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Posts tagged "city"
Esquire: Janette Sadik-Khan: Urban Reengineer
Photo:Olugbenro Ogunsemore via Esquire
A great piece on NYC DOTs, Janette Sadik-Khan in Esquire at the moment as part of The Brightest: 16 Geniuses Who Give Us Hope …
Whereas most city officials and past DOT commissioners would have insisted on capital funds for something like, say, a bike lane, Sadik-Khan teases them out on the cheap. When you use capital funds for a project, you need approval from a few different places, and it takes months, sometimes years. So she takes a bunch of guys already painting double lines and gets them to dot a bike lane with the extra paint. Where she wants a plaza to swallow a car lane, she convinces abutting stores and the local business-improvement chapter to pay for the cleaning and to take the chairs and tables in every evening and set them out every morning. She tells them that shutting down the street will actually help their business, the way it did in Times Square. She shows them the numbers and where once they may have been against her, suddenly they are footing her bill. She doesn’t even need to check in with Bloomberg. Like a high school a cappella group trying to get to Ibiza for spring break, Sadik-Khan finds money between seat cushions. She uses her guile and glamour to get what she needs, craftily but lawfully.
More downright rebelliously, she sometimes circumvents the community by experimenting with test swatches called pilots, like little harbingers of the future. With a pilot change, you don’t necessarily need community permission, since the idea is that you may end up just taking it down. For example, with the DUMBO parklet, a past commissioner might have educated the residents first, tried to get them to buy into the plan. But it takes months to convince a neighborhood to agree to a change. Instead, she just painted. She did the same thing in the Meatpacking District, when she drummed up a plaza next to the Apple store, and again on Willoughby Street in Brooklyn. She’s figured out a quiet way to get her way without getting the pesky public in her face.
Jan Gehl on Good Cities for Bicycling
Definitely worth a weekend read! The Danish Cycling Embassy have published “Good Cities for Bicycling” an excerpt from Jan Gehl’s “Cities for People” that deals with creating good cities for cycling! It offers practical advice on what can and needs to be done to make cities fit for cycling!
Improvements to bicycle infrastructure are far cheaper and faster to implement than other infrastructural improvements and also give faster and longer payback!
In many cities, bicycle traffic continues to be not much more than political sweet talk, and bicycle infrastructure typically consists of unconnected stretches of paths here and there rather than the object of a genuine, wholehearted and useful approach. The invitation to bicycle is far from convincing. Typically in these cities only one or two percent of daily trips to the city are by bicycle, and bicycle traffic is dominated by young, athletic men on racing bikes. There is a yawning gap from that situation to a dedicated bicycle city like Copenhagen, where 37 percent of traffic to and from work or school is by bicycle. Here bicycle traffic is more sedate, bicycles are more comfortable, the majority of cyclists are women, and bicycle traffic includes all age groups from school children to senior citizens.
At a time when fossil fuel, pollution and problems with climate and health are increasingly becoming a global challenge, giving higher priority to bicycle traffic would seem like an obvious step to take. We need good cities to bike in and there are a great many cities where it would be simple and cheap to upgrade bicycle traffic.
…The cities that have successfully promoted bicycle traffic in recent decades can be tapped for good ideas and requirements for becoming a good bicycle city. Copenhagen is a compelling example of a city whose longstanding bicycle tradition came under threat from car traffic in the 1950s and 1960s. However, the oil crises in the 1970s were the catalyst for a targeted approach to inviting people to ride their bicycles more. And the message was received: today bicycles make up a considerable part of city traffic, and have helped keep vehicular traffic at an unusually low level compared to other large cities in Western Europe. The experiences from Copenhagen are used in the following to provide a platform for discussion about the good bicycle city.
Excellent magazine from Cities on Farming in the City, a project currently being exhibited at Arcam in Amsterdam! You can get more info on the project in their introductory video here. I checked it out when I was there…well worth the visit! They have some great infographics and case studies!
The magazine features a cross section of community led, policy led and design led urban agriculture projects.
Symbiotic Districts: Towards a Balanced City
Interesting article from Arch Daily by Kelly Miner on Portland discussing the relationships between neighbourhoods, districts and cities and how neighbourhoods are the building blocks of sustainable, successful and robust cities !
Neighborhoods are the building blocks of cities — semi-autonomous areas where people build their lives and root their identities. Neighborhoods are also the right scale to accelerate sustainability — small enough to innovate quickly and big enough to have a meaningful impact. This link between people and scale makes neighborhoods the most critical “intervention points” within cities to identify and develop sustainability strategies. Called EcoDistricts, they provide the very ingredients needed in a resource-constrained world: the harvesting of water and energy, the production of food, the ability to move freely and affordably without a car, and careful stewardship and reprocessing of materials.
Yet in a city, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. While neighborhoods provide the right scale to accelerate sustainability, they regularly behave differently from each other and display unique characteristics. These unique traits can be an asset, providing a set of resources to share across a city. A neighborhood prone to flooding can supply fresh water to neighborhoods that run dry. Or a district with ample sun exposure can fuel a downtown that consumes more than its solar potential. Between them, districts create balance — the yin and yang of urban resources. The result is a city in symbiosis with its districts giving and taking resources from one another to maximize the performance of the whole.
I really like this…simple and effective! Spurs a moment of contemplation! Check out some other really simple, cost effective, diy traffic calming measures here
I still want to try “guerilla street calming”.
Who’s down to help me make stencils and purchase paint?
Summer art project!
Jan Gehl - Livable Cities. I have city envy! A place that recognises that “people want to be with people” and can work that ethos into policy and deliver it! Jan Gehl has done such good work forwarding the cause for human scale and liveable spaces!
I want to live in a pedestrian-centered city!
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A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentration on earth, the poem whose music is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.Excerpt from “Here is New York” by E.B. White
After High Line’s Success, Other Cities Look Up - NY Times 15 July 2010
The High Line’s success as an elevated park, its improbable evolution from old trestle into glittering urban amenity, has motivated a whole host of public officials and city planners to consider or revisit efforts to convert relics from their own industrial pasts into potential economic engines.
What are we scared of? The value of risk in designing public space
A brilliant and wholly fascinating booklet by CABE on the negative effects of risk culture on design and city life.
Running through each piece is the idea that tolerance of risk is a necessary stimulus for us to be able to understand, enjoy and deal with our urban environment.
Get it here! Especially like the contribution by Charles Landry.
Pioneer of Urban Farming in New York retires
John Ameroso, who has helped New Yorkers raise food to feed themselves since 1976, is retiring.
Empire Diner in New York has closed!
This really is sad news! My partner and I visited it one Sunday morning in December 2009 on a trip to New York. It had the most lovely neighbourhood feeling! It was warm, welcoming and judging by the interaction between the people eating there, completely jammed with locals. The waiters were really friendly and interactive and the food was scrummy. It will be a loss to that part of the city if not the city as a whole! Its depressing to hear about local places being shoved out for corporate landlords.
The Spitalfields Milkman
A really great article about the milkman for Spitalfields in London - gives an insight into everyday hidden city life! nice photos too!
A bit late: Jane Jacobs Is Still Watching
So true!
I have been re-reading Jane Jacobs this week (not nearly as fun as re-reading Jane Austen, which might be the only thing Elena Kagan and I have in common), and despite my dislike of her beef with architects and planners, so many points seem strangely prescient. Like this:
…I have read…
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