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2013

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Urban Strategies

Detroit Dist urb a nc e a nd Recov ery · Rio de Janeiro Pl a nning for Big Sp or t s E v en t s · Medellín In t egr a l U rb a n Projec t s · Songzhuang Cre ative C lusters · Bucharest Urba n Periphery a nd Post-Soci a list Cit y · Copenhagen M a n aging Cloudbursts · Kiruna C h a llenges of moving a town · Lessons learned Suburbs of t he fu t ure · Essay SM ART CITIES AS DIGITALLY AUGMENTED SPACES · Peter Latz Speci a l Sec tion by Topos L a ndsc a pe Awa rd winner 2013

urban

strategies

table

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contents

Cover: Songzhuang Creative Clusters, Beijing Plan: Sasaki

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A multiple landscape system

J ane A mid o n

N eel StrØbÆk, Ch ristian N yerup N ielsen

forms the Songzhuang Creative

16 Cities, Disturbance and Recovery

72 Managing Cloudbursts in Copenhagen

Clusters, an urban development

Challenges for a landscape-driven development of Detroit

An opportunity to set new standards for city planning

Herbert D reiseitl

Team Transform ApS and SLA

on the edge of Beijing.

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C hris R eed

24 Detroit Future City

77 Blue-Green Infrastructure for Cities

Productive landscape and new urban ecologies

The story of a sustainable planning impact

S o lan ge C arval ho

N ash id N abian

26 Who Is the Real Winner?

80 Smart Cities as Digitally Augmented Spaces

Urban redevelopment for the 2014 Soccer World Cup and

A case study-driven inquiry into interactive spaces

the Rio 2016 Olympics

and shared urban places

Competitions for Danish suburbs show how they

could face the future. In Søndermarken in Jutland, a

Gabriel D uarte

“strip” should connect the village with the landscape.

32 Hermetic Artifacts

To p o s

Landscape Award 2 0 1 3

Big sports events and the engineering of certainty: a report from Rio de Janeiro.

86 Peter Latz honoured for his life’s work

U D O Weilach er 87 Driven by the Will to Rebuild – Inspired by the Ingenuity of the Renaissance

E va S c hwab, Glo ria A po nte

36 Small Scale – Big Impact?

Sasaki

Medellín’s Integral Urban Projects

MIT SENSEable City Lab

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D ennis P ieprz, M ic hael Grove PEter Lat z 44 Songzhuang Creative Clusters 89 Open Space in Times of Affluence

Small-sized interventions like pocket parks aim to improve the social and spatial development of Medellín.

For the Parque 20 de Julio traffic routing was changed to create a public open space.

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“Wikicity Rome” is an example for the real-time

Strategies for the urban fringe of Beijing

M i hai A lex andru, E llen Fet zer , Gabriel Pascariu

51 The Urban Periphery and the

Post-Socialist City A great chance for Bucharest’s regional development

visualization of data. It uses data from cellphones to

illustrate the city’s pulse during a big event.

Alex S. MacLean / Landslides Aerial Photography

Sam Keshavarz, Krister Lindstedt, Mikael Stenqvist

56 Kiruna – The Challenges of Moving a Town

110 Authors

Living with ore mining in Sweden

111 Credits/Imprint

S vend E rik Ro landsen, Kim D irckinck-Ho lmfeld

64 Lessons Learned – Suburbs of the Future Competitions for exemplary visions for Danish suburbs

After its de-industrialization and depopulation, Detroit could become an experiment Monika Nikolic

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Currents 6 Competitions, Projects, Personalities, Report

for landscape-driven urban recovery. Detroit Future City is a plan that initiates a number of

Eva Schwab

transformative strategies.

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The private garden of Peter Latz, who was hon­

oured with the Topos Landscape Award 2013, is a reminiscence to the garden of the Villa Ruspoli in Vignanello.

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currents

competitions

competitions

competitions

Transformation of a military site in Montpellier, France

Suzhou High-Speed Rail New City, China

The design for the redevelopment of the historic Flinders Street Station on the banks of Melbourne’s Yarra River by Hassel + Herzog & de Meuron will include different open spaces like a public plaza, an amphitheatre and a marketplace.

West 8

Flinders Street Station in Melbourne, Australia

The West 8 team will design the former site of the School of Infantry in ­Montpellier. The future core of the area is an open space called “The Crescent”, a 21st century version of classic French public space.

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Hassel and Herzog & de ­Meuron have won the design competition for the redevelopment of the historic Flinders Street Station in the city of Melbourne, Australia.

The station is the hub of Melbourne’s fixed rail network with connections to other transport modes. It sits on a 4.68-hectare site on the banks of Melbourne’s Yarra River, adjacent to the city’s Federation Square and important

arts and cultural institutions.

The suggested project transforms the site into a new civic precinct with a major public art gallery, a public plaza, an amphitheatre, marketplace, and a permanent home for arts and cultural festival organisations while retaining its heritage features and buildings. The competition attracted 117 entries. The winning proposal was selected from six shortlisted entries.

The German design team ­Valentien (Valentien + Valentien Landscape Architects and ­Urban Planners SRL and Molenaar. Architects and Urban Planners BDA/SRL) has won the competition for the design of Huanxiu Lake, Suzhou High-Speed Rail New City.

Suzhou High Speed Rail Park is situated north of Suzhou’s centre, within the Xiancheng district. The Rail City neighbourhood is being developed around the new station for the Peking – Shanghai – Hangzhou high-speed rail link and comprises Huanxiu Lake and High Speed Rail Park which mark the centre.

A modern and vibrant urban centre is being proposed for the 160-hectare site.

Commerce, trade, research and recreation areas will be developed around the transport hub of the new station and its forecourt designed as a “water square”. The Rail City site sits for the most part

two metres above the level of the lake. Various design solutions have been conceived to overcome the level change in different areas around the lake. North of the station ­architectural flights of steps and generously dimensioned terraces lead to the embankment. They serve as a “city balcony” which offers extensive views across the lake and the new urban neighbourhoods. The western shore is modelled with landscaped contours. Low hills crowned with viewpoints alternate with wooded valleys. The northern shore is lined with park terraces that merge into reed beds and urban wilderness. In the east an elevated promenade juts in and out two metres above the lake with cafes, restaurants and other public facilities. A motor­way bridge crosses Huanxiu Lake in the north; a curved footbridge leads across the water to the south.

Huanxiu Lake and the High Speed Rail Park mark the centre of the new ­Suzhou High-Speed Rail New City envisioned by the German design team ­Valentien. The shore of the lake features different solutions to overcome a ­level change of two metres. The forecourt of the station is designed as a “water square”. Flights of steps and terraces lead to the embankment.

Deutsche Planungsgruppe Valentien (2)

Hassel + Herzog & de Meuron (2)

West 8 from Rotterdam, in collaboration with Montpellier ­architects, Boyer-Percheron-Assus, and Merlin has won the ­urban design competition for the conversion of the former School of Infantry site (EAI) in the city of Montpellier. In 2010, the troops of the EAI retreated from their city base.

While this created considerable economic trauma for the city – over 1,000 jobs were lost – it also became a great opportunity to redesign 35 hectares of open space in an otherwise dense urban sector, located less than a mile from the historic centre of Montpellier.

The West 8 team envisions a sustainable neighbourhood with ­diverse architecture and an environmentally enhanced park.

The construction of about 3,000 homes will be phased gradually over the next 15 years. The core of the open space is The Crescent: a 21st century version of classic French public space, a promenade that facilitates diverse activities. The crescent includes The Prairie: a terraced ecological lung for the city that creates the illusion of the French “campagne”. This stepped ­basin landscape works as water retention infrastructure.

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currents

Detroit, once known worldwide as a car manufacturing center, has been de-industrialized and depopulated over the last ­few ­decades, leaving substantial vacant land and buildings. The city’s abundance of available land resources presents an opportunity to create a new green and sustainable city unlike any other in the world.

Jane Amidon

Cities, Disturbance and Recovery The U.S. city of Detroit could serve as the world’s biggest experiment in landscape-driven urban recovery. There are lessons to be learned about long-term, landscape-based, multi-scale, multi-pronged urban regeneration.

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Solange Carvalho

Urban Redevelopment for the Rio 2016 Olympics

When I was invited to write an article about public urban projects in preparation for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games in the city of Rio de Janeiro and the participation of the people, my first impulse was to decline; I would have very little time to gather up-todate information, which would be further complicated by the fact that there is hardly any publicity about the projects that are currently under construction. But wouldn’t this lack of publicity about these urban projects actually serve as a good indicator that the level of public parti­ cipation is minor or almost non-existent?

Then I realized that, now more than ever, this would be the opportune moment to publish an article on this topic. We just finished hosting the Confederations Cup and Brazil is experiencing a period of social unrest, with demonstrations flooding the streets. And the lack of public participation in decision-making procedures throughout the country is one the reasons for these demonstrations.

In Rio de Janeiro, we are witnessing a process of urban redevelopment devoid of any transparency in its projects and government spending, and lacking the appropriate channels for public participation. Furthermore, all this urban redevelopment has been affecting the cost of living of Rio de Janeiro’s residents. Driven by these massive investments, Rio de Janeiro is becoming an absurdly expensive city – in 2012 it was ranked as the 13th most expensive metropolis in the world – and the gentrification process is being felt throughout all social strata.

Who is the Real Winner?

Overpriced sports infrastructure

A big promise for the Olympic Games and the World Cup had been to upgrade the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.

But in the end, there are only a few that benefit from the investments. One of those is Rocinha, where a new metro station is under constrution.

Big events like Olympic Games suggest to push urban development. So does Rio de Janeiro. But the winner of the games are less the citizens, but more the investors. In the end, they dictate the planning.

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The emergence of widespread demonstrations coincided with an increase of public transportation fares – one of the factors that directly impact on the cost of living – and with the beginning of the Confederations Cup, an event that saw the (re-)construction of stadiums in the host cities at ­astronomical costs that have not been fully disclosed.

The renovation of the Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro was initially budgeted at US$ 450 million, but increased by 32 per cent, as proper project planning guidelines and public tender procedures were violated, resulting in overbilling and corruption. Furthermore, due to a lack of appropriate planning and the need to meet international deadlines, several months of renovations were carried out 24 hours a day, significantly increasing the total cost of the sports facility.

In fact, the Maracanã Stadium had already undergone two recent renovations: in 1999, to host the FIFA 2000 Club World Championship, and in 2005–2007, for the 2007 Pan-American Games. Even so, according to the Rio de Janeiro Popular Committee for the World Cup and Olympics, “The total amount of money spent on the Maracanã would have built two

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Sam Keshavarz, Krister Lindstedt, Mikael Stenqvist

Kiruna

The challenges of moving a town Mining subjects the town of Kiruna in Sweden to continuous transformation. The small town was founded a hundred years ago because of the the iron ore industry and now mining is the reason for its displacement to a new location.

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Kiruna is a mining town under unprecedented pressure for transformation.

It will have to be relocated. With the ongoing global demand for iron, the expansion of mining operations will most likely not stop within the current urban planning horizon of 2033. This offers unique challenges to all. Whatever the city aspires to, the uncertainties surrounding future mining and its effects on the land and landscape makes it clear that there will never be a completed or an ideal state for the town of Kiruna.

It is in the orchestration of transformation processes where we can find ways to create a highly livable town – although it will be a town in a constant

state of flux. It is in the hopes and needs of Kiruna’s inhabitants where we can find a vision and subsequently the key elements of the new masterplan.

Located in the very north of Sweden, the town of Kiruna was founded in 1900, because of its proximity to large deposits of iron ore. The urban plan was designed by architect Per-Olov Hallman to adapt to the harsh sub-arctic inland climate. As mining activity continues, following an iron deposit that runs under the town itself, the subsequent degradation of the land will affect the central areas of the town. Kiruna now needs to relocate in order to able to survive; mining drives its economy so there is no

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