Traffic management and reinventing wheels

Commentators

At Ecobuild Michael Sorkin talked about designing new cities in the US and in China, where walking radiuses of 10 minutes were being used as a defining characteristic of a healthy and sustainable neighbourhoods.

Elsewhere, Will Self keeps up his ‘psychogeography’ campaign, extolling the benefits and radicalism of travelling by foot:

We understand that to walk the city and its environs is, in a very powerful sense, to use it. The contemporary flâneur is by nature and inclination a democratising force who seeks equality of access, freedom of movement and the dissolution of corporate and state control.

Meanwhile, the economics of having to transport people and goods, and the small matter of pedestrian safety keep other discussions down to earth.

Legislators

Somewhere in the middle, Manual for Streets 2 (MfS2) and the concept of shared spaces keeps both viewpoints in focus for designers and planners – and for product manufacturers and technological innovators – all of whom are involved in squaring the circle, and trying to create better environments for living.

Pedestrians

In theory, barriers, bollards and strict demarcation are against the spirit of shared spaces. But the reality is that sympathetic and thoughtful design can mean that low key safety features are less intrusive.

There’s also the school of thought that says we can revel in street furniture elements as individual features in their own right. Note the popularity of the Bollards of London blog.

‘Smart’ traffic management technologies are also being more closely integrated into realtime traffic control and pedestrian movement.

The thinking behind ‘puffin crossings’ (‘pedestrian user-friendly intelligent crossings’), for example, is to make traffic signal and pedestrian crossing control more contextual, while encouraging greater awareness of traffic by people crossing busy roads.

The ADEPT website (the Association of Directors of Environment, Economy, Planning & Transport) makes the same points:

ADEPT believes that seeing approaching traffic will reduce the risk of an accident should a driver fail to stop at a crossing. Pedestrian detection may be used to confirm the presence of a pedestrian waiting to cross, and to vary the duration of crossing time to more accurately reflect the time needed to cross the road. The crossing time can be extended for groups of pedestrians, and for mobility impaired users, or operate for a minimum time when a single pedestrian crosses quickly.

It’s not necessarily something that would float Will Self’s boat, but systems and software are being harnessed here to help pedestrians and drivers to co-exist. This summary from the Intelligent Transport Society talks about influencing driver awareness and behaviour:

ITS [intelligent transport systems] can be applied to road transport to improve efficiency and safety through the provision of on-line information to drivers in their vehicles and by equipping the vehicle with computerised systems which assist the driver (e.g. following and lane keeping).

It also improves the efficiency of transport by use of electronic systems to improve traffic control and enforcement of traffic regulations. Electronic motorway tolling and congestion charging are also ITS options.

Conclusion

For designers and for residents – whether commercial or private – there will, no doubt, be ‘robust exchanges of views’ as the realities of shared spaces, town planning and traffic management are hammered out. But that’s shared spaces for you, be they residential car parks, market town centres, or historic ‘debatable lands’:

In 1551 the Crown officers of England and Wales, in an attempt to clear out the trouble makers, declared that ‘All Englishmen and Scottishmen, after this proclamation made, are and shall be free to rob, burn, spoil, slay, murder and destroy all and every such persons, their bodies, buildings, goods and cattle as do remain or shall inhabit upon any part of the said Debatable Land without any redress to be made for the same.’

Ecobuild 2012 – External Works notes

As the dust settles after the 2012 Ecobuild event, here are few observations, in brief, from the External Works corner.

1) Landscape Institute sessions

• Launch of Landscape Architecture – A guide for clients; vision – the power to transform places.
• Case studies Q&A with Ian Houlston of LDA Design (Cotswolds AONB), Jon Berry of Tyler Grange (East Float Wirral Waters), and Duncan Ecob of Devereux (Prince Bishops Park, Bishop Auckland).
• The theme of sustainable communities, including consultative planning and design, development of shared spaces, green infrastructure, and the importance of play and healthy lifestyles and behaviour.
• Working with product manufacturers 1: the usefulness of landscape architects and manufacturers cooperating from the earliest stages of projects.
• Working with product manufacturers 2: the value of innovation, and the critical role of manufacturers in communicating, educating and championing new technologies and techniques.

2) Conference session: Michael Sorkin on ‘The City After Now’

• Wrong slides to start with – maybe a bit of performance theatre to set up the idea of disruption.
• Crisis, the Gini coefficient, and the Occupy movement.
• Reflections on ecological footprints, responsibility, modesty, consumption and ‘good lives’.
• Terreform ONE (Open Network Ecology): non-profit design group promoting green design in cities.
• Design actions: planning and designing compact cities; limiting scale and boundaries.
• Applying patterns from Fez and Prague, Islamic and Medieval cities: plazas, streets and the chance to have ‘encounters’.
• Venice, and the way that cars are parked outside.
• Planning based on neighbourhoods with walking radiuses of 10 minutes.
• Setting high bars: carbon neutrality in designed cities; 100% green cover (green roofs).
• Increased urban autonomy, based on more agricultural self-sufficiency.

3)  Conference session: London 2012: the greenest Olympics ever

• Collaboration between client, consultants and contractors – with Sir John Armitt (ODA), Jim Heverin, Zaha Hadid Architects (Aquatics Centre), Mike Taylor, Hopkins Architects Partnership (Velodrome), and Tom Jones, Populous Architects (Olympic Stadium).
• Critically, clarity and consistency of objectives – including sustainability as a measure of success.
• Innovation, from ground remediation processes to recycled aggregate constituency of concrete in the Velodrome.
• Integrating landscapes: the unifying role of the river; parks, locks and habitats.
• Urban parkland in the south; pastoral parkland in the north.
• Landscape ties masterplan and unique building together.
• Glass, rooflights and building envelopes connect insides and outsides.

4) Seminar: Delivering sustainable concrete on the Olympic Park

• Kirsten Henson, Director, KLH Sustainability.
• A good example of the expertise, subtlety, diplomacy – and passion – involved in materials procurement.
• Materials management and the influence of the ‘balanced scorecard’.
• ‘If you don’t ask, you don’t get’ approach with manufacturers and materials suppliers.
• The complexity of sustainable materials – sometimes recycled aggregate substitution, or PFA cement replacement, or local sourcing is the answer. But not a straightforward template or cure-all.
• Resource: Learning Legacy website.

“Designing out crime”, street furniture and soft landscaping

Urban designers have the tricky task of balancing security with civic life. Creative product design can help. In the right hands, innovative products make public spaces safer by weighting them against antisocial behaviour and more serious crime. And they can do so without creating bristling, draconian, fortress towns.

Security versus liberty

In the process of reconciling urban planning theory with urban planning practice, “events” have a knack of interfering – a point made in our post looking at this summer’s riots in the UK.

Similarly, Vancouver’s Director of City Planning, Brett Toderian, recently explained how the events of 9/11 led at the time to a familiar urban planning dilemma, writ large:

The problem with tidiness: the Kindle and urban design

Summary: Scandalously breaking the rules of blog-writing best practice (make one point), this is a meandering post that touches on e-books, urbanism, lego, ESI product development and the poetry of Les Murray. An untidy post on tidiness and over-tidiness.

I’ve recently joined the ranks of Kindle users, and I was very excited to do so too.

I had run out of room for bookshelves, and never really got to grips with note-taking and ‘processing’ books. I like traveling light. I’ve been navigating the shift from print to digital content in construction information publishing at work. I was in the mood for a panacea.

I was looking forward to a simpler, more streamlined life.

More on urban ‘movement’

Following on from last week’s post on the mobility of trees, there’s more on ‘movement’ in the context of urbanism:

• The movement of one commuter recorded and made visible using GPS and smart phone apps, by UrbanTick
• The movement out from Jakarta of Indonesian civil servants, by guardian.co.uk
• And the movement of hotels, swimming baths and concert halls on rails in a Norwegian city concept, by Web Urbanist

On urban trees moving, climbing and tidying up

There’s a thaw on in Central Scotland and it’s a relief to see a bit of greenery. Bring on the green shoots, literal and otherwise.

UrbanTick reviews a few books and articles that look at the ‘mobility’ of trees in urban design and landscape architecture. They test assumptions about trees’ rootedness, reporting on things like seed vaults, the international migration of plant species, and the industrialisation of tree production.

They include Dominique Ghiggi’s Tree Nurseries – Cultivating the Urban Jungle: Plant Production Worldwide:

Maps, walking and public spaces

After re-reading an earlier post of ours on walkability, I came across the Communities of Foot programme in Edmonton, Canada.

The authorities have sent a new walking map to 13,000 residents in the north of the city to encourage them to explore their local area on foot.

Stirling: walkability and civic tourism

A week and a half into my walkability lifestyle experiment, and so far so good. If nothing else, injecting the mystique of psychogeography into the daily commute sugars the pill, even if I’m still having to get from A to B fairly directly.

3 or 4 views on urban change

In a recent article about science fiction, philosopher John Gray says that the kind of books that used to be driven by a utopianism nowadays take a different tack:

During much of the 20th century, speculative fiction served an impulse of world transformation. Fantasy was understood as an exercise in which alternative worlds were imagined in order to create new possibilities of action. Today fantasy has the role of enabling us to see more clearly the elusive actualities. The question of action is left open. We debate what can be done to change the world, but no one expects an answer.

What’s interesting for us in this is the high profile of imagined cities and suburbs in the books he’s talking about: from the societies of Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four to Ballard’s visions and China Miéville’s The City and the City.

So far, so abstract. So what?

Book review: Digital Culture in Architecture

Digital Culture in Architecture: An Introduction for the Design Professions, by Antoine Picon

There is something odd about a hard-copy book devoted to emergent technologies. It feels old before its time. Aren’t practicing architects’ methods more likely to be shaped on the job, or by the real-time peer reviews that social networks are starting to provide?

Either way, Antoine Picon is aware of the tension. As an historian, he charts a course between long-view philosophical musings on the one hand and the over-excitement of early-adopters on the other.

Digital Culture in Architecture does well in placing recent developments in their historical context, while still arguing that there is something unique about digitisation in society and culture.

Picon alternates slices of theory and practice, and clusters examples in three areas: the influence of digital technologies on architectural form, on the sensory experience of architecture, and on the relationship of individuals to urban environments.

This is not a crossover title. It makes few concessions to the non-academic reader. Nor does it go out of its way to be particularly fluent, and in this it’s not helped by laissez-faire copyediting. But it avoids obscurity thanks to the good measure of well-appointed illustrated examples that signpost the essays.

Digital Culture in Architecture: An Introduction for the Design Professions
Author: Antoine Picon
Format: Book
Pages: 225
Publisher: Birkhauser
Date Published: Apr 2010
Stock Code: 71709
ISBN: 9783034602594
Binding: Paperback