Urban life balance between nature and architecture (english) by Veronika V. Parfenova

URBAN LIFE BALANCE BETWEEN NATURE & ARCHITECTURE

VERONIKA V.PARFENOVA

Veronika Parfenova

URBAN LIFE. BALANCE BETWEEN NATURE AND ARCHITECTURE

Landscape can provide different kind of things: leisure, comfort, tranquility, food, water, shadow in a sunny day, home for different species, place to rest, place to live. Nature is not good or bad, Nature is what we need now. (V.V. Parfenova)

Veronika Parfenova

URBAN LIFE. BALANCE BETWEEN NATURE AND ARCHITECTURE

Contents

Foreword ......................................................................................................... 3 Introduction ................................................................................................. 4 How and when the city turned into a metropolis? ................................. 6 Visual differences of past and presence. ................................................. 8 City = Choice and Freedom. .................................................................... 10 Urban open spaces. ................................................................................... 12 Conclusion ................................................................................................. 15

Veronika Parfenova

URBAN LIFE. BALANCE BETWEEN NATURE AND ARCHITECTURE

Foreword Mankind is always in the process of constant evolution. Most of us no longer live in villages and towns, or at least most of us trying not to, because the life is centered in big cities, mega cities with mega structures, such as New York, London, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, San Paolo, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Paris, Berlin, Deli, Singapore, etc. Many of humans are not inhabitants of the natural environment. But we still need nature, we need green landscapes because it provides physical and psychological health for us. We are living an urban life. After years of neglect of the human dimension, here at the beginning of the 21st century we have an urgent need and growing willingness to once again create cities for people. We have got new global challenges. The vision of ensuring lively, safe, sustainable and healthy cities has become a general and urgent desire. It is important that residents of the city can be invited to walk and bike as much as possible in connection to their daily activities, because now most of the people who live in urbanized world do not have many chances to have it every day. It is urgent to strengthen the social function of city space as a meeting place that fulfills the aims of social sustainability and well-being society. Work on urban planning concepts now requires plenty of expertise in the area of complex engineering design, ecology, social science, architecture, urban science and landscape design. Urban space is impossible without dialogue, exchange of opinions and experiments. There is God-given nature and nature that we create ourselves: architecture. True architect can to a certain extent see him/herself as a creator of this second nature.

Veronika Parfenova

URBAN LIFE. BALANCE BETWEEN NATURE AND ARCHITECTURE

Introduction In this thesis I want to talk about the meaning and the purpose of the city and its urban landscape, its green zones, open spaces, public spaces and how it all interacts with our lives. What influence it has on our lives. Think about what mistakes have been done in urban planning and what shall we do to fix them, are we able to it and how? I won’t give all the answers but my aim is to push the readers to think about it, think about the importance of natural environment and how we can apply it to urban life. What we can modify what we have got from urban history, how to adopt it to a modern one. Each chapter represents different questions: What cities used to be? Why it’s started to change and when? When and why again, we start having difficulties living in concrete jungle? What were the mistakes of urbanization? How things are nowadays in the city? How is life and why people changed their life from being a habitant of a town to become a habitant of a city? Why do we have discomfort in every day big-city-life? What happened when u get out of a “man-made” malls public spaces? Why the human dimension is a necessary new planning dimension? As long as the landscape is the primary element of urban order, how landscape architecture and urban design can help to solve the problems that we are dealing with in city-planning? This will be a “talk” about Landscape urbanism. The discussion is what we want our cities to be, we have to have solutions for both: centers and suburbs. Possibilities for expanded public spaces to ask questions and find the answers to the following: why our open public spaces look the way they do? Who wants them to look that way and why? Are they functional? Do they need to be functional in terms of traffic or in terms of beauty or in terms of being public domain, public space? Let’s keep an eye at the cities that I believe need to work in progress. While contemporary cities have a lot of in common they have much more distinctions. What is the phenomenon of the city? The present- day structure of the urban community includes everything that is surrounding us: nature, buildings, transport, pedestrians’ traffic in the streets, bicycles. Whereas we used to associate cities with the increasing number of cars, the emergence of new thoroughfares and traffic interchanges, erection of numerous skyscrapers, today we often ask ourselves: what is coming next? People are getting tired in

Veronika Parfenova

URBAN LIFE. BALANCE BETWEEN NATURE AND ARCHITECTURE

the megacities; they have difficulties withstanding anthropogenic stress, slowing down on their life dynamics to relax to look around. Urban landscapers and architects should start taking better care for of the city, blocks, offices, public spaces, recreational and rehabilitation areas. We all dream to live in a friendly city, attuned to human needs. Urbanized space is a place where all inventions of mankind exist in a full harmony with urban environment and nature.

Veronika Parfenova

URBAN LIFE. BALANCE BETWEEN NATURE AND ARCHITECTURE

How and when the city turned into a metropolis? When talking about nowadays city what do we all imagine? What kind of landscape we firstly think about? Is it a natural one? Is it a concrete jungle? It is easy to answer: mostly when having a thought of a contemporary city, we all have an image of skyscrapers, highways, cars and subway system. Busy life. Hard to imagine someone when saying “city” or “megapolis” will imagine quiet streets, parks or any other public spaces. But this is now, before cities used to be different in many ways. So, let’s see how situation in urban landscape have been modified, how cities have had grown, parks have had created and how people’s lives have had changed at the same time. The time 20th century has begun, changes in global urban landscape started being more and more obvious. The industrial revolution took its place in every human being’s life. Natural landscapes have been transformed into cities, mountains became valleys, and deserts became lively places with lots of vegetation. By the end of that century, technologies let people change planet Earth and its natural shape, which affected all inhabitants, their minds and humanity got a new model of the “paradise”. After the Second World War there were much more visible transformations inside the cities. During that time plenty of them were destroyed completely and some were just damaged. Clearly, everything had to be build and made as fast as possible because people got no home, no place to live, place to work or study. And it’s not only affected environment, it also affected people’s dreams. They wanted to forget what had happened so they tried to change the surroundings. And with those dreams we built the reality that we know today. More and more, faster and faster industrial revolution started spreading everywhere around the globe. All types of transportation replaced the one we used to have (horses): automobiles, trains, buses, trams, trolleybuses. Telecommunication times had begun. Now people could call each other, that was something very different from the way people used to communicate in the past. The way to school or work became faster, easier and took less time than it

Veronika Parfenova

URBAN LIFE. BALANCE BETWEEN NATURE AND ARCHITECTURE

used to take before. Past century was revolutionary because of what was discovered. As the water in the river streams into the sea, people streams into cities. Agricultural era: it was beginning of the end of it. Lack of work in villages brought farmers to the cities where they have built slums, which in future become a big complicated problem. Mega cities were born. Concrete jungles with lots of traffic and very rhythmic life. More concrete-less natural landscapes, lack of parks and green zones. The mistakes in city-planning were made because changes were spreading too rapidly. Ever-busy, ever-building, ever-in-motion, ever throwing-out the old for the new , we have hardly had time to pause, to stop and to think about what we have thrown away. Meanwhile, the everyday landscape becomes more and more nightmarish, more unmanageable each year. The word “development” becomes not as positive and nice-to-hear as it used to be. Most of the architecture that was built in the last century in our countries is brutal, grey, unhealthy, spiritually degrading, sometimes can be even called depressive. Urban space has stopped to be associated with something pleasant: shopping malls, plazas, office “parks”, glass walls. This process of destroying, rebuilding, largely became our economy. Destruction of age-old social arrangement, distinction between city and country life, it was rural landdestroying. All of us need to try to discover how and why it happened, and what we can do as professionals. Nature, Planet Earth is a place for living. What it has become, in most of the countries? Firstly it was all wild, after that it was the agricultural landscape, deprives wildlife. This rural landscape remained the abode of nature, but the new version of nature, wild unbridled force nor the cold scientific curiosity. It was safe, green, warm shelters, giving life to the realm, full of fruit, grain, sheep and poultry, its hills and valleys of the feminine forms. It was a sweet homeland. First of all it was the antidote to a cruel new place called industrial city. We can see that the ecological method is effective in combating rural metropolis region in prospect of urbanization. But can it solve the problems of an existing cities? What is “city”? Firstly, it is a sum of natural processes adapted by man. City is a world, which was created by mankind, with its own structure, culture, historical development.

Veronika Parfenova

URBAN LIFE. BALANCE BETWEEN NATURE AND ARCHITECTURE

Visual differences of past and presence. Some decades ago, in the end of 19th century, beginning of 20th , only few towns were worthy of the term city as well were beset by the horrors by the era of industrialism. The urban culture was made way too rapid and insecure. The reason was that the main aim at that time, after the Second World War, was to provide basic needs for citizens, such as: houses, schools, hospitals. Only nowadays we started to figuring out how to escape the creation of new industrial cities for a better life elsewhere. The spaces that we live in are not only buildings, but also streets, public institutions, roads, highways, parks, shopping malls, giant supermarkets, where we must walk quite a long way to reach the destination according to the scale of contemporary cities. Everything is car-centered. Car-scaled. Far, cold, uncomfortable. Components of the city life such as office centers and houses are extremely separated one from another, it is not as compact as it is used to be, it is not a ten-minute walk anymore. People without a car are just unlucky. For people, who lives in suburbs, but works in downtown, they must drive every day to their job, supermarkets and back. So it is necessary to have two cars or sometimes even more, if the kids are grown up. This creates traffic jams and also it costs a lot of money. Families are under the pressure of those costs, less children to be born, more chances to get depression. At the other hand, in some places in the world there are slums, where people get low-quality life with no water, pipe system, no health care provided, no education, no job, there are more children get born, more slums build, more crime in the city.

Let’s get back to “developed” places, the urban landscapes. It is becoming very popular and very common to create, design and build “leftover” roads, the roads without clear separation between pedestrians and the automobiles: putting sidewalks together with the space for riding a bike, the same space to drive a car, same space for children to walk. What is horrifying is that it is being used by many landscape architects and urban planners. All they thinking about is projects is to be build faster and cost cheaper, what are real

Veronika Parfenova

URBAN LIFE. BALANCE BETWEEN NATURE AND ARCHITECTURE

needs of the people, who will use it for the next 50 to 100 years, do not matter to designers and planners nowadays at all. “Mechanic” solutions are only oversimplifying the real issues, but it doesn't care of the psychological aspect, real influence on people’s lives, of the atmosphere in the district, the landscape itself. The culture of good place-making is dying: just like the agriculture, it is a body of the knowledge and skills. We shall take it serious and take care of what we have got now and what we will bring to the future. Public realm is mostly composed of roads. Environment must be more hostile to pedestrians, place with the spiritual rewards. People are most likely to enjoy outside spaces. Now there is a lack of this type of pleasure, the reason to it is that there is not enough of green spaces, open spaces, public spaces. Spaces where we all gather together and socialize, or opposite-get some peaceful moment to relax and take a deep breath, think and dream. Just be ourselves. All the generations who were born before 1995 spent their childhood at the playgrounds, fields, farms, parks, gardens, climbing trees with their friends, learning how to socialize naturally. Children which were born after that, at the age between 6 and 15 years old rarely have that opportunity, opportunity to be physically active which means psychologically healthy, stressed-free. Most of them now are spending their free time playing computer games, it might be the result of bad planning as well, the result of not having an opportunity to enjoy spending time outside, the lack of playgrounds and children’s parks. Trees which create shadows and comfort.

Veronika Parfenova

URBAN LIFE. BALANCE BETWEEN NATURE AND ARCHITECTURE

City = Choice and Freedom. We need to try to diagnose the city in order to improve its health and by doing it make dwellers happier and healthier. How can we understand where is the “pain” and how to help? First we need to understand the city itself: all you have to do is to look at the market place, train station, local theatre, embankment, popular park: and those are all public spaces and all of those places are very valuable. People are coming to the city for liberation, acquiring freedom and as well assuming obligation to it. Urban community is a very complex and at the same time interesting mechanism. The meaning of the “City” is identical to “choice”. If you do not want to have choice, you do not need to go to the city. A city always offers an opportunity for choice and it is just like the nature: always ready to provide the shelter to those who need it. We are the part of it, and historically is a citadel of democracy and a generator of true freedom. It is a contradictory place, at once it can be bad and good. You always get something and loose something, it is very hard to reach the state of the balance. The good choice is when everything is near, more compact. Each of us chose what we want: favorite coffee shop where you can sit at late evening, a forest near your house, which reminds you maybe of your childhood, job five minutes’ walk away from where u live, etc. If you have decided that you want to have a variety of public gardens, boulevards, parks, theatres, cinemas, bars, places for education and work nearby - you really need a city. We need to live in different places in different time of our lives. Open spaces, well planned open spaces, both public and private, bring the balance to the city between nature and architecture. In the case of architecture, the meaning is very clear, but what does mean “nature” and how it can exist, the balance of it? It can, and it can because of landscape architects and designers, public artists doing thing such as land art, as well can create a strong bound between the nature and the architecture. As humans more and more live in man-made surroundings, which are cities – they have a risk of harming themselves by building and acting in ignorance of natural processes. Besides that man-nature beneﬁt, urban open spaces also serve as islands of nature, promoting biodiversity and providing a home for natural

Veronika Parfenova

URBAN LIFE. BALANCE BETWEEN NATURE AND ARCHITECTURE

species in environments that are otherwise uninhabitable due to city development. In a sense, by having the opportunity to be surrounded by a natural urban green spaces people gain a higher appreciation for the nature around them. The balance between nature and architecture are green public open spaces, urban open spaces.

URBAN LIFE. BALANCE BETWEEN NATURE AND ARCHITECTURE

Veronika Parfenova

Urban open spaces. What is an urban open space? It describes many types of open areas. It can be counted as a part of development, urban open space is a natural and cultural resource, and it is a synonymous to both unused land and park, recreation areas. Another can be: land and/or water area with its surface open to the sky, serving conservation and urban shaping function in addition to providing recreational opportunities. Almost all instances, in fact, are the green space. However, there are examples of urban green space which, though not publicly owned but are still considered urban open space. From another point, public space in general is deﬁned as the meeting or gathering places that exist outside the home and workplace that are generally accessible by members of the public, and which foster resident interaction and opportunities for contact and proximity. This is focused on public involvement. The beneﬁts that it provides to citizens: • • •

Recreation (Organized sports and individual exercise; passive recreation, which is simply means just spending time in the open space.) Ecology (The conservation of nature in an urban environment has a strong influence on people.) Aesthetics (The aesthetic value of urban open spaces is self-evident. People always enjoy viewing nature.)

As well it provides the public health. Improvements in medical technology that allow humans to heal from numbers of different diseases and medical conditions, research shows that contact with the green environment offers great benefits to mental and psychological health. Researchers are continuing to find evidence of increased health benefits from a green environment that provides abundant vegetation. When physical activity of an individual is paired together with green environments, there are more health benefits. Psychological benefits gained by visitors to urban green spaces increased with their biodiversity, indicating that 'green' alone is not sufficient, the quality of that is important as well in delivering the health benefits.

Veronika Parfenova

URBAN LIFE. BALANCE BETWEEN NATURE AND ARCHITECTURE

The more interaction we have with nature, the more we have a restorative effect on attention and/or focus levels. In this way we are providing to the brain a break from over stimulation. A research made in New York by the group of scientists in United States of America, for a better understanding how the green environment and open spaces can increase and strengthen our immunity system, showed that women who spent six hours in the woods for two days showed an increase in white blood cells. This increase was also recorded to have stayed for seven days afterwards. How else can we provide benefit to our everyday life? Benefits from nature can be manipulated by humans as well. When showing pictures of scenic, natural environments brain activity is increasing associated with recalling happy memories, same happened with showing pictures of green spaces, beautiful parks and gardens. This means that even if we put more colors and images of the nature it will increase the level of the life-quality. How about physical activity, that open public spaces provide to us? Studies done on physically active adults from 35 to 70 years old showed that there are amplified benefits when the physical activities are coupled with green space environments. Those leads to decreased levels of stress, lowers the risk for depression as well as increase the frequency of participation in exercise. Casual group walks in a green environment provides a positive attitude and lower stress levels as well as risk of depression. When open spaces are attractive and accessible, people are more likely to engage in physical activity, which obviously gives health benefits. Accessibility means a distance of a five to fifteen minutes’ walk (from 400 meters to 1.5 kilometers). Neighborhood layouts must have this type of accessibility. We should mention as well that it is important that, physical exercise in natural environments do not necessarily elevate one’s health state such as treating depression, but rather benefit in the form of preventing the decrease of peoples’ mental well-being, for example the risk of depression or distress. Regular use of non-natural, sporting environments, was positively and significantly associated with greater well-being in terms of physical health, but no such correlation was found with regular use of any of the natural environments from the study. This suggests that green environments and their positive benefits on human health are limited to mental health and well-being. A large epidemiological study made by British scientists in London says, that wealthier people were generally healthier than people who have a lower

Veronika Parfenova

URBAN LIFE. BALANCE BETWEEN NATURE AND ARCHITECTURE

income, the reason is that the wealthier individuals reside in areas which are mostly much more concentrated with green space. There was a positive correlation with increased green space and improvement in health. Also, from equal exposure to green space, everyone benefited but the lowest income group benefited the most. These striking results based on a very large sample confirm the health-related effects of green space and suggest having them, to bring them more to the neighborhoods. This is would not only reduce health disparities between incomes, but also it would also promote general health and well-being of all citizens.

Veronika Parfenova

URBAN LIFE. BALANCE BETWEEN NATURE AND ARCHITECTURE

Conclusion After all I want to mention that everything what had happened during and right after the industrial revolution. Has a huge resonance in our environment, but the number of landscape designs and parks started growing, friendly urban green space grown, situation became slightly different. Those spaces brought more comfort and relaxing places to the big cities which were really in need of it and many still are. The work of an urbanist, architect, landscape architect nowadays is a true challenge. Each city is unique and we must take that challenge to find out how we can manage city scapes. By finding a solution to it we can continue living in an urban paradise, the one where all: technologies, nature and people live in harmony. Balance between nature and architecture is a well done urban planning with the must of green open spaces, gardens, parks, streets with attractive and functional landscape design and infrastructure. Now it is not just luxury but also a necessity in the modern metropolis. This helps a lot to create a rich cultural life in the cities.

Veronika Parfenova

URBAN LIFE. BALANCE BETWEEN NATURE AND ARCHITECTURE

Notes

[1] Marilyn. (1975) “Decision Making in Allocating Metropolitan Open Space: State of the Art.” Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science. Pp. 149–153.

[2] Francis, J., Giles-Corti, B., Wood, L., Knuiman. M. (2012). Creating sense of community: The role of public space. Journal of Environmental Psychology, Volume 32,Issue4,Pages401-409.

[3] Lee, S. (2008) “Deﬁning Parks and Park Systems.” From Recreation to Re-creation. American Planning Association.

[4] Eysenbach, M. (2008) “Park System Function and Services.” From Recreation to Recreation. AmericanPlanningAssociation.

[5] Thompson, C. (2013) Activity, exercise and the planning and design of outdoor spaces. Journal of Environmental Psychology, Volume 34,Pages7996, ISSN 0272-4944.

[6] Bureau of Municipal Research. (1971) Urban Open Space: Luxury or Necessity?. Toronto.

[7] Berry, D. (1976) “Preservation of Open Space and the Concept of Value. American Journal of Economics and Sociology. Pp113–124.

[8] Fuller, R.A., Irvine, K.N., Devine-Wright, P., Warren, P.H. & Gaston, K.J. (2007). Psychological beneﬁts of green-space increase with biodiversity. Biology Letters, 3,390– 394.

Veronika Parfenova

URBAN LIFE. BALANCE BETWEEN NATURE AND ARCHITECTURE

[9] Berman, Marc G., John Jonides, and Stephen Kaplan. (2008). “The cognitive beneﬁts of interacting with nature.” Psychological science. Pp. 1207-1212.

[10] Li,Q. (2007). “A forest bathing trip increases human natural killer activity and expression of anti-cancer proteins in female subjects.” Journal of biological regulators and home costaticagent. Pp. : 45-55.

[11] Kim,Gwang-Won,etal. (2010). “Functional neuro anatomy associated with natural and urban scenic views in the human brain: 3.0 T functional MR imaging.”KoreanJournalof Radiology. Pp.: 507-513.

[12] Astell-Burt, Thomas, Xiaoqi Feng, and Gregory S. Kolt. (2013). “Mental health beneﬁts of neighbourhood green space are stronger among physically active adults in middle-toolder age: evidence from 260,061 Australians. ”Preventive medicine.

[13] Mitchell, Richard. (2013). “Is physical activity in natural environments better for mental health than physical activity in other environments?.” Social Science & Medicine 91. Pp. 130-134.

[14] Hartig, T. (2007). “Three steps to understanding restorative environments as health resources.”Open Space People Space. Ed. Catharine Ward Thompson and Penny Travlou. London.

[15]cMitchell,R. and Popham,F. (2008). “Eﬀect of exposure to natural environment on health inequalities: an observational population study.” The Lancet 372.

[15] Taylor, Hilary A. (1995). Garden History. “Urban Public Parks, 1840–1900: Design and Meaning”.

[16] Young, Terence. (1995) “Modern Urban Parks.” Geographical Review. Pp: 535–551

Veronika Parfenova

URBAN LIFE. BALANCE BETWEEN NATURE AND ARCHITECTURE

[17] URBAN magazine (2013), number 11, Russia, Moscow. [18] Howard, J. (1993). The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape. Simon and Schuster., United States ISBN 978-0-671-70774-3 [19] Lars Muller Publishers. (2010), “Ecological Urbanism”, Harvard University. ISBN 978-303778-189-0

[20] “Educating architects: How tomorrow’s practitioners will learn today. (2014). University of Greenwich, Thames & Hudson, London ISBN 978-0-500-34300-5.

[21] “The Landscape Urbanism Reader”. (2006) Princeton Architectural Press, New York ISBN 978-1-56898-439-1.