urban difference

"… the main challenge of and the main key to sustainable development is not more knowledge..."

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 13:50:00 +0100

““… the main challenge of and the main key to sustainable development is not more knowledge about ecosystems, or necessary technical innovation, and not even the constrains of the economic or political systems, but the lack of organisational capacity of grassroots - and individual citizens - into the development process.””

- Pål Castell in Managing yards and togetherness: Living conditions and social robustness through tenant involvement in open space management

"Professionals are against participation because it destroys the arcane privileges of specialisation,..."

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 08:50:55 +0200

“Professionals are against participation because it destroys the arcane privileges of specialisation, unveils the professional secret, strips bare incompetence, multiplies responsibilities and converts them from the private into the social.”

- Giancarlo De Carlo, - An Architecture of Participation (1980)

"A developed country is not a place where the poor own cars. It is a place where the rich use public..."

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 12:50:52 +0200

““A developed country is not a place where the poor own cars. It is a place where the rich use public transportation””

- Gustavo Petro - Mayor of Bogota 2011-2014

"Sustainable development is like teenage sex - everybody claims they are doing it but most people..."

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 11:59:27 +0200

“Sustainable development is like teenage sex - everybody claims they are doing it but most people aren’t, and those that are, are doing it very badly”

- Professor Chris J Spray

"Design activity and political thought are indivisible"

Thu, 17 May 2012 10:23:00 +0200

“Design activity and political thought are indivisible”

- Thomas Jefferson

"What makes a space public .. is not its preordained “publicness”. Rather, it is when, to..."

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 13:32:00 +0200

“What makes a space public .. is not its preordained “publicness”. Rather, it is when, to fulfill a pressing need, some group or another takes space and through its actions makes it public”

- Don Mitchel in The right to the city: Social justice and the fight for public space

CICLAVIA!!! Connecting communities and giving people a break from the stress of car traffic

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 10:04:00 +0200

Source: http://www.ciclavia.org

Inspired by Bogota’s “ciclovia”, Los Angeles, one of the worlds more car oriented cities has started an new public space campaign that “temporarily removes cars from streets - and fill them up with smiles!” CICLAVIA!

Last Sunday was the fourth time this exiting initiative took place, covering over 10 miles of Los Angeles’ downtown. The goal is to make this event on a more regular basis, following the example of Bogota that does it every Sunday. In this city “ciclovias” have been carried out since the 1990’s as a response to the high congestion, pollution of city streets, as well as low amount of appropriate public spaces. A very common escenario of many cities in the world. As expressed by the organizer of Ciclavia “In Los Angeles (and i would add other cities) we need CicLAvias more than ever. Our streets are congested with traffic, our air is polluted with toxic fumes, our children suffer from obesity and other health conditions caused by the scarcity of public space and safe, healthy transportation options”.

Find more about what is going on with Ciclavia at http://www.ciclavia.org/blog/ . The next one is in October 14

"We need more insurgency in the city in order to break unsustainable and privatizing patterns of..."

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 10:21:06 +0200

“We need more insurgency in the city in order to break unsustainable and privatizing patterns of urban development”

- Jeffery Hou editor of Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary city

"…ordinary people can make the extraordinary happen, given the chance."

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 08:49:18 +0100

““…ordinary people can make the extraordinary happen, given the chance.””

- Charles Landry in The Art of City Making

"Many architects and planners today advocate the necessity of having more public space in the city...."

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 16:19:57 +0200

“Many architects and planners today advocate the necessity of having more public space in the city. Richard Rogers in his report Towards an Urban Renaissance (Urban Task Force, 1999) calls for such public spaces, envisaging them as squares, piazzas, unproblematically open to all. However, as Doreen Massey notes in her recent book For Space, ‘from the greatest public square to the smallest public park, these places are a product of, and internally dislocated by, heterogeneous and sometimes conflicting social identities/relations’.This is what gives real ‘public’ dimension. Public space should be, then, described in terms of its evolving relations,
as a space in permanent mobility, not only physical but also social and political. Architects and urban planners might learn that creativity is required where the conflicting nature of public space is revealed; by way of imagining solutions, or of making sense together, etc.”

- Doina Petrescu in “How to make a community as well as the space for it”

Taking urban sustainability seriously: A call for radical "small" approaches to urban change

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 13:12:00 +0200

In the last decade of planning and policy making, radical or experimental approaches to the organisation of society and the way we plan, design and manage cities have been rare. What has instead evolved during recent years is a firm consensus that sustainable societies and cities can be achieved within the frames of our current unsustainable path (economic, organizational, consumerist patterns) through small steps such as biking lanes, light-rail, densification strategies and growth boundaries.

Critical researchers, such as Erik Swyngedouw and Roger Keil, argue however that this “light greening‟ of current society and cities cannot reach deeply enough to fundamentally redirect the destructive dynamics of today’s urbanism. They are not enough to handle the threats posed by climate change, uneven global development, and growing socio-economic segregation (see this blog’s post Green Building alone won’t save the planet). Instead they call for visions and initiataives of alternative futures and more deep-reaching approaches that can help change the structural problems of our unsustainble society. As Zev Naveh well said it “our present environmental crisis has to be recognized and resolved as an all-embracing cultural revolution”.

Therefore attention needs to be paid to the growing number of initiatives of social movements, communities, and non-traditional practitioners that challenge today’s predominant social order and the ways in which we traditionally plan, design and manage our cities.

In this blog I try to share alternative practices that have the potential to creat big difference in our cities. Some of these can be seen in posts such as the ones about Park(ing) Day, Space Hijackers, The Bottle city project, or the practice of Atelier d’architecture autogérée. Although most of these examples and their initiatives and projects are small in scale, I believe that it is through these small bottom up initiatives that we can create the structural change that it is needed. Initiatives that do not only change the way cities are physically, but that also dig deep and create a change in the way people and communities think, how they organize, how they use the city and what they value in it. The accumulation of many of these small initiatives can help us create a shift to our current unsustainable path. Therefore a call for much more radical “small” approaches to urban change.

parts of the text are based on: Green Futures Symposium: Form Utopian grans schemes to micro-practices

Start Up Street - What will you start up? Another interesting...

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 11:11:00 +0200

Start Up Street - What will you start up?

Another interesting example of how government agencies are involving local communities in the development of their urban areas.

According to Architecture+Design Scotland the Start Up Street initiative’s goal is to “explore how people with ideas, talents and capabilities in the city can be matched with the available spaces in the city, supported by a community of interest. This idea is being tested in a prototype phase to engage a wide range of interests in exploring how the idea works, what is feasible, what is not. The objective is to use this practical method of testing the idea to develop a live project, to start small and build up a sustainable, self supporting enterprise”

Find more about the Start Up Street project here.

via irishboyinlondon

User generated urbanism: Park(ing) day reclaim your city

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 17:22:00 +0200

Once more it is time for Park(ing) day, a worldwide event that invites common citizens everywhere to engage in transforming metered parking spots into temporary parks or public spaces. 2011 is the seventh year that Park(ing) day is being organized, gaining more and more participants and becoming more visible and significant. 30 countries, 186 cities and 850 parks where created during Park(ing) day 2010, showing how engaged people are in transforming car space into social/green space.

Besides being a fun activity, Park(ing) day intends to create discussions how cities’ open space is used, criticize the priority given in many cities to cars, reflect how public space is created and allocated, and of course to try to improve the quality of urban areas, at least in a small scale and temporary.

Over the years this event have served to organize Urban DIY groups in many cities as well as raised important questions to city planners and politicians. In some cities it has been used as an inspiration for municipal planning initiatiatives, such as San Francisco’s Pavement to Parks program (see more about this kind of strategies in “New approaches to Public Space: Reclaim, Test, Evaluate, Establish”). It has also become an interesting design exercise as many groups experiment with new forms of public space design.

Image by lunch street party

Here you can find a very interesting video showing what Park(ing) day is all about

"The sheer physical presence of roads, schools, and houses does not render them meaningful - or..."

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 10:44:06 +0200

“The sheer physical presence of roads, schools, and houses does not render them meaningful - or useful - . It is the collective intentionality, the capacity of humans to assign functions, to symbolize these objects beyond their basic presence that makes them part of the social reality”

- Ali Madanipour in “Why are the design and development of public spaces significant for cities”

"Audiences judge a play, film or novel according to how it resonates with some aspects of human..."

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 15:46:50 +0200

“Audiences judge a play, film or novel according to how it resonates with some aspects of human experience, although specialists may also be interested in the technical skills of its construction. A strategic spatial frame of reference for the governance of urban regions as imagined places, however skilled its technical construction, will have little legitimacy unless it too resonates, with people’s experience of daily life in urban places and their imagination of what being in a particular urban area means to them. Such a strategic play proceeds not by analytically smoothing out the messy complexity of urban life, but by calling it to mind in all its wondrous, frightening, routine, unexpected, comic and tragic manifestations …. The touchstone of judgements about the performance of a strategic play about place governance will be how well it resonates with the multiple, particular expereinece of that co-existence.”

- Patsy Healy in Urban complexity and spatial strategies

"Cities are socially determined in their forms and in their processes. Some of their determinants are..."

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 12:34:43 +0200

“Cities are socially determined in their forms and in their processes. Some of their determinants are structural, linked to deep trends of social evolution that transcend geographic or local singularity. Others are historically and culturally specific. And all are played out, and twisted, by social actors that oppose their interests and their values, to project the city of their dreams and to fight the space of their nightmares.”

- Manuel Castells in European Cities, the Informational Society, and the Global Economy

"First life “-all life forms- , “then spaces, then buildings, the other way around never..."

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 12:24:01 +0200

“First life “-all life forms- , “then spaces, then buildings, the other way around never works.”

- Jan Gehl

from flower to edible gardens: “growing” local food and commuities

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 11:46:00 +0200

image source: Grow Local Colorado

Here is a great initiative that is taking urban agriculture to a next level. It is call Grow Local Colorado a group of volunteers dedicated to promoting and “growing” local food, local commuity and local economy. The initiative creates the conditions for community members to come together and plant, maintain and harvest vegetables in previously existing flower plots in selected parks.

What is interesting about their initiative is that it not only promotes, educates and engages communities in local food production, but also donates the food produced in the new edible gardens to local food banks and communities in need.

Grow local Colorado has 14 garden plots throught Denvers parks including the gardens of the Governor’s Mansion.

Online Interviews Resilient Cities 2011 Congress

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 10:58:48 +0200

Online Interviews Resilient Cities 2011 Congress :

smartercities:

Interviews from ICLEI’s Resilient Cities 2011 Congress are now online on the www.climate-change.tv website.

ICLEI’s President, Steve Cadman, discusses what resilience is. From the Oceania branch Steve Gawler gives a concise overview of the Rockefeller-funded ACCCRN (Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network) and their ten champion cities. From ICLEI USA, Missy Stults reports on the US and vulnerability assessments. US EPA’s Anthony Socci goes further into adaptation measures there, focusing on the tribal perspective.

World Bank Special Envoy for Climate Change, Andrew Steer introduces their report on cities in North Africa and the role of cities in the negotiations. In a separate video, he shares his thoughts on what will make Durban a success.

UNISDR’s Helena Molin discusses their monitoring tools and disaster preparedness. From the UNHABITAT, Joan Clos emphasises the urgency cities are under and contemplates financing.

Mayors and representatives from US North Little Rock, Mexico City (Marcel Ebrard and Martha Delgado), Dar es Salaam, Brazil’s Belo Horizonte (in Portuguese and English), The Philippines’ Quezon, Vancouver and Jerusalem, discuss impacts of and adaptation to climate change.

via climateadaptation:

"The challenge for any strategy making focused around urban areas is that an urban region is not a..."

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 16:15:35 +0200

“The challenge for any strategy making focused around urban areas is that an urban region is not a thing, to which an analyst can approximate an objective representation. It is an imagened phenomenon, a conception of a very complex set of overlapping and intersecting relations, understood in different ways by different people.”

- Patsy Healy in Urban complexity and spatial strategies