'Machine as the Garden' & the future of development

The Spring/Summer Harvard Design Magazine's main theme is non-formal cities, a hot topic and certainly a rich one - but the there is an an exciting counterpoint to this issue. Nathalie Beauvais, examines an exceptionally 'formal' planned city (well, campus extension): Harvard's Allston Campus. And her article is, mercifully, free. 

She asserts elegantly that the environmental "performance targets... can be read like source code... [and] will direct the forms of the built environment", facades will perform as permeable, reactive skins, and an entire ecosystem of solar panels, geothermal wells, bioswales and their compatriots will increase efficiency and protect the Charles river. The article explains much better than I can (links will remain valid until the issue is archived, I'm guessing).

Frequently the sheer scale of contemporary development seems overwhelming, homogeneous, a dehumanizing beast to attach stone veneer to or rally against at town meeting. What is so exciting about this article and the idea of the working landscape is that entire neighborhoods are being thought of as systems and structures; that scale is being used to enable harmonious diversity and increase sustainability rather than threaten these things.

Shared Spaces: harnessing the civility of people

A recent article in the Boston Globe Magazine suggests "Boston drivers are bad, but Boston pedestrians might be worse", presumably because they break traffic rules. But what if the rules are the problem? Because of the questionable habits of both parties, many streets in Boston exist in a de facto state of Shared Space, the slowly & steadily growing idea of Dutch planner Hans Monderman. It seems we are edging toward the recognition that the urban street is an altogether unique creature.

The idea is that all our fussing and stoplights and walklights and orchestration for safety is making our streets less safe. Drivers and pedestrians believe if they obey, everything will be fine. People stop thinking. Shared Space advocates the removal of curbs, signs, lights, etc. and letting people figure it out for themselves. Calling on common sense and cooperation, it harnesses the civility of people rather than letting it atrophy. Apparently it actually does reduce accidents, and reportedly reduces congestion due to increased efficiency.

The aesthetic value of clearing the clutter is promising as well, in addition to the promise of freeing urban life from the four foot strip of concrete mashed against building facades.

It's had success in the Dutch town of Drachten and in Germany.

The discussion brings the larger political implications of urban design tantalizingly close to the surface, but that's a post for another day.

"We're losing our capacity for socially responsible behaviour, ...The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people's sense of personal responsibility dwindles." ^[4]
- Hans Monderman

Living in parks

I've abandoned my blog and I'm sorry. Spring came, work got crazy, the academic season ended, and I've realized a phenomenal urban situation is evolving in our fine city.

I live in parks.

I wake up in the morning and weave through the narrow streets of my near medieval-density neighborhood, cross two lanes of (admittedly ornery) traffic and find my way down the lush greenery of the Greenway, through fountains and lawns for at least a third of my commute, then into urban fabric so dense it makes traffic seem ridiculous (it takes much longer to drive than to walk, and once you get there you can't park anywhere near by). My whole life is arranged around this park: work, gym, friends, groceries, farmer's market, favorite bars, the T, the highway tucked neatly underneath. Even trips to the bookstore, library, barber, and clothes are more than half spent in the Common, Garden, and Commonwealth Mall in that order. When I take the train to Cambridge I have found ways to do most of my walking next to lawns, as are my frequent destinations. I run on the esplanade, far from the road as possible. I'm not alone.

It's significant because it could make urban density more than palatable to the vast majority of people, reversing the wasteful cycle of sprawl and highway extension we are locked in.

The thing it's missing is contiguity: the ability to walk from a building directly into a park setting, to avoid almost entirely the damaging effects of particulate exhaust inhalation that will certainly surface in health care costs as generations age, dangers of traffic to children, and prevent the foolish hope that you are that very special person for whom the universe has reserved a parking spot directly in front of your destination.

This does exist in one quiet but enormously pregnant instance: the "corridor" park that runs between the Back Bay and South end, however no buildings open onto it, not one building admits it's proximity even though the park is lined with wealthy residents and their high-end retail establishments - what a precedent that could be. Oh well.

cyborg urbanism: Matthew Gandy, Geographer

Last week I went to go see what Geographer Matthew Gandy had to say about cyborg urbanism, mainly because it's a ridiculous title for a lecture, he is a Geographer, and it was beautiful out and I wanted to wander around Harvard Square.

His lecture delivered on the promised sci-fi kitsch from the moment he stood up at the podium, thirtyish with that skinny, wild-haired supernerd genius look and continued with references to awesome, campy sci-fi pop culture & movies (Metropolis sticks out in my mind).

He also delivered on substance, putting some meat on the study-but-inanimate bones of science fiction: he explained the term 'cyborg' and illustrated how it could be applied to the city, if we think of the city as an organism.

cyborg: Abbreviation of cybernetic organism.

cybornetics: the interdisciplinary study of the structure of complex systems, especially communication processes, control mechanisms and feedback principles. The essential goal of cybernetics is to understand and define the functions and processes of systems that have goals, and that participate in circular, causal chains that move from action to sensing to comparison with desired goal to action.

feedback and goals are the key to this idea. At first I was confused, he talked about the cyborg as an organism with both natural and artificial systems, and when we apply that to the city as an organism it falls a little flat - urbanity is natural (bodies) and artificial (streets, buildings). The novelty is in the idea of the digital enabling the city to pursue goals through feedback loops, presumably responding mechanically. This relates to a lot of the exciting work being done at the MIT Media Lab by folks like the Tangible Media Group and Ambient Intelligence Group. It also leaves the door open for material feedback systems that rely on the material's innate properties to create the desired mechanical reactions, rather than depending on delicate electrical systems.

I don't really know how this all relates to geography.

seeing our cities: Cervin Robinson's "By Way of Broadway" and our urban experience

I went to see architectural photographer Cervin Robinson's work the other day. It is titled "By Way of Broadway" and is a series of shots up and down Broadway in New York City, to show a cross-section of Manhattan.

The photos were largely deadpan, head-on views of buildings, with a few perspectives in the mix. While it didn't seem to be the intent of the exhibit, it struck me how little we see our cities as we scurry up and down the sidewalks, mashed up against the buildings in single-file by the rush of cars.

Our entire urban lives are forced into high-speed linearity. But pedestrian life is omni-directional. Do we not loose some richness of urbanity with this tunnel vision? It seems like our buildings are strangled by ropes of traffic, isolated, unable to reciprocate or participate as anything but anonymous, perpendicular shelter or distant monument in this rush.


I found this pdf of his images, hopefully it will remain after the exhibit announcement is gone.

the inevitable Rose Kennedy Greenway commentary

The Rose Kennedy Greenway, flower of Boston's Big Dig, is nearing completion and there are a lot of things to say about it in terms of American use of open space, park obsession and urban shame (it's OK that we aren't suburban, really)... thankfully I have this article from the Boston Globe's Tom Keane to take the edge off my bloviation temptation...

big talk about the formal/informal

There's a lot of talk about the divide between the "formal" (i.e., the planned, the controlled, the centralized) and the "informal" (messy, unplanned life), frequently the formal being associated with the first world, mcmansion, gated-community mentality (although the "first-world" status of gated communities is debatable) and the informal embodied in it's most pure form in Brazilian favellas and the dream worlds of Lebbus Woods.

I'm watching a fantastic video of a GSD lecture by Teddy Cruz (fantastic b/c, in addition to the content, I am in my sweatpants, eating dinner, and able to pause-and-rewind). He is giving a fascinating tour of the Tijuana/San Deigo border and the exchange that is going on there - the clash of the corporation-saturated southern California and the disorder of Mexican Tijuana. Drug dealer's tunnels through earth and buildings, entire houses picked up and transported south to make room for new ones, a double-headed Trojan Horse, built for transparency, straddling the boarder. I could go off on a dozen tangents.

He asserts, as many do, that the formal is ignorant of the informal, which is hard to deny. But isn't the formal just a reaction to the informal? Isn't it a clumsy, ham-fisted reaction to the informal, deriving it's existence from the very thing it seeks to squash?

Isn't it more than that, but actually a product of the failures of the informal?

look at the 'formal' systems around you - they seem to sink into the cracks in our "informal' society, where tight social circles fail and crime sneaks in, the formality of police force oozes in after it. Where private/civic organizations fail to provide comprehensive and open education, public education arises. Where the social contract fails to moderate land use, zoning arrives.

The strength of the organic, freely determined will always overwhelm the hollow and the formal, but can we guide and accelerate this to ensure it is as positive as possible?