Visions of the City edited by: Zhongjie
Lin
Published to highlight the Visions of the City Lectures given at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte College of Arts + Architecture January - March 2010. Editor: Zhongjie Lin Book Design and Copy Editing: Brandon Benzing Transcriptions: Kemena Brooks and Danalee Petyk Typeset in Helvetica Neue Printed and Bound in the United States. Š Copyright 2011 The University of North Carolina at Charlotte College of Arts + Architecture School of Architecture 9201 University City Boulevard Charlotte, NC 28223 www.coaa.uncc.edu
Visions of the City edited by: Zhongjie
UNC Charlotte | School of Architecture College of Arts + Architecture
Lin
Published by the College of Arts & Architecture, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, www.coaa.uncc.edu Special thanks to Ken Lambla, Dean of the College of Arts + Architecture, Chris Jarrett, Director of the School of Architecture, and Cheryl Myers of Charlotte Center City Partners for their financial and kind support in sponsoring the Vision of the City Lecture Series. Foreword ©2011 Chris Jarrett. Essay ©2011 Zhongjie Lin. China, Carb, City ©2011 Yung Ho Chang. Cities after the End of Cities ©2011 Robert Fishman. Climate Change and Urban Development ©2011 Gary Hack. Planning, Ecology, and the Emergence of Landscape ©2011 Charles Waldheim. Postword © 2011 Zhongjie Lin. This book is not for commercial sale or distribution. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the author. The University of North Carolina is committed to equality of educational opportunity and does not discriminate against applicants, students, or employees based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, age, sexual orientation or disability.
Contents Foreword
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Introduction: Visions of the City
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Climate Change and Urban Development
18
Cities After the End of Cities
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Chris Jarrett
Zhongjie Lin
Gary Hack
Robert Fishman
Planning, Ecology, and the Emergence of Landscape 52 Charles Waldheim
China, Carb, City
74
Charlotte 2020 Vision Plan
96
Image Credits
100
Biographies
101
Yung Ho Chang
Cheryl Myers
Foreword Chris Jarrett We thrive in cities. In fact, most of us live in them. To paraphrase Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, cities have been think tanks and engines of innovation since Plato and Socrates quarreled in an Athenian marketplace. The artistic and cultural streets of Florence gave us the Renaissance. The scientific achievement and commercial innovations in Birmingham (UK) gave us the Industrial Revolution. Cities have flourished through a combination of immigration, entrepreneurialism, innovation, civic pride, and growth. The messy vitality of urban life characterized by Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities produces a complexity and humanism that people and communities thrive on. The energy, vitality and prosperity of contemporary London or Tokyo originate from their ability to engage complexity, elicit creativity, and produce new ideas.
Yet, cities continue to be begrudged. The perception of cities as
unhealthy, fearful, full of crime, expensive, and environmentally destructive continues to drive people away from cities. Over the past half-century, tens of millions of people have left American cities for the suburbs. The federal government ignited much of this expansion and subsidized much of this flight. Artificial inducements encouraged families to move from urban areas to suburban and exurban ones. Miles of freeways, off-ramps, highways, roads and cul-de-sacs, and the associated water channels and power lines that joined them, reorganized the distribution of America’s resources at arguably great expense.
The environmental, social, and health care cost of subsidizing an
infrastructure supporting gross quantities of large houses on large lots is nearly incalculable. America’s current carbon emissions output was once unthinkable. Sprawl is brown, cities are green. Living at higher densities in mixed-use and mixed-income walkable neighborhoods fueled by renewable energy is an environmental and social model worthy of sustaining. Living in low-density suburbs and driving everywhere to do just about anything is fundamentally unsustainable. Failure to enact strong environmental policies creates a toxic anti-urban bias. People who choose to live in outlying cul-de-sacs, and the 8
Foreword associated circuitous infrastructure and big box industry that sustain these communities, should pay the true cost and benefit of living and working there.
We now know those who live in cities use less energy and emit
less carbon. The need to price carbon emissions appropriately is particularly important in places like India and China, whose lifestyle decisions in the coming decades will determine the world’s future carbon emissions. As author and critic Thomas Friedman argues, the most straightforward way to address climate change is a simple carbon tax. If energy users are taxed for the social costs of their actions, they’ll live in more energy-efficient communities and use more fuel-efficient means of transport. By not taxing energy use accordingly, we are implicitly subsidizing energy-intensive nonurban lifestyles. Environmental and human health concerns should direct tax policy that encourages urban living.
Interestingly, the information (r)evolution is accelerating the urbanism
of cities. The development and improvement in information technology has increased, rather than reduced, the value of place. Networked infrastructure, smart phones, intelligent pads, interactive screens, and sophisticated computers are making cities more idea-intensive, better connected, and ultimately, more urban. Silicon Valley is but one example that reminds us that electronic interaction doesn’t compete with face-to-face communication. The computer industry, more than any other sector, is the place where one might expect remote communication to replace person-to-person meetings. Yet despite their ability to collaborate across long distances, this industry has become a recent example of the benefits of geographic concentration.
We are learning that communicating electronically complements
personal interaction, thus creating a more relationship-intensive world. One might argue that no modern invention can equal the printing press in its impact on long-distance communication. The ability to put words on paper at little expense and in great quantities created a paradigm shift in our ability to communicate with people across long distances. Yet there is no reason to think that books undermined the life and vitality of cities. In fact, one could argue that the printing press helped create a more urban world. Advances in information technology appear to be operating in a similar fashion.
But what will the future of the city look like? We really do not know.
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, roughly 40 million Americans 9
Visions of the City work flexible schedules. Hence, we can speculate that places of work in the future will operate as collaboration centers, large information-based infrastructures accommodating freelance life-styles, equipped with community work spaces, lounges, racquetball courts, housing, sky gardens and play grounds, interspersed coffee bars, computer labs, retail spaces, conference rooms, and private spaces for one-on-one videoconferences. But will it be that way? Will our communities become a place where live, work and play coalesce under the same expansive roof or block, and networked infrastructure?
Despite such speculation, we really have no idea what’s going to
happen in the future. We have no idea how the future will play out. So the unpredictability of what’s ahead is extraordinary. This is why staging a series of public lectures, discussions, debates, and open forums between the School and the City is so vital to understanding where we are, where we might want to go, and how we might get there.
The initiative of staging a public urban lecture series on Visions of the
City – the primary content of this book - was formed by Professor Zhongjie Lin, developed in collaboration with Cheryl Myers of Charlotte Center City Partners. It came to fruition during my first year at UNC Charlotte, in concert with the inauguration of the School’s Master of Urban Design program. The lectures themselves and the subsequent discussions around the different topics provided a forum for students and faculty, and urban designers and planners alike, to engage in conversations about the future of our cities: what they are, what defines them, who inhabits them, how they are used and how they function, when they succeed and when they fail, and why they are beloved by some and loathed by others.
Although this book focuses on specific aspects of cities, it may be
seen as part of a wider interest within the School to examine alternative ideas and practices. What the various contributors share in common is a concern for the quality, spatiality, vitality, and difference of cities. There is equal concern for spaces that are socially constructed, ones that are dynamic, free, and open, as they are for spaces that are formally planned and organized. It is clear that Professor Lin chooses not to privilege any one particular vision. Instead, he wants to prompt one’s thinking about the nature of cities today, and to encourage the reader to make use of these ideas and practices for their own end. 10
Foreword
The success of urban growth depends on the life, health, ecology
and density of our cities. As we proceed in the first quarter of the 21st century, will the city become more dense and multipurpose? Will dynamic community hubs, linked with multi-modal public transport, replace the disparate spaces and single use infrastructure where too many people now live and work? Will the geographic relationship between work and living be constructed as an overlay? Will future commuting involve traveling through rich landscaped spaces, public parks, gyms, pools, and retail spaces? Will the future growth of the city rely on renewable energy? Through reflective insight, analysis, and imagination, the following contributors make an important case for the city’s import and wonder. They remind us forcefully why we should nurture our cities and the communities that sustain them.
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Visions of the City Zhongjie Lin The world’s urban societies were faced with two fundamental challenges as we entered the 21st century, one being the rapid urbanization and the other climatic change. Both have profound impacts on architecture and urban design. In 2008, the number of urban dwellers crossed the threshold of 50 percent of the total population in the world, signaling the arrival of the first urban century in human history. The urbanization rate is expected to rise to 80 percent by 2050, which would create greater pressures on cities to expand the urban territories and to better manage the limited resources on the planet. Particularly, this rapid urbanization is an uneven process and leans heavily on the developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In China, around 16 million rural residents are relocated to cities of different sizes each year. This trend has continued since the early 1990s, constituting what David Harvey called the “largest mass migration ever seen in human history.” Resulting from this dramatic demographic shift are continuing constructions and reconstructions of cities throughout the country as well as numerous ambitious new town plans intended to house the swelling population and sustain economic growth. On the other hand, the environmental impact of growing energy consumption and greenhouse gas emission has raised the concern of the scale and severity of climate change, which increasingly influenced the global politics, championed by the former US Vice President Al Gore’s campaign of climate changes. The recent massive destructions and casualties in northeastern Japan resulting from severe earthquake, Tsunami, and consequential nuclear leak reminded us again of the vulnerability of human society in the face of the nature’s force. Such environmental concerns, along with growing energy price, are driving building industries toward a fundamental revolution. Green architecture has gradually emerged as a mainstream in design practice through the promotion of organizations such as the US Green Building Council and the BRE group in the UK, and various building technologies are being developed to meet new standards developed by them. The needs of sheltering growing population and responding to climate change entail a reconsideration of current paradigms of architecture and
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Visions of the City urbanism. These double challenges demand that we take a holistic approach to design and building, in which technological innovations, urban and environmental policies, and economic and social strategies should be deployed to facilitate more coherent and sustainable developments. We have come to realize that green architecture will never truly succeed as an ecological movement without setting our sights on the macro level and wrestling with the broader issues of land use, transit, green infrastructure, and urban morphology. Green houses sitting on half-acre parcels would not be as effective in reducing energy consumption and carbon emission as dense living communities supported by a well-functioning transit system. The dramatic shift of urban demography and growing impact of climatic change also mandate that the solutions must be sought in a global context. No matter how green architecture can achieve in the United States, it may ultimately mean little if China, India, and other developing nations can’t find a way to build more sustainably. It was based on these ideas that this public lecture series was organized. We call for visions of the city, ideas that will shed new lights on our urban future. We invite debates of different paradigms of urban design and points of view from different perspectives that address the pluralism of emerging urban forms in response to the current global environmental challenges. The concept of Carbon Wedge that Gary Hack introduced in his talk manifests the imperative of combining political measures and technological breakthroughs on different levels in order to reduce carbon emission, or even just to maintain it at the current level. Building a truly sustainable city requires highly cooperative efforts: renewable and clean energy, local power and smart grid, urban density and mixed uses, pedestrian/cyclist-friendly design, highperformance and recyclable materials, revolutionary rail and transit system, vertical farming, end of deforestation, and so on. The past few years have seen a proliferation of eco-city initiatives, which suggests that the concept and experiments of eco-city has gained considerable momentum and begun to be embedded in national and municipal policy-making. In spring 2009, President Sarkozy of France announced that Paris would become the “first post-Kyoto eco-city” as part of his ambitious plan to transform the French capital into an expanded, regenerated greater metropolis. Later that year, the British government initiated the program to build a series of new “eco-towns” across England. China has also embarked on an ambitious agenda to build some 40
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Visions of the City new eco-cities. So far, the showcase is Masdar, a self-claimed “world’s first carbon-neutral zero-waste city” near Abu Dhabi characterized by traditioninspired urban form with a fine grade, cutting-edge building and environmental technologies, and a “personal rapid transit” system. The first phase of Masdar was recently completed, including a complex for Masdar Institute of Science and Technology dedicated to advanced research in environmental technologies. As the living quarters are yet to be built and the city is not in full performance, it remains to be seen how well the eco-city as a direct response to the global environmental challenges and the need of socio-economic regeneration will function in the translation of visions into concrete built environments. Figure 1: Masdar Institute
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Visions of the City Figure 2: New Cave Dwelling Project in Shaanxi, China.
Figure 3: New Cave Dwelling Project in Shaanxi, China.
While the comprehensive eco-city plans have drawn enormous attention and publicity, some of these ambitious top-down projects fell through for the lack of solid financial measures to realize them, particularly when political supports were withdrawn. Dongdan Eco-New Town in Shanghai is one of such examples. Some other projects did not lived up to expectations either when built up because they focused on the scientific aspect of energy and environment,
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Visions of the City and tended to ignore issues of social sustainability. In some cases, the effort of pursuing environmental and social balance became subordinate to strong economic agendas and political propagandas. In the meantime, numerous bottom-up projects operated under smaller initiatives across the world, particularly in northern European nations and the hinterland in China, have gained significant grounds. Some of them are not brand new towns, but rather retrofits where innovation has to take place within established social, economic and political structures. They might demonstrate even better the feasibility and potential impact of sustainable planning and design. Landscape architecture has emerging as a prominent field in this dialogue of sustainable urbanism, particularly through the concept of landscape urbanism that has developed rapidly as a new field during this past decade. Both Robert Fishman and Charles Waldheim discuss about the role of landscape architects in the search of new paradigms of the city. Fishman revisited the theoretical and design works of Ian McHarg and Lawrence Halprin in the 1970s, in which he found profound urban visions that should continue to inspire us in addressing the current ecological threat and designing cities with the nature in mind. Waldheim tries to distinguish landscape urbanism from traditional landscape practice by defining it as a discourse native to North America and emerging from the contemporary cultural context and urban conditions. Although the actual impact is to be tested in more concrete built works, the parametric urbanism that landscape urbanists advocate has drawn attentions to the temporal dimension of urban development and ecological process, and suggests an alternative to the prevalent approach to urban design. From wine glassware to new town, Yung Ho Chang’s trans-scale designs have been guided by the principle of doing more with less, which reflects his understanding of sustainability and distinguishes his firm from other practices under the unprecedented building boom in China. In his point of view, sustainability should not be done in sake of sustainability and technology should not be pursued in its own end; they are about livability. His consciousness of the role of technology in social development raises the issue of architects’ cultural responsibility in the current urban transformation. Without attempting to construct a singular discourse or normative urban ideal, these authors address the imperative environmental and design issues
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Visions of the City related to the contemporary city from their different perspectives as an urban planner, an architect, a historian, and a landscape urbanist. Their essays provide alternative thinking to the existing models of urban development, and represent a pluralism of visions that could potentially lead us to a different future of the urban society.
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Climate Change and Urban Development Gary Hack
After I stepped down as the dean of Penn’s design school, I decided I really needed to re-educate myself. I have been looking at projects and efforts around the world to face up to the new imperatives that we all have to address over the coming decades. I want to share some of the thoughts that I have gained in that process of looking into the future. My point of departure is that we are facing two critical, converging imperatives.
The first is the decline of peak oil, the reduction of supplies of
cheap energy, and the run-up of cost of energy. This imperative is difficult to discern at this moment, as gas prices are at $2.50 a gallon (down from almost $4.00 just a few years ago). Current prices are likely to be short lived, in my judgment and the judgment of people who have looked at this phenomenon. So, rising prices will force us to think differently about travel, think about energy usage, and many other facets that are the result of cheap energy. Second, and surely more important, is confronting the imperative of global warming. Global warming is an issue we can not avoid. Despite some politician’s claims to the contrary, there are no serious scientific doubts about the existence of global warming. There may be a debate about the rate of global temperature rise, and when we are likely to see 2o or 4o C temperature increases, but not about its inevitability. And it seems equally clear that the discharge of carbon into the atmosphere, in its various forms, is responsible for a good deal of the climate change that we are facing. When you join these two phenomena, it is obvious that we will have to think in radically different ways about the way we build our cities, the way we adapt them, and how we manage them. I can only skim the surface of these issues; there are plenty of articles and books about these matters. Most profiles of oil exploration and production suggest that that we have either reached, or we will shortly reach peak production of inexpensive petroleum as an energy source. Despite the new gains of natural gas and deep-water oil exploration, both of which have many 18
Climate Change and Urban Development hazards, we will see a declining supply of energy from traditional sources over the next twenty to fifty years. Total consumption of petroleum is rising at a 2% rate per year worldwide, the current recession notwithstanding. Petroleum consumption increases in large part because its rise in China, India, and other developing countries, where rises average 6% a year. Declining supplies and a galloping demand for oil is a recipe for a major run up of prices.
The Decline of Peak Oil Faced with expensive energy in the US, we will begin to think more like those countries that have had to deal with it for some time – in much of Europe gasoline is $4-$8 a gallon. In Japan it is $7- $8 a gallon. Those countries have had to deal with expensive energy for some time, and it is not accidental they are way ahead of us in responding to this as an urban phenomenon and as an architectural challenge. When we look at worldwide composition of energy supply today, 86% of it is from fossil fuels of various kinds. Other sources include nuclear energy (8%), largely because France, Japan, and other countries have heavily invested in it, hydro power which is very small, and geothermal, biomass, solar and wind that are a minor contributors to energy supply today. The heavy dependence on fossil fuels will magnify energy shortages as we move forward. If you were to travel a few hundred miles west of my home in Philadelphia, you would discover that people are euphoric about the new energy supplies being discovered in the Marcellus Shale. Natural gas exists below the surface,
Figure 1: Oil and Gas Production Chart
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Visions of the City not in huge quantities, but still a lot for the place where oil was first discovered in the United States and exhausted in the early parts of the 20th century. In this downtrodden area, coal next became king, until deep mining became too expensive and was depleted. The prospect of new energy that can be extracted from the shale below the surface gives people hope again for this part of the world. But the problem with it is that in order to extract natural gas, explosives below ground are required and water must be pumped at very high pressures to force the gas to the surface. The process creates the equivalent of minor earthquakes and runs the risk of contaminating ground water. Like most other new sources of fossil fuels, the price of extraction is high and there are serious environmental consequences. In northern Alberta, tar sands constitute the second largest oil deposit in the world. The landscape that is left behind after oil is extracted looks like a ruined moonscape. The process of extraction essentially involves boiling the sandy mixture of tar, and it takes one gallon of energy to produce one gallon of oil. Yes, we can expand our supply of oil, but it has huge environmental consequences. Those who say ‘drill baby’ avoid talking about these phenomena. The cost of extraction needs to include the energy required and carbon emitted into the atmosphere in the production process. It is not incidental that Qatar, the largest supplier of natural gas in the world is also the largest per capita contribute to global greenhouse gases. While there is much hope in sequestering carbon, this only works in locations where large underground reservoirs exist, and at a high cost. So in the immediate future, we will face much higher energy costs, shortages, dependence on unreliable suppliers, high environmental costs, and increased carbon emissions. There is urgency in adapting our way of life to reduce dependence on fossil fuels.
Greenhouse Gas Emissions The second half of the problem is global warming, which meshes closely with global energy shortages. The diagram made famous by Al Gore shows a close correlation between our carbon emissions, particularly carbon dioxide, and global average temperatures. Both have risen exponentially. Others have argued that this is based on old data and that we are in a cold spell now; indeed the last couple of winters have been quite cold in North America. However, worldwide temperatures averaged across the globe have continued to rise.
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Climate Change and Urban Development While some places have been colder, many more places have been warmer, and worldwide temperatures suggest that last year was the warmest year on record. This phenomenon will continue, since even if the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were to be capped at today’s levels, temperatures would continue to rise by up to 2o C. Temperatures in urban areas are likely to rise by even greater amounts, since heat island effects must be accounted for. While I could find no projection for temperature rises in Charlotte, predictions for Atlanta suggest that by 2050 average daily temperatures will increase between 4o and 7o F. Just think about the added costs of air conditioning to cope with a 7o temperature rise in Atlanta or Charlotte. Temperature change, of course won’t be even across the globe. Across the Midwest, we will see 6o to 8oF degree increases, undoubtedly affecting crop production. In Brazil and Africa, and unfortunately many of the lowest income countries of the world, temperature increases will be even greater. These are places that cannot afford to absorb the additional costs, and are highly vulnerable to droughts and other disruptions of food supplies. Figure 2: Climate Change Attribution Chart
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Visions of the City Climate changes will also result in greater extremes: there will be more extremely cold and hot days; more years of high rainfall and more prolonged periods of drought; and more hurricanes, although this prediction is controversial. Catastrophic change could come from rising sea levels as polar ice caps melt and oceans find their new levels. Simulations of US cities suggest that many cities will be devastated. A rise of 2 meters in sea level in New York City would flood much of Lower Manhattan, and virtually separate it from Midtown. With a Category 3 or 4 hurricanes – which the city has suffered in the past – the city would be devastated; even a Category 2 hurricane would make much of the outer boroughs of New York look like New Orleans after Katrina. Who emits the most greenhouse gases today? In absolute quantities, the US and China are the two largest emitters. However they have vastly different populations: the US is responsible for 21% of the carbon going into the atmosphere with 4% of the world population; China 18% of the carbon going into the atmosphere, but 21% of the population.
In the lead up to the climate
talks in Copenhagen there was a great deal of clamor in the United States for ensuring that China roll back overall carbon emissions, notwithstanding the fact that on a per capita basis, their emissions are less than one fifth of ours. China’s attitude is that they it is only fair that they be allowed to grow, and emit more greenhouse gasses, and the reductions ought to be taken in countries with much higher carbon emissions. They have, however, committed to reducing the carbon content as a fraction of GDP.
Reducing Carbon Emissions The essential question is what one does about the amount of carbon we are throwing into the atmosphere. A useful concept is that of “carbon wedges,” pioneered by Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow of Princeton. In an article published in Science in 2004, they argued that with emissions rising at about 15% a year, it would take herculean efforts just to stabilize carbon emissions. No single action can hope to accomplish this. They offered a menu of possible actions, each of which was designed to reduce by 1/7 the amount of additional carbon – that is, to simply keep emissions at current levels. What are those carbon wedges? One carbon wedge would be to double the efficiency of the world’s cars from 30 to 60 miles per gallon. This would require major technological 22
Climate Change and Urban Development breakthroughs, massive conversion of today’s auto industry, and widespread conversion to battery powered cars, but seems within the realm of possibility. A second wedge might be to reduce by one half the number of miles travelled by all passenger cars. Contemplate for a moment what it would take to accomplish this – surely much more mass transit, denser cities, walking to school and shop, living more like people did before ubiquitous automobiles, in the first half of the 20th Century. Another carbon wedges might include using the best available technologies for every new building and retrofitting every existing building. Wind and solar electricity contributing 15% of the US energy supply would constitute another wedge. This would require an area of solar arrays totaling 100 by 200 km, or the size of the State of Connecticut, plus 3% of the US land area devoted to wind farms. By comparison, the urban areas in the US occupy about 6% of its land area, so meeting the wind and solar target would require space totaling more than half the area of all cities and towns. And so on – it would require seven of these wedges to stabilize atmospheric carbon. Not one or another, but all in tandem.
Figure 3: Carbon Wedge Plot
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Visions of the City That is only to stabilize things. President Obama proposed in Copenhagen that the US set as its target a 17% reduction below 2005 levels to be accomplished by 2020 and an 83% reduction by 2050. That means that more than 15 carbon wedges would be required. It will force us to totally rethink how we build cities, and supply energy to them. I doubt that many of our citizens have the foggiest notion of the magnitude of change that will be required.
Cities Addressing Climate Change Climate change will need to be addressed at two different scales: citywide actions and individual projects. Its not either-or, but both that will be required, and much more. Before 2008, the US federal government largely denied there was an issue of climate change, so the only meaningful actions taken were at the local level. Almost every city has done a study of their ecological, energy, and carbon footprints, and virtually all cities now have a climate action plan. The proposals take many forms, but generally include promoting higher densities, redeveloping underutilized lands, creating alternatives to private automobiles, conserving critical ecological lands, creating green infrastructure, adopting new development standards, using local resources for everything from construction to consumption, and reintroducing urban agriculture as an alternative to flying or trucking in foods. New York City is a leader in planning for climate change, and that’s a little surprising because one doesn’t think of New York as a leader in these issues. Ironically, New York has the lowest carbon emissions rate per capita in the US, largely because of its high densities, heavy dependence on mass transit, and urban form that promotes walking. The mayor is deeply committed to these issues and has created an office of sustainability, which has prepared a long list of actions to promote reduced use of energy and lower carbon emissions. Their efforts spring directly from the idea of carbon wedges, and set as a target a reduction of 40% by 2030. New York’s four carbon wedges focus on avoiding sprawl in the region by increasing the city’s densities, moving to clean power for much of the city’s consumption of electricity, insisting on energy efficient buildings, and expanding sustainable transportation.
Each
area includes a long list of actions, and every year they monitor their progress in reaching their targets. Measures and metrics are critical. As management 24
Climate Change and Urban Development Figure 4: Greenhouse Gas Reduction Strategies
consultants counsel, “if you cant measure it, you can’t manage it New York has adopted high performance building guidelines, which are essentially mandated all new buildings. They have created high performance infrastructure guidelines. You might not think of New York as a place where there is much new infrastructure being built, but in reality over a 40 or 50-year period, all cities rebuild most of their streets. New York is determined to create streets that absorb water rather than transporting it off in sewers, that are shaded to reduce heat buildup, that encourage walking and cycling rather than driving and parking. Their priority for use of street space places pedestrians first, then bicyclists, then buses, and last in line, automobiles. The city has been aggressively reallocating traffic lanes to create cycling routes, and has closed Times Square to traffic, to dedicate it to the thousands of pedestrians who arrive there each day. The number of bicyclist in New York has gone up by about 600% in the last five years. When I was planning the Westside waterfront two decades ago, we proposed a continuous bicycle path from Battery Park up to 57th street. Most people dismissed the idea claiming that nobody rides a bike in Manhattan. A temporary bike route was established to test the idea. Two weeks after it opened the big question was how to ration the use of this bicycle path because it had attracted hundreds of people on wheels of all kinds from speed cycling teams travelling at 60 miles per hour in packs of 20 to children on tricycles
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Visions of the City and parents teaching their youngsters how to ride without training wheels. It proved that there was an enormous latent demand for cycling. As I look around Charlotte, I see very few cyclists even in areas with many young people such as Uptown. Perhaps there is an equal latent demand here. The second city I want highlight is Vancouver, in Canada, a truly a remarkable case of planning for sustainability.
The Winter Olympics will
highlight just how livable the city is. Vancouver took many bold actions, and began them early. The results are now paying off. Beginning 25 years ago, they created an agricultural land reserve around the city, and it is a hard boundary to urbanization. At the time it was created there remained considerable land within the reserve for urban development, but as they have held the line, the reserve became a girdle for the city. Now as it grows, it has to become denser because there is no other choice. A second big move in Vancouver was to ban expressways from the center of the city. Instead, they rely on city streets to handle traffic, and all of their resources have been devoted to mass transit, particularly an extensive system of trackless trolleys and both express and local buses. To this they have added light rail, regional rail lines and an elevated train system that connects most of the region. Allowable densities have been increased at each of the stops, and use of mass transit has grown every year. There is congestion in the city but in Vancouver, they argue congestion is their friend, and is the only real way to ration the use of roadways. The metropolitan plan designates a number of regional centers on the perimeter of the city. The center in New Westminster has about thirty 30-story buildings, and can be reached from Downtown Vancouver in 20 minutes. Vancouver has pursued its growth strategy for over 25 years, and now claims to be the greenest large city in North America. Vancouver’s successes are also at the local level. Their “eco-density� program couples increased densities with ecological improvements. When densities are increased, there is an obligation to also increase the available open space. The city requires developers to provide or pay for the equivalent of 2.75 acres of green space per thousand people on their site, although they are highly flexible in the form that may take. The added amenities in downtown have made it a highly attractive as a place to live. Another new initiative recently is promoting laneway housing, which can have the effect of doubling densities.
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Figures 5 & 6: Giving Pedestrians Priority in New York
They have offered six prototypes of pre-approved housing units as examples of what is possible, and have rezoned much of the inner city to make this possible. This returns to an old tradition where in Philadelphia and other older cities, development of alleyways allowed the city to get denser as it grew, without destroying the housing that gave it its character. In Vancouver they ensure that this occurs in ecologically sensitive ways: no additional runoff, retaining water on green roofs and bioswales. Vancouver has also been a pioneer in complex and interesting mixed-use
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Visions of the City Figure 6: The Visionaire at Battery Park City
Figure 7: High Performance Housing
Figure 8: Vancouver Agricultural Reserve
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Climate Change and Urban Development developments, which increase density and reduce the need for travel. The recently opened Woodward’s mixed-used development has green spaces on most levels that absorb all of the rainfall falling on the structure, and serves as a new hot spot for downtown. It includes, among other uses, a university campus, a high-income condominium building, and a building for the homeless, all integrated on the same block and sharing facilities. The idea is that if allow increased density, it can’t just be for the wealthy, but must include a cross section of the city’s residents. Another fascinating development is called the Rise, located in an inner city neighborhood. It and contains a Home Depot, supermarket, street level shops, offices all topped by a terrace with allotment gardens and housing. People living in the inner city shouldn’t have to commute out to the suburbs to get their building supplies or drive to the suburbs to get low cost groceries. Downtown Vancouver has a full sized Costco in the base of two high rise residential buildings. Making density livable and ecologically sustainable requires innovative solutions to meet all the residents’ needs.
Innovative Projects Many of the most innovative urban development projects that address energy and climate change are found in Europe. As I have noted, Europe has a longer history of dealing with high energy costs, and has a deeper commitment to addressing global warming. Freiburg is a German city of roughly 600,000 near the Swiss border. Ten years ago, Freiburg decided to become the solar capital of Europe. This was partially motivated by the presence of a solar panel manufacturer in the town, so they decided it would be a good business to become a showpiece for use of solar energy. Over a decade, they have created 7,000 solar installations, many consisting of dozens or hundreds of panels. They created a solar utility to collect electricity and redistribute it. The solar utility is also connected to district heating and other facilities, which doubly increases energy efficiency. But they have also encouraged passive solar design through new energy standards. The city has many double walled or double skinned buildings that exhaust the heat before reaching the interior, and use it for heating in winter. Many of the installations involve retrofitting existing buildings, including a department store in the city center where solar panels double as sunshades. A highrise building beside city hall generates about 20% of its energy in solar panels on two sides of
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Figure 9:EcoDensity in Vancouver
Figure 10: New Westminster Satellite Center
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Climate Change and Urban Development the building. Nearby there is a university campus where they’ve tried just about every type of solar installation you can imagine as a test bed for innovation. Near the station a wonderful full service bicycle center has been created. It includes a bicycle garage heated by solar energy, the Café Velo where you can sip a cup of coffee while your bicycle is repaired, a lockup bicycle storage area, a sales center for bicycles, even a car share service for those who need to shift from bicycle to auto. Many store their bikes there, beside the railway station, to navigate the first or last mile. Also in Freiburg, Vauban is an exemplary redevelopment of an old French army base to become an ecological community. Wastes are recycled or used to power district heating, and virtually every structure has been fitted for active or passive solar usage. The Solar Garage may seem like a contradiction -some would say that no garage is really sustainable unless cars are locked up permanently – but the solar array on the roof not only contributes to the grid, but also anticipates a day when electric cars will become commonplace. Much of Vauban is car free, and the garage at the edge of the community does serve as a reservoir of unnecessary horsepower.
Figure 11: The Rise Mixed Use Development, Vancouver
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Visions of the City Figure 12: Double Skinned Office Building, Freiburg, Germany
Figure 13: Bicycle Center Beside Freiburg Station
The Schlierberg solar development in Vauban is one of the finest examples of a small mixed use community dedicated to exploiting solar energy. Located at a light rail stop, it has an organic supermarket on the ground level, offices above and housing on top. Solar panels cover the mixed use structure and the lowrise units adjacent, providing much of the energy for the development. Passive solar devices bleed heat off through atria, and store it below for 32
Climate Change and Urban Development Figure 14: Schlierburg Mixed Use Development, Vauban, Freiburg
Figure 15: Solar Parking Garage, Vauban, Freiburg
heating purposes. Vauban proves that even at a modest scale, it is possible to dramatically lower carbon emissions and imported energy requirements. Stockholm, Sweden has a longstanding reputation for innovative urban development. In recent years, it has focused on the conversion of a large brownfield site, a former shipyard, into the new community of Hammarby
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Visions of the City Sjostad. The objective was to combine green and grey infrastructure in a creative and sustainable way. The grey infrastructure includes a light rail line that was built before the people arrived, so that they didn’t need to use an automobile to reach their jobs or the city center. Under the street is a vacuum garbage collection system that collects all the wastes from housing and commercial areas, and allows it to be separated for recycling or incineration to power the district heating system. Water from the estuary is used for cooling. The central idea of the development was to construct a closed system of resource flows, inasmuch as possible. Solar installations provide a significant fraction of electricity required. At Hammarby Sjostad, the light rail system extends the length of main street, allowing residents to shop to and from work or school.
Schools,
community facilities and offices also line main street. The development was planned by the city, but constructed by 35 different private developers, each competing to create projects that performed better ecologically than their counterparts. The overall quality of life is high, and the community has quickly become a location of choice in a city that has many fine neighborhoods. All runoff at Hammarby Sjostad is collected in a series of ponds, then filtered and reused or discharged into the bay. The entire landscape is irrigated reusing a runoff from the site or greywater from residential buildings; a twopipe system extends throughout the community. Energy usage is monitored in the Glashaus, which serves as a learning center for residents and visitors. No potential source of energy goes to waste, including the methane gas that is harvested from the previous landfill areas, that is harvested to fuel the community’s district heating system. The final European example is Lanxmeer, in Culemborg, The Netherlands. This grassroots development was organized by a group of faculty associated with the Technical University of Delft, who decided they wanted to create a zero carbon community. Many of the people involved live there today in a neighborhood that consists of about 450 housing units. The Lanxmeer site was a combination of brownfield areas and lands reserved to protect the city’s water supply, with wells and storage areas located in one portion. The water facilities have been maintained, and are now used largely for district heating and cooling, as a geothermal reservoir. The site is 34
Climate Change and Urban Development Figure 16: Hammarby Sjostad, Stockholm, Sweden
Figure 17: Hammarby Sjostad, Stockholm, Sweden
located near a railway station, and it is possible to walk to trains leading to most of the Netherlands within 10 minutes of one’s home. As a result, the decision was made to make Lanxmeer a car free community. Cars can, of course, get to individual doorways to deliver things, but there are no parking spaces adjacent to units, only at the perimeter of the neighborhood. Lanxmeer is organized it as a series of clusters. Each is an experiment in building forms and outdoor spaces, as only the Dutch can do. Landscape 35
Visions of the City has largely overtaken the site, irrigated by runoff, and using plant species appropriate for self-propagation. No potable water is used for irrigation. Each cluster has an open space planned and used by residents, usually a mixture of private areas, allotment gardens and gathering spaces. One cluster is for elderly residents, with a garden that is magnificently tended. The initial objective was to have least one job for every housing unit in it so that there would be a job-housing balance in this community. They have fallen a little short, but by counting service and maintenance workers, they come close. Small businesses, home businesses, light manufacturing and professional offices are integrated into the neighborhood. They never believed everyone who lived in the community would work there, but by achieving a jobs-housing Figure 18: Lanxmeer, Culemborg, Netherlands
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Climate Change and Urban Development balance, commuters would be balanced by reverse commuters balancing the demands on roadways and transit. At Lanxmeer, surface water is purified as it moves through wetlands that are carefully tended as part of the site. By the time it reaches a small retention basin, water quality is high enough to support children’s play and swimming. Nearby, an orchard produces fruits, larger allotment gardens supply vegetables, and a small farm supplies eggs and an occasional feast on locally raised poultry and meat. While supplying only a small fraction of the food needed, the local agricultural areas keep people in touch with their land, and are used to educate children. Theirs is a productive landscape, not simply an ornamental one. In one section of Lanxmeer specially designed live-work units and artists studios integrate work with living.
Progressive school, and more routine
educational facilities for all ages are within walking distance. The community has largely achieved the objective of being a self-contained community where you can live, work; meet a large fraction of your everyday needs, and build a social network. Maintaining the community requires dedication from the residents, from running the district utility system to maintaining the orchards and landscape. They cannot operate, or are uneconomical, if maintained solely by contract workers. The best way to assure that residents are engaged is to involve them from the beginning. Figure 19: LiveWork Housing, Lanxmeer
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Visions of the City Becoming Inspired by the Challenge The European examples just cited inspire design professionals to think more expansively, and developers to see their role as creating places that are sustainable long after residents arrive. There are examples in the US that set their sights high – Prairie Crossing, in suburban Chicago, Battery Park City in New York, among them. However, they are pioneering ventures, not sustained by a larger commitment in our society to advance the art of building sustainable communities. As I have noted, meeting the dual challenges of high energy costs and targets for reduction of greenhouse gases will take more than minor adjustments to what we do. Suburbs that are now totally dependent upon automobiles will need to be reconfigured with higher densities, a better balance of jobs and housing, more local amenities and walkable commercial areas. Existing buildings in the centers of cities will need to be retrofitted for energy conservation, and new development will need to be transit oriented. Green infrastructure will need to become as important as gray infrastructure. And we will need to learn to do many things simultaneously, since there is no single silver bullet that will solve the problem of global warming. Most importantly, truly dealing with carbon reduction will require setting aside traditional fault lines. The air suburbanites breathe, and the climate they experience is the same as that of their urban counterparts. The carbon emitted by sprawling western communities affects the dense urban areas equally. Private real estate companies must pay for the increased costs of air conditioning their buildings as temperatures rise, regardless of whether they had a role in forcing global warming. This is an opportunity to build new alliances and partnerships. Indeed, they will be essential.
[The preceding is a transcription of a lecture given in Charlotte, NC at Wells Fargo Auditorium, Jan. 20, 2010]
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Climate Change and Urban Development
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Cities After the End of Cities Robert Fishman
First, I should warn you that I took this title, Cities After the End of Cities, from a philosopher Arthur C. Dento, who, himself, took the idea from another philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel, who is the ultimate origin of this whole end-of history narrative – end of art, end of city, etc. It was Hegel who argued that all philosophies or all existences could be understood as a struggle, as dialectic. This struggle, however long it lasts, is not eternal because it ends. It ends in a synthesis. It ends in the overcoming of the realm of necessity and the entrance into the realm of freedom. So the end-of history means the beginning of a new era of freedom. Danto takes up this rather striking idea and applies it to the history of art. Following Clement Greenberg, he argues that the history of the different arts has been a long struggle for purification as each art attempts to purify itself and to become exactly what it is. In painting, for example, this purification means going beyond the concept of the painting as somehow a window into nature, or a window into reality, and to understand painting as simply an arrangement of pigment in colors on a flat canvas. This purification was indeed accomplished by the Abstract Expressionists of the 1960’s such as Jackson Pollock. In other words, every art has its destiny, as does painting, and reaches the end of its narrative. So what do we do? Does that mean that all paintings subsequently are just another version of Jackson Pollock? Danto says, “No.”, And he says that the end of this narrative means the entry of art into a new realm of freedom, a new realm of pluralism. It is a new realm of art that is becoming many different things. Is there a comparable dialectic for cities? I believe there is: the dialectic between the city and the countryside. A great city, by necessity, expands, and it expands into its countryside. This expansion will drain the countryside, dominate the countryside, and so destroy itself. Its seeming growth is, in fact, a process of self-destruction that ends in what Patrick Geddes calls, “the Necropolis”, the city of death and destruction. Geddes and his great follower Lewis Mumford feared that the great cities of the early 20th century, which
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Cities After the End of Cities were larger than any city in history, were following the Necropolis pattern. New York itself would turn into a city of death, a city of destruction, a Necropolis. But this did not happen. Urban history at its deepest sense takes a different turn. The new means of transportation covering the ground and moving goods and people from place to place, the new abundance from agriculture, and the whole result of the industrial revolution ultimately embodied in the super highway system, has instead led to an overcoming, I believe, of this age-old struggle between town and country. And it has created a new synthesis, as we now see it. Cities that were once tightly constrained within their walls and boundaries have now exploded over the whole landscape. The very distinction between city and countryside is lost. As Frank Lloyd Wright said, “the city is everywhere or nowhere.” In terms of the larger narrative, this means cities now have a freedom to shape themselves or to reshape themselves, just as art has attained its freedom. Urbanism is now faced with this new freedom to redefine what the urban is. So cities attain a fragmentation, or rather a de-definition, unprecedented in history. Some cities attain a practice of concentration unknown before, such as Shanghai. Other cities attain a radical spreading out, like Mexico City—one of the mega cities of the developing world with twenty million people in this huge low-rise plain. Some cities attain a power unimagined before, as seen in Tokyo. Also of course, cities attain poverty. In the next thirty to forty years, we will see an increase in human population from six billion to nine billion people. Almost all of the increased three billion will be living in slum environments. So cities will become the concentrated interaction of rich and poor. Some of this is retained within the traditional fabric, but much of it is a kind of urbanism and urban fabric in its variety and pluralism never seen before. Even traditional cities that look to us as if part of the old guys like Paris have, at least in their core, become part of a stage set. Looking at the real Paris of the suburb where the work of Paris really gets done, it looks very much like the sprawl of the United States. This process of radical redefinition and disintegration of the city reached its fever stage in the craziness of the last decade’s real estate boom that overtook, not only the United States, but the whole world. Under this guise of manic speculation, the pluralism of cities has reached a fever pitch. This pluralism resulted in the carnival cities in the desert such as Las Vegas, or emerged as what has become the symbolism of this crazy decade, the world’s tallest
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Visions of the City Figure 1:Home Values Chart
building in Dubai. As I said, cities can be anything. What we are learning is that freedom in the world of urbanism does not mean the same as freedom in the world of art. Art, by necessity, is a realm of freedom and creativity. Cities are somewhat different than art, and the very freedom that technology and other innovations have given to urban form – the freedom from all traditional form – has been a burden or a curse, especially when one considers freedom as we know it, from Gary Hack’s lecture for example, the dependence upon the unlimited supply of cheap energy and cheap land in the United States. Even more so, this freedom for cities to be anything has meant the radical disintegration of traditional form, the loss of all contact with the great history of urban form that was always based upon density and walkability, and the disintegration and de-definition of what a city was. As a result, the great challenge today within this realm of freedom is to find some principle of order that connects urban form today, even in our present conditions, to the great achievements of urban form in the past. We especially seek that which answers the tremendous challenges of global resource exhaustion and global warming. From where is this discipline going to come? As I say you are probably in 42
Cities After the End of Cities trouble asking a historian to answer this, but I’ll give it to you anyway. With my training as a historian, the way I am looking forward is to take you back in search of an answer. We must look at two very important earlier moments when these issues, as it were, enter the consciousness of some of our great designers who understood this necessity of freedom and discipline. One partial answer is just to go back to the older cities, a phenomenon called “reurbanism”. This of course is happening, and I think it is one of the most important and most hopeful elements of the present, but I do not think in any sense that it is the answer to the tremendous issues that the de-definition and the disintegration that the city has confronted us. For many people living in New York City, the answer for all urban problems is to move to New York City. This solution is not possible, as far as I am aware. Sadly enough I think we have to confront the realities of this new world of fragmented urbanism, low density urbanism, sprawl that we have been building for the last forty years. We must recognize, however banal it might seem in terms of the history of urbanism, that cities without a center or edge are truly radical innovations. There is no downtown, and there is no factory zone. We call them “suburbs”, but in fact the majority of our productive activities of every kind take place in them. The suburbs are clearly not cities in the traditional sense, not suburbs in the sense being traditionally bourgeois utopias isolated themselves from the world of production, and they are certainly not rural. They represent a challenge in terms of basic urban design as it has always been understood and taught. Perhaps the essence of this challenge is that this sprawl, to use the academic term, is not a place but a process. Its existence is not wholly dependent on its continual expansion. Creating this sense, space had been a luxury with cities. Now, space tends to be become a burden or curse. Why drink coffee on the terrace when you can drink coffee on the parking lot? All of the rules that have governed urban public spaces, and the uses that have governed public space, are lost in a world of seemingly unlimited space. The worst part is the ecological consequences at its edge. These consequences are not an accidental element in sprawl, but I think it is the essence of it. So, how do we deal with this phenomenon? That is the issue that I want to pose. I like to, instead of going forward, perhaps perversely go back. We must go back to several key moments when we understood, or, at least, some urban designers understood, the radical nature of the phenomena with which they were dealing. 43
Visions of the City The first of these were Frank Lloyd Wright and his “Broadacre City” plan going back to the 1920’s. He advanced it in different forms until his death in 1959, and then two other people, in late 60’s to early 70’s, responded to the reality of sprawl that Wright had in some ways anticipated but did not comprehend the magnitude. These two other people are landscape architects, non-coincidently I think, Ian McHarg and Lawrence Halprin. Let’s begin with Wright and his Broadacre City plan from the 1920’s. It was first published in 1932 in the book The Disappearing City. I find Wright to be tremendously fascinating in this regard because he saw and he understood before anyone else that the great city, which seemed to be impregnable and seemed to be an absolute fact of modern life, was vulnerable, and there was Figure 2: Broadacre City Sketch
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Cities After the End of Cities going to be a tremendous change undermining the very foundation of it. This understanding is present in his original drawings from his notes of Broadacre City plan. He took this fact that the vulnerability of the old city in the new era was not a curse and not as a problem, but rather it was a kind of promise, a utopian promise, of what a new and completely radical form of urbanism can be. Wright called it the “Broadacre City”. He propounded this Broadacre City during the 1920’s when we only remember him as the great American architect. In the 1920’s Wright was an isolated figure who was too radical for most American architects and was behind the times compared to the Europeans. He was in deep trouble financially and with his marriages. I think we know more about his marriages than we do about any other American architect. In other words, Wright was a figure that seemed, even to himself, to have failed. In the midst of this isolation and failure, he imagined another country and another America, of which he would be a leader, or a prophet as it were, of this new way of living that he calls Broadacre City. So, a tremendous emotional investment went into this book The Disappearing City and the sequels that Wright would publish throughout his life. What is striking about Broadacre City is the hard thought that lies behind it. Wright very clearly identified the traditional city, the concentrated city, as essentially obsolete. He asked the basic question ‘why crowd?’ And he found that the present pattern of the present city was futile. He found the great concentrations of the rail road, especially, as built up around New York and other cities, completely unnecessary and leading only to absurd congestion and human overcrowding. The city itself had become a kind of obsolete curse on the people who were living in it. Nor did he see the city as a necessary point of concentration of life, such as the Burnham and Bennett plan in 1909 of Chicago. It featured Chicago as somehow centralizing the life of the Midwest, in its great streets like State St. and in its great factories and in its factory zones. For Wright, the great promise of 20th century technology, especially technology of the automobile, was a radical decentralization. There was no longer any need to crowd or any need for these futile centers. Technology, in its radical form, was building a world in which there would be the same advantages at the edge as the center. The old cities had thrived by creating things together, creating the means of, in effect, rapid communication or face-to-face communication. In the era of automobile, of great bridges and super highways, of networks
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Visions of the City of electrical power delivering power throughout vast metropolitan areas, of telephone and radio, there is no need to crowd. What you want to do is to create communication by opening things up, opening up the city to rapid motion instead of closing it down in this futile congestion. So here is Wright’s vision of the way a human city should be, especially a human American city, as shown in the drawing of Broadacre City from 1957 at the very end of his life. The essence of this idea is that, with the mass ownership of automobiles and with the superhighways moving across this great landscape at sixty miles an hour, the city can in effect merge within the landscape. This confluence is what he meant with the Disappearing City. The very opposition between town and country disappears and, instead, one has this continual landscape which supports the most advanced industrial facilities and techniques. Everything had been crowded together in the great city under this obsolete congestion now becomes integrated into this beautiful landscape. What makes the city a city now, moving across this great landscape at sixty miles per hour, is that you can bring together and unite these different elements of the city. A plan of Broadacre City shows us the Midwest mile square grid sections. The basic rule is that there is as much land for every family as they need – at least an acre per person – and everyone is a part time farmer with an intense relationship to this land. Scattered around are all the facilities: industry, culture, schools, markets and so on. They are as a city but placed so that they are integrated in this new environment. Wright and his students in the Taliesin Fellowship made a beautiful model of the small section of Broadacre City from the 1930s, and they hoped it would persuade the American people. As you can see, it is a city in which landscape has become the predominant element. The new ideal is a complete merger of the city and the land giving everyone this intense emersion. In another drawing from 1957, besides the helicopter, all of the buildings in Broadacre were designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. However, this is a world where the landscape is a city and a landscape simultaneously. This world is a utopian promise of modern technology as Wright would have it in his beautiful drawings. The issue of Broadacre City, as we can see more clearly in retrospect now, is what keeps Broadacre City in harmony with nature? Wright did have an
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Cities After the End of Cities answer to that – it is buried in his writings. He is, for the most part, a kind of libertarian as we would say today: constantly insisting on how bad government is, and that there would be no full-time politicians in Broadacre City, and that all government larger than the county level would fade away. However, he does at one point mention that every county would have an official called the county architect, and the county architect was responsible for issues of what architects do. And then as you read further, you realize that the county architect is in fact the complete dictator of Broadacre City. Since the landscape and the organization of the city are fundamental to Broadacre, every single major decision is made by the county architect, who of course is just one of these utopian stand-ins for Frank Lloyd Wright himself. Nevertheless, I think there was a deeper discipline in Wright’s writings. For Wright, the whole purpose for this radical decentralization was an intense relationship with the land, as you can see from Taliesin in Wisconsin, which is a kind of landscape by Wright. With everyone being a part time farmer, it was not just an economic thing or a throwback to the previous years. It implied that the whole society would be dominated by a feeling for landscape by a direct involvement through daily work and daily life and a direct involvement with the community. Everything would be, as it were, subordinate to the land, to its meaning, and to its preservation. This would give the kind of discipline and meaning to its decentralization that Wright thought was happening. An environmental dependence and discipline was the essence of his idea, but we know that this automobile-based decentralization, disintegration, and fragmentation of the city did happen without the discipline that Wright had hoped for. This turns into the American suburbanization as we know of, essentially a multiplication of subdivisions, completely uninvolved and uninspiring in terms of landscape that Wright was talking about. So the reality becomes the reality of sprawl and, as this sad fact becomes more and more evident, I think two figures become more prominent in terms of how to get out and how to deal with this reality. These two, as I mentioned, are Ian McHarg and Lawrence Halprin. Even though their books are 30-35 years old, McHarg and Halprin are ahead of us and their work are showing the way forward. I shall start with McHarg’s great book Design with Nature. McHarg’s great principle of discipline was a scientific
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Visions of the City Figure 3: Water Features Diagram
Figure 4: Responsible Growth Mapping
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Cities After the End of Cities understanding of the landscape and a scientific understanding of ecology that could guide the process of development at the edge. He shows how understanding the pattern of water flows can teach us where development is possible, where it is good, where it should be forbidden. He shows how one can analyze the different land forms to see how one can build and where one can build. He applied his principle, for example, to the area north to Baltimore in the valleys. He showed in a wonderful mapping how, through clustering, one can concentrate developments and keep the development away from the parts of ecology so that they can be less damaging. In his version of Design with Nature for one of the valleys, he presents one of the most striking elements and one of the most striking maps. It is not a map that we are supposed to follow and see, but it is a map where he chose the pattern of subdivision that were already developed or planned. The actual existing subdivision does not correspond at all to McHarg’s concept of where development should or should not go. In other words, there was a complete disconnect between the economics and process of suburban land development and the kind of ecological consciousness that McHarg was pointing us toward. That, as he says, is the threat. Figure 5: Study for “The Valleys”
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Visions of the City So how do we deal with that threat? The answer, I think, was the contribution of this man, Lawrence Halprin, who sadly died in October, 2009. I found his philosophy in a remarkable document that he wrote for the state of Oregon in 1972 about the Willamette Valley, which is the beautiful valley that runs south from the City of Portland. The issue was, as people of Oregon realized, that even in 1970’s the process of sprawl was so dynamic, that this beautiful valley could turn into urban sprawl. How to stop it this sprawl was Halprin’s challenge. Behind his response was an interesting analysis of just how sprawl takes place. The essence of it is the relationship between the subdivision and the automobile and freeway. Because subdivisions are automobile dependent, this world can only exist with freeways and with high-speed automobile connections. The Figure 6:
Williamette Valley
subdivision and the freeway feed off each other, and the result is the dynamism Proposals of sprawl. One of his drawings shows the process of leap frog
development
in which a relatively small
town
subdivision
has
a
outside
it. These subdivisions multiply, and there are connections between them,
which
then
make the agricultural land
between
them
unviable, and the result is a dynamic process of sprawl. How to deal with this process of sprawl? Halprin’s very
answer
is
interesting:
to
revive the rail system. It must have been a very radical idea in 1972 to run a high speed rail
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Cities After the End of Cities system south from Portland through the Willamette Valley connecting the major cities instead of building more freeways. His concept was the very inflexibility of rail and its need of people to live within walking distance of the transit stops would necessarily limit development and contain urban development and leave the open spaces around it open. This concept, as we know today as “transit-oriented development”, was started here by Halprin in 1972. The mass transit system as a form-giver to the valley, as he says, allows development to concentrate along the lines, introducing a pattern of discipline into a radically undisciplined process. Halprin hoped this discipline would leave this beautiful valley untouched. Well, the idea lay fallow for almost twenty years. Many of you will recognize it as the basis of what we now call transit-oriented development. In this remarkable charrette at the University of Washington, preserved in this remarkable book The Pedestrian Pocket Book, Peter Calthorpe basically revives Halprin’s idea of using rail as the basis for this new discipline. The pedestrian pocket idea has now become the essential element of transit-oriented development as it has now been most elaborately applied to the development of Portland Metropolitan Area. However, I think it represents probably our best hope for introducing this new discipline into the limitless freedom that urbanism otherwise has. Calthorpe’s drawing indicates a contained TOD community built around walkability and connected to a transit stop with a center and an edge. He has been particularly active in the Portland metropolitan area. There are strong similarities between Halprin’s 1972 report and Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton’s 2001 book The Regional City, showing the same Willamette Valley now contained with the same mechanism. I want to conclude this reflection on “Cities After the End of Cities” with a short statement from Halprin’s Willamette Valley report: “But the big changes are still to come and we can still affect them if we act now in the 1970s.” Well, we missed that opportunity, but I think the key sentence is the last one: “We cannot change the past, but we can influence the future.” [The preceding is a transcription of a lecture given at UNC Charlotte at Storrs Hall 110, February 3, 2010.]
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Planning, Ecology, and the Emergence of Landscape Charles Waldheim I wanted to start by saying a couple of words about my own background, although what we are going to talk about tonight is not autobiographical. I did grow up in the South: I would have been one of those like you who grew up with a suburban house in with yards on four sides, drove everywhere, and all the things that accompany a suburban lifestyle. As a result, a better part of my career has been trying to grapple with what I understood to be a sort of contradiction. I was really interested in cities, ultimately. I was trained as an architect, I practiced as an architect, but I am really an urbanist—I love cities. My research revolves around cites, but the models we are given, the models I was given at least, have very little to do with the kind of place from where I come. For example, for my first big vacation I drove with my family to Atlanta, and I mistook Atlanta for a real city. Growing up in Orlando outside of Disney, I mistook that for a real city. My career is this misrecognition of trying to map city onto the places where I lived and worked. Over the course of the last several years, I have been trying to develop more specific and more relevant theories of urbanism related to the North American context. My graduate school studies, as wonderful as they were, did not really prepare me to describe the city in my first teaching position at University of Michigan in Ann Harbor. I naively began asking my colleague, “Why do we not look at the city of Detroit?� We still do not seem to do much work in Detroit these days. My first work was to look at the City of Detroit as an example and trying to come to terms with it. Much of the discourse around urban design and urban planning has been dominated by Eurocentric models for design and planning. While the Eurocentric models are valuable and are an important part of history, much of my work has been in pursuit of a specific alternative based on the North American economic and cultural context. Therefore, landscape urbanism became more than just a regional or national significance for people. I have been asked increasingly to present to people that if landscape urbanism is true, and if what I am saying is true, what are its implications for urban design? What does it mean for urban planning if, in fact, this theory of landscape urbanism has some traction? What does it say about these other disciplines?.
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Planning, Ecology, and the Emergence of Landscape About 15 years ago a couple of obscure academics, who would have at a point in time described themselves as Neo-Marxists, began looking at urban theories and developing the idea that landscape could provide a basis for thinking about the city. One way of thinking about this idea, first formulated as a concept called “landscape as urbanism”, moved away from the thinking of the city as built up out of aggregated building blocks made by architects which is the sort of conventional western way of thinking about the city. The way that I was trained was that urban design was accumulating enough architecture. If you had sufficient architecture that was good enough, sympathetically styled, and spatially organized, then you could produce a city in the model of the Beaux Arts and the City Beautiful movement-I am thinking of Daniel Burnham and his plan of Chicago one hundred years ago. About fifty years ago, you might have been interested in the insurgent movement invented at Harvard called Urban Design. Urban Design was specifically invented to address the failure of urban planning to deal with the growth of program and capital and the mobility of the contemporary city. Now, landscape urbanism has emerged partially as a critique of the failure of urban design and planning, the failure to deal with North American conditions, and the failure to forthrightly address the environmental catastrophe. Equally importantly, landscape urbanism provides analternative to the failures of the so called “New Urbanism.” Landscape urbanism intends
to provide an intellectual and practical
alternative to the hegemony of New Urbanism. If you worked in Michigan, Chicago, or Toronto, the discourse and ethos around urban design and building projects had much to do with the idea of the 19th century image of the city. If we could somehow put the toothpaste back in the tube of auto-mobility-if we could all get out of our cars and live the right way, a moral and just way- we could somehow reproduce some social justice and environmental health that we feel we have lost. Many of us in the landscape urbanist project understand the New Urbanism to be perhaps well intended, but ultimately misguided because it uses nostalgia to really critique the fundamentalism of North American new urbanism. Landscape urbanism tries to invert that technique by suggesting that we try to think about the city as being built up in the first instance out of ecological relationships; from those ecological relationships one could actually build urban form that is informed by the environmental knowledge available. You will understand where the real profound crisis of urban planning exists
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Visions of the City today if you look at the retrospective literature in Harvard Design Magazine’s issue called “Urban Planning Now.” This theory is not my personal finding, but rather that of the experts in the field who said urban planning is in a state of crisis. There are also other literatures available in these fields which indicate that both urban planning and urban design are in a profound crisis right now. On the one hand, this crisis is due to the fact they have bet so single-mindedly on density and the idea that we could somehow move away from a hundred years of decentralization, or that peak oil auto-mobility will perish and we will collapse back into the cities of different narrative. It is within this space that Landscape Urbanism has emerged, as well as in the space of the perceived failures of modernism. If you were a student of architecture at a point of time in the postmodern era, you would have seen images of the demolition of PruittIgoe in 1972, which Charles Jencks cited as the so-called “death of modern architecture.” For many of us, a generation was weaned on the failures of planning, but at the same moment we have not been given any practical or even intellectual alternatives to move forward. In my own thought on this subject and my teaching these days I am increasingly looking at the work of this obscure Scottish landscape architect named Ian McHarg. You will remember that McHarg was a graduate student of landscape at Harvard and then went to found the department of landscape architecture and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania. McHarg’s 1969 publication Design with Nature is a pinnacle for thinking about planning as a really clear and simple model. Although internationally successful, it is now fair to say it was a failed project, and I say that very judiciously. What I mean is that it was built on the premise of organizing ecological knowledge and applying that ecological knowledge spatially to decision making about the built environment. It was a laudable and incredible goal, and McHarg was extraordinarily successful in training two generations or more of landscape planners and influencing the discourse worldwide. McHarg’s project failed largely because we have decided not to plan. That is precisely in the post-‘68 era as McHarg’s theories were being disseminated internationally with the oil shocks of ‘73 and ‘79, the onset of the ReaganThatcher era, and a new neo-liberal idea about economics. We live in a largely Western culture, particularly in the North American context, in which we do not plan our cities; our cities are the result of economic processes as much as
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Planning, Ecology, and the Emergence of Landscape anything else. This fundamental dilemma is a part of what I have been puzzling out recently in my own thinking. A more succinct way of stating that is: however we arrived at this place. We have abandoned the hope of ecological design and we have moved to designer ecology. By “design ecology,” I am invoking Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau’s competition-winning project for Downsview Park in Toronto in 2001. The circle motif is meant to kind of telegraph, and my intention today is to try to connect the dots between those two moments. For many audiences, especially those who are urban designers and planners, the response to landscape urbanism is: “Well, have we not been trying to do this for 45 years? Is this not exactly what McHarg has been arguing for? Is this not exactly what others have been arguing for?” Our answer today is “no, not exactly.” In fact, the McHargian era agenda depended fundamentally upon a robust welfare state, a planning bureaucracy, and a mechanism through which to deliver the public realm and public infrastructure. Today we have largely abandoned this cultural or social aspiration in the North American context, of course to the extent of which the North American economic model is increasingly globalized. This is now an international global condition. One can say that it has its points of resistance and its alternatives, but by and large, urban practice today is the kinds of projects you will be engaged in once you graduate and leave here and move into your roles as architects and urban designers. You will be engaged in a global economic condition in which economic flows and capital dictate urban forms as much as anything else. What I would do is sprinkle in here a few by now canonical projects and references, not assuming that you have spent a lot of time on this relatively obscure literature in landscape and urbanism. I will show you one more project from the Downsview park competition of 2001. This entry by James Corner of Field Operations with Stan Allen did not win, but I think it summed up where landscape urbanism was about nine years ago as well as any other project. These are diagrams by Nina Marie Lister, an ecologist and planner, which represent so-called celebrity mega-fauna, or the kinds of species that drive large public projects. My main thesis here is that in landscape urbanism you see the fetishization of process and the continual deferral of gratifications. The continued denial of gratification over elaborate phasing strategies is really the result of economic processes. In phase one, where you can plant 24 birch trees and get a frog colony going, you have very modest public resources, so this is how you grow a public realm in a 55
Visions of the City contemporary era. You do not have the resources, the public will, or the political leadership to build a more robust public realm. Therefore, one engages in growing more complexity through impermanency and succession over time. We can also cite the work of Adriaan Geuze of West 8 out of Rotterdam, one of Europe’s most interesting landscape urbanists. His Scheldt project from ten or twelve years ago is one in which the Dutch welfare is delivering highways, dikes, water control mechanisms and the like, and the landscape commission here is simply for the white and black stripes. The white and black stripes are an insider reference to the Parc de la Villette competition entry by OMA for the cultural or literal types. At the same moment, mussel shells are organized into these stripes using the knowledge that Geuze brings as an ecologist from the Netherlands- the knowledge that seabirds with largely white feathers on them will alight on the white stripes, and those with largely black feathers will alight on the black stripes to avoid predation through natural selection. This has been sorted out and so this is a form of ecology as a kind of public spectacle. Similarly, if you look at Adriaan Geuze’s scheme for Schiphol airport, it is, I think, the best airport landscape scheme in the world in terms of sorting water, keeping the glycol de-icing fluid out of the water, and also using a landscape strategy; in this case, the strategy involves the use of clover bees and honey as a kind of regime to manage birds and bird strikes, which is one of the more important functions in airport landscape. At the outer edges of thoughts over the past ten years there have been projects that aspired to use ecological knowledge to derive the shape of the city, and that is what I want to spend most of my time talking about this evening. Figure 1: Schiphol Airport Landscape
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Planning, Ecology, and the Emergence of Landscape There are two earlier projects from about 10 years ago that are particularly salient to the discussion. The first one, again by West 8 from Rotterdam, is a scheme for a new suburb on the North Sea coast of the Dutch mainland. In a series of figure-ground drawings, the black is the sea water, and there is the new polder and the construction of what Geuze calls “Buckthorn City,” which uses the Buckthorn plant and the ecologies of the buckthorn plant to consolidate its root structure and the soil in this sandy condition, and to essentially give the outline of the shape of the city,instead of the traditional urban design strategies such as precedents or block structure or laissez-faire development principles. This technique is an example of the sort of avant-garde practice over the last ten years. Another example is James Corner and Field Operations’ Delaware waterfront redevelopment, which is a fairly traditional brownfield remediation or post-industrial remediation. Phytoremediation plant materials are combined with mixed-use development. There is a sort of mixed-use palette and waterfront remediation. The development features football-shaped public and open park spaces. Corner’s proposition here is that the shape of the public realm – the parks, the plazas, and the open spaces – would not be derived by urban precedents from models from the nineteenth century, walking radius, or from transit oriented development principles. It would be derived based on a mapping of the plumes of toxicity subsurface on site. In this way, the phytoremediation plant material that would be inserted to absorb these minerals and toxics would effectively indicate, through the death of the plant material, the need for additional remediation. This technique is on the one hand the reverse of traditional phytoremediation techniques, but it allows the shape of the city and the shape of the public realm to be derived equally through ecological processes. Corner and Geuze are indicative as kind of a generational type in landscape practice in that they have combined two things. First, both of them are trained in ecology – Geuze at Universiteit van Wageningen and Corner with McHarg at Penn. Secondly, they are also leavened by contemporary architectural fascination in ecology as a metaphor. So when you look at their work, what you are seeing is a sort of avant-garde architectural practice- an interest in autonomy of authorship, distance authorship, indeterminacy, and openendedness. Equally you see an applied science of ecology on the ground, and
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Visions of the City Figure 2: High Line
the combination of those two things plays at both ends of the registry as it was indicative of Landscape Urbanism practice today. Of course on that list we can put the highline of New York today I was just there last week for the first time, and it is amazing even in the winter. It does not yet emulate the rendering, but Piet Oudolf’s plant material is coming through and Corner/Field Operations has done what is essentially the kind of middle age work of landscape urbanism in that project. In Chicago’s Millennium Park, another major urban redevelopment project of recent memory in major markets in North America landscape emerges as the sort of median venue. In this case Kathyrn Gustafson’s Lurie Garden with Piet Oudolf provides a kind of central focus for design culture. What I want to suggest is not that we do not have design practice anymore. We still have planning bureaus and planning bureaucracies. We still train urban designers and urban planners. In many contexts, internationally and certainly in the United States, what I find is that the public realm is increasingly being delivered through a weird amalgam- a new hybridity between private real estate development donor and arts culture, private philanthropy combined with design celebrity associated with brand name designers, and disproportionately landscape architects. Landscape urbanists are leading this kind of work, so what I wanted to do was show you an array of examples of such. My basic thesis here is that under the Neoliberal economic condition, landscape urbanism has
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Planning, Ecology, and the Emergence of Landscape emerged as a way to go around the planning bureaucracy, as did the mayor of Chicago, Daly, or the mayor of New York, Bloomberg. It is not as though they do not have planning offices, but it is true they did not call those planning offices to execute that kind of signature destination environments that their cities desperately need to compete. In fact, they called upon the donors and arts groups, such as Cindy Pritzker in Chicago, or the Friends of the Highline – the community group that includes Robert DeNiro – and friends of others. A conversation with Bloomberg produced a condition in which the public realm is reduced to a kind of cultural extortion. When the Pritzkers call up and say “We will give you these millions of dollars and you will have a Frank Gehry,” the mayor of course will respond favorably. So in that context, landscape urbanism is emerging as a kind of spatial glue that can deal with the remediation of the site, and can equally deal with producing destination urban environments. There is a more recent project from a couple of years ago, the work of Clare Lyster from Chicago. The Graham Foundation held a competition for the completion of Lincoln Park to the north, which is again indicative of that kind of middle aged urbanist practice. It is no longer the new thing, but having said that, it is increasingly evident that in competitions like this, landscape urbanism is a kind of discourse that’s having quite a lot of say these days. Claire and her team won the competition based on a model of ecology and the functioning health of Lake Michigan. Another example from North America is in Houston. Christopher Hight, my friend at the Rice School of Architecture, was contacted by the Texas Medical Center in the wake of the tropical storm Allison, which lingered over the city for several days and produced an amazing amount of water. So researchers at the Texas Medical Center and Rice University began to study what the impact of a category two or three hurricane would be, on one of the single most important economic engines in the state, not to mention one of the largest medical complexes in North America. They did not call the hydro bureaucracy in Houston or the planning bureaucracy, not because they could not afford some knowledge that they had but because, in many contexts, these planning bureaucracies or the hydrological entities are perceived as incapable of affecting change. In many cases the planners have really been the agency responsible for protecting communities from change- they are very good at managing down to a kind of zero degree effect, and certainly the army corps
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Visions of the City of engineers and other hydro structure management regimes are on kind of shaky ground these days over the general competence. It is in that context that Christopher Hight and his group were commissioned to do a series of landscape urbanist strategies looking at Buffalo Bayou. They were to identify sites which possessed these weird combinations of planning for new future development, ecological management, and flood control. These sites were to also serve for destination and recreation under this new economic condition. Hight and his group did something that looks like planning done by focus groups. They interviewed neighbors, and they basically did what we used to refer to as physical planning. A small city in Israel called “Bat Yam” has a biennale of landscape urbanism. The first event was held the summer of 2008, and again they are going to host a same event in summer 2010. The mayor of Bat Yam, upon his election, went to his cultural advisors and said, “I am committed to making Bat-Yam a significant international venue for the arts and culture.” He looked at the Bilbao effect, and he understood the impact of design culture on leveraging the identity of his little town. His advisors said, “That is very nice, Mr. Mayor, if we pour millions of dollars into museums we would have the thirty-fourth most significant regional arts museum in Israel – not a big country; let us look at environmental practices instead.” So, independent of the planning bureau (which was perceived to be incompetent and corrupt) he proposed this idea of an environmentally-driven landscape urbanism program in which would produce a series of destination Figure 3: Houston and Harris County floodplains
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Planning, Ecology, and the Emergence of Landscape events using temporary art installations and environmental remediation. Typical of this would be the site and the reconstruction of a space of the beach. This evokes an emerging art practice. In this practice, ecological drivers and environmental practices are thought of as salutary and have value toward social justice. Environmental health is introduced as a kind of acupuncture element of an overall programmatic menu intended to draw destination recreation tourism and leisure. As a Latin American example, the Parque del Lago was a competition project from a year and a half ago in Quito, Ecuador. Michael Flynn, who got third prize in the competition, is indicative of what I am seeing internationally in that the techniques used in the drawings made a matured, middle-aged landscape urbanism. Using an airport site in the height of Quito’s Andes Mountains, which would to be relocated down the mountain, and he opened it, as the competition brief suggested, as a new public park. What is innovative for me is not so much the plan strategy or the succession idea. The indeterminate open-ended plant succession could produce a richer public realm, but that is fairly established practice. What is innovative here is that landscape urbanism is to go around the planning mechanism to avoid planning essentially even in this context in which urban design is still held in great esteem. The proposition here was that the hydrology of the airport, which was engineered to move water off the surfaces as quickly as possible, was the problem. The simple move of clogging up the Figure 4: Parque del Lago. View of the lagoons and proposed productive renewable landscape corridor
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Visions of the City airfield, to allow the site to collect water, would allow for more complex species Figures 5 & to inhabit the site over time. These kinds of actuarial table Excel spreadsheets, in which plant material is being installed in such a way as to steer or predict future succession, have now become typical for landscape urbanist practice. The landscape urbanist indicates future tendencies or inflicts future conditions with fairly modest initial investments. The idea being that we do not have the funds or the public will to develop a robust public realm. In the North American context, David Miller’s Toronto and Michael Bloomberg’s New York City have emerged as the two most important venues for landscape urbanism in part, I think, as a contrast of the new urbanism. The new urbanism took hold in Florida and rapidly spread over the country. Truly,in suburban America that the new urbanism has had its heyday. It is really in the leading cultural markets – the largest markets in the two countries and the two most significant cultural venues New York and Toronto – that landscape urbanism has really began to play out in terms of built form. Toronto’s waterfront is being redeveloped as kind of post-industrial redevelopment, which is reconceived around landscape urbanist strategies. The plan for that waterfront was prepared by Adriaan Geuze of West 8, who won the competition besting an array of five other teams led by celebrity international architects. Geuze’s scheme was the only scheme that was smart enough to say the real issue here on the water front is the Lancastrian ecology: recuperating fish habitat, collecting storm water from the downtown of Toronto and its business district, remediating it, cleaning it, and using ecological principles so as to allow it to make its way back in the lake. It was a post-industrial way of water remediation combined with Geuze’s understanding that the heavy street cars in Toronto together with their Québecial hydro-electric dam power produce one of the lowest carbon mass transits systems in North America. They were going to pull this system out of the ground 25 years ago because it was backwards. Now it is an extraordinary low carbon transit system. Geuze’s team was the only one that understood this system’s ecology. I do not mean to despair architects. I was trained as an architect and practiced as one. Having said that, it is the ecological literacy of Geuze and his team that begin with the ecological idea and that could then drive the urban design strategy. The West 8 team is really urban designers, and we have seen
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6: Toronto Waterfront
Visions of the City Figure 7:Don River Plan
their work in the Borneo-Sporenburg Inner Harbor of Amsterdam. What they produced is an urban design strategy which looks a lot like European urbanism, but it is built upon a framework that is fundamentally driven by ecology in the first instance. This strategy is a profound paradigm shift from the way that urban design and planning have played out in Toronto over the last twenty-five years. Another example from the waterfront of Toronto is the Don River, coming out of the Inner Harbor in Toronto, subject of the international design competition a year and a half ago. Harvard’s Michael Van Valkenburgh, associated with Kim Greenberg the urban designer, were selected as the prize winning scheme. The brief of the competition invited them to take this channelized industrial water course and essentially treble the volume of water and the volume of surface area given over to ecological function, to rebuild a wholly functioning river delta in the site of what had been a river delta. They also have a robust new residents’ urbanizations strategies for new communities on the waterfront. Interestingly, 66
Planning, Ecology, and the Emergence of Landscape Figure 8:BorneoSporenburg, Amsterdam
the landscape urbanist practice, maybe five or six years ago, was critiqued as, “Oh, those are the guys that do the big parks; is it that not really just about landscape at a large scale park system?” What I see today are landscape urbanists who are actually describing urban form, whether it is Geuze or, in this case, Van Valkenburgh, or others. This shift begins with a reconstruction of an ecology that is largely absent, and a reconstruction of a Lancastrian ecology at the river mouth. At the same moment, it includes some very progressive architectural ideas. The architects are Banish and Banish out of Germany. They included some very interesting low-carbon low-energy so is to make this as close to zero-carbon as a contemporary development could be. Having said that, these typologies are now driving the block typologies. The block structures as the shape of the city are not driven through historic precedents, not driven by 19th century precedents, urban design guidelines, or even planning mechanisms. They are driven through ecology of solar orientation and solar gain. A project by Chris Reed seeks an environmental response to the ideas of building form, block structure, and typology. Chris Reed, if you do not know him yet, I think is maybe the best in his generation. A Penn trained landscape architect in his thirties; he produced a scheme with Nina Marie Lister as the ecologist. Chris and Nina Marie for the same site produced what they described as a “sex park for fish”. It begins with the celebrity species: those species that have federal funding, that are in decline, that are somehow under threat,
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Visions of the City but also those that have name recognition, that can be put in advertisement campaigns, that can generate positive public good will. They can engineer certain environments from those species and the proclivities and interests of those species to reproduce themselves. One of their diagrams involves the area with which these species like to frolic—from the delta spectrum, to the tributary, and all the way down to lake. Working from that they then engineered from the fish and the sex life of these fish. One of the more interesting debates right now within landscape urbanism is the question about who is viewing this project. One of the things that Lister and Reed are clear about is that the fish do not care what their design solution looks like. It does not have to look 19th century; it does not have to have a picket fence and a pitched roof and a brick face on it. To make the fish happy, as they proclaim it equally here as in the Van Valkenburgh’s scheme, they proposed very innovative algae walls. These walls serve as low-energy, low-carbon green strategies for building, and the block structure as new forms of living. What does it mean to live on a wetland? What does it mean to live on a water body of this kind? These are among the questions that are emerging from landscape urbanist practices today. Chris Reed was one of the first in his generation of landscape architects to first put it in his firm name. His firm is called “Stoss Landscape Urbanism”, signaling very early on in his practice his commitment to essentially being an urban designer. The basic takeaway here is that the landscape architect has emerged as the urbanist of our age. It is my own story, but it is also the story of others, such as Chris Reed and many others of his generation. We are now seeing a body of work over the last several years in which, the urban form, the shape of the city, the shape of the block structure, and the shape of the building form are initially derived through ecological principles. Because urbanization in Asia has its own singularity and because the Chinese experience is different than the experience of urbanization in any other contexts, and, being honest with you, because a question I got for every lecture I gave was what about China, I thought I would close with an example from China. Shenzhen, China, is the sister city in inland from Hong Kong. It was, in the 1970’s, a fishing village of a few thousand people. It is now one of the most rapidly urbanizing cities in a rapidly urbanizing country. There was a design competition two years ago for the piece of the city called Longgang. I was on
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Planning, Ecology, and the Emergence of Landscape the jury that saw sixteen finalists, and the basic brief was kind of modest: give us another 200,000 to 250,000 new residents in a year or two, and at the same moment look at our historic fabric. This closing scheme is an explicitly landscape urbanist agenda. It is by Eva Castro and Eduardo Rico, both principle directors of the Architectural Association’s landscape urbanism unit in London. They did a scheme which overwhelmingly won the jury’s praise and is under contract. It is going into design now based on really two achievements: the first achievement is that they did by far the most convincing and comprehensive assessment of the culture heritage of Longgang—this is at a moment when the Chinese are largely erasing their cities, keeping just one block, or keeping just one Hutong block as a kind of exemplar but putting a shopping mall in it. Castro and Rico said: no, you have to go through the interpretive work of understanding your culture heritage and its manifestation in built form; this built form will become the identity of Longgang, and if you do not do this work now, it will be lost. This claim was progressive. It was the right argument to make and had a big impact on the jury. Even more impactful and significant in the jury’s decision was that they did, overwhelmingly, the most convincing ecological analysis and argument for the recuperation of the health of the river as the framework for the new city of Longgang. Having done what is a kind of classic landscape urbanist move like looking at the post-industrial river front and recuperating it, they developed a series of landscape typologies. These typologies varied from a typological scale down to a material scale. They also began from landscape typologies to build a kind of easement or setback for various tributaries and aspects of the river space. Only then did they go so far as to establish a kind of urban design framework or guidelines. We see here is again a kind of mature middle-aged landscape urbanist practice in which the shape of the city, the shape of the block, the height of buildings, and the setback of those buildings were based on solar gain and orientation, and derived in the first instance from an ecological understanding of the recuperation or re-engineering of the river. Only at that point does historic precedent filter in. Of course they look at block structure, typology, and many of the things that urban designers and planners have been trained to look at and to study, but what is significant for my purposes is that knowledge is only applied after and in service of the ecological-derived scheme, that is, the ecology comes first. This ecology-centric model seems to be what McHarg aspired to, but my answer is: no, not exactly. The McHargian project was driven by the idea of
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Visions of the City Figure 9: Longgang Plan
Figure 10: Longgang Landscape Strategies
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Planning, Ecology, and the Emergence of Landscape using ecological knowledge to decide where to build and where not to build to optimize building decisions, but the fact that we build our cities as in China’s as much a neo-liberal economy as they control top down delivers conditions in which the McHargian project has foundered. In the wake of that project, landscape urbanism practices have emerged as allowing for an ecological literacy to inform the shape of the city, but into which Neo-liberal forms of development can be poured. By far the most provocative thing that the AA team presented, which won both mine and the jury’s vote, was a diagram in which they described a parametric urbanism and associative urbanism. The brief allowed for the other fifteen of the sixteenth finalist entries to produce essentially a master plan, which included a fixed decision about where the building should go and the shape of the buildings for this huge new district with a quarter of a million new people. They also asked for a big model. Every other team dutifully built a ridiculous nine-foot model of acrylic and wood extravaganza and shipped it across the world. When you look at those 15 models, you know as soon as phase one is under construction, they are irrelevant. The first decision on site to build something and the first community to live on this site will invalidate master plan thinking. This shortsightedness was ultimately one of the failures of master planning, and it led to the rise of landscape urbanism. The Rico and Castro team argued: we need a parametric urbanism. We need a model like this. If you can make this out, you have on one side building height, on the other side you have density targets FAR ideas. Along this side you have this flank certain urban typological or block structure options. Their argument was that they would essentially engage their Chinese planner hosts in a kind of dialogue, a discussion about what the shape of the city could be in response to certain decisions or certain parameters. This way, if you decided to keep more historic fabric or less, obviously that would affect the outcome in terms of density or height. If you decided that buildings in certain place should be lower out of respect of certain view angles, of course that would produce greater densities elsewhere. So the kind of parametric modeling that you see in contemporary architectural practice is increasingly being absorbed into urban design discourse because of the claim that it can be more responsive and it can deal with much more complex data sets. Ultimately, they played through a couple of these scenarios and gave certain visions certain images of what that might look like if they were to assume a certain FAR, a certain density, a certain amount of retention of Hutong fabric; therefore, they gave their Chinese planning host a political challenge. The firm said that you needed to engage in
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Visions of the City a discussion about what the shape of the city should be. We cannot get off a Figure 11: plane from London or from Charlotte or from anywhere else in the world, land here for two days and determine we can say what the shape of the city should be in thirty years. These things are far too complex, even if you consider the combination of ecological and economic issues alone, not to mention the social and cultural ones. Having been told that, the Chinese planners were happy but slightly puzzled. The planners knew they were getting something innovative and progressive and maybe avant-garde, but they were puzzled about who they would have this conversation with. The political aspect of it for me and my colleagues was that it pushed the Chinese planners to imagine a community, or to convene a community, for a discussion about what the shape of the city should be ultimately. So a part of what I want to leave you with is to say that landscape urbanism is in a kind of matured middle-aged phase. In architectural culture, it is so three years ago. If you do not have the new thing in architecture every eighteen months, you are so behind the times. With this claim, it should be noted that landscape urbanism is being absorbed into a planning and urban design discourse right now. There are a lot of puzzlement, befuddlement, and questions. Is that not what we have been trying to do for the last forty-five years? I also see evidence that landscape urbanist practice is emerging as a vehicle of design through which we can reconcile the prospects for social justice and environmental health. Equally, the idea that we deliver our cities through this neo-liberal economic model results in a kind of random sampling internationally. I do not mean, in any way, to suggest that this is exhaustive or authoritative. What I do want to suggest is that if you are interested in the city, or if you are studying the city as an urban designer, I am thinking that landscape urbanism will be an important framework for you to at least be literate about, or maybe inoculate yourself with as you move into your career. [The preceding is a transcription of a lecture given at UNC Charlotte at Storrs Hall 110, February 17, 2010.]
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Longgang Aerial Plan
China, Carb, City Yung Hu Chang
As the order in the title, I will begin this discussion with China, then the issue of sustainability, and then the issue of city. China is a huge place with a long history, and it could easily take hours just to discuss where China is today. However, for me, perhaps this image will really give you a sense of the kind of China I have experienced. I grew up in a courtyard house in Beijing many, many years ago. This image sums up a very unique lifestyle you probably do not see outside of China or even outside of Beijing. There is a peacefulness to it, and also a kind of life in a city that is close to the nature. The man is looking at the bird, although in a cage, then there a piece of sky, then there is a courtyard, and then there a piece of the land. The third part of this image, however, is the fact the picture is not taken when I was young, and it is not taken in the 60’s or 70’s or 80’s. This is a very recent photograph. It was taken only a couple of years ago by a person who became my friend. He was from Portugal and came to China to photograph the way people live. Soon after he took the pictures the house was demolished. So the question for me is not so much about if we should still build buildings like it, but if we should still maintain that lifestyle. You Figure 1: Beijing Courtyard House
China, Carb, City will notice teacups on the tables outside, different plants, the birds, and so on. Is there any chance for us to still maintain that lifestyle, the unique lifestyle? This is the question. People certainly enjoy it very much, but now it is disappearing. So I would like to show a group of projects that are taking on that very question. The first one is a house we designed. The reason it is called the “Split House” is because we started actually looking at a courtyard house in the city. Soon after we started the design, we realized the courtyard project, as such, is very much urban, is about density, and is about one house next to another. It is about an introverted way of living, although once you are in a courtyard you are connected back to nature. We were thinking if that is an urban model and what we should do in the open landscape, which is what we were given to do this project. We ended up studying a prototype, rather than just one specific house. A house would be split in the middle and then, depending on the landscape and the topography the house, can be opened up on a different angle. This ensures that it would be able to accommodate this different geography, but the house would always be enclosed with the landscape to form a courtyard. Then in the end, this version is the one that got built because the site is a slope. The house is splitting in the middle, and then a courtyard is formed in the middle. The idea, of course, is still about a courtyard house but is not one for the center of the city but one for the open landscape. By doing the house in this way, we were able to have a courtyard and also save all these trees on the site. So the “Split House” actually went further to have a quite symmetrical plan. The symmetry is not really in a classical sense, but rather is to let these two wings of a house to talk to each other. We used rammed earth walls. Like Rick Joy who uses rammed earth for a set of reasons and personal agenda, we used the material particularly for our own observation. The site actually was meant to develop a state forest park; however, today’s economy in China is all about the market. The government would not put in the money simply to build a park as they would rather hand the land over to a developer (our client) to build houses. I wondered that, in today’s context, a house is not really built for a hundred years, not even fifty years; it is really talking about a life span of about twenty to twenty-five years. The questions for me became how long would this house last, and what would happen to the afterlife of the site? How long will a structure like this last? With those kinds of questions, we decided to build a house that would eventually
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Visions of the City Figure 2: Split House
disappear. It uses very traditional construction with the rammed earth wall. Inside of the house is laminated wood structure. By using earth and wood, not only is the house about traditional construction, but rather this traditional construction is really about a house that would not leave a lot of waste and debris on the site. Eventually maybe its life span would end. Although in the late 90’s I was not aware of issues like energy and the environment, I was concerned with the site. We were going that direction. This house has to do with the cultural tradition of courtyard living. On the other hand, we started to use materials in a particular way so it would address the issue of having lighter impact on the site. The symmetrical house has terraces on the second floor. There are introverted enclosed spaces in a courtyard, but you can look out on these terraces or look back into the courtyard. The reason the floor is glazing is because there is a stream going down from the hill and, although the client has since rerouted the stream, when we worked on the project we thought that we would really like the stream to stay where it is so you can see it. Here is the view looking out from the living room and then looking back in to the living room. You can also see the construction of the laminated wood frame and the rammed earth wall. Laminated timber is actually very much American, and in the early 2000s it was widely used in China yet. We worked on the rammed earth on our own with architect colleagues all over the world sending us recipes. Then we collaborated with a furniture maker to produce the structural wood. So the “Split House” is a traditional idea, and in a way, it is a passive approach to the environmental issues. This house was the beginning approach to a long series of efforts to 76
China, Carb, City work towards some of the environmental issues. Ufida is a major software company in China and we got to design their research and development center in Beijing. The project started from programming. The reason you see a lot of people doing boxing or Kung Fu is not that we watched too many Bruce Lee movies, but rather we realized that computer programmers do not work like the typical office workers from nine to five, but rather they work like us the architects. They may go into their office late in the morning but they stay on well into the evening and they pull all-nighters if necessary. We thought they deserved to have a better, healthier working environment, one that resembles perhaps home because they spend so much time in there. They also work in teams very much like architects. They need a lot of meeting spaces. They should also have places where they can get out and do some stretching. To really make it a healthier working environment we thought we should not make this a high-rise, although that’s what the clients would love— an iconic building in the landscape. We thought a three story building would give the people at Ufida much better chances to be closer to nature on the ground or go out on the top floor to be in touch with the weather and so on. The middle floor is suspended, and different in a way from both the ground and the third floor, so there are three very different spatial experiences. From there, we are trying to make buildings hin to ensure that there is plenty of natural light and natural ventilation. Courtyards are being formed between the buildings. There are big courtyards on the ground, and there are smaller ones on the roofs. The clients rejected our idea for the shape of the lake so it didn’t turn out that way, which you will see. Otherwise that’s how the building is, two layers of outdoor spaces and three layers of buildings. We thought of a mixture of spaces: outdoor and indoor spaces, public spaces, more private spaces, and so on. This is fabric architecture, or really it is a mat building as designed by Le Corbusier for the Venice Hospital. It is a classic modernist topology, but yet somehow being integrated with more traditional making of courtyards. You can see the layers and the integration of spaces on the second floor again. There are a number of little courtyard houses on the top floor. Essentially, it is an extensive flat building with outdoor spaces, big and small, and indoor spaces integrated together to make a carpet. The building got a flat top with terraces here and there as if it could go on forever. The idea is not about this particular
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Figure 3: Ufida Research and Development Center
Figure 4: Ufida Research and Development Center
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China, Carb, City configuration or look. Looks are important to architects, but it is also about the argument how social programmatic thinking, in this case would actually shape the building in a certain way, could provide a certain kind of living environment that we believe is healthier. Once, we started to talk about this kind of fine-grained fabric architecture in a way that suggests a kind of fabric urbanism. With our clients in the computer software industry, we also started to use the notion of a pixilation as our inspiration. The landscape design and the façade design were taking on the same kind of cue. Although we designed on a rather flat piece of land, we created a certain kind of topography in a man-made way. We were thinking about these open spaces not as the residual space of the buildings, but rather as the big open room-- so these exterior elevations are at the same time really interior facades for these big open spaces. The buildings are being connected by bridges, and there are courtyards with one story buildings, so there is a change of scale from various locations. There is a notion of layering that’s also very much part of the traditional courtyard houses. People can easily come out on the rooftop for exercise. In reality, nearly 95 percent of men in China smoke. We really do not want to encourage that behavior, but if they do, they actually have opportunities to, at least, do it outside. On different levels there are small courtyards with a cut into the building to let natural light to go down into the mini courtyard buildings. The natural light then travels to the ground level. There are also little courtyards on the rooftop for meditation and napping, perhaps. We embedded glass blocks into the concrete masonry wall. You can see we also used glass channels. We use several materials repeatedly on this building. During the day it would create a more controlled light quality inside, but at dusk or in the evening, it gives these buildings a certain amount of translucency. While the building is relatively enclosed from the outside, in the courtyard it is more open. This openness is consistent with the way the courtyard is, but rather, is really the way a northern building in China perhaps should be designed. The stronger exterior formation would be able to stand up against the severe winter, and then the courtyard would create a kind of micro-climate inside. Again, in a perhaps very primitive way, we started to take on some of the environmental issues using this very simple basic design measures any architecture would have demanded and then to organize the building masses and the spaces and the materials in such a way that it would cut down somehow, that is not really
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Visions of the City quantified in this case, the consumption of energy and carbon footprint in the end. I think this is a very small step we took towards sustainability from the split house. We started to really engage a kind of attitude working toward a low carbon world at Ufida. In this case, we noticed that what is really more important is the notion of a lifestyle that would bring people out here, as you can see at lunch break, which now becomes part of the corporate culture in this office. They would always come out to have a walk. If it is a better day, they spend a whole hour out here and they bring their lunch out, and if it is lesser day, like what we have today in Charlotte and in Boston, then they would go out just for a few minutes still because of the easy accessibility of outdoor spaces and nature. Our design would really encourage them to come out and then do their stretching once in a while. Concerning Carb,
it is about the environmental crisis we have been
confronted with: what we can do as architects. It is a huge question, and I don’t think any individual person would have a solution. Yet individual architects, and individual citizens in a way, could always contribute to this global cause we have today. One of my particular interests is about lightweight buildings and especially lightweight buildings built with plastic. There is a scene in an old movie “The Graduate” in which a fellow whispered one word into someone else’s ear, and that word was “plastic.” I pretty much do not remember the rest of that conversation. The reason I do not remember that is that I really find plastic particular fascinating. This is a particular kind of plastic called polyethylene. There are a number of qualities that are very important; one, of course, is that it is a 100 percent recyclable material, as we are talking about environmental issues. Structurally speaking polyethylene is very strong. It is typically used in China to pave parking lots and driveways. I realize that block can take a load pretty well horizontally, but we realize that it also works well vertically, so we actually developed a structural system with that material. There is an art project we did in ’08 at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. We used that particular material during the summer in the central courtyard of V & A. We designed this labyrinthine garden. By doubling up the material, the structure was able to go up to 4 meters and still maintain the level of translucency to create rather complex space. Experiencing
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China, Carb, City the space became a game for the old and the young. Of course this is just an art project, but we like to think that could be the future or at least one of the futures where architecture is going. Also, we gave it a try in our office bathroom. A few years ago we decided to build a new bathroom for our office. However, we had a little problem: we were short of cash. We decided this time we would really consider how to do a low budget project. One thing we knew was if we were going to put a foundation in for this bathroom then the cost would be just too high. So the question from a really cheap building transformed into how to make a building without a foundation. We used the material used to pave the parking lot in China. We contacted a manufacturer. They were so fascinated by our proposition that they gave us some blocks. They had some grey ones for free. We thought it looked a little nicer than the green ones. We sandwiched the paving blocks with Plexiglas on the inside and a layer of polycarbonate plastic on the outside. As a result, it is a plastic building, plastic roof, and so on. We developed three details: to make a two dimensional joint, which is straightforward; to turn a corner; and for privacy and insulation we cut a bubble wrap and wrapped them up so this is called “bubble wrap sushi roll”—the most sophisticated detail. Maybe it should be called Beijing roll, just like California roll, and so on. As you know today, especially with nano-technology, there are all kinds of materials, some being advanced materials. Building design becomes how Figure 5: Victoria & Albert Museum
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Visions of the City Figure 6: FCJZ Bathroom
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China, Carb, City to design materials. This is the World Expo in Shanghai which will open at the beginning of May. We got the commission to design the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion. Forty-four Shanghai companies organized themselves to do a pavilion which is the host pavilion in the corporate pavilion district. We decided that to really showcase the kind of cutting edge technology and the spirit of industries in Shanghai we ought to engage some new technology. One of them, I am not really sure if it is very new, is to use polycarbonate tubes to form a block of infrastructure resembling scaffolding. In these tubes we can have LED lights, water for solar energy collection, and we can also have water for mist making – the mist is for cooling the ground. Then we carved out interior spaces in this block: panoramic theatres, exhibition space, a store for souvenirs and so on. This building system is not an original idea in deed. We were inspired by the Centre Pompidou in Paris that Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers designed in the late 70’s. So the idea existed, and we are reusing their idea in a way because they were very much interested in the infrastructure of the building. However, in the late 70’s, their understandings of infrastructure were pipes with a diameter of 2-3 meters and made of metal. Today, we talk about plastic tubes of 5 cm diameter, so we like to think we could update that whole argument. It is difficult to draw anything on elevation because it becomes a line as it is just 5 cm, and it is just too small. So we made a model that is slightly closer to what Figure 7: Shanghai we envisioned, then the whole building is elevated. The waiting and queuing Corporate Pavilion
Visions of the City area is on the ground, and the escalators take visitors up. We started to work with the real material using some standard scaffolding parts to put together just some off-the-shelf tubes. We started to experiment with the prototyping of our ideas on a much bigger scale. An example is in Shenzhen, an installation with a 3-D LED performance, in which words and images can be zoomed in and out and can revolve inside the architecture. The concept of infrastructure, as well as translucency, remained in this project. Translucency is, for our office, a recurring theme. There was also a notion of a building under construction as scaffolding. This notion actually got us in trouble. Some high official from the City of Shanghai came to see the construction site and someone commented he liked the building very much “but when are you going to take the scaffolding off?” We told him, “soon, soon, we are going to do that soon” so as to not confuse them further. All the tubes have been assembled. The orange workers are from the construction company just for doing the polycarbonate tubes. As I said, polycarbonate is 100 percent recyclable, and that is the reason we actually picked the material. We used a large amount of it. If you don’t really know what they are made of, polycarbonate is actually the materials to make CDs and DVDs, so we all have plenty of polycarbonate with us all the time. If we recycle them, you can, for instance, use them to make some tubes for a pavilion at the expo. After the expo these materials will again be recycled. As you know, plastic materials are made from petroleum, but maybe this is a better way of using petroleum, if we recycle it, than to burn it for energy. Another project that is underway in our office is a skyscraper. We believe that the same kind of way of thinking: passive approach combined with some more recent technology is a way to really look at all the building design. We won a competition towards the end of last year for the first skyscraper ever designed in our office. In general we think whether we should build skyscrapers or not is the question we really need to ask. When we were given the opportunity to build a skyscraper, we started to ask another question. If you visit different cities, one striking thing is that for the low rise buildings they can look very different from one region to another, but all the skyscrapers tend to look very much alike. The city is almost on the southern tip of China, and it is three and a half hours away by plane from Beijing. Our question is: is there a southern 84
Figure 8: Shenzhen skyscraper; is there a skyscraper equipped for a region where the climate and TV Tower
the quality of light are different from the north? After some studies and research
we came up with this particular design. As you can see, this texture on the surface is doing two different things: One is this sculpting so the building is able to provide shading to its own surface. Because it is in the south, the sun is on top of the building, so the second use is to collect solar energy. We are using a technology that is quickly developing. It is called BIPV. It is not just a photovoltaic device; instead, it is a building integrated photovoltaic. It resembles a silk screen, printed on glass in a way. It filters light, allowing a certain amount of light going through meanwhile collecting solar energy. By a combination of these technologies, we are able to make the building save some energy. On the east and west side the sun is more horizontal than on the
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Visions of the City north and the south side. We configured the building facades accordingly. We did some rough calculations on how much electricity it can generate. Although it looks like typical photovoltaic panels, actually light can filter through. We also made a few diagram, for instance, to show the amount of sun exposure on the South elevation on May 1st from the morning at 9:00AM to 4:30PM, the same time on July 1st – there is none – and then September 1st. The core idea of our design: the configuration is about shading and is about collecting solar energy. Because of the sun angle on the west and east side, the configuration is different. It is composed with different materials. The project is still ongoing. We are trying to use a lot of basic wisdom and intelligence of architecture design, but combine this knowledge with the most recent technology. In a lot of the designs that we are doing, we are not able to do the more scientific calculations. We hope to be there very soon one day, but at least we are heading hopefully in the right direction. That is the Carb part, and the third part is about the city. The theme of this lecture series, as I understand, is about the city. In Beijing there is a particular street called, “Financial Street”, which is lined with banks. It is probably one of the worst streets in Beijing. What is problematic is that all these buildings, although they are close to each other, are free standing objects. They do not really communicate with or relate to each other, so they do not add up to become a livable city. Their landscape is presented just like an urban scale decoration. This kind of object city consumes a lot of energy, because people have to travel by car. There are highways everywhere in the city, and the city creates a very large carbon footprint. The biggest problem is that this kind of cities is not really livable. Shanghai is a much nicer and more livable city than Beijing, but yet in the heart of Shanghai, again, it is still automobile-oriented street. A street is no longer a street; it is a road. Landscapes are just decorations. It does not give people a chance to come close, let alone doing things in there. I do not believe that we are doing sustainability for the sake of it. Sustainability is really about livability. If in a city, people can really enjoy and live a healthier life, though it may consume a lot of energy, in a way I think it is probably okay. However the reality is that we consume a lot of energy, we generate a lot of pollution, and now we have a lousy life. Really they don’t make sense at all. If we are building this kind of new city, I do not believe China has a
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Figure 9: Shanghai Jiading Creative Hub Plan
Figure 10: Shanghai Jiading Creative Hub Plan
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Visions of the City future. We are going to use up all of the energy, and everyone is going to cough like hell all of the time. We finally got a chance to design, not really a city, not a town, but it is pretty big. It is an industrial office park northwest to the city center of Shanghai. It is one of the satellite towns of Shanghai. We asked ourselves: can we turn an office park into a town? It means that people are not just going to there and Figure 11: Beijing Financial District
work and go home or elsewhere, but actually have the chance to live in the city— not only in terms of having a home, but really where you can walk on the street, you can shop, you can socialize, you can have a happy hour. With that, we started to look at precedents in traditional water towns and cities in this region, and we came up with our master plan. If you look at this master plan, it is pretty abstract and boring. If you don’t see anything interesting, you are probably right. The only important thing is the size of blocks. You know the size of a block in Manhattan is 60 meters by 120 meters. In Beijing a typical block is 600 meters by 600 meters; so it’s huge. A typical European block is somewhere between 50 meters to 100 meters. In Berlin they call their blocks super blocks that are 200 meters by 200 meters. Here we are looking at 40 meters by 40 meters. It means the block is so small that there are a lot of interface between the buildings and the urban spaces,
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China, Carb, City and it creates a lot of street corners. This argument is not really new. In the city of Portland, Oregon, they thought about it too. They use a half-block idea although their block is a little bigger than this. For our project, the street inbetween is 10 meters wide. What we like to do is to offer urbanity in an office park to the extent that people do not come here just to work but would be able to appreciate a level of urban life, so they can walk and spend some leisurely time in the city. We developed a building design guideline by regulating the envelope of the building and defining the distance between them, and also require covered walkways. It does not matter how you design the building stylistically or in terms of materials and so on; you have to provide this arcade so it would increase the walkability of the city. We essentially developed three kinds of streets: first being totally pedestrian; the second one comes with landscape in the middle; in the third one, which is probably the most important, instead of separating the pedestrian traffic with the vehicular traffic, it integrates the two. The idea was initiated in Holland and was developed in Japan. It is called a shared street. The critical thing is for the cars to make a turn every so often that the car has to go really slow and does not become a threat to the pedestrians and children. When there are fewer cars people can cross anywhere they want to. Also because drivers wish to travel really fast they would take the bigger street rather than this kind of shared streets. In this whole region there are a lot of canals, so we developed more urban spaces along the canals. The design is not really about embracing new technologies but rather about using common sense to reorganize a city so that people can really live in it. In a way the design is about redefining the urbanity. At the same time, perhaps being traditional, it is about a new industry, in this case, about advertisement. On the ground level, there are a lot of cafĂŠs outside as well as other commercial and public programs. People live on top where there are apartments. They cannot be, according to the Chinese planning codes, condominiums; we can only design apartments and hotels. So in this one project we started to change a number of things about typical Chinese cities. We are also building up to the property line with no setbacks, and we are making buildings not as objects but as fabric. We are changing the way
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Visions of the CityVisions of the City
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China, Carb, City Figure 12: programs are made although it is still very modest, but we were able to push Shanghai Jiading ahead a bit. I hope that it is the right direction for the making of a new city. Creative Hub Street Perspective
Another project in my office right now is located at the center of Beijing, which is a 900-year-old city. We have the chance to redevelop some areas along the city’s north-south axis on which Tiananmen Square and Forbidden City are located. If you look the historic images, this was a really bustling commercial area in the past. However, they were all demolished soon after my office conducted a survey. So the question became not so much about preservation, because we really did not have the power to stop the demolition. We were able to save a number of buildings, but a lot of the buildings were unfortunately bulldozed. We were thinking, however, maybe the old fabric, the little alleyways called Hutongs in Beijing, could be saved. The texture of the city could be preserved and, by so doing, we could actually still preserve a lifestyle that is unique in Beijing. These areas used to be residential, and now they are commercial and public. Still you can find that original life quality that I described in the very beginning of the presentation. We studied the old formation of the blocks with courtyard houses and alleyways and reorganized them, enlarge the scale just slightly so that it can accommodate the public functions. People can go through the courtyards to find eateries and shops, and spend the day or afternoon there, although it is no longer residential. Together with the new architecture we make a newer block. I also want to mention that there is always a social agenda in design. In the West, especially among intellectuals, there is a strong sense of social responsibilities, which I share very much. However, we have to understand in China the market economy is very dominating. If you really design a residential building here, then few people would be able to afford them. For a courtyard house, the property value is 3 to 4 million U.S. dollars; so who can afford them? I think actually it is not a bad idea to turn them into this commercial development. I grew up in an area like this. If they were houses, I would never have a chance to get into one; but at least I can go there for a cup of tea. So that is the reality. It is not ideal, but I think it makes sense to this extent for this particular period under this idea of capitalism in China, because commercial is still more public. We made an aggregation of courtyard houses and reorganized them on a large scale but in a simpler formation. You can see some older buildings
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Figure 13: Qian
here and there, and the new buildings regrouped to form a more complex Men Old Town organization. New materials and older materials were used together to carry Regeneration the similar sense of the traditional architecture. If you take a close look they are unlike what they used to be, but they share something in common. The idea is not so much to build the way it used to be, the technology is lost in a different economy with a different lifestyle. The question is: can we create any continuity from the old to the new? We are experimenting with different ways of laying brick walls. They aren’t traditional but hopefully they give a sense of the old craftsmanship. Here are brick wall mock-ups on the construction site. To end this talk I want to show you again the types of work our office does. We design high rise building as well as folding screen. Folding screen is a traditional Chinese furniture that interests me a great deal. It is a very elegant wooden frame with rice paper over it, so it would have light coming through. It is about translucency. I think there is something about the whole business of the folding screen: it is between architecture and the furniture. Essentially, it is a wall, and that is what I find fascinating. We decided to do a contemporary version of it. With the help of a CNC milling machine in Shanghai, we created a contemporary version of folding screen using only one material. The material is not Chinese; it is American. This material is Formica. You have seen it a lot
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China, Carb, City but probably do not know the name of it. Check a kitchen countertop, and it is very likely made out of that material. The quality of this plastic slab that we discovered is that if you carve the Surreal slab down to some extent it starts to become translucent. In our case we wanted to get down to 4 mm so that there is a very good amount of light coming through. What we did was to make it thicker one end, which is 40 mm, and then reduce to 4 mm to the other end, so there is a gradation of light. The veins of the plastic resemble the veins of the rice paper. What is interesting about the old folding screen is that it used one material for structure, wood, and another material for light, rice paper. Here one material does those two things. I do not believe there is a cut between the old and new, but rather there is continuity. We also do things even smaller in our office; we do product design. We designed chinaware. Our inspiration came from gourds. In northern China we usually dry them up, cut them in the middle, and clear the inside. It becomes a kitchen utensil with which you can scoop water or rice or whatever else. We thought that is an interesting way to generate forms for chinaware. We did several sets of plates and bowls as gourds, and when you are not using them they can be displayed on the table. When you open them up they become plates and bowls. New bone china is a very fine and delicate type of porcelain. It makes a nice table-scape. We like to think there is some economy involved with all these configurations. When you put them together like a puzzle, they save some space on a table, and then you eat even more. We used the baby gourds for some different sauces for dipping and so on. It was actually a Figure 14: Folding Screen
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Visions of the City commercial success, and we were asked to do more. This time we were asked to do two different wine sets. One a decanter for European wine, and the other is a carafe for Chinese rice wine. Chinese wine is heated in the winter when you consume it, so the double layer would allow you to hold the piece. Western wine glass, on the other hand, was a difficult thing to design because it does not need to be designed at all; it is a classical thing. So at the end we only put a little dent on the bottom of the bowl but you still feel it with your hand, but visually you don’t even probably notice it very much. I have to justify why we do these product designs. Because we are architects, these are extracurricular activities. We actually do quite a bit of it: we are starting a clothing line this year, and we are doing art projects. I found that a link between the buildings we design and the cups we design exists, and all of them add up to a lifestyle. This lifestyle on one hand is disappearing, but on the other hand I think it is worth the fight to keep. We actually work in such an environment that looks unlike any other offices. Our agenda perhaps is not about technology for the sake of technology or sustainability for the sake of sustainability, but rather if we are able to actually work in such an environment, we have to think about a kind of livability that is particular to where we are. [The preceding is a transcription of a lecture given at UNC Charlotte at Storrs Hall 110, February 24, 2010.] Figure 15: HULU Oil and Vinegar Set
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China, Carb, City Figure 16: HULU Tableware
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Charlotte 2020 Vision Plan Cheryl Myers
The Center City 2020 Vision Plan is a community-wide planning process established to create a vision and recommendations for the growth and development of Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s urban core. The 2020 Vision Plan sets forth a bold vision for the future that is unique to this modern, livable and gracious City. It provides a set of innovative, transformative strategies that chart the course for achieving the vision. And it outlines clear implementation actions and performance measures to ensure that these ideas become reality in the coming years. Sponsored and managed by Charlotte Center City Partners, the City of Charlotte, Mecklenburg County, the 2020 Vision Plan’s study area includes Uptown, South End and other close-in neighborhoods adjacent to the I-277 loop. The lead consultant for the 2020 Vision Plan is MIG, Inc., a nationally known, multidisciplinary firm with a focus on planning, designing and sustaining environments that support human development. They have re-energized urban districts and city centers of all sizes including Boston, Denver, and Los Angeles. Their team also involved highly respected local firms including Cole Jenest and Stone, Kimley Horn and Associates and Wray Ward.
Community Engagement In an effort to engage citizens in the 2020 Vision Plan process and to create a blueprint for growth and development reflective of the entire community’s interest, the project team hosted a number of events to solicit input and feedback and to educate citizens. On October 21, 2009, nearly 300 people attended the first community workshop for the 2020 Vision Plan. More than 100 others participated online by watching the entire event as it streamed live on CLT Blog. Every participant, both in person and online, provided input on assets, challenges, opportunities and their visions for the future of the Center City. The second of three community workshops was held on March 31,, 2010, again at the Charlotte Convention Center. Approximately 250 people attended 96
Charlotte 2020 Vision Plan in person and another 244 individuals participated on-line as the meeting streamed live on CLT Blog. Attendees heard a presentation of the plan’s draft vision, goals and recommendations from lead consultant, Dr. Daniel Iacofano. Citizens then participated in breakout sessions or Idea Stations where they gave feedback on more detailed information about the recommendations. These breakout sessions were organized according to six focus areas of the plan including: Economic Vitality, Transportation & Mobility, Urban Living, Parks, Recreation & Open Space, Urban Design, and Arts, Culture & Entertainment. The workshop concluded with a report of the comments heard at each Idea Station and more information about the next steps in the planning process. On the evening of November 18, 2010, over 200 people attended the third and final community workshop at the Charlotte Convention Center. Participants received a handout that summarized the key high level recommendations of the plan and a comment card. Those in attendance were asked to prioritize key plan recommendations while viewing a PowerPoint presentation narrated by Daniel Iacofano of MIG, Inc.
Figure 1: Planning and Goals
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Visions of the City Along with three community workshops, a lecture series and neighborhood workshops were also conducted. On January 20, 2010 at the Wells Fargo Auditorium in Uptown, an audience of 300 attended a lecture delivered by Dr. Gary Hack, former dean of the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. In his talk structured around issues of design after the age of oil, Dr. Hack addressed the need to re–imagine and rethink how cities are designed and organized in a future without the plentiful and abundant oil upon which prosperous urban economies have been built. On January 21st and February 3rd, the 2020 Vision Plan Project Team hosted four neighborhood workshops in the north, south, east, and west areas of Mecklenburg County. During these four meetings, nearly 100 citizens voiced their issues and ideas about Center City Charlotte. Attendees received an update on the planning process to date before delving into an interactive workshop that gave everyone a chance to have their input on the Plan. Ideas and issues, both big and small, were discussed that have impacts on future projects, policies, and programs.
The Plan Several integrated, high-level recommendations bind together the plan’s specific initiatives and actions. These recommendations – grouped under the topics of Economic Development, Center City Living, Transportation, Sustainability and the overall Urban Experience – must all work together to achieve the vision for Center City. Relative to economic development, Center City must strengthen its position as the economic engine and employment center of the region with a greater diversity of industries and job opportunities. To achieve true urban living, Center City must provide a broad range of housing opportunities. Capitalizing on its central location in the region, Center City must have a seamless system of multi-modal transportation choices that serves residents, workers and visitors with a range of options to reach local and regional destinations. To support the vision of creating the most sustainable urban center in the Southeast, Center City must achieve environmental and social sustainability to remain attractive, competitive and viable over time. And finally, Center City’s physical context must evolve in order for it to become a truly great urban environment.
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Charlotte 2020 Vision Plan The Center City 2020 Vision Plan will be recommended for adoption by the Charlotte City Council and Mecklenburg County Board of Commissioners in 2011. The complete details of the plan is available on centercity2020.org. Figure 2: Implementation Model
Figure 3: 2020 Vision Plan Community Workshop
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Image Credits Visions of the City
Figure 1: Courtesy of trevor.platt under CC License Flickr Photo Archive Figures 2 & 3: Courtesy of Qun Zhao.
Climate Change and Urban Development All Figures: Courtesy of Gary Hack.
Cities After the End of Cities
Figure 1: Courtesy of NY Times Figure 2: Courtesy of http://archiveofaffinities.tumblr.com Figures 3-5: Courtesy of Design with Nature by Ian McHarg and Wiley Publishers Figure 6: Courtesy of Williamette Valley Environmental Protection & Development Planning Council
Planning, Ecology, and the Emergence of Landscape
Full Spread Figure: NM. Lister with James Corner/Field Operations, 2000 Figures 1, 5, 6, 8: West 8 urban design & landscape architecture Figure 2: Courtesy of Kwong Yee Cheng under CC License Flickr Photo Archive Figure 3: Hydrauli_city Project: www.hydraulicity.org. Christopher Hight, Project Director; Natalia Beard, Michael Robinson, Project Designers. Copyright and Courtesy of Rice School of Architecture/ Rice Building Institute Figures 4, 9, 10, 11 : m3project landscape urbanism Figure 7: Michael Van Valkenburgh, Associates Inc.
China, Carb, City
All Figures: Courtesy of Yung Ho Chang.
Charlotte 2020 Vision Plan
All Figures: Courtesy of Cheryl Myers.
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Image Credits and Biographies
Biographies Yung Ho Chang Yung Ho Chang, Professor of Architecture and Head of the Department of Architecture, comes to MIT from Peking University where he was Head and Professor of the Graduate Center of Architecture. He received his MArch from the University of California at Berkeley and taught in the US for 15 years before returning to Beijing to establish China’s first private architecture firm, Atelier FCJZ. He has exhibited internationally as an artist as well as architect and is widely published, including the monograph Yung Ho Chang/Atelier Feichang Jianzhu: A Chinese Practice. His interdisciplinary research focuses on the city, materiality, and tradition. He often combines his research activities with design commissions.
Robert Fishman Professor Fishman teaches in the urban design, architecture, and urban planning programs. He received his Ph.D. and A.M. in history from Harvard and his A.B. in history from Stanford University. He is a nationally recognized expert in the areas of urban history and urban policy and planning. He has authored several books regarded as seminal texts, on the history of cities and urbanism including Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (1987) and Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier (1977). His most recent work is on “ex-urbs.”
Gary Hack Gary Hack teaches, practices, and studies large-scale physical planning and urban design. Prior to coming to Penn, he was a professor of urban design at MIT, and a partner in the professional firm of Carr Lynch Hack and Sandell in Cambridge. He has also served as an urban design consultant for projects in Japan, Thailand, Taiwan, China and Saudi Arabia. Professor Hack has served on the board of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning and the Planning Accreditation Board. Professor Hack has prepared plans for over thirty cities in the United States and abroad. He was a member of the team that won the competition for the redevelopment of the World Trade Center in New York, and drafted the urban design guidelines for the project. 101
Visions of the City His research includes studies of urban design successes in the US, published as Lessons from Local Experiences, and an international comparative study of urban development patterns, published as Global Regional Cities.
Chris Jarrett Chris Jarrett is Professor and Director of the School of Architecture. His research and teaching traverses a wide range of environmental design issues, including green building theory, eco-tectonics, and sustainable building technology. He recently received the BP Solar Award for Innovation in the 2007 Solar Decathlon Competition, an AIA regional COTE Award, and an Outstanding Interdisciplinary Research Award. He has significant international teaching and program directorship experience. He is the author of over 30 articles and papers, has won numerous design awards, and his design work has been published in Japan Architect, Architecture, Progressive Architecture, and Interior Design.
Zhongjie Lin Dr. Zhongjie Lin is an assistant professor of architecture and urbanism and a core faculty member of Master of Urban Design program. He received a M.S. and a Ph.D. in architecture from University of Pennsylvania, and a B.Arch. and an M.Arch. from Tongji University in Shanghai, China. His research focuses on modern architectural avant-garde movements, theory of urban design, and contemporary urbanism in East Asia. Dr. Lin is the author of Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement: Urban Utopias of Modern Japan (Routledge, 2010) and Urban Design in the Global Perspective (China Architectural & Building Press, 2006, co-authored with Kuang Shi and Gary Hack). He published a number of articles in periodicals such as Journal of Urban Design, Journal of Architectural & Planning Research, Time+Architecture, and Architectural Journal. He coordinates School of Architecture’s China Program and is enthusiastic in promoting international academic exchanges. He practices architecture and urban design in China and the U.S., and lectured or served as studio critic at several prestigious universities in both countries.
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Image Credits and Biographies Cheryl Myers As Charlotte Center City Partner’s Senior Vice President for Planning & Development. Cheryl Myers contributes to strategically guiding the growth and development of Uptown and South End of Charlotte. Myers currently serves as the project manager for the 2020 Vision Plan, a blueprint for development and growth of Center City neighborhoods for the next ten years and beyond. Myers previously worked for architectural and engineering firms in Boston on projects such as: the Central Artery/Tunnel Project (or ‘The Big Dig’) and the MBTA’s Southwest Corridor Project (or Orange Line Subway Extension) . She has also served as the Senior Planner for Urban Design and Area Plans with the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Planning Board. Myers holds Masters degrees in both Architecture and City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With a major in Studio Art, she earned a Bachelor of Arts from Mount Holyoke College.
Charles Waldheim Waldheim teaches design studios at the intersection of landscape and contemporary urbanism. Waldheims research focuses on landscape architecture in relation to contemporary urbanism. He coined the term landscape urbanism to describe emerging landscape design practices in the context of North American urbanism. He has written extensively on the topic and edited The Landscape Urbanism Reader (Princeton Architectural Press, 2006). Previously Waldheim was Associate Professor and Director of the Landscape Architecture program at the University of Toronto. He has lectured on landscape and contemporary urbanism across North America, Europe, and Australasia. He has taught as a visiting faculty member at Harvard University, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, and Rice University. He is an honorary member of the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects, and in 2006 was recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship in Landscape Architecture at the American Academy in Rome.
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