CityReads│Urban Design as a Solution to Urban Ills
Urbanized is a feature-length documentary about the design of cities, which looks at the issues and strategies behind urban design and features some of the world’s foremost architects, planners, policymakers, builders, and thinkers.
Source: http://www.hustwit.com/about-urbanized/
Over half the world’s population now lives in an urban area, and 75% will call a city home by 2050. But while some cities are experiencing explosive growth, others are shrinking. The challenges of balancing housing, mobility, public space, civic engagement, economic development, and environmental policy are fast becoming universal concerns. Urbanized is a feature-length documentary about the design of cities, which looks at the issues and strategies behind urban design and features some of the world’s foremost architects, planners, policymakers, builders, and thinkers. By exploring a diverse range of urban design projects around the world, Urbanized frames a global discussion on the future of cities.
Urbanized is the third part of Gary Hustwit’s design film trilogy, joining Helvetica and Objectified.
ⅠSlum: Participatory Design
Mumbai, a city of 12 million people that is set to be the world's biggest by 2050. Already, 60% of its population lives in slums with such poor sanitation that there is only one toilet seat for every 600 people. The municipality is reluctant to build toilets for fear that it will encourage more migrants to come.
Sounds pessimistic? You really need a small group of innovators, a small group of people that can demonstrate how to do things differently, and once that gets mainstreamed, change happens really quickly.
Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, whose system of half-houses that residents complete themselves is cited as a paragon of "participatory design".
It was efficient to make the half that a family could never achieve on their own.
And then allow families to do the other half, on their own,with their own timing,according to their own needs. We call it participatory design.
To have a participatory design means to have families sitting at the table to help us decide what we are going to deliver from day one and what can be left so that families themselves take care of that. We asked families what was more important: a water heater or a bathtub. There was not enough money for both. Decision makers, or politicians,or professionals they normally tend to answer the water heater. And in 100% of the cases when we asked the families they preferred the bathtub over the water heater.
The idea is that citizens, not god-like architects and planners, are the solution to the urban question.
ⅡTraffic Jam: Bus Rapid Transit System, Pedestrian and Bicycle-only Street
Many things about cities are very counterintuitive, for example it seems to us that making bigger roads, or flyovers, or elevated highways will solve traffic jams. And clearly it has never been the case. Because what creates traffic is not the number of cars, but the number of trips and the length of trips.So the more road infrastructure you do, the traffic will become even worse.The only way to solve traffic jams is to restrict car use.And the most obvious way to restrict car use is restricting parking.
So when I was elected mayor, we created a bus-based public transport system. We copied a system from Curitiba, Brazil. We called it TransMilenio.Because buses in most places have a... stigma, a bad image of being for the poor, so we had to raise the bus's status.
TransMilenio bus system actually works more like a subway on wheels than a traditional bus. Buses go on exclusive lanes. People pay when they enter the station. When the buses arrive, the station doors open simultaneously with the bus doors.You can get a hundred people out and hundred people onto the bus in seconds.And now they can go from one extreme to the other very fast.
For the same cost that we could do a 25km subway, we do 400km of TransMilineo. These systems are also more flexible.
This system is very powerful symbol of democracy. It means for example that a bus with 100 passengers has a right to 100 times more road space than a car with one. It's democracy at work. You can really see that public good prevails over private interest.
Here we are on part of the Porvenir Promenade.This is a 24km, pedestrian and bicycle-only street,which networks very low income neighborhoods to the richest area of the city.It's a revolution in the way urban life works. This kind of high quality infrastructure for bicycles increases the social status of cyclists. Before we had bicycle ways, low-income people were ashamed of using bicycles. Now a high-quality protected bicycle way shows that a citizen on a $30 bicycle is equally important to one in a $30,000 dollar car.
In Copenhagen we have, for 30 or 40 years, this very distinctive policy to invite people to bicycle as much as possible. There is a complete network of bicycle lanes citywide. In what we call Copenhagen-style bicycle lane. We always have the bicycle lanes next to the sidewalk.The sidewalks are the slow traffic, the bike lanes are a little bit faster, and then there would be parked cars, and then there would be the traffic.In this way you have the parked cars to protect the bicyclists, instead of the bicyclists to protect the parked cars.It helps invite a lot of people who would be too afraid to bicycle to get the idea, "I can actually do it,because now it is much safer." We have seen that now we have 37% of everyone commuting to work arriving on his bicycle.It keeps people fit, it doesn't pollute and it doesn't take up much space.It's a really smart way of getting around the city.
ⅢPublic Space：Human Scale
Knowing about Homo sapiens and the kind of creature he is has been a very important key to understanding why some places work and some places don't.
Much of it is bound to our senses, how long you can see and how long you can hear.
How your eye is horizontal,you see very little upward,you see much more downward,and you see much,much more out to either side. The eye can't command an area more than about 100 meters by 100 meters. That's why nearly all the squares in all the old cities will be smaller than this 100 meters.
We are really talking about the urban habitat of Homo sapiens.It's the same Homo sapiens all over the world. Cultural circumstances differ,economic circumstances differ, climatic circumstances differ,but basically we are the same little walking animal.
I think a good city is like a good party. If people get involved in social activities they will forget place and time and just enjoy. That is why I would say, do not look at how many people are walking in the city, but look at how many people have stopped walking to stay and enjoy what is there.
The challenge is how we make sure that public open spaces are inviting and well used. And in these spaces, design detail makes all the differences.There should be multiple kinds of seating, many different reasons for people to come into a space. For instance, movable chairs. People, when they sit in a chair that's moveable, they just move it so much. So it's kind of their chair and it's their place. Movable chairs also let you socialize,they let you be by yourself, they let you be part of the city,or away from the city.
ⅣPost-Industrial Sites: Transformation
The rise of post-industrial sites in cities around the world, have come about only in the last 30 or 40 years, and people don't know what to do with them.They think should be removed and erased.
What we've found over the past 10 years is that you can actually take these post-industrial conditions and through creative design actually produce something that people love. It's not erasure and it's not preservation.It's really transformation.
The High Line was this extraordinary artifact, rusting steel where grasses and flowers had taken seed naturally.
As a landscape architect,a question I always ask is what will design actually mess up here.What through design will you anaesthetize? Will you destroy?
Because a lot of these sites have a sort of charm to them that really I'm always looking to try to capture and actually amplify.
It's much more about a symbiotic relationship between nature and civilization. Because a city's a messy place.
And so there are lots of places for nature to move in and not take over but form a relationship with the urban infrastructure in a really interesting way.
It's not overly manicured, or overly scripted. And the noises, I guess, are part of it. It really is about showcasing Manhattan in a way that is authentic.
ⅤShrinking Cities: Self-Organized Urbanism
Cities are extremely dynamic organisms. Throughout the history of the world we've watched cities that bloomed and then collapsed.
Detroit was once two million people.And a metropolitan area that really was the center of industrial production,not just in the United States,but in the world.The city has shrunk back to about 700,000 people.
So we started a community garden project. It kind of turned into healthy food choices,cheap food, because we were giving it away for free.We got hot peppers,two beds of okra,in the back corner's two bedsof mustard and turnip greens.We have 31 raised beds for vegetables. And across the street,there's two vacant lots where we did an orchard and across the street from that is our community center.
I would use the term "self-organized urbanism" to describe what's going on there. In the sense that there is a kind of possibility,a sort of DIY aesthetic that does exist in the city that is allowing for a lot of individual initiatives to happen.
And you see that in the urban agricultural movement not only with community gardens,but also with these large-scale commercial gardens.
There are all sorts of different retrofitting practices, not only on an urban scale but also on an architectural micro-scale happening in the city. If we think creatively,if we think as entrepreneurs,there is no reason why in 15, 25, 35 years we shouldn't be looking at a very different Detroit.
ⅥSustainability: Public Display of Electricity Usage
Cities today consume 75% of the world's energy and therefore contribute to 75% of CO2 emissions. Added to that, population will be living in cities and they will consume more and more energy. So a small reduction of the environmental footprint and energy footprint of a city has a massive impact on the planet.
We're interested in making people more aware of their patterns of behavior so that potentially they can change them.
In this project we were interested in electricity usage. Eeach day we got participants on Tidy Street to go down to their electricity meter, note down the reading and then they went to our website and put that number in.
We were doing a public display,so we turned the street essentially into a big graph. On the street, we show how the average usage of the participants compares to the Brighton average.It's 500 feet long,we recorded for three weeks, and each day we show how they compare.Over the first three weeks of the project, the average electricity usage of the participants came down by 15%.
The main lessons we can learn about sustainability from this project is that although it starts with individuals, a really important factor in people's behavior is their community. People are influenced by what other people are doing around them. So if you can engage them as a community, they seem to be more motivated and more likely to change their behavior.
ⅦCrime: Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading
Khayelitsha's one of the youngest townships in South Africa. It was built in the 1980s. The then local authority was trying to concentrate the growing African black population at the periphery of the city.
It was specifically developed as a dormitory residential area with no economic base. People were required to travel out of the area to gain access to jobs. And it was characterized by very poor health conditions and very high violent crime rates.
What's interesting about Khayelitsha is the storm water systems, which create large,vast tracts of open,underutilized land,which become crime hotspots.
When VPUU was introduced into the community by the KDF and the city, that made a big change. VPUU is Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading. The idea was to transform the very unsafe areas that form part of the storm water system into something that is more positive.
The first one we started working on was the pedestrian walkway that extended from Khayelitsha railway station, across the suburb of Harare, towards the informal settlement.
Historically the way urban design has happened in South Africa is along what are seen as major routes, and that's where all the infrastructure happens.The different tack that VPUU took is they actually spoke with the community,which meant that the decision as to where pedestrian routes went wasn't the normative position, but more where people were walking, which were those desire lines, which cut their way through the settlement.
It's not imposition, but it's engagement. It's what we call negotiated development. It's not top down, it's bottom up.
Another idea of this linkage, in this route, was every 500 meters you would have a lookout point, or lookout tower. They're designed in such a way to provide an identity and also to provide a vertical element that one could see as one was walking along.
We've used red in this case so they're very clearly visible during the day, and then they're down lit at nighttime, so they're light boxes at night. They're occupied 24/7, so there's always a caretaker, somebody always involved.And they form little points where you can also have economic activity and just coming together of community. The murder rate has come down by approximately 40% since VPUU started in this area.
ⅧPost-Disaster City Rebuilding: Civic Engagement
In New Orleans people talk about planning fatigue. After Katrina, lots of people went to lots of community meetings and put lots of stickers on lots of maps. Oftentimes they didn't really see any noticeable change. So I thought, well, what if local residents had better tools to shape the future businesses in their neighborhood and beyond?
I put grids of stickers on neglected buildings around the city, and a little sharpie pen, for people who are walking by to write what they wish was there.
I think we really need to consider whether our public spaces can be better designed so they are not necessarily going to the highest bidder, instead they're reflecting what's important to our neighborhoods.
ⅨConcluding Remark
In Asia and Africa you're going to have complete new cities that capitalize on all the new thinking about how we can reorganize cities. That will function completely different to everything we think and know about cities. So that prospect of dramatic, disruptive change within one generation.
Fundamentally as a species we need things that can power our imaginations, that can get our passions going, that can give us sort of a sense of meaning. And that is not a brick, it is not a pipe, it is an idea. That's what drives cities forward.