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

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

Recently I have been finding some interesting initiatives by which some cities are creating new public spaces in areas that were previously underused. Such initiatives are based on what I would call a “Reclaim-Test-Evaluate-Establish” approach of which I will show you an exciting example.

Inspired by New York’s Plaza Program, San Francisco’s “Pavement to Parks” is a program that creates spaces for people reclaiming excess roadway, through the use of simple and low-cost design interventions.

The first step was to recognize that San Francisco’s streets occupy 25% of the city’s land area (more space than all of the city’s parks). Many streets are considered to be excessively wide with high underused space (something that happens in most cities around the world).

The “Pavement to Parks” projects seek to temporarily RECLAIM these unused spaces and quickly and inexpensively turn them into new public plazas and parks.This is done by a temporary closure of the street and the installation of a new public use with the help of temporary activities, seating, landscaping, and treatment of the asphalt.

The reclaimed space becomes then a public laboratory where the City works with the community to TEST different uses and designs. After trying different configurations the space is EVALUATED to see if whether the temporary closure should be a long term community investment and ESTABLISHED as a permanent public space.

This is the case of the “Castro Plaza”. After being tested and evaluated for over a year, the Castro Plaza was made permanent by request of the community. The trail period provides the designers all the information they needed to create a public space that is tailored to the desires, needs and routines of the community. Something that would definitely contribute to the sustainability of the project.

In times where there is a shortage of resources, where there is a high demand for local public spaces and green areas, where municipalities can not cope with such demands, where there is the need of actively involving communities in the development and management of their public areas, it seems to me that a “Reclaim-Test-Evaluate-Establish” approach can be very useful. Having said that there should be much more support and attention given to initiatives such as the Park(ing) Day.

Here you can find a video of the transfromation of the Castro Plaza done by StreetFilms

Images from Pavement to Parks program

Here you can find other initiatives of reclaiming unused streets for more sustainable transportation. 

Planners, architects, designers are “always” trying to create places that enhance sustainable ways of living, ways that are more environmentally sound, more economical, or more conducive to the building of community. Today we talk a lot about high-density and walkable neighborhoods, transit oriented developments and mix use, waste and water management schemes, self-organized and resilient communities. Neighborhoods that include new, modern-stylish designs and sophisticated technologies have become the new model for achieving sustainable urban development and are trying to be replicated/exported all over the world.

However it seems to me that there is the dubious assumption that making an area, garden or building look nice will go hand in hand with more sustainable and eco-friendly living. This has been shown in a recent research (Just Environments  : Politicising Sustainable Urban Development) where it is argued that today sustainable urban development decisions are mainly based on the believe that more gardening, tidiness, recycling and eco-technologies will solve our environmental problems, ignoring deeper unsustainable societal structures. In short this means that one can live in a nice, green and tidy neighborhood but still live live in a very environmentally unfriendly way (with airplane use, car use, high levels of energy intensive consumption, etc).

So if this is true, are there any other models than the multibillion-dollar neighborhoods with all the so called features of urban sustainability?

Recently I found an article by Pavlina Ilieva and Kuo Pao Lian, showing how all the trendy “features” of sustainable urban design (high-density and walkable neighborhoods, transit oriented developments and mix use, waste and water management schemes, self-organized and resilient communities) can be found in a very different context. The examples of sustainable neighborhoods are not new and innovative areas in Scandinavia, Germany or the US but in the neighborhoods of the world’s poorest inhabitants. In the so called Slums, Favelas, Ghettos.

picture from digitaljournal

As said by Stewart Brand “to a planner’s eye, these cities look chaotic. However for biologist like me, they look organic. They are unexpectedly green, they have maximum density—1m people per square mile in some areas of Mumbai—and have minimum energy and material use. People get around by foot, bicycle, rickshaw, or the universal shared taxi”.

Of course living in Slums has many problems and I don’t mean that we all should live in them to become more sustainable. But there are many lessons that can be incorporated in to new urban developments (the Self-Generative Community or Rem Kolhass’ book and documentary “Lagos, How it works”).

Pavlina Ilieva and Kuo Pao Lian argue that if we look beyond the poverty issue, slums can serve as an example of humanity in its most resourceful, responsible and aware of its surroundings. Is in it this what we are trying to achieve in sustainable urban development?

“New York City (Steady) State” is a project and exhibition created by Terreform. A very interesting non-profit design group that promotes green design in cities. The project’s objective is to explore how can the ecological footprint of New York City become co-terminus with its political boundaries. The driving force of the project is that: the city can become completely self-sufficient.

For doing so the project explores strategies to improve the use an improvement of water, air and climate, food, energy, building, manufacture, movement, and waste.What is interesting about the project, and Terreform in general, is their believe that we can not achieve self-sufficiency if we do not change our life styles and habits. Although they propose some “ecothecnology” solutions they are also critical to these when saying that such technologies tend “to abstract and de-individualize responsibility and to de-politicize the environmental problem”. In my opinion this is why in the project’s images emphasis is made on showing people making the change and not the infrastructure or the buildings. 

This reminds me some of the quotes that I have put in this blog:

citizens not engineers will achieve sustainability - Julian Agyeman

to effectively address the global environmental problems, we will have to start with the lifestyle of residents in their local communities - Per Berg

designers, engineers, planners, artists, sociologists in collaboration and partnership with citizens will achieve sustainability

you can find more information and pictures of the project in designboom or follow terreform’s blog

via summeroffrugality via  davidgalestudios:

Although considered as a guide for the future of sustainable urban development there is something about those one-fit-all solutions that I just can’t swallow, especially when they are mainly based on land use and traffic patterns.

The idea which originated in one Portland’s development companies is an interesting one: “all of the necessary and enjoyable things that make life great, including open spaces, grocery stores, workplaces, libraries, events, and schools, within 20 minutes of the home.Twenty minutes on foot is ideal, but 20 minutes by transit, bike or even auto is a reasonable goal.”

Of course this goes in favor of the need of mixuse neighborhoods, fight against sprawl, walk more, etc, etc, etc, bla, bla,  which for many american cities this is a huge eye opener a real difference. But living in a city that could say follows many of these principles in its urban fabric I can think of a few buts that might be good to consider.

Here are just some questions that come in to mind:

do I really want to limit my daily life to my neighborhood? 

are my social relations/networks in a 20 minute radius? in other words do my friends live in my same neighborhood?

who is deciding what a community, what I consider as necessary and enjoyable things/uses?

what if what I consider essential is different from my neighbor’s?

will having “all the essential things” in a 20 minute radius mean that it will be a little of everything instead of quality of a few? … those few things that I really value

is it proximity to a certain use, as in time-distance that takes me to go somewhere, what really matters? or is it the accessibility, meaning different, comfortable, enjoyable, fruitful, inviting, etc, etc ways to go to the place I want/need.

can proximity really make a difference in our transportation patterns? I just say this because I know people that prefer to drive to the local Macdonalds even if it is just a few blocks from their house.

Fantastic Norway is an architecture studio with a unique approach to their planning and design process.Their office initiated with the ambition of “creating an open, including and socially aware architectural practice and to re-establish the architect as an active participant and a constructor of society”. Their uniqueness of their practice is a red caravan which they use in an emblematic way to creat dialogue with local communities they are working on. The idea is to invite ordinary people to reflect over the values they think should form the basis for urban development. Here is an example of their work. 

The trademark of their practice, the red caravan, and the concept behind it, was exposed in the Venice Biennale 2008