008). At a broad level, citizens — and their institutions, enterprises, and governments — are already asked to engage in public dialogue about debt that sits in the trillions (Hall, 2008), the routing of pipelines that run for thousands

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of kilometres (Kraus, 2011), or the allocation of water for a million-square-foot shopping mall (Gondek, 2011). At the same time, the small-scale public life of the everyday citizen has been steadily degraded in favour of predictability, reduction in minor conflict, physical barriers to interaction, and the idolization of private expression. Public life is a type of practice, and like any practice, it must be practiced. A public life grows, thrives, and creates innovation through weathering many small conflicts — like a muscle, it will atrophy when not exposed to regular stress. Public life could be considered “antifragile” in its thirst for mistake, debate, and conflict. It is a small logical leap, then, to suppose that the degradation of stressors in public life has left people ill-equipped to engage in the types of critical, large-scale public discourse mentioned above. The term “narrative wars” was recently proposed (Simpson, 2012) to describe the intense, rhetorical milieu within which these conversations happen. How can one expect to engage in such combat while reducing their training at every opportunity?

The suburban mythology has until now been fertile ground for the forces of social predictability (see Schmitz et al., 2003), conflict avoidance, physical barricades (Low, 2001), and private expression. Sennett elucidates this point succinctly in The Fall of Public Man: “The atomizing of the city has put a practical end to an essential component of public space: the overlay of function in a single territory, which creates complexities of experience on that turf. [...] To destroy the multiplicity of function in it and so design that usages of space cannot change as the users of it change, is rational only in terms of initial investment” (1974, p. 297). Sennett’s ideas here finds productive overlap with Foucault (1984a), Lefebvre (1970), and de Certeau (1984) in their condemnation of homogeneity .

The current condition of suburban public life offers three main entry points that might offer productive footholds to subvert and re-imagine the existing expression of public life in suburban mythology. These are: (i) multiplicity of use, (ii) accessibility of program, and (iii) opportunity for social collision.

Multiplicity of Use Both lived and representational spaces in the suburbs are highly atomized and segmented. Each parcel of land or individual building tends to have one specific function that does not invite much interpretation — what Sennett refers to as “complexities of experience” (1974, p. 297). Because each use has its designated

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safe zone, behaviour and form become normative, reducing variability and unpredictability. The zoning of the suburbs could in this way be considered a first-order approach. Any experience with a typical land-use amendment process will offer a stark example of the current system’s distaste for change, error, or indeed multiplicity. A city that is divided into various normative safe zones that resist change and reinterpretation would be considered fragile, because events that cause conflict end up driving all parties away from the kind of dialogue that could reach an resolution that offers net benefit. By approaching suburban space with an eye to multiplicity and a more complex layering of uses, one can begin to undermine existing homogeneities. The questions that aspire to a third-order multiplicity could include: How can differing uses of a space over time not only avoid conflict with each other, but actually benefit from each other’s presence?

How can suburban zoning amendment processes be structured so that each case is informed by the small failings and successes of previous projects? In effect, how can the land-use bylaw accept change and challenge at a pace nearer to the pace of the demand for change?

How can architecture integrate novel and hybridized uses while improving the overall legibility of urban space?

Accessibility of Program In addition to its lack of multiplicity, suburban space also has a greatly abridged catalogue of programs. This catalogue usually omits space for employment, industry, production, public gathering, art production and display, and local infrastructure. These uses have been given their own domains in the city, and this physical and conceptual separation from the daily life of citizens has resulted in a range of issues, from the infrastructural divorce discussed previously to significant accessibility issues (Muller, 1995). The transportation network of suburbs has reduced the friction of motion for many, but has also had the effect of increasing friction for others. Any suburban dweller who is too young, too old, or too poor to operate a personal vehicle is spatially isolated from entire segments of urban programming and public life, many of which have been relegated to cultural zones or entertainment districts. The programmatic poverty of suburban neighbourhoods leads to fragility in public life simply because citizens are

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precluded from participating in the processes that operate the city and enable the practice of everyday public life. In order to reconfigure this element of the suburban mythology toward third-order approaches that build integration and antifragility, the following type of questions could be posed: How could investment in cultural institutions occur in a dispersed way that avoids the fragilities of centralized monumentality?

How could a new central library be 100 non-central libraries?

How could mixing domains of industry, artistic production, employment, and residence in space improve all involved programs?

Social Collision/Reduction of Barriers The mythology of suburban space is in part defined by exclusion (Jurca, 2001); over time and in different places this has manifested along lines of race, gender and class (ibid). The same groups have not always inhabited the same sides of the line, as in the case of socio-economic status: in some places the suburbs have been territory of the middle class, in others a haven for the rich, and still others the cheapest available land for low-income families (Dodson & Sipe, 2007). A great deal of thought and research has occurred in urban studies exploring the phenomena of suburban exclusion and isolation, and some of this work has gone beyond the social domain to examine the physical structures that create or reinforce this exclusion. Setha Low’s work on the forces of fear in American gated communities (2001) captures the most explicit and territorialized version of barriers in suburban space, but there are may other, more insidious examples.

Exclusion and barriers have had a “fragilizing” effect on suburban space. Embedded in the ever-present, outward growing promise of more space lies the option of avoidance. This result is similar in ways to the aspirations and disappointments of the Internet as a space that could re-build the public sphere. The rise of the web was heralded as a new arena for engagement and exposure (Litan & Rivlin, 2001), but recent studies have shown the opposite effect has indeed occurred (Chen, 2013). The “endless” space of the web has created not only a place for multiple viewpoints, but the ability to visit selected viewpoints without any risk of conflict. People’s religious and political ideologies, for example, have been found

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A collision of infrastructure and public life. (Photo: Senor Codo)

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to become increasingly polarized after exposure to internet space, as they are able to (and tend to) seek out only messages that build upon their current world-view (Taber & Lodge, 2006).

The modern world is full of examples of ways that extreme polarization has had a net negative effect on human prosperity, in political dialogue, religious conflict, and attempts at multiculturalism. The question then, of how to work toward third-order collisions finds its roots in the limitations, rather than openness, of space. Questions that might subvert the existing mythology may include: How can the limitations of the existing suburban parcel fabric become a productive constraint in renovation?

How can one create a public world in the suburbs that is safe and specific enough to invite meaningful conversation, yet open enough to evolve through mis-use, subversion and reinterpretation?

How can the integration of heterogenous forms and styles of housing create small, repetitive, healthy conflict?

Suburban Subversion This section has (i) suggested that infrastructure and public life are two fragile elements of suburban mythology that offer generative entry points for renovation, (ii) explored a collection of examples in both of these domains, with a focus on how they contribute to fragility, and (iii) posed a range of questions that might serve to push thinking into the liminal space necessary to subvert status-quo solutions. The goal of this process is to reduce moments of fragility in suburban space and find ways the implicated systems can become better integrated and thrive in the context of disturbance. The next and final section of Chapter One will explore the ways in which architecture can engage these questions and the frameworks and imperatives in which they exist.

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The Role Of Architecture Until now, this project has avoided engaging the question of architecture directly.

The purpose of this succession was to find entry-points into suburban mythology that aren’t born from architecture scale, history, or process — and to then see what potentials lie in architecture driven from these new directions. At this point, however, as this project is building toward an architectural solution, there is value in exploring how architecture has engaged two things: (i) the suburban mythology and (ii) the project’s entry-points of infrastructure and public life. It will conclude with a brief reflection on what one could mean by antifragile architecture. The following section will explore these ideas before Chapter Two introduces the site that will be analyzed, programmed, and brought to architectural resolution in chapters three and four.

Architecture and the Suburbs The relationship between architecture and suburban space is in many ways a study in absence: part of what continues to make suburban space unique and compelling is its lack of reliance on architecture or architects. There are few urban precedents that, in practice, can claim such autonomy from the discipline’s grasp. Seen one way, this separation freed suburban space from the oppressions of architecture’s political and aesthetic lineage; seen another, this freedom came at the cost of increased stagnation, convention, and monotony. The growth of the suburbs in the 1950s coincided with the rise of both do-it-yourself culture and consumerism across North America (K. Jackson, 1987). In many facets of life, and particularly in the private realm, people replaced professional craft with material culture. This trend found perhaps its most obvious manifestation in the world of home improvement, and the hardware store emerged with new relevance as a cultural setting. Opportunities for self-expression emerged not through competence, skill, or relationships between people, but through consumption of deck kits, barbeque utensils, and column wraps. The essential contradiction of this transition — that common skills were degraded from craft to assembly while the expectation of “crafty” expression grew — propagated a dependency on the materialist systems offered by the suburban hardware depot. And the quest to make such products more accessible to the population had a sedative effect on

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the production system: extinguishing risk, increasing convention, and penalizing novelty. This process has played a visible role in delaying innovation in suburban character; builders have drawn from an increasingly recycled collection of formal gestures and a limited material palette that remains virtually unchanged in seven decades. Architecture, with its insatiable taste for novelty and risk, its perceived estrangement from practical life, and its additional expense, has simply had no place in this world.

This is not to say that architects have not tried, in their own manner, to understand, design, curate, or intervene in suburban space. Over time (and even before the wide-spread suburbanization of cities) architects and urbanists have presented compelling schemes that have contributed to the suburban mythology. It would be limiting to speak of suburbanism while omitting mention of such precedents.

The following section is broken into two parts: historical precedents that predate suburbanism as a dominant form — Frederick Law Olmsted’s Riverside Subdivision (1869), Ebeneezer Howard’s Garden City (1898), and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City (1932) — and precedents that occurred in the context of the dominance of the suburban concept — Duany & Platter-Zyberk’s Seaside (1980), and Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette (1984). This section concludes with a discussion of contemporary examples of architecture in the suburbs, and explores alternate potentials for the discipline in suburban space.

Riverside Subdivision, Chicago American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted completed a range of notable projects in the United States in the late nineteenth century (including New York’s Central Park), combining his interest in the British picturesque tradition with the protestant grids that dominated the American city (Zaitzevsky, 1982). His plan for Riverside (1869) in Chicago was one of the earliest planned neighbourhoods in the United States, designed as a residential community with easy access to Chicago’s downtown. This was one of the earliest American examples of a neighbourhood scheme in which natural areas were woven through the fabric of an urban space.

Olmsted’s pioneering work in Chicago and other major U.S. cities became the basis for park-like residential developments throughout North America, and spawned a lineage of design that continues to influence the compositions of suburban neighbourhoods around the world (Zaitzevsky). Riverside offered an

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Olmstead’s Plan for Riverside.

An excerpt of a schematic for Howard’s Garden City. | 61 |

Illustrations of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City.

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early taste of an alternate kind of urbanism that rejected the severe, hard-surfaced metropolitanism of the major cities of the era but still participated in the city’s daily life. Along with landscape and neighbourhood designs, Olmsted and other British and European designers brought with them emerging ideas about what constituted a healthy urban environment, especially the importance of regular access to green space. These ideas formed key seeds in the origin myth of the suburbs, ideas that would eventually contribute to the rejection of the city as “unhealthy”, and the promise of the suburbs as a more clean and natural human habitat.

The Garden City Looking back on Ebeneezer Howard’s Garden City scheme, which in 1898 came three decades after Olmsted’s work in Chicago (and over 115 years before this project), it is clear that the plan demonstrated keen foresight regarding the attractive forces that would drive the growth of suburbia more than fifty years later.

Howard’s Garden City was at its core a collective restructuring of land-ownership, but it was primarily the plan’s formal properties that drew the fascination of urban designers and scholars (Ward, 1992). Crafted in direct response to the miserable programmatic adjacencies of the industrial city, the Garden City integrated large and well-ordered agricultural and park spaces within the traditional limits of the city. Thus was planted the tremendously influential idea that there could exist a set of daily practices that drew from the benefits of both “city” and “country”, and, more importantly, that this life was accessible to the common citizen (Howard, 1898). Notably, the garden city scheme also integrated industrial and commercial uses for residents that balanced the spread of new residential space. As the Garden City movement grew, however, a range of interpretations led to developments that drew selectively from Howard’s ideas. One of the more problematic of these interpretations was the Garden Suburb, which applied formal patterns from the Garden City to urban edge development. The Garden Suburb replaced the notion of self-sufficiency with centralized dependency, and replaced collective land ownership with participation in the wave of outward-flowing land speculation.

These ideas ultimately undermined the Garden City’s ideals while carrying forward notions that would contribute aesthetically to the roots of suburban mythology.

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Broadacre City Frank Lloyd Wright’s infamous Broadacre City scheme saw the city diffused beyond any kind of urban comprehension, spread in acreage-scale units throughout the landscape. Like Howard’s Garden City, Wright’s approach was politically charged, though the two schemes had opposite approaches to the basic units that comprised society. Whereas Howard looked toward small, town-like units of collective ownership and decision-making, Wright pushed decentralization all the way to the individual and the family unit. His approach, which was first published in 1935 but remained part of his works and writings until his death, drew from a range of philosophies, including transcendentalism, libertarianism, exceptionalism, democracy, self-determanism, and manifest destiny (Wright, 1945). While Wright’s (non)urban scheme has largely been dismissed by scholars and practitioners as too radical to warrant serious consideration (Alofsin, 1989), it presents two key notions that are of particular interest in the present project.

First, Wright imagined a space of continuous urbanism; one where low-intensity uses integrated human and natural habitat in a seamless felt. In this idea lies an opportunity to transcend the prevailing assumption that suburbs are inherently damaging, and that environmental redemption lies in intensive city-space. Wright shows a very early example of ecological integration that does not rely on separation or conservation. The entire landscape becomes a working space of production, movement, exchange, and inhabitation. The second idea of interest here is the imaging of a suburban space that is not dependent on a centre. As in Howard’s scheme, Wright understood that these decentralized settlements required the presence of industrial, commercial, and recreational uses that ultimately dissolved the hard-line zoning that characterizes conventional urban space. To Wright, the scheme would only be successful if it included a range of public programming throughout the decentralized settlement, reducing any reliance on a centralized (and therefore oppressive) node (Wright, 1935). Much like the localized selfsufficiency of the Garden City, this notion was stripped away almost completely in the development of the suburbs. Wright would likely be appalled by the pseudofunctionality and mono-culture that characterizes contemporary suburbia.

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Precedents The precedents discussed above were all formulated before the suburbs became a widespread urban form. In this way, they are selections from architecture and urban design’s contributions to the suburban origin myth. But architects also had interpretations of the suburban mythology after it came to dominate the North American landscape. While there are many precedents that stand out as reactions to suburban development, two in particular will be discussed here. The first project, Duany & Platter-Zyberk’s Seaside, Florida (1980), will be examined as a traditionalist approach to crafting community that uses the suburban canvas to craft a very specific world. The second project, Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette in Paris (1984), is relevant here not because it offers anything explicitly suburban (indeed it is a city park design that contains no residences), but rather because of the way it builds conceptually around the ideas of program and public experience in a decentralized, deconstructed version of the city. While both of these precedents are drawn from the same era, they provide very different responses to the suburbanizing city.

Seaside, Florida Construction of the resort community of Seaside began in the Florida panhandle in 1980 under the design direction of Andrew Duany and Elizabeth Platter-Zyberk (DPZ). The development holds claim to being the first community designed based on the principles of New Urbanism, a school of thought founded by DPZ in the late 1970s. New Urbanism aspires to the design of communities derived from the tradition of the American small town, placing high value on mixed uses, walkability, localism, and an urban structure anchored in institutional representation (Duany et al., 1993). Common elements in New Urbanist communities include main streets, town-like residential lanes, and a bricolage of historical architectural styles. Seaside, and New Urbanism, is invoked here both because it purports to be an antidote to suburban sprawl and because it has had notable influence on the trajectory of the suburban mythology over the last thirty years.

Critics of Seaside and the New Urbanism movement are usually focused on three things: its tendency to rely on affectation to make sense of urban environments (through traditional stylings and institutions), its inability to challenge the momentum of conventional urban systems (by relegating itself to mostly surficial

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Plan for Seaside, FL.

Aerial view of Seaside, FL. | 66 |

Schematic drawing of Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette.

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principles), and the shallow section it cuts through the socioeconomic side of the city (it tends, like much contemporary urban design, to fall into the trap of making city space for the upper middle-class) (see Ellis, 2002). Its influence on North American neighbourhood development has been both explicit, with development occurring under the New Urbanist banner, and implicit, as the town-like ethos it espouses has proven highly marketable, even when many of the underlying principles are absent.

The present project draws a key lesson from the New Urbanist pursuit. The broad critiques and practical failings of the movement (for example, its demonstrated inability to reduce its desired vehicle use (Lund, 2003)) have revealed the fragility of the “manifesto” approach. This project will therefore seek to understand and design within a more flexible narrative that avoids claim to a static future or dominant aesthetic sensibility.

Parc de la Villette Bernard Tschumi’s design for Parc de la Villette in Paris (1984) was conceived in the same period as DPZ’s Seaside but drew from a remarkably different conception of urban space. The 1980s were steeped in a new consciousness of the cultural space of architecture, historic and present. The products of modernism (which by this time included the mass-produced suburbs) had begun to accumulate and dominate the fabric of cities, revealing the movement’s limitations and triggering a broad questioning of conventional practice across disciplines. Parc de la Villette was built on a large reclaimed site that provided the opportunity to experiment with new configurations of urban space. Whereas DPZ built order upon the expected, Tschumi’s scheme explicitly side-stepped past conceptions of city space, rejecting well-established landscape traditions in favour of open interpretation and use. The space of Parc de la Villette was organized into abstract layers of geometry: points, lines, and surfaces. Each of these elements played a role in affording new opportunities for programming and play. Of note, Tschumi designed a series of thirty-five deconstructivist “follies”, which sponsored a range of uses without themselves laying any claim to a particular function. These red steel constructs drew on a self-similar formal strategy that offered a sense of orientation without relying on the signs and symbols of the traditional city. While

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the design for Parc de la Villette is not in itself suburban, it presents a keen critique of the convention-steeped suburban approach and offers a successful example in which architectural-scale design can subvert the dominant order of a city.

From Antidote to Antifragile Over the last decade, architecture has been increasingly teased into action as an explicit antidote to suburbia. Harnessing the discipline’s enduring fondness for the large public commission, municipalities have invested heavily in new urban articulations and points of intensity within their suburbs. A recent example is found in Surrey, BC, where a series of developments have sought to explicitly “take the suburb out of Surrey” (Hadani, 2013). Surrey’s intervention, like many similar strategies found across North America, involves the construction of a dense collection of new programming that includes such uses as a civic centre, library, university campus, and recreation centre, along with high-rise residential and office buildings. Although the architecture itself is quite interesting, the fundamental strategy begs the question: is the only productive architectural response to suburbia one of re-authorship? Is architecture’s role in this mythology relegated to land-mark interventions? At the urban scale, these revisionist strategies are reliant on proven models of urban form and composition. In this way they are certainly robust, but their predictability fails to equip them with the capacity to produce the kinds of novel urban relationships required to build the integrated, antifragile systems described in the first section of this chapter.

This critique produces a new question: can architecture intervene in the suburban mythology without mass erasure, and if so, at what point in the spectrum of change is the suburban myth bent beyond comprehension? In an earlier section, this project argued that the suburbs were difficult to define via consistent quantitative metrics, and were better understood as an intuitive ‘mythology’ of space and mind. Until now, it has shied away from trying to capture that intuitive space, but this can also preclude one’s ability to claim any degree of “erasure” or “fitness” in a design. While acknowledging the limitations of a reductive model (for an example of where reduction becomes problematic, see Norberg-Schulz, 1980), the following section will attempt to scribe this intuition through the phenomenology of the figure-ground.

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Figure/Ground In studies of urban space, figure-ground relationships describe in a simplified manner the reading of built versus un-built portions of the environment. In rural environments, vast tracts of “ground” are interrupted sparsely by the “figures” of the farmhouse and its accompanying structures; in this realm, undeveloped space rarely becomes figurative. In the densest urban centres, the figure-ground relationship can form an inverse to this condition; the un-built streets, plazas, walk-ways, and interstitial spaces take on a perceivable figurative quality. In between these two extremes exists a range of figure-ground conditions in which un-built space takes on degrees of “object” presence.

In the suburbs, the figure-ground relationship has tended to rely on readings in which built form (usually houses) is read as a collection of objects within a continuous, non-figurative ground. The figurative house is tied into many different elements of the suburban mythology, including private ownership of land, pastoral ideals, freedom, connection to landscape, and the glorification of the home as an “object” of personal expression. This perceptive quality is reinforced in the themes of real estate marketing — advertisements for suburban homes have tended to evoke individual estates in neighbour-free expanses of land. While it is easy to become cynical here, such characteristics should not be dismissed — they have clearly been attractive to the tens of millions of North Americans who have moved into suburban neighbourhoods over almost seven decades. Philip Johnson famously remarked that architecture is the “art of wasting space”; in a recent lecture at the University of Calgary, Scott Cohen further reflected that in the architecture of a house, this waste occurs in the land that surrounds the building (2012). The house is a naturally figurative type, and it relies heavily on surrounding ground to give it this presence.

Suburban development has had the challenging task of constructing figurative buildings in the context of ultimately limited space, and has thus developed an eclectic short-hand repertoire of formal gestures (see Southworth and Ben-Joseph, 1995). Houses tend to be centred in their lots, maximizing distance between buildings at the expense of useless interstitial spaces and diffuse streetscapes.

Outdoor spaces on private lots almost aggressively avoid any function beyond lawns and small decorative gardens, as if to assert the fact that their presence is only in service of the home’s distinction and privacy. Neighbourhood architectural

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controls prevent neighbouring houses from sharing an exterior colour, reducing the risk that two houses blend together. From an architectural perspective, such prescriptions seem inherently problematic. However, when the limits of these thresholds are pushed in the absence of design (remembering that the architect was expelled from this territory long ago), the results can fail in both directions — urban space that lacks figurative qualities in both the buildings and the street (for further discussion see Trancik, 1986).

On Suburban Terms Given this description of suburbia according to a figure-ground relationship, it can be inferred that one’s intuitive sense of suburbanness will diminish as built form increasingly delineates the space around it. Any attempt to renovate the suburbs that simply increases density, establishes street walls, and conglomerates built form is ultimately scribing a new type of urban space (see, for example Dunham-Jones & Williamson, 2009). If one wants to make the claim that they are productively engaging suburban mythology, rather than dubbing-over with a foreign order, they should be able to demonstrate some continuity of the basic qualities that make the suburbs suburban. The present project will take this position. Although it will look to introduce novel patterns, programs, and relationships within suburban space, it will approach this task in a manner that respects the rhythm of suburban fabric and will seek to maintain the spatial qualities that form the intuitive core of suburban myth.

Architecture and Infrastructure The last ten years have seen architecture take on an increasing role as an investigator and innovator in infrastructure design, bridging the gap between engineering and the environmental sciences (McDonough et al., 2003; McIntyre et al., 2000).

The emerging recognition of natural and urban interconnectedness, outlined in the early parts of this chapter, has led to a new push for ecological, non-linear systems-thinking and a demand for more complex and nuanced patterning for urban systems. Architects and designers have found themselves relatively well-

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Hopwas Village, Staffordshire, UK. The small rural setting produces a figure-ground map in which open space (white) rarely becomes figurative.

Nolli’s Plan of Rome. Exterior and large interior public spaces take on a figurative quality in this map of Rome from 1748. | 72 |

Neither here nor there. When the limits of suburban expression are pushed in the absence of design, the result can produce an environment entirely lacking in figural presence. | 73 |

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equipped to dwell in the uncertain spaces stipulated by this conceptual shift. It is no coincidence that “design thinking” has become a relevant and desirable term in disciplines from the social sciences to engineering and business (Capra, 2000).

Traditional methods of infrastructure design are predominantly first-order in their reaction to disturbance. That is, they seek to control and resist variation in the systems for which they are responsible. Engineering-based approaches have been, in linear terms, quite successful in building robustness into infrastructure systems. Roads are widened, water pipes are more leak-resistent, and a flick of a switch delivers electricity to a light-bulb from distant production facilities.

However, as the world shifts into second- and third-order approaches, a new type of method is becoming necessary. This method accepts questions that have multiples answers, embraces locality and unpredictability, and questions demand-driven strategies. While the infrastructural questions of “how much”, “how”, and “why” have conventionally been the domain of the engineer, this domain is opening itself to a broader range of disciplinary inputs (including an overall reduction of the idea that professionals, rather than citizens, make these determinations). It is here that architecture is beginning to find new relevance as a participant in the design of the infrastructures of cities.

The most recent institutional manifestation of this trend is ecological urbanism, an emerging body of thought that is beginning to investigate and design new relationships between the human systems of the city and the natural systems in which these are situated (Forman R. & Godron M., 1986; Niemelä, 1999). Drawing from a century of development in the (relatively) burgeoning field of ecology, ecological urbanism offers a formalized name to the phenomenon of increased participation among architects and designers in the processes that manage technical and biological flows in human settlement (Gaston, 2010). Researchers and designers now increasingly recognize that “in cities people mobilize some nutrients and deplete others, create habitats that never before existed, divert water, increase temperatures, and, by intent or by accident, manipulate the community of other species found within city boundaries and beyond” (Collins et al., 2000, p. 416). If traditional ecology was concerned with the protection of natural space, it is now irrevocably about the construction and maintenance of new, integrated

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ecologies that draw relationships between human and natural systems. Anne Spirn said twenty years ago what many disciplines have now increasingly integrated into their own practices: “The city is part of nature” (1984, p. 4).

The thrust of ecological thinking into city design has created new entry-points for architecture to question conventional practices and propose new patterns and systems. The present project, although not presented explicitly under the ecological urbanism banner, is nonetheless drawing from the same momentums and imperatives.

Architecture and Public Life While the increasing overlap between architecture, ecology, and engineering in urban infrastructure is a relatively new phenomenon, architecture has enjoyed a longer relationship with the social sciences, urban studies, and the sociology of public life (Newman & O’Brien, 2006). The discipline has long positioned itself as bridge between physical space and the softer9 social sciences. There has throughout this time been an implicit understanding that there is a link between physical space and the daily practices of its inhabitants, but the specific nature of this relationship has been the subject of much debate. Scholars alternately characterize architecture as socially deterministic (Broady, 1966), a naturally occurring product of daily life (Heidegger, 1971), a crime-prevention device (Newman, 1972), a series of repeating socio-spatial patterns (Alexander et al., 1977) an expression of power (Foucault, 1982), or something that adapts to its users (Brand, 1994). While specific approaches have gone in and out of vogue over time, recent disciplinary consensus has shied away from reductionist or deterministic arguments. Although architects still commonly make claims that their environments will support (or foster, sponsor, afford) particular types of social interactions, they are more reserved in their claim that the patterning of the environment will “cause” the change. The assertive “will make” has been replaced by the double negative “will not preclude”.

9

The term ‘softer’ is used here to describe those research fields in which there tends to be less disciplinary consensus. The distinction is made to avoid the claim that architecture has had a traditional relationship with the more clinical examinations of humans in their environment — this bridge has been increasingly built from the “harder” side, in the form of environmental psychology.

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This question comes into focus in the present project. When deploying architecture as a tool that intervenes in suburban public life, one must establish some position about the manner in which this intervention occurs. This project will attempt to avoid problematic claims through the use of mythology as a frame for its intervention. In its analysis and designs, it will suppose that the settings it creates do not “force” a type of behaviour or attitude, but rather create opportunities for the enactment of story-lines that could not have (or would not likely have) played out in the absence of its designs. It will open the dominant suburban mythology to a broader range of interpretations10. In this way, its design gestures are like stage settings, providing citizens with spaces to practice new everyday performances.

Systems theorist Stafford Beer coined a relevant term that finds resonance here: “The Purpose of the System is What it Does” (abbreviated as POSIWID) (Sillitto, 2005). POSIWID tries to avoid understanding complex systems according to intention, prejudice, or judgement. Instead, it looks to observed system behaviour as the best indicator of the “purpose” of any systemic intervention. If an architect builds an outdoor theatre, but the local community uses it as a farmer’s market, its purpose is to provide space for selling food — the intentions of the original intervention have no bearing on its actual role in the city system. In the spirit of POSIWID, the present project will make no claims about the particular ways in which its interventions will take root over time or what components of the scheme might find a more permanent place in the suburban pantheon. It will simply offer what it can: new settings, opportunities, and excuses to live a public life at the neighbourhood scale.

Conclusion This chapter began by introducing a framework for understanding change in cities, organized according to four types of reactions to disturbance and unpredictability. It argued for responses that go beyond resistance and even resilience: toward structures that thrive in the context of disturbance. It followed this by examining the suburbs as a relevant constituent in North American cities that have tremendous impact on the capacity for urban space to engage change. Positing that the suburbs are more mythology than metric, it set out to understand how one might intervene in the suburban mythology, considering a 10

In a manner, this increases the antifragility of the myth itself.

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range of opportunities and perils present in this approach. From here, the project identified two productive entry-points into the suburban story: infrastructure and public life. It explored in general terms the current state of these two phenomena in the suburbs, and raised a series of questions with the aim of shifting common understanding into a more liminal space. The final section began by exploring the role of architecture in these ideas, reviewing a series of precedents that captured a range of relationships between architecture and the suburban mythology. It concluded with brief discussions that set out the rising opportunity for architecture to intervene in the project’s two entry-points of infrastructure and public life.

The next three chapters will begin to test the ideas set out in this introductory essay. Chapter two will analyze a section of suburban neighbourhood in Calgary, exploring its morphology, systems, and patterning. Chapter three will introduce into this area a series of strategies that begin to respond to the neighbourhoodscale aspirations toward re-framing infrastructure and public life. Chapter four will conclude the project by zooming in to a selection of sites to examine the ways in which the project’s ideas find manifestation at the architectural scale.

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Chapter 1: Antifragile Suburbs

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2

Chapter Two: The Study Area

Site Scale and Extents The project’s study area is located within the neighbourhood of Silver Springs, a suburban development in the city of Calgary, Alberta. Developed in the northwest quadrant of the city in 1970s, Silver Springs now forms part of the outer edge of what might be conisidered Calgary’s “middle ring” — a region encircling the inner city that captures much of Calgary’s first wave of suburban development (Sandalack, 2006). A small (approximately 0.5 km2) portion of the neighbourhood was selected for analysis. The scale was set by the desire for enough detail to work with the parcel fabric and to bring portions of the study area to architectural resolution. The particular extents of the area were determined by boundary conditions present in the site: to the north a major roadway (Silver Springs Drive) that runs through the neighbourhood and connects it to the nearest arterial (Crowchild Trail); along the west and south the Bow River escarpment; and to the east an undeveloped right-of-way that separates Silver Springs from the adjacent neighbourhood of Varsity Estates. Other parameters that drove the site selection included its presence in the study region of the preceding project, availability of municipal infrastructure data and historical records, and physical accessibility for site visits.

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Neighbourhood Profile The neighbourhood of Silver Springs was constructed between 1972 and 1980.

When it was built it formed part of Calgary’s edge, but the neighbourhood’s outward edge is now over 3.5 kilometres from the nearest part of the municipal boundary. Its current housing stock is comprised of 72% detached houses (significantly higher than the city-wide rate of 58%) (City of Calgary, 2010a).

Along with its relatively large lots, this places the neighbourhood’s density among Calgary’s lowest 20%.

In 2006, Silver Springs was home to 9329 residents, 84% of whom owned rather than rented their property (ibid). Its population has receeded slightly (<4%) over the last five years as it undergoes a lifecycle shift (likely as a children born throughout the 1980s move away from home). The City projects a reversal of this trend, as re-investment infiltrates the middle ring and a new generation of families settles nearer to the city core (City of Calgary, 2010b & 2011a).

Formal Lineage of the Study Area The study area is comprised of the “Silverdale” and “Silverview” street clusters at Silver Springs’ southernmost extent. It is separated from the rest of the neighbourhood by Silver Springs Gate, which is the primary access point for Silver Springs and one of only three roads that connect the neighbourhood to the surrounding road system.

The study area’s perimeter presents several oddities. First, the intersection that terminates the Silver Springs Gate is significantly over-scaled, and offers a fourth, south-bearing route that terminates within a block. Second, there is a broad and largely un-programmed strip of land that sits between Silver Springs and Varsity Estates, cutting off any vehicular connectivity directly between these neighbourhoods (a remnant gravel emergency access road and a bicycle path remain the only bridge between the two neighbourhoods). Third, the neighbourhood’s escarpment edge is bounded by a broad, single-loaded roadway open to the escarpment. This is notable in that such a feature is nearly unique among Calgary’s many escarpment-oriented neighbourhoods — treatments of such edges typically revert to a double-loaded road with private escarpment lots forming the perimeter.

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Aerial view of the study area. (Photo: Microsoft Bing Maps)

Looking north along the east edge of the study area. | 81 |

Chapter 2: The Study Area

All three of these anomolies seem to be explained by a substantial revision to the Silver Springs plan while it was going through the approvals process at the City. In Calgary’s transportation plan at the time, Sarcee Trail (the major road that links Silver Springs to Crowchild Trail) was planned to run in between Silver Springs and Varsity, connecting south across the Bow River to Bowness via a large flyover bridge. This proposal designated 40th Avenue as a major secondary route that would intersect Sarcee Trail at a cloverleaf interchange on the cusp of the escarpment and continued along the escarpment edge of Silver Springs.

Debate over this routing (and the effect it would have both on residents living in Bowness and along Varsity’s 40th Avenue) was at full pitch (see letters from the City clerks’ office in the following section) while the plan for Silver Springs was in flux. The City ultimately chose to terminate Sarcee Trail at Crowchild and deadend 40th Avenue in Varsity, but ghosts of the conversation lingered in the layout for Silver Springs. This explains the large intersection at the study area’s northwest corner (anticipating a major road running along the escarpment), the green gap to the east (an unused right-of-way), and the broad road that now runs, singleloaded, along the study area’s south edge.

The study area takes its outer form from these three peculiar edge conditions.

The north and west edges are defined by Silver Springs Gate and its terminating intersection. To the east, the straight and broad right of way for a never-built highway. And, to the south, a road following the winding contours of the Bow River escarpment.

Internally, the study area’s composition is typical of Calgary’s earliest suburban development. The street pattern blends the centralized principles of the neighbourhood unit with more decentralized curvilinear roads and cul-de-sacs (Sandalack, 2006). The blocks are a standard 76m (250 ft) depth, accomodating two 33.5m (110 ft) lots on either side of a 9m (30 ft) laneway. The lots are typically 15.5m (50 ft) wide, and each holds a house with a footprint that averages 142 m2 (1528 ft2). Seventy-five percent of the single-family lots have detached garages; the rest have either uncovered on-site parking or rely on the area’s ample street parking for vehicle storage.

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75

37.5

straight-line distance from core (km) 0

Downtown West End Chinatown Lower Mount Royal Mission Eau Claire Beltline Sunalta Bankview Point McKay Cliff Bungalow Sunnyside University of Calgary Erlton Windsor Park Spruce Cliff Hillhurst Lincoln Park Greenview Crescent Heights Queens Park Village South Calgary Bridgeland/Riverside Tuxedo Park Rosscarrock University Heights Kingsland Parkhill Killarney/Glengarry Capitol Hill Renfrew/Regal Terrace Red Carpet Highland Park Falconridge Altadore Somerset Palliser Ogden Applewood Park Glenbrook Erin Woods Albert Park/Radisson Mayland Heights Patterson Shaganappi Ramsay Parkdale West Hillhurst Rideau Park Penbrooke Meadows Haysboro Glamorgan Richmond Pineridge Acadia Inglewood Castleridge Mount Pleasant Kelvin Grove Forest Lawn Millrise Forest Heights Coach Hill Dover Abbeydale Rundle Cedarbrae Banff Trail Winston Hts/Mountview Beddington Heights Whitehorn Temple Ranchlands Monterey Park MacEwan Braeside Varsity Rutland Park Marborough Country Hills Deer Ridge Marborough Park Dalhousie Thorncliffe Signal Hill Shawnessy Martindale Fairview Hidden Valley Deer Run Rosemont Riverbend North Haven Arbour Lake Westgate Sandstone Valley Queensland Huntington Hills Southwood Hounsi eld Heights/Briar Hill Coral Springs St. Andrews Heights Midnapore Harvest Hills Canyon Meadows Cambrian Heights Montgomery McKenzie Lake Hamptons Brentwood Rosedale Highwood Elboya Douglasdale/Douglas Glen Lakeview Edgemont Chinook Park Upper North Haven Sundance Strathcona Park North Glenmore Park Hawkwood Bowness Scenic Acres Willowpark Silver Springs Oakridge Discovery Ridge Diamond Cove Lake Bonavista Collingwood Wildwood Maple Ridge Glendale Charleswood Woodlands Vista Heights Upper Mount Royal Southview Scarboro Parkland Roxboro Meadowlark Park Bonavista Downs Elbow Park Bayview Britannia Pump Hill Scarboro/Sunalta West Greenwood/Greenbriar Mayfair Eagle Ridge Bel-Aire

20

15

Study Area

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10

5

0

Chinatown Eau Claire Beltline Sunnyside Downtown West End Cliff Bungalow Crescent Heights Mission Lower Mount Royal Hillhurst Rosedale Erlton Upper Mount Royal Ramsay Sunalta Roxboro Rideau Park Bridgeland/Riverside Bankview Scarboro Renfrew Mount Pleasant Elbow Park Tuxedo Park HounsField Heights/Briar Hill Parkhill West Hillhurst Scarboro/Sunalta West South Calgary Capitol Hill Winston HEIGHTS/Mountview Inglewood Richmond Rosemont Elboya Shaganappi Britannia Queens Park Village Banff Trail Altadore Mayland Heights Cambrian Heights St. Andrews Heights Vista Heights Highland Park Spruce Cliff Collingwood Killarney/Glengarry Windsor Park Parkdale Highwood University Heights Albert Park/Radisson Heights Rosscarrock Southview Bel-Aire Greenview Point McKay Meadowlark Park Rutland Park University of Calgary North Haven Charleswood North Glenmore Park Mayfair Lincoln Park Glendale Dover Wildwood Westgate Thorncliffe Glenbrook Kelvin Grove Kingsland Glamorgan Eagle Ridge Lakeview Brentwood Forest Lawn Fairview Montgomery Forest Heights MarLborough Chinook Park Ogden Rundle Erin Woods Patterson Strathcona Park Coach Hill Huntington Hills Signal Hill Varsity Haysboro Whitehorn Acadia Penbrooke Meadows Bayview MarLborough Park Riverbend Red Carpet Pineridge Beddington Heights Pump Hill Dalhousie Palliser Oakridge Temple Bowness Southwood Abbeydale Applewood Park Willow park Castleridge Maple Ridge Sandstone Valley Edgemont Braeside MacEwan Monterey Park Falconridge Country Hills Discovery Ridge Silver Springs Cedarbrae Martindale Harvest Hills Ranchlands Canyon Meadows Bonavista Downs Coral Springs Greenwood/Greenbriar Diamond Cove Hawkwood Woodlands Hidden Valley Lake Bonavista Douglasdale/GleN Hamptons Queensland Scenic Acres Arbour Lake Deer Ridge Parkland Millrise Deer Run Midnapore Shawnessy McKenzie Lake Sundance Somerset

Density and distance of Calgary neighbouroods. Only completed neighbourhoods are included here; many others are in progress around the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s perimeter.

112.5

calgary neighbourhoods - density + distance

density (units / hectare) 150

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The City of Calgary is located approximately 225km north of the Canada-US border, on the easter slopes of the Rocky Mountains. It experiences hot summers and cold winters, though the winter season is punctuated by warm â&#x20AC;&#x153;Chinookâ&#x20AC;? winds.

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Slope in the Calgary Region. Calgary sits at the pinwheel of three major ecologies.

study area in calgary

Study Area

Central Business District

Calgary is a city of nearly 1.1 million people (City of Calgary, 2011b). The city is highly monocentric, with concentric rings of development spreading from its dense core. These rings are interrupted by radial industrial sectors to the north and southeast.

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Suburban reputation. Calgary’s density profile (black line) shown in comparison to Vancouver and Montreal.

Growing in all directions. Even though Calgary’s density profile is skewed significantly to “low”, a large percentage of its population lives within 15 kilometers of the core. | 87 |

1951

1961

built area = 40 km²

built area = 104 km²

study area built extents land reserve full build-out

1971 built area = 163 km²

The city’s footprint has grown in concert with pulses in the regional oil and gas resource industry; the first major suburban growth-spurt occurred with the 1970s oil boom (Foran, 1978).

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calgary development footprint

1981

1991

built area = 261 km²

built area = 316 km²

2001

2010

built area = 400 km²

built area = 2010 km²

Calgary has maintained a large land reserve for growth. In the last thirty years, this land reserve has expanded rapidly as the city’s population doubled. Growth has occurred in all directions, though the Tsuu T’ina Reserve in the southwest has formed a notable barrier.

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This newspaper advertisement, presenting new homes in Silver Springs, reveals the influence of the American bungalow style on the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s suburbs (The Calgary Herald, 1971).

While most of the neighbourhoodâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s houses had detached garages positioned along the lane, some integrate the garage into the massing of the house. | 90 |

Proposed Land Use Amendment. This map formed part of the application to City Council to accomodate the new Silver Springs subdivision. Note the alignment of both Sarcee Trail and the proposed Silver Springs Boulevard.

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Silver Springs Masterplan Diagram. This diagram shows the overall plan for Silver Springs. This map was published in the Calgary Herald with a notice of public hearing.

Public reaction to the â&#x20AC;&#x153;possibleâ&#x20AC;? roadway plan was fervent (see letters on facing page).

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Varsity Resident Letter. Several citizens living along 40th Avenue in Varsity wrote the City to indicate their opposition to the plan.

Bowness Community Association Letter.

Bowness residents opposed the plan due to the â&#x20AC;&#x153;possibleâ&#x20AC;? Sarcee flyover.

Rural Residents Letter. Existing residents in the area voiced concerns over inaccurate representation of existing properties.

Varsity Resident Letter. Citizens also questioned the legality of the council vote regarding the extension of 40th Avenue.

Old

Ban

ff C oac

hR

Can

ad

ian

oad

Study Area

Pac i

fic R

ailw ay

Silver Springs in 1950. Note the CPR tracks in the southwest corner of the image, and the precurssor to Crowchild Trail, then called “Old Banff Coach Road”, in the northeast.

Farm houses

Remnant wetland pond

Silver Springs in 1953. Space at the top of the escarpment was dedicated to agriculture; note the remnant wetland pond at the image’s centre and the line of homes at the top-centre. | 94 |

Town of Bowness

Silver Springs in 1959. Note the houses in the southwest corner. Bowness was a separate town connected to Calgary via streetcar. It is now a neighbourhood in the city.

Cro wch il

d Tr ail

Silver Springs 1963. Crowchild Trail (in the northeast) has been twinned; predating the Trans-Canada Highway, at this time it is the primary route to Banff and Vancouver. | 95 |

Water main

Silver Springs in 1972. Development begins. Of note here is the water main seen running east-west across the site and angling down across the base of the main coulee to the west.

Coulee infilled

Outfall excavation

Silver Springs in 1973. To the study areaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s south, you can see remnants of the stormwater outfall excavation. The coulee to the study areaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s east has been partially infilled. | 96 |

Varsity Estates

Silver Springs in 1974. Housing construction in the study area is nearly complete.

Construction starts in the west phase and through Varsity Estates golf course to the east.

Utilities and pathway construction

Silver Springs in 1975. Residential buildout is complete. Construction of a recreational pathway atop a utility right-of-way is evident along the path of the major coulee to the west. | 97 |

School Commercial and multi-family Community Centre

Silver Springs in 1976. Construction of multi-family and commercial buildings (including the school) is well underway.

Intersection at Crowchild Trail

Regional pathway

to city core

Silver Springs in 1978. The pathway system can be seen winding along the escarpment to the north of the Bow River. A larger intersection has been constructed at Crowchild Trail. | 98 |

Silver Springs in 1980. The neighbourhood has reached full build-out.

New cloverleaf and LRT extension

Silver Springs in 2011. The intersection at Crowchild Trail is expanded with a cloverleaf overpass to accomodate the C-Train, which was expanded along this route in 2009. | 99 |

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proposed Sarcee trail extension

study area

proposed 40th avenue connection

proposed interchange

16th Avenue Bridge

Regional road system indicating existing river crossings, proposed Sarcee Trail alignment, and proposed 40th Avenue-Sarcee Trail interchange.

Stoney Trail Bridge

00 310 00

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1300

410

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00

00

570

10000

120 100

00

0

| 101 | 0

5000

00

1900 150

780

00

00 240

280

00

420

00

380

390

00

140

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17000

11000

00

170

0

00

73

14000

11000

440

00

00

430

22000 19000

0

35000

210 180 00

Traffic Volume. Totals indicated here are for an average 24-hour business day. The study area is separated from the rest of Silver Springs by the neighbourhoodâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s major access point, and almost all traffic from the area is directed north to Crowchild Trail.

24000

00

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330

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0 00

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24000

0 00 10 80

11000

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00

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Drive-shed. This map shows drive times to other points in the area; Silver Springs and the study area in particular hang off of Crowchild Trail and rely on this artery for almost all vehicle trips.

Study Area

Cro wch il d Tr ail

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Riv er

Viewshed. The dark portions of this map indicate the areas visible from the study area according to topography. The main views are to the south overlooking the river and Bowness.

Bowness

Bow

Study Area

figure-ground

The study area presents a very homogenous coverage of single-family homes and garages.

The only exception is at the northwest extent, which contains a small number of semidetached homes and one townhouse complex.

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topography - 1m contours

1m contour 0.2m contour road reference

The study area generally slopes toward the southeast. The escarpment seen in the southwest corner presents a steep drop-off.

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roads + lanes

paved roads paved lanes gravel lanes

The influence of both â&#x20AC;&#x153;neighbourhood unitâ&#x20AC;? and curvilinear design styles is evident in the street layout. Every block is divided by a laneway, but only some of these are paved.

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block pattern

block extents

The blocks are a standard depth, and form a radial pattern from a node toward the northeast corner.

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tree cover + green space

tree cover green space

Most streets are lined with trees in private yards. The principal exception is along the southern escarpment, which is likely the result of the tremendous view to the southwest.

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parcel fabric

parcels road reference

The parcel fabric follows a very regular pattern, with most lots residential falling close to the median lots size.

| 109 |

public space network

public space private space

The public space map highlights a narrow walkway running norteast-southwest through the study area, alongside a small centrally-located park. When the lanes are given the same graphic weighting as the streets, the fabric appears to be relatively fine. Long blocks still exist in most of the study area. | 110 |

municipal water supply lines

water supply road reference

The municipal water system lifts water up to the top of the escarpment to the west of the study area. The large mains can be seen running east-west at the north end of the study area.

| 111 |

375 m

375 mm

m

storm-water culverts

750 mm 200 mm

375 m

375 m

m

m

1200 mm

450 m

m

525 mm

m

450 mm

375 mm

375 m

mm

1200 mm

525

600 mm stormwater pipes road reference

The storm-water system shows a hierarchical branching away from the main line seen running down the east side of the study area. This water is diverted directly into the river.

| 112 |

overhead power lines

poles powerlines road reference

Much of the neighbourhood is serviced by overhead power lines. The blocks along the escarpment are a notable exception.

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water flow - roads + lanes

public space private space

Flow direction of water, traced along the study areaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s roads and laneways.

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sewerage

manhole sewer main

The sanitary sewer system drains with gravity to a point near the southeast corner of the study area, where it is carried down and underneath the river, eventually ending up at a processing facility in the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s southeast.

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assets & opportunities

existing commercial

primary vehicle access

recreation fields

access to regional cycling path old highway right-of-way open space

small park

views

low point

public escarpment road edge

three-lot cluster

| 116 |

issues & constraints

little connection to recreation fields

poor link to cycling path

homogenous private parcel fabric throughout study area

escarpment edge presents fragile ecological condition

long blocks form barriers

| 117 |

Silver Springs House Portraits 1/6. Capturing the form and character of the study areaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s existing architecture.

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Silver Springs House Portraits 2/6.

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Silver Springs House Portraits 3/6.

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Silver Springs House Portraits 4/6.

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Silver Springs House Portraits 5/6.

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Silver Springs House Portraits 6/6.

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Chapter 2: The Study Area

| 124 |

3

Chapter Three: Three Lines, Ten Points

Chapter One presented a manner of reading suburban space and explored a set of opportunities and strategies for intervening in the suburban mythology.

Chapter Two introduced and analyzed small study area in suburban Calgary in which these ideas could be further explored. The purpose of Chapter Three is to present one strategy for re-weaving and re-programming the study area presented in Chapter Two. It begins with a real challenge: how could the study area be renovated to align it with the aspirations presented in the opening essay? This challenge is large, and quite open, so it is met here by an artifical constraint: how could this renovation occur while limiting intervention to existing public space and ten pairs of private lots?

The following chapter presents a range of design gestures that intervene in both infrastructure and public life, introducing three linear gestures and ten point gestures. The linear gestures, presented first, intervene in manners following the patterns set out in the existing public space network, and are concerned with re-weaving existing threads and flows. The point gestures, presented second, intervene in ten chosen pairs of lots. They are concerned with introducing new and visible infrastructural and public programming to the study area.

Following this chapter, the fourth and final section of the project brings one of the point gestures to a more detailed architectural resolution.

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line gestures

roadway laneway promenade

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Chapter 3: Three Lines, Ten Points

Three Lines The project proposes the revision of three types of linear spaces in the study area.

These are classified as roadway, laneway, and promenade. The goal in re-weaving these three lines is tied to a range of desired outcomes that cannot be affected solely through point-type interventions. More specifically, the linear renovations aim to alter flows of stormwater (with cascading effects on energy), as well as the hierarchy and character of the study area’s public space.

The project first proposes to entirely remove the study area’s reliance on its belowground stormwater management system. As discussed earlier, stormwater systems remove a valuable resource (fresh water) from where it is needed (to flush toilets, recharge ground-water, and irrigate green space), and transform it into a system that delivers pollutants, sediment, and excess energy downstream. In order to remove the study area’s reliance on stormwater pipes, it is necessary for all three lines (roadways, laneways, and promenades) to reduce their channeling effects and contribute to the landscape’s water-holding capacity. The goal is to make the study area more like a sponge, and less like the hood of a car.

To do this, the project re-configures the study area’s roadways and laneways, removing hard gutters and replacing them with semi-permeable swales. These swales contain highly permeable plastic structures filled with soil (that maintain structure while allowing water-flow, large stones, surface soil, and low vegetation.

These swales are then covered with metal grates. The swales can carry flows of stormwater to desired destinations (for storage and use) while allowing partial infiltration and preventing standing ponds. Collectively, the swales form a “network sponge”, balancing natural flows with desired human uses. In concert with underground storage cisterns, they have the capacity to manage all of the stormwater experienced by the study area.

This intervention has a cascading effect relating to the flow of energy. By removing the stormwater system from the water-management process, a significant opportunity emerges in the dormant water mains buried throughout the study area. The project proposes that these mains be re-activated as utility-corridors that contain a new district heating system (reducing the implementation cost of such a system by as much as 85%) and power lines (allowing the study area’s above-grade powerlines to be buried). This opportunity will be described in greater detail below.

| 127 |

The view looking south from the study area’s escarpment road.

The second revision relates to public space. The roadway that wraps the southern edge of the study area presents a rare opportunity in that it offers public access to the neighbourhood’s natural perimeter and pushes buildings away from the cusp of the escarpment (as noted earlier, this opportunity is the result of a discarded plan for an arterial route). The project proposes that the escarpment road be turned into a promenade shared by pedestrians and vehicles. The roadway currently has very low vehicle traffic, and already attracts cyclists and pedestrians to the informal dirt paths that run parallel to the road. Such a walkway would take advantage of the stunning escarpment views (one of the study area’s key assets), creating a unique and memorable public space that has the capacity to attract visitors and support novel programming (Giles-Corti et al., 2005). Walkability is often discussed in terms of functional catchments and supporting uses; in addition to such metrics it is important to remember the power in a beautiful space made simply for walking.

By narrowing this roadway into a more human-scaled shared space, further benefit is derived from the fact that hard surfaces are drawn further from the fragile escarpment edge.

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A typical roadway in the study area.

A typical laneway in the study area.

A view along the â&#x20AC;&#x153;promenadeâ&#x20AC;? road.

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Roadway

front lawns slope toward street, letting water slide off toward the gutter water runs across sidewalk, creating hazardous ice in the winter roadway drains into gutter lawns are irrigated

storm drains gather water and transmit it to Bow River

Existing roadway section. Water is treated like a problem on the street and a valuable resource on the lawns a few metres away.

roadway drains into swale

semi-permeable swale moves some water while allowing infiltration

stormwater system circumvented

Roadway Section Proposed yards collect storm water around vegetation, naturally irrigating plants and allowing infiltration

Proposed roadway section. A semi-permeable swale is used in place of the gutter/drainage system. Lawns and gardens are graded to collect and hold water in soil and vegetation. | 130 |

Study area roadways.

A small intervetion that makes a significant difference. | 131 |

Laneway runoff from back yards and building surfaces is directed to the laneway

lawns are irrigated laneways are concave, creating a channel along which water flows to the nearest street gutter

Existing laneway section. Water is purged into the centre of the lane, which delivers it to the problematic roadway system seen above.

water allowed to drain from yard into laneway water from building surfaces collected in individual cisterns for re-use

semi-permeable swale is dug into laneway centreline, holding and carrying water

Proposed laneway section. A semi-permeable swale is embedded into the lane to hold and transport water for re-use. Stormwater is collected by residents for local irrigation. | 132 |

Study area laneways.

The laneway becomes a more productive corridor. | 133 |

Promenade

the lack of a sidewalk along the escarpment side of the road leads to worn dirt trails ugly fencing prevents cars from driving onto the escarpment

street runoff pours into stormwater basins

Existing escarpment road section. There is no outboard sidewalk, so the many pedestrians that use this route have left a series of eroded dirt trails alonside the road.

street is resurfaced with permable material that allows infiltration and indicates a shared pedestrian/vehicle space

all surface development is pushed back from the fragile escarpment

lighting and small bollards prevent vehicles from driving onto the escarpment street runoff collected in promenade perimeter swale. Larger swales account for anticipated accumulation along this lower contour.

Proposed promenade section. A narrower, permeable, shared space replaces the road and pulls development back from the escarpment. | 134 |

The proposed route of the promenade.

The gesture is simple but the result offers a remarkable difference. | 135 |

water runs off lawns into gutter

street runoff

gathered into storm sewer

street runoff

landscape sponsors infiltration semi-permeable swale moves water for storage/use while allowing partial infiltration

ejected to river

current

water runs into landscaping

proposed

stormwater channels used as utility corridor for district heat & power

Current and proposed use of stormwater pipes. By handling stormwater through a variety of methods, the large pipes are freed for use as utility corridors for other infrastructures.

Ending Stormwater: The District Opportunity As the suburbs slowly densify and incorporate new programming and uses, district heating infrastructure becomes a more viable opportunity. District heating systems are an ancient and relatively low-tech infrastructure. In a typical district heat system, hot water is run through low pressure loops, and individual buildings â&#x20AC;&#x153;plug inâ&#x20AC;? and redirect some of this heat to their spaces (Persson & Werner, 2011).

The partially cooled water returns to a district plant, where it is reheated in highefficiency boilers and sent back out through the loop. In practice, district heating systems are an expensive retrofit. While the installation of insulated piping only costs ~$700 per metre, the additional expense of trenching a new buried utility through existing city space adds ~$4000 per metre (Enmax, 2013). Employing the utility corridor offerred by a retired stormwater system results in financial savings of up to 85%, and a tremendous increase in the feasibility of retrofitting district systems in settled urban spaces. In the study area, only three small stretches of new utility trench would be required to create a large looping system reaching every block. Small district heating plants have an effective range of ~6km, so the study area could potentially form a sub-loop off of a larger system. | 136 |

District Heat & Energy Loop

new buried utility adapted utility stormwater pipes road reference

| 137 |

Ten Pavilions The project chose ten sites in which to intervene at an architectural scale. The decision to constrain the intervention in this way serves to focus the project, makes the approach more feasible, and brings attention to the particular grain of the existing development. It is more than a reaction to the pattern of ownership; it presents a fuller opportunity to acknowledge and respond to the suburban rhythm of the study area.

In addition to their particular program, all ten “pavilions” offer two common performances: pedestrian connectivity and water storage. This functionality drove the standard site pattern: a pair of backing lots. This site pattern serves to puncture long blocks and offers laneway space for accessible below-grade water storage.

The location of each of the pavilions was determined based on three drivers (in order of importance): (i) impact on the grain of the street and public connectivity, (ii) functional catchment of surface water flows (given the renovated roadways, laneways, and promenade), and (iii) specific programmatic drivers (discussed in more detail for each pavilion in the following section. Chapter Two identified that the study area’s edges held tremendous opportunity, so in many cases the pavilions have been located and programmed to activate these large linear conditions.

Ten programs are proposed in the present project, selected based on their potential contribution to the study area’s infrastructure and public life. They do not purport to be a comprehensive list of possible suburban programs or indeed a complete set for the given study area. They are illustrative and experimental, rather than prescriptive.

The ten pavilions, explored in further detail in the following pages, are: (i) employment, (ii) carbon, (iii) recreation, (iv) arts, (v) community, (vi) information, (vii) heat & power, (viii) food, (ix) sanitation, and (x) education.

Their specific agendas vary, but in general they seek to decentralize institutions, create spaces for social gathering, and districtize, localize, and integrate urban infrastructure. As a system, they aim to create the opportunity (basic function), setting (backdrop for social performance), and excuse (normative openings) for the expresion of a public life.

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sport fields require anchor and gateway

all viable sites for extending existing streets and breaking down long blocks are identified potential for cultivation of undeveloped edge

promenade edge needs to be anchored

employment pavilion (requires good road access) carbon pavilion (requires visibility and exposure to predominant winds) recreation pavilion (requires proximity to other recreation facilities and loading access) cultural pavilions (require walkable access and legibility as core neighbourhood features) heat & power pavilion (requires access to main trunk of old stormwater system) agricultural pavilion (requires proximity to open space for cultivation) sanitation pavilion (requires access to low-point of existing subsurface infrastructure, and agricultural pavilion) education pavilion (requires visibility and legibility as a major public node)

Fig 1 Tium fugiam. velenis etur repti aut optate a si alignis dis volorit hicae porepelest et etur asit qui audio. | 139 |

| 140 |

| 141 |

prevailing winds

pathway access

de

na

me

pro

carbon filter

employment centre

commercial access

sports fields

views

oulevard

vehicle entrance

cultural b

promenade anchor

sewer intercept

heat & power loop access agriculture anchor

recreation anchor

cultivated ROW

| 142 |

site selection

3

1 4

7

5

2

8 6

1. employment 2. carbon 3. recreation 4. arts 5. community 6. information 7. heat & power 8. food 9. sanitation 10. education

9

10

| 143 |

proposed block permeability

The presence of the pavilions has a tremendous effect of the grain of the study areaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s blocks.

| 144 |

surface water catchment areas

1 3

4

7 2

8 5

6

1. employment 2. carbon 3. recreation 4. arts 5. community 6. information 7. heat & power 8. food 9. sanitation 10. education x. no pavilion (irrigation source)

9 10 x

Water catchment areas. Overflow water flows into the next catchment area. The last of these catchment areas (labelled x in the diagram) is a large overflow cistern used for irrigation of the cultivated space to the east. In an extreme flood situation, this cistern can direct water down the coulee to the river. | 145 |

Pavilion functional relationships and activation of site edges.

| 146 |

Employment

Carbon

Recreation

Making

Community

Information

Heat & Power

Food

Sanitation

Education

| 147 |

Chapter 3: Three Lines, Ten Points

Employment Pavilion Program The employment pavilion provides space for two small retail frontages, a rentable industrial kitchen, mid-scale storage, and a flexible co-work office space with shared resources for small businesses owners, consultants, and freelancers.

Description There is increasing demand for employment — and innovative employment space — closer to the places that people live (Cervero, 1995). Calgary’s Central Business District neighbourhood is a tremendous employment sink, containing jobs for 157% of its residents. Within the current boundaries of Silver Springs there exists employment for only 3.2% of the residents (City of Calgary, 2006). The rapid of growth of network technologies, including video conferencing and cloud computing, further bolsters the opportunity to distribute employment space in an extensive manner throughout the city (Office Space Market Review, 2011).

The employment pavilion focuses specifically on creating flexible spaces that can house small and burgeoning enterprises — representing the more antifragile and entrepreneurial side of the economy. The emergence and growth of the co-work model (see van der Linden, 2013), in which solo consultants and small start-ups share office space, resources, and (perhaps most importantly) a sense of community, offers a tremendous opportunity to deploy such space in the suburbs. In addition to more traditional office program, the presence of small retail and industrial kitchen space in the pavilion broadens the profile of potential enterprises that may find a productive foothold.

The pavilion is located at the confluence of the study area’s access roads and the regional pathway system, offering exposure and bringing legibility to the intersection of these two systems. It is also nearest to the commercial centre north of the study area. The massing concept connects two boxes with twisted secondlevel bar that bridges over the laneway. This allows for a large uninterrupted office space that maintains a low overall profile and presents a less massive elevation to the street. The two boxes house vertical circulation, storage, retail, and the industrial kitchen.

| 148 |

existing commercial quick access to rest of transporation network high visibility along cycling route

Schematic map.

retail co-work office

storage

industrial kitchen

Schematic Massing. | 149 |

Chapter 3: Three Lines, Ten Points

Carbon Pavilion Program The carbon pavilion functions as a large air filter. Air is drawn through an acidic solution that dissolves the carbon out of carbon dioxide. The carbon is then gathered from the acid as salt, and can either be sequestered or used in the production of synthetic hydrocarbons.

Description There is now little debate that levels of human-created atmospheric carbon have had negative effects on the well-being of the planet (Keith, 2009). And while there are a range of techniques for reversing this trend, the extent of the imbalance is now such that technical intervention is required. Natural techniques for carbon capture, such as tree-planting (Nowak & Crane, 2002), require 1000x more land than an equivalent technical carbon-capture facility (Carbon Engineering, 2013).

Present discussion around the issue of carbon capture is focused on large systems that intervene at the point of emission. However, such solutions are less feasible for vehicles, which are too small, mobile, and numerous to make such sourcebased interventions realistic (Keith, 2009). As an alternative, the system deployed by the carbon pavilion re-captures carbon post-emission.

The carbon pavilion is scaled to capture the equivalent of all of the carbon emissions generated by vehicle trips by residents in the study area. While centralizing such a facility would gain engineering and economic efficiency, there is also tremendous value in building a localized solution. By making an otherwise diffuse and vast issue more visible and local, the pavilion serves to educate residents and increase their sense of ownership of both the problem and the response. The carbon cycle is invited as a participant in the neighbourhood, and the pavilion serves as both a functional and symbolic accounting of the areaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s outputs.

The pavilion is located on the west-facing escarpment road, a location that is both visible and exposed to the wind. The massing concept is comprised of two processing bases containing tanks and a small monitoring office, and three large filter faces. The faces crane westward to capture the predominant wind.

| 150 |

prevailing wind direction

forms education moment along promenade promenade anchor

Schematic map.

processing unit monitoring office air intakes

Schematic massing. | 151 |

Chapter 3: Three Lines, Ten Points

Recreation Pavilion Program The recreation pavilion provides change rooms, administration space, and equipment storage for the sport fields located at the north edge of the study area.

Description Regular physical activity is linked to increased physical and mental well-being, longevity, improved mood, and a reduced healthcare burden on society (GilesCorti et al., 2005). Calgary’s suburbs are host to a great quantity of open spaces and sport fields, but few have supporting uses like change rooms, drinking fountains, or equipment storage (City of Calgary, 2006). Without such amenities, these spaces become dependent on the support of private spaces around them (cars become change rooms and people buy gum to use the washroom at the corner store). This ultimately limits the potential range of possible functions that recreation spaces can to contribute to the daily life of the neighbourhood (Francis, 2003).

In addition to their general lack of supporting uses, Calgary’s recreation spaces rarely exhibit a legible connection to the fabric of the neighbourhood. Chain link fences with infrequent breaks and roads with infrequent crossings often define their edges, and efforts to stem cross-cutting pedestrians end up choking any continuity (or indeed the wonderful sense of “openness” that open spaces ought to contribute). There is, then, a great opportunity to re-address the relationship between the neighbourhood street and recreational open space.

The recreation pavilion is located at the north edge of the study area, next to a park that contains two baseball diamonds, three soccer fields, and an unprogrammed field. It sits at an intersection of two laneways, establishing a broad and legible gateway between the street and the park. The pavilion’s massing is divided into two buildings: one containing change rooms with washrooms, and the other creating a lane-accessible storage building with a small administration space. The two buildings sit on opposing edges of the adjoining lots, framing a pedestrian thoroughfare that integrates the lane.

| 152 |

direct access to sports fields public laneway edge provides accessibility and visibility

Schematic map.

office storage change rooms

washrooms

Schematic massing. | 153 |

Chapter 3: Three Lines, Ten Points

Makers Pavilion Program The makers pavilion provides two facilities: a shared making space that includes a community workshop and rentable studio spaces, and a small art gallery.

Description There is both great demand and great capacity for creativity in the suburbs.

Researchers and workplace leaders are both increasingly pointing toward the importance of creativity and craft across all professions (Capra, 2004). In Calgary, many suburban garages presently double as workshops, but they are limited by the capacity and quality of private tool collections, small spaces, and, often, the need to use the garage to store cars. Shared workshops offer a range of benefits that do more than overcome these limitations. They provide access to safe project space, a broader selection of quality tools, large or expensive equipment that would rarely make its way into a private collection (CNC mills, for example), and access to a community based in common interest. The recent growth of maker-spaces in cities across North America provides further indication of a renewed interest in the practice of craft and creating as an amateur pursuit (see also “hackerspace” for references to this trend).

When it comes to the display of creative work, Calgary is lacking in gallery space (Calgary Arts Development, 2007). Past attempts to establish a large contemporary art gallery in the city have, for a range of reasons, never taken hold. But what if the pursuit of a large, centrally-located gallery was the wrong solution for such an extensive city? Research has indicated that it is important for people, and especially children, to be exposed to art where they live (Goleman et al, 1992). This notion implies that the opportunity to access art should not be relegated to a centralized “cultural district” or major institution, but embedded throughout the fabric of the city. And in Calgary, this could mean exploding the large contemporary art gallery into a network of small, neighbourhood galleries.

The makers pavilion is located at the north end of a cluster of three culture-related pavilions. The making space is a simple massing with easy loading access that addresses the smaller gallery across the laneway. The gallery is centred in its lot to give it an object-like presence, and lifted slightly so as to suggest the compelling nature of its contents. | 154 |

making pavilion anchors north end of central pedestrian district

Schematic map.

workshop & studio

gallery

Schematic massing. | 155 |

Chapter 3: Three Lines, Ten Points

Community Pavilion Program The community pavilion provides a flexible-use building fronted by a public plaza.

The building contains space for community meetings, community association business, recreational programming, and other spaces that could be be used for a range of public gathering needs.

Description Most suburbs offer few places for public gathering. The suburban mythology has been primarily concerned with the private sphere and private expression, diminishing the importance and relevance of any kind of social node. Indeed, many new suburbs in Calgary are built without a physical community centre.

Silver Springs has a community centre that is relatively central, but only 40% of the neighbourhood would be considered within walking distance.

Community centres can serve as much more than the home base of a Community Association. They can become local nodes of activity and expression that provide a setting for everything from protests to polling stations, political forums, immunization clinics, emergency gathering stations, dance classes, and preschools. Ultimately, they can provide a key backdrop to the kinds of every-day, informal conversations that build collective decision-making capacity and bring antifragility to the social fabric of a neighbourhood.

The community pavilion is located centrally within the study area, at the core of the three pavilions that form a cultural boulevard. This allows it to form an anchor to these other community-oriented uses while also being geometrically accessible to all of the study areaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s residents.

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community space located centrally within neighbourhood district

Schematic map.

multipurpose centre

plaza

Schematic massing. | 157 |

Chapter 3: Three Lines, Ten Points

Information Pavilion Program The information pavilion contains two buildings: a theatre and a small library. The theatre contains a simple performance space with seating and a lobby area. The library contains a remote material pickup and a small reading room.

Description A simple performance space forms the first part of the information pavilion.

Performance space is currently scarce in Calgary, especially small-to-medium scale venues (Calgary Arts Devleopment, 2007). This space could be used for events including the performance arts, academic lectures and presentations, amateur recitals, story-telling festivals, community film screenings, or political debate. Having such a facility embedded in the fabric of the neighbourhood allows the study area to “host” the kinds of small-scale public conversations that build community and give residents the excuse to practice public life.

The library program in the information pavilion is a reaction to the shifting role of libraries in cities. The Internet has irreversibly changed the way that people generate, organize, and access information. And while the “social” extensions of the internet have risen to define its presence in popular culture, web use can still be characterized by loneliness (Amichai-Hanburger, 2003). At the same time, the internet is becoming increasingly indispensible for daily practice, making public access a legislated necessity (Cerf, 2012). In this context, the role of the municipal library has found new contributions to the city alongside its traditional role as a respository of published material. Given the new dispersed nature of information, there is an opportunity to decentralize the library system and make its benefits accessible throughout the fabric of the city; take the notion of the “branch” one step further and build library “twigs”.

The information pavilion is located at the south end of the cultural boulevard at the centre of the study. The massing concept frames a curving walkway between two masses. The theatre is a bold mass with a strong indent that creates a welcoming forecourt; the smaller library is brought to a pinch-point that separates the loading and material pick-up from the reading room.

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information pavilion anchors south end of central pedestrian district

Schematic map.

library

theatre

Schematic massing. | 159 |

Chapter 3: Three Lines, Ten Points

Heat & Power Pavilion Program The heat and power pavilion is a light industrial plant that uses high-efficiency generators to convert natural gas to electricity for local use. Excess heat from the generation process is used in concert with boilers to warm water for a district heating system.

Description The residents of Silver Springs live very far from the infrastructures that produce and deliver their electricity. In Alberta, 45% of electricity is generated from coal, 45% from natural gas, and the remaining 10% comes from wind turbines, provincial transfers, and other sources (Statistics Canada, 2006). Most of the electricity consumed in Silver Springs is generated in large power plants in the provinceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s north and carried over long distances through high-transmission power lines (Government of Alberta, 2013). This is a large, robust system, but the technical inefficiencies and high costs of long-distance transfers are pushing providers toward more local production (Enmax Power, 2013). Moving the production of electricity closer to where it is consumed also has the effect of reducing alienation among users, who are otherwise conceptually disconnected from the infrastructures that subsidize their daily activities. Over the next century, necessity and cost will drive electrical production toward solar and wind sources, but the gap between present systems and future needs will require solutions that can bridge the transition in both function and narrative.

Heating for buildings in Silver Springs currently faces a different (and nearly opposite) challenge. Each house is heated by its own furnace, which is expensive and energy-inefficient. Centralizing heating to a district level (in which larger, high-efficiency furnaces create heat for a collection of buildings) typically leads to a 60% energy savings (Chen et al., 2013).

The heat and power pavilion combines local electricity production with district heat. It is located in the northeast corner of the study area, at a point in which it can directly access the re-purposed stormwater channels. The massing concept includes a large sloped solar roof that conceals the boiler stacks and includes space for the regulation, transfer, and exchange equipment used in such a facility.

| 160 |

local power & heat production sits along district loop system located in re-purposed storm-water system

Schematic map.

turbine & boiler room

input/output connection

Schematic massing. | 161 |

Chapter 3: Three Lines, Ten Points

Food Pavilion Program The food pavilion offers a support node for agricultural uses in the unused rightof-way to the east of the study area. It contains a green-house for seed-starting and year-round production, a storage space, and an industrial-grade compost processor that turns local waste into productive nutrients for local use.

Description Local food production contributes to health, security, economy, and well-being (The Calgary Food Committee, 2012). It can also help reduce the sense of alienation that can be caused by the modern industrial food system.

The study area has access to a substantive area (~30 acres) that it can dedicate to food production. Pre-development air photos show that this particular parcel of land was cultivated before it was subdivided as part of the city. Like much of the land within the municipal limits of Calgaryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s northwest, it is productive agricultural space.

The food pavilion seeks to activate this right-of-way and create a space in which the community can directly interact with their food system. The pavilion includes two buildings: a large greenhouse and an industrial composting tunnel. These two programs intervene in different moments in the cycle of biological nutrients. The greenhouse draws nutrients together and re-composes them into new forms, and the compost tunnel breaks down nutrients such that they can be re-assembled.

The massing concept produces a south-oriented greenhouse with a large glass wall, and a semi-submerged tunnel that literally takes waste products from the neighbourhood and delivers them to the cultivated space across the street.

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food pavilion acts as anchor for new agricultural uses in old highway right-of-way

Schematic map.

greenhouse

storage composting tunnel

Schematic massing. | 163 |

Chapter 3: Three Lines, Ten Points

Sanitation Pavilion Program The sanitation pavilion intercepts and processes sewage sourced in the study area, creating safe, inexpensive irrigation for the agricultural space to the east.

Description There is a great deal of mis-understanding and fear associated with human waste and the potential for it to play a productive role in local infrastructure loops (Dupont, 2013). This fear likely stems from a mix of intuitive distaste and decades of sewage infrastructure that have made the processes of sanitation nearly invisible to the average citizen.

The sanitation pavilion seeks to interrupt the existing santiary sewer system, allowing the study area to take ownership over the process and gather its benefits.

Modern regional processing facilities are capable of handling local sewage loads in a manner that does not rely on damaging chemicals and omits no disruptive odour to the surrounding area (gas from the processes of sewage decomposition are released underground). Such processes can produce functional grey-water and require mininal off-loading of the remnants of solid waste processing. The pavilionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s proximity to the proposed agricultural space east of the study area simplifies the potential for processed grey-water to supplement the irrigation system.

The pavilion is located at the southeastern section of the study area, near the lowpoint of the system (sanitation infrastructure in Calgary is gravity driven). In this way it is able to intercept the sewage produced in the study area (and beyond) while easily re-routing excess into the conventional downstream system. The massing concept is driven by the dimensions of the processing equipment, which needs to be submerged and insulated to prevent freezing. The system is centered in the lots to make it easily servicable and to offer an outward appearance of little more than broad planter boxes sited in a walkway.

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resulting grey-water used for irrigation of agricultural space sanitation pavilion intercepts and treats local sewage Schematic map.

office hookup

processing tunnel

Schematic massing. | 165 |

Chapter 3: Three Lines, Ten Points

Education Pavilion Program The education pavilion provides a small campus for local or long-distance institutions. The program includes a public cafe/restaurant, studios, open workspaces, a lecture hall, and an accessible rooftop outdoor park.

Description Post-secondary institutions can offer significant contribution to the public life of a city, offering spaces that provide security, interest, and activity. Presently in Calgary, universities and colleges tend to form isolated islands — the public spaces and networks of the campus are segregated from the public spaces and networks of the surrounding city. Although such separations can enhance the internally-focused collegial qualities of a campus, they fail to take advantage of the tremendous productive overlaps that can occur between the campus and its city (for example, strengthening both campus and city businesses by making them more accessible to the general public and students (Steinacker, 2005)). At the same time, advances in communications technology are eroding the significance of the campus as a discrete territory; courses and now entire degrees are offerred via “distance” or “correspondence” models (Bates, 1996).

The education pavilion is not intended to house a specific institution, but rather provides spaces that could host a range of educational activities. If such a strategy were deployed throughout large regions of the suburbs, it could lead to a number of different patterns. In one possible future, a university might locate its varying faculties in distinct neighbourhoods: Engineering in Tuscany, Fine Arts in Edgemont, Social Work in Silver Springs. This extensive university would truly be embedded in community, allowing it to further shed the sense of isolationism that is reinforced by distinct, closed campuses. Such an arrangement would also benefit suburban neighbourhoods, bringing daytime activity (and security), a sense of identity, and the capacity needed to support other neighbourhood amenities (like cafes and shops). The pavilion is located on a cluster of three lots located to the south of the study area, offerring a landmark and anchor for the promenade. The massing concept provides a ramping public roof that provides a public “quad” with tremendous views through the Bow River valley to the Rocky Mountains.

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university pavilion anchors promenade, providing public space and views out over the escarpment

Schematic map.

rooftop quad

lecture hall and classrooms

shared public amenities

Schematic massing. | 167 |

An over-head view showing all ten pavilions.

Looking southwest over the study area. | 168 |

A view from the sanitation pavilion north to the heat & energy pavilion.

Looking northwest over the study area. | 169 |

Chapter 3: Three Lines, Ten Points

| 170 |

4

Chapter Four: A Theatre and Library

The following chapter zooms in on the information pavilion introduced in Chapter Three. This section of the project examines the architectural implications and potentials embedded in both the suburban pavilion as a type, and the information pavilion as a specific program.

Engaging the New Linear Infrastructures The information pavilion’s site-planning is directed primarily by its participation in the new linear infrastructures proposed at the beginning of Chapter Three.

Starting with the notion of a water cistern buried under the lane, the site captures water flowing through the laneway and roadway swales. The movement of surface water across the lots creates the first site elements: green strands that will manage on-site water flow, drive the composition and profile of the site’s vegetation, and create livable conditions for the site’s public spaces.

Water gathered in the site’s cistern can be used for several purposes. First, it offers a source of grey-water, providing flushing water for toilets and any required irrigation. Second, the cistern’s mass of insulated water provides a regulating heat source/sink for the pavilion’s environmental systems, acting as a battery into which heat is dumped when the buildings are warm and from which heat is gathered when the buildings are cold. Such a system can work in conjunction with the district heating network by reducing problematic peak loads.

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Chapter 4: Theatre & Library

Program and Connectivity The program of the two buildings is simple and flexible. The theatre contains a simple performance space with a connected lobby, washrooms, and a forecourt.

Such simplicity opens the architecture to a range of unanticipated uses and interpretations — a more antifragile approach to laying out a space. The library contains a forecourt, an open reading room, a washroom, and a material pickup area with a back-end delivery space. With a secure, remote material pick-up system, the role of the library could expand to include all manner of media and parcel deliveries. With more and more content shifted into the digital realm, there exists a new potential to celebrate the special role of necessarily material objects.

These two programs are laid onto the site in the context of the previously introduced green strands and a pedestrian thoroughfare, producing a diagram of connectivity and flow across the two lots.

Neighbours In order to achieve functional widths within the buildings while maintaining openness in the outdoor spaces, the massing of the pavilion is pushed beyond a typical suburban setback to within 0.5 metres of the side property lines and within 1.5 metres of the front and rear property lines. This gesture has several implications. First, it endows the pavilion with a more aggressive presence on the street, giving it greater capacity to influence the long-term evolution of the study area’s built fabric. Second, it impacts the neighbourhood’s figure ground; as discussed in the opening chapter, there is a thin line between working with the suburbs and simply overwriting them with a different kind of urbanism.

Third, it impacts the permeability (visually and physically) of the walls facing the neighbouring lots — in order to protect privacy and prevent over-lighting of these spaces, the pavilions turn a solid face to the outer edges of their lots.

Materiality The pavilion exhibits a simple material palette. The complex geometry drawn in plan is offset by planar elevations that allow simple, ruled cladding systems to deploy across the building’s geometry. Vertical siding panels fabricated from a locally-produced magnesium oxide composite are hardy, require no special finish, and are easily replaced. In areas where there is need for transparency, gel-

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The information pavilion is located at the south extent of three pavilions that create a â&#x20AC;&#x153;cultural boulevardâ&#x20AC;? that forms the core of the study area.

insulated channel glass provides a high-performance envelope that continues the visual rhythm of the cladding. As this is a community building that will weather and will require straight-forward maintenance, the glass channels are also easily replaceable.

The roofs of the buildings avoid maintenance-heavy green systems, instead opting to deliver runoff into the siteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s green swales (and ultimately its cistern).

Small Gestures At the finest scale, a series of small gestures bring another level of innovation to the archtiecture. The library contains a small free public book exchange in the reading room, allowing anyone to take and leave books without any need for a formal tracking system. The material pickup area does away with complicated systems; a simple swipe of your library card automatically opens whatever compartment contains your delivered materials. In the theatre, the space under the north exiting stairs serves as a back-stage when necessary, and a mezzanine-like section to the west provides an open and accessible viewing area.

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Teaser trailer.

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Street

pavillion side 1

Lot Boundary

Lot Boundary

Swale

Swale

pavillion side 2

Lot Boundary

Lot Boundary

Laneway

Swale Street Typical pavilion site conditions. All but one pavilion (education) are confronted with the basic elements and relationships indicated here.

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Street Swale Connect to new district heat/energy loop

Draw storm water through site

Collect laneway runoff Collect rain-water in cistern under lane-way

Swale Laneway

Swale Street Linking to the new linear infrastructure.

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Street Swale Use cistern as heat source/sink

Use for toilets and irrigation

Cistern as grey water + heat source/sink

Swale Laneway

Draw from cistern for both pavillions

Swale Street Establishing functional loops within the site.

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Library forecourt WC reading room book share pickup

stocking delivery

stage

seating WC forecourt

lobby

Theatre

Functional relationships.

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pedestrian connection

Street Swale reading room book share

stock

WC

pick up

uti li

ty

storm water

forecourt

exchange delivery

water collection

Swale potential crossing

Laneway

exchange

storm water

utility

stage

seating

WC

forecourt

lobby

Swale

pedestrian connection Plugging programmatic networks into the infrastructure loops of the site.

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Street

Lot Extents - 1:500 N

The site.

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street face

reading room forecourt

le swa

lane face

stocking

pickup

WC

delivery cistern

lane face

stage

swale

seating

WC street fa

ce

forecourt lobby

Program Mapping - 1:500 N

Diagram delineating program and site elements.

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Site Plan - 1:500 N

Pavilion roof plan.

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First Level Plan - 1:500 N

Pavilion plan.

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D

E

F E

seating

stage

ing are a

F

accessib

le view

seating

G

forecourt WC

G

lobby swale

WC

N

D

Theatre plan.

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Looking northwest over the theatre.

The seating area inside the theatre. | 185 |

lobby

mezzanine

utility & storage

stage

utility connection

Section D - 1:300

Theatre, long section.

walkway

projection space

lobby

mezzanine

entrance

storage

utility

Section G - 1:300

Theatre, short section 1. | 186 |

walkway

projection

mezzanine

theatre space

utility corridor

Section F - 1:300

Theatre, short section 2.

roof drain

north exit

walkway

backstage

Section E - 1:300

Theatre, short section 3. | 187 |

Theatre, east elevation.

Theatre, west elevation. | 188 |

Theatre, south elevation (street-facing).

Theatre, north elevation (lane-facing). | 189 |

A

reading room

B

book share shelves

seating

B

WC

C

pickup loading area

C

loading dock

N A

Library plan.

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Looking southeast over the library.

A interior view toward the reading room. | 191 |

reading room

wc

delivery area

utility connection

Section A - 1:300

Library, long section.

| 192 |

loading

walkway

pickup

delivery

utility

Section C - 1:300

LIbrary, short section 1.

seating

plaza

Section B - 1:300

Library, short section 2. | 193 |

corridor

Library, east elevation.

Library, west elevation. | 194 |

Library, north elevation (street facing).

Library, south elevation (lane-facing) | 195 |

Looking north along the library walkway.

Theatre cladding detail. | 196 |

The west side of the theatre.

Looking south west over the information pavilion. | 197 |

Chapter 4: Theatre & Library

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C

Conclusion

This project began by arguing for three ideas: first, cities must shift their engagement with disturbance by moving away from systems that stifle unpredictability and toward systems that embrace stress and change; second, there is tremendous potential for change embedded within the mythological and material worlds of suburban space, particularly in the realms of infrastructure and public life; and third, architecture can productively renovate suburban space in ways that shift the city’s relationship to disturbance, while building within – and not over – the existing suburban world. In the second part of the project, these ideas were tested by applying them to a study area in the suburbs of Calgary. The project’s final section presents one resolution: what architectural forms and infrastructural patterns emerge as most suitable, given the shaping forces of the project’s ideas and its real-world constraints?

Upon reflection, the resolutions found in the project’s final section serve to bolster some ideas, while raising further questions about others. These reflections broadly fall under the themes of: infrastructure, public space and program, and the extensive city.

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Infrastructure

There are a range of infrastructural gestures presented in the design, ranging from conventional to radical, from ‘centralized and complex’ to ‘dispersed and every-day’. In each scheme, whether the proposed change was decentralizing (in the case of the stormwater management) or decentralizing (in the case of district heating), the resulting system shifted in some way toward the ‘thirdorder’ presented in chapter one.

Water The proposed stormwater system removed entirely the city’s reliance on a below-grade network of stormwater channels, opting for on-site capture, infiltration, and over-land transmission of stormwater. Early on, the project identifies as third-order those systems that (i) connect human/natural ecologies and (ii) thrive in disturbance. The design achieves the first criteria by bringing the neighbourhood’s stormwater system into functional relationship with surficial ecology (allowing it to participate in the systems of soils, nutrients, vegetation, and wildlife) and connecting it to the neighbourhood’s social life (producing patterns for public space and delivering a range of human goods and services). The proposed design also presents a superior capacity to manage fluctuation and disturbance. Conventional stormwater networks are engineered to accomodate a certain maximum flow rate, beyond which point they fail and fill the ill-equipped landscapes around them with water (with ultimately damaging consequences). Even at their peak function, they pass over upstream systems (like natural soil drainage) and damage downstream systems (like riverbanks), weaking the ability of those systems to regulate in the face of a range of stresses. By integrating the stormwater into the daily life of the spaces in which it falls, major water events become not only a source of provision (filling cisterns, flushing channels) but also participants in ecological cycles, which serve regulating functions at scales ranging from the organism to the planet.

Energy The changes to the energy system proposed in the design alter the moment of energy translation in two ways, both of which move the pattern of the

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energy system toward the neighbourhood scale. In the production of electricity, the design proposes more decentralized, neighbourhood-based production; in the production of heat, the design proposes slightly more centralized production. These gestures serve multiple purposes: they each find an efficiency in their particular system (for electriciy, this means less transmission; for heat, this means more efficient equipment), and they both serve to bring the infrastructure to a scale that is more in line with the lived scale of the city. This shares an agenda with the water infrastructure discussed above, in that it aims to bring the function and the production of processes closer together in space, at a legible human scale. As discussed earlier in the project, at the most decentralized and localized scale, energy is â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;expendedâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; by local natural processes at the moment (in time and space) of insolation. The proposed scheme acknowledges that, in the context of current technologies, the presence of urban environments will require some degree of energy subsidization. Said another way, it is not presently feasible for the energy needs of city spaces to be met solely with exisiting technologies that convert local insolant energy into usable electricity. For this reason, the design still includes the importation of fuel into the study area. But how then do the proposed energy infrastructures aspire to the third-order?

Future trends in energy production, availability, and cost are by their nature unpredictable (the thriving market in energy futures is indeed driven by this uncertainty). At this point, Taleb would remind us that focusing on the unpredictable future tends to build robust (first-order) systems (2012). As an alternative, one should focus on the patterns and fragilities of the affected systems. The project achieves this by making its energy systems present in daily life, at a scale that is technologically practical and socially (politically) comprehensible. The creation of a public production node (in the energy pavilion) as well as a simple and efficient network of distribution (in the reclaimed stormwater utilidor) places the reactive qualities of the local energy system in the hands of local residents, who are now equipped both with a sense of ownership and the capacity to evolve their reality in response to impending global energy shifts. If future energy shifts were to occur at the

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scale of the district – rather than the nation – the entire system would evolve, fail, and grow in a third-order fashion. As Taleb states: it is better to fall one metre twenty times than twenty meters once (Taleb, 2012).

This section has discussed in some detail the manner in which both the water and energy systems proposed in the project’s design move the study area toward the third-order in its relationship to disturbance. The design intervened in more than those two infrastructures, but they tend to provide productive illustration, and set out patterns and gestures that resonate with the other interventions presented in the design. Captured broadly, these patterns include: (i) move production and consumption closer in space, (ii) close ‘open’ loops, (iii) make key moments in these loops visible and comprehensible at the neighbourhood scale, and (iv) recognize abundance in systems.

Public Space & Program

At the architectural scale, the proposed design produces spaces that create a range of new public potentials in the study area. Chapter One suggests that architecture has the capacity to create new opportunities, settings, and excuses to live a public life, and that it is important for more people to live richer public lives, closer to where they dwell. The project’s built spaces (and the spaces around them) all in some way contribute to these three dimensions of public experience and forward the agenda of local public life. Taken here, “public space” is understood more as “public world” – it is distracting to focus on “space” in the material sense that typically draws attention in the design disciplines. “What doors are locked, and who locks them?” is a valid question, but it risks obscuring the representational and lived experiences that contribute significantly to the construction of public space.

In the design scheme, the architecture enables all three of Chapter One’s public life “dimensions”: opportunity, setting, and excuse. First, the opportunity: specific spatial arrangements afford basic functional relationships (a performer is offerred an opportunity to perform by a theatre space that creates lines of sight and sound to many audience members). At the second level, the setting: backdrops and props that enrichen the experience and further enable public life (a flat field becomes a “setting” for soccer with goal posts,

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bleachers, lights, and a porta-potty). Finally, the excuse: the accumulation of environmental elements that weave public performances into the daily life of a city (a dance club is a good example of a particular environment that, in a cumulative sense, provides an “excuse” to engage in a particular mode of public behaviour). In some manner, all of the design’s pavilions engage the three dimensions, allowing someone to imagine – and ultimately engage – new modes of participation in the city that may not have been previously available, condusive, or acceptable.

This line of thinking naturally focuses attention on the particular architectural programs explored in the project. These range from entirely conventional (the theatre), to existing but reconceived (the heat & energy pavilion), to speculative and unconventional (the carbon-capture pavilion). By engaging this variety of expectation, the project is able to explore both new uses and the re-configuration of existing uses, preventing itself from delving too far into programmatic experimentation (which would undermine the scheme’s distribution of uses), or programmatic convention (which would undermine the scheme by relying entirely on familiar building blocks in building a new structure). It could be argued that the present project relies too heavily on the familiar, especially in the face of its own arguments for adaptibility and change. While there is likely a version of the project in which the program and architectural resolution is more open, this route bears the risk of designing “for nothing”. As precedent demonstrates, some of the most adaptable and antifragile architectures were not designed to be open, but were rather crafted for a specific purpose.

Density and the Extensive City

A final reflection remains, and it is directed toward the future of the extensive city. How might the schemes presented in this project find their way into other neighbourhoods? How might they be integrated into pieces of the city that have not yet been built? Should the study area be densified?

The present project did not focus on density as a technique, but rather as a condition of urban space. In light of this position, it did not specifically advocate for any change to the density of the study area (outside of Chapter

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Oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s discussion of figure/ground, which set out certain perceptual limits to intervention). The City of Calgary projects that Calgaryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s population will double to two-million residents by 2070 (2011a). Even if the entirety of this growth occurred evenly within the existing fabric of the city (with no outward growth), each neighbourhoodâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s density would need only to double.

Semi-detached infills and small laneway units throughout the study area could easily accommodate even this most severe change. Realistically, only half of the total population growth is projected to occur within the existing city limits, and much of this increase will occur in established nodes. While this does not erase the question entirely, it removes some momentum from the notion that the study area will undergo any significant densification pressure over the next fifty years. On a practical level, there will likely not be an externally-driven imperative to densify.

On a conceptual level, however, the present research fuels a much broader question: how might extensive urban space offer a productive model for future development? We can assume that in any particular area, given a set of human economies (i.e. transportation, communication, energy, information) and a particular set of ecological capacities (i.e. provision, regulation, filtration, habitat), that there is both a minimum viable density and a maximum viable density for human settlement. The minimum viable density is determined by things like the limits of distributive infrastructures, catchment populations, and landscape patterning. The maximum viable density is determined by limits of supporting ecologies: things like available fresh water, incident solar energy, and nutrients to grow food. Both of these extents are affected tremendously by technology: our ability to defy, displace, or extend these limits.

The present research begins to identify (in concert with its Urban Design sibling referenced in the prologue) that a series of broader trends and imperatives are lowering both the maximum and minimum viable density for urban spaces. On the bottom end, decentralizing technologies in domains including wireless communication, environmental technology, and transportation are slowly shifting economies and eroding the advantages of centralized systems.

On the top end, rising awareness of the capacities of local ecologies, and the desire to integrate these ecologies into the human infrastructures of the city,

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is imposing real constraints on development and moving thinking away from the notion of “dense city here, pristine nature there”. At both extents, the limits have been stretched by an unsustainable subsidy provided by fossil-fuels; the depletion of these subsidies will have a tremendous effect on the viability of a range of urban schemes (especially super-high and super-low density).

Presently, the shifts in these limits are minor enough that they do not create any acute imperatives for the existing city. However, they do suggest that the idea of a density “sweet spot” might be shifting toward more extensive urban patterns. And in light of this supposition, the suburbs of North America seem distinctly equipped to step into a new role in the city.

It is beyond the scope of the present project to explore this line of thinking to any degree of satisfying detail. It does, however, suggest that there exists a rich line of potential research in extensive development that could align the aspirations and qualities of urban ecology with the limit-based disciplines of planning and infrastructure engineering. And perhaps, as this research progresses, it will emerge that seven decades of suburban development will turn out to be a saving grace.

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References

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