Unique use of bollard in Brussels

I like how this guy stood like this for a half hour late at night. Bollards.

Another Planning Corps article

I have been amiss about posting this, and it is no reflection on Urban Omnibus, who I just adore. If you haven't signed up for its newsletter, you are surely missing out. I wrote a longer piece about Planning Corps' work on Queens Boulevard for it, voila.

Update on Planning Corps - Queens Blvd project

For nearly two years, in fits and starts, I've been working with Planning Corps on project to improve Queens Boulevard. We finally finished the final product - a book comparing boulevards from around the world. A write-up of the process of working on this project and also our internal process questioning the work of planners and how to be useful in an immediate and tactical way, is laid out on MIT CoLab Radio.

When do experiments end?

The name of this is Diagram of Urban Actors.

On the way to the Manhattan Street Grid exhibit at the MCNY last week (see here for a great article reviewing the exhibit), I stopped by the Design with the Other 90%: CITIES exhibit at the UN. Many of the projects have been well-documented in other exhibits - for example, in the recent MoMA exhibit Talk to Me or at the Center for Architecture in NYC.

The popularity of these projects in so many different exhibitions says something about the projects, perhaps that a good idea needs to integrate so many facets of what it takes to be sustainable and participatory and global that they can be viewed from many different angles.

The quality of public space continues to play a significant role in a community's ability to participate in any change-oriented project, yet there were only a couple of projects that focused on a public space itself. Though you could say that nearly all these projects are inherently about public space, whether they are physical, or about protecting the public realm.

a public gym


a communal kitchen


a public transportation system, a gathering place, etc.

There was one example of the participatory planning process (including participatory budgeting), but I would argue that nearly all these projects - from the exhibit cards - had public participation. While this doesn't happen nearly often enough and needs to scale globally in a significant way, it struck me that maybe planning, as a tool, perhaps doesn't need the emphasis that I once thought it should have. Maybe when the end-goal is better articulated for social, economic, and environmental benefits, the planning process itself is more naturally oriented to be more inclusive and strategic. What do you think?

As I looked at the projects in the exhibit, I couldn't help wondering what role Planning Corps might have in each of them. Perhaps none at all. In fact, one project was a manual on urbanism, so that informal settlements could establish a kind of order that would benefit the overall community. Here are some pages from the Manual for Urbanism:





(Manuals are something that Planning Corps has prepared as well.)

Planning Corps started out as an experiment. Was there a niche for planners to fill in the planning process? Could there be better match making between projects and planners? This exhibit made me think that maybe the thrust of the problem is that the problem is rarely defined correctly, which is why planners need to intervene in a strategic way. But if the projects were scoped appropriately from the beginning, intervention would no longer be necessary. Plus, if planners could always be strategic, then when process needs to change, all the actors can adapt. The need for a strategic process will never go away, but maybe the bad matching is not a procedural outcome, it's that we're not defining the problems correctly.

In fact, much of the preparation in advance of the monthly Planning Corps working sessions involved us re-structuring the process so that the group could be strategic. It wasn't that the group was magically strategic when they came together; we had to be very structured and careful about how we used the two hours we spent with members of the corps.

Planning Corps started as an experiment in 2010 and it's now 2012 - we're thinking about the year ahead. When you see better versions of your idea out there in public discourse, is it time to end your experiment?

In NYC, the stair and ramp combo

After reading my post on Zurich, a friend sent in this photo from her walk in Fort Tryon Park this weekend. Nice! Now we have to get the public to think that this design could work on streets and sidewalks, and perhaps doesn't need to be relegated to just parks.
Thanks Deborah!

The Legibility of Street Design

I had the incredible opportunity to go to Switzerland for a week devoted to the study of sustainable transport, thanks to an amazing program run by the Swiss Embassy in DC, ThinkSwiss. Yay for Swiss ingenuity.

My cohort of US transportation nerds included experts from academia, public sector, and industry associations from across the country. It was a pretty diverse group, an almost even split in gender, and not dominated by white, middle-aged male engineers.

The program design was very thoughtful. We met with Swiss people responsible for federal level transport policy, sustainable planning, financing, down to city-level design and implementation. We got an in-depth briefing about the timetable approach for managing rail systems. We visited the construction site of the Cross Rail project in Zurich, toured the Stadler rail car factory and Zurich airport, and even went down to the still under construction Gotthard Base Tunnel, for an up-close look at one of the greatest engineering feats in world history. Thanks to our intrepid hosts, our visits to all sites were conducted via rail and public transport.* I don’t know how they put up with us non-German-speaking yahoos (myself included) for so long on so many transit trips - I can’t say the word amazing enough.

For me, it’s hard to walk around a European city and not ooh and aah over the livable street design and the stories behind making them happen. On the other hand, more than once, more than one of my colleagues mentioned that he just didn’t “get” urban design/policy, so I wanted to dive into this a little bit.

Here’s a typical street one might encounter in Zurich.



We walked through many streets like this, and one day was even led by Ruedi Ott, currently Director of Transport Planning in Zurich and a hero in street design and urban planning. (If you know how lovely it is to meander around Zurich these days, you have Ruedi to thank.)

This typical Zurich street is supported by multiple policies. The parking design speaks to a culture that puts bicycles and pedestrians above cars. Look at how bike parking is treated with the same level of importance as car parking. Plus, cooperation from enforcement agencies is needed to make sure cars don't overrun the sidewalk. Look at how well the trees are protected, so yes, street trees are important. Cars have to drive down this street very slowly, since people cross wherever they like - no curbs! What does this say about how this city thinks about how people must share space and how that space is connected to the health of the environment overall?



OK, what about this image? Another typical alleyway/path in old town Zurich. Maybe it can be attributed to medieval design, but those weren’t exactly golden days. People struggled and were lucky to survive the plague. Still, the stair and ramp combo? Genius: it supports every level of physical ability, makes it easy to have a bike in spite of the hills, and kudos to modern Zurich for keeping the design. (You can see updated versions of this in mega-cities in China). As for the quality of the path materials, the cleanliness, etc, these things don’t happen on their own. They are a reflection of some form of urban design, zoning, preservation, and sanitation policies.

I bring these up because the policy-design link tends to be elusive, especially when one is so deeply focused on technology and engineering, which the transportation field tends to be. Plus it's easy to overlook small scale details when thinking about big policy. But I do believe that the way we design and therefore experience our streets and cities is an illustration of our policies and therefore priorities as a society. Don’t want to get too lecture-y, this was just one of the interesting conversations that happened a few times over the week.



* Without mentioning it to us, our hosts also chose some of the best places in Zurich for hanging out and meals. Here are a few, in case you’re in need: Reithalle is a restaurant in an old horse barn on a redeveloped military riding school on an island in the center of Zurich, worth checking out just for the history; Schipfe 16, a state-run restaurant that also acts a rehabilitation program, and it's on the waterfront on the border of Old Town; Restaurant Terroir for everything Swiss, from the tables and cutlery to the food and wine; Corazon for an extensive cocktail menu and warm, laid-back crowd; LaSalle, part of a theater, bar, restaurant, club complex in a redeveloped building that used to handle ship construction.

Winter and Summer on Capital Bike Share

Somehow I got into two videos about Capital Bike Share. Obviously, this means that I can hardly wait for the NYC version to launch. The system is amazing - it really adds a much needed dimension to getting around.

The summer version by Streetsfilms



The winter version by Aurash Khawarzad of Pattern Cities, DoTank:Brooklyn, Project for Public Spaces, urbanist

July

via swissmiss instagram