Urban Design and Development Seminar Ten

Ø  Patrick Geddes. Biologist that turned his thinking towards cities. Evolution of cities

Ø  Major problem – ignorance of planning with modern planning – Lewis Mumford on Patrick Geddes

Ø  Sustainability and liveability:

Ø  Liveability

- Security and safety

- Cost of living (affordable housing)

- Key factor of urban planning

Ø  Sustainability

- Low energy use

- High production of renewable energy

- Recycling

- Provision for future growth through infrastructure (i.e. Barcelona)

- Long term durability

Ø  Values of a city e.g. Sydney to have café/restaurant society. However, it is more sustainable to cook at home that to go out.

Ø  Liveability while can be measured, quantified, is SUBJECTIVE to interpretation

Ø  Sustainability when you look at it as a process – there are real limits – one could make an argument that it is OBJECTIVE

Ø  Limits governed by physical and evolutionary aspects

Ø  Quality of life

Ø  CONFLICTS between sustainability and liveability are at the root of the problem in urban design. Resolving these conflicts is the job of planners, designers etc.

Ø  “Secrets of Terra Preta” – BBC documentary

Ø  Compact city is a PLEONASM

Ø  Most of the data is ambiguous when looking at the compact city

Ø  Underlying essential components

Ø   The rate of change – whether it is accelerating or decelerating e.g. population increase, poverty, energy use etc.

Ø  Any system (animal or city) has a capacity to adapt to change

Ø  RESILIENCE is the ability to absorb change/impact and still maintain or resume its normal healthy functionality

Ø  If the rate of change is faster than any process of adaption then the system loses it ability of resilience and suffers. E.g. genetic mutations – organisms that cannot adapt to rapid change or get a susceptibility to viruses etc.

Ø  This happens when any system exceeds its ability to adapt to it e.g. 5 million more people come into the city in 10 years. The infrastructure of the city is not sufficient; therefore it creates its own, such as slums, favelas etc.

Ø  This is related to resilience and rate of change

Ø  Main part of sustainability is PROCESS

Ø  Process is more critical than form. In fact it leads to form

Ø  Form follows function

Form follows FLOW

Ø  Compact city characteristics:

1. High residential and employment densities

2. Mixture of land uses

3. Fine grain of land uses (proximity of varied uses and small

relative size of land parcels)

4. Increased social and economic interactions

5. Contiguous development (some parcels or structures may be

vacant or abandoned or surface parking)

6. Contained urban development, demarcated by legible limits

7. Urban infrastructure, especially sewerage and water mains

8. Multimodal transportation

9. High degrees of accessibility: local/regional

10. High degrees of street connectivity (internal/external),

including sidewalks and bicycle lanes

11. High degree of impervious surface coverage

12. Low open-space ratio

13. Unitary control of planning of land development or closely

coordinated control

14. Sufficient government fiscal capacity to finance urban facilities and infrastructure

 

Ø  Accessibility of cities – sign of a healthy city. An analogy would be any healthy organism has a free flow of nutrients, circulation etc. through its body.

Ø  The flow of cities – information and materials – accessible of flow that provides for growth

Ø  The list above could apply to any city

Ø  Missing from the list is homogeneity

Ø  Compact city paradox. The inverse relationship between liveable and sustainable.

Ø  The more liveable the less sustainable

Ø  The more sustainable, the less liveable e.g. slums

Ø  This paradox cannot be slowed if we restrict our thinking to urban form only – have to think of urban flows. Deep seeded focus on form is the problem.

Ø  Sustainability is normative – how we should/ought to live is prescriptive – value based and driven

Ø  Five different intellectual traditions:

1. CAPACITY to support human life and activities – place and time specific e.g. carbon/energy footprint relates to activity in time or place

2. FITNESS – appropriate fit of an activity to a city. Interactions of the species of that place. A local trait that stems from urban processes that adapt to fit that place.

3. RESILIENCE – responds to limitations of theories in thinking about fitness. Looks at the place and how to absorb the impacts and the activities of that place.
Fitness and resilience are a process of adaption on time. They are two sides to a coin.

4. DIVERSITY – refers to positive pre-disposition of the diverse members of the community. Refers also to the variety – co-inhabit a place

5. BALANCE – not static not dynamic. An adjustment process to establish balance - It implies equilibrium. But is a city ever equilibrium? There are cycles – ‘punctured equilibrium’. Dynamic system in equilibrium maintains all the traditions noted above – natural disasters but also human caprice

Ø  How do we manage that change? Guiding urban change to improve it in the future?

Ø  By living in ways that are unsustainable are taking us away from equilibrium, such as climate change

Ø  New challenge is maintaining urban change through a sustainable lens

Ø  What are the common themes of sustainability?

1. How we are/ought to be living – sustain an ongoing process

2. Health – maintaining life – important focus in urban living

3. Place specific conditions – all the traditions relates to this, whether it is the local climate etc.

4. Interrelationship among system components e.g. assess ability

Ø  What does this mean for sustainability in the compact city?

Ø  The focus on form in urban design does not deal with the themes of sustainability

Ø  Looking at form alone (which most previous generations have) missed the boat. It is the structure that comes from and shapes process. Leads us to a compact city fallacy – which is  neither a necessary or sufficient condition to be sustainable

Ø  Nature works in distributed networks

Ø  By continuing along this path we will continue

-  To have unsustainable cities

- Cheaper infrastructure in the short term but the long-term/life cycle would be insufficient

Ø  Space and time simultaneously to be sustainable (flow)

Ø  Time is process