Brand Avenue

Dreaming Big

Check out Future City, a 100-day "game" created by the Hamilton Spectator wherein readers imagine what the Canadian city's next 100 years could look like.

And you get to influence and vote on how the city morphs and adapts to dramatic changes in climate, shifts in the economy, new patterns in population and immigration as well as through many unpredictable events.

Above, Hamilton as it appears nowadays, on the shores of Lake Ontario. (via Flickr)

The city's future--taking into account changes in climate, population, lifestyle, and economics--plays itself out in a engaging and clever way. Already automobiles have been banned from the city and replaced by trams, and voters have rejected the construction of a solar panel "bubble" covering part of the city in favor of a nuclear reactor. Hamilton has weathered a flu epidemic, and an African safari park has been established nearby. (According to the game, it's already 2078, so you should hurry over.)

Each week from November to February, a key event will occur in the city.

And you get to vote on things like whether the city builds an underwater highway on the lakeshore to Toronto to solve gridlock, or whether a new airport is built in Flamborough, or whether ... well, we don't want to spoil the surprise.

After votes are counted and an event occurs (or not) in the city, these new landmarks appear as high-impact visuals on an interactive map that lets you click and play individual map graphics of buildings and other icons to see how the city has evolved.

It's fun to click around, but also fascinating to see how the presentation of the city in game format (a la SimCity) can build interest in its future. Civic visioning processes can be simultaneously informative and fun; the limited real-world constraints of the game permit participants to dream big.

Along the lines of dreaming big, alternative versions of the future, and fun: 202 Collaborative's hydrogen-fueled urbanism (featured on BLDGBLOG in November; and friends of mine too, I'm proud to say) envisions a self-sufficient addition to the Reykjavik cityscape, powered ultimately by the photosynthetic byproducts of algae:

We developed a prototype algae "pond" and "balloon" that could produce and store hydrogen for use by up to 12 vehicles.  This ratio of pond to vehicle become a planning module, and the process become a technology which Iceland and their universities could theoretically develop and export (technology not the actual h2) to other nations.  Our proposal envisioned several scenarios (low density housing, research fields, higher density housing, commercial districts, and a hydrogen race track) that were centered around the algae ponds.  In all instances the ponds become a very tangible element of the design supporting our belief that the visible presence of environmental technologies only strengthens users awareness of our complex relationship with nature.

I'm hardly the first or most informed person to say this, but imagine the potential of renewable energy sources to reconfigure urban form. (As Worldchanging points out, "what we build is how we live.") It's impossible to look at the images below and not conclude that the cityscape of the future will indeed look quite different than how it does now. And that it will continue changing.

Below: several images of the project--thanks, Patrick! (Earlier, somewhat related)

Public Spaces + Public Life

At the beginning of the month, Danish architect and "urban quality consultant" Jan Gehl produced the results of his nine-month study of central Sydney, Australia. The city of Sydney had hired him to produce a body of recommendations in order to improve the city's core, both functionally and experientially.

His report paints a picture of a city at war with itself - car against pedestrian, high-rise against public space. "The inevitable result is public space with an absence of public life," he concludes.

His nine-month investigation found a city in distress. A walk down Market Street involved as much waiting at traffic lights as it did walking. In winter, 39 per cent of people in the city spend their lunchtimes underground, put off by a hostile environment at street level: noise, traffic, wind, a lack of sunlight and too few options for eating.

Gehl's report calls for the creation of three new major public squares along George Street, which Gehl envisions as the city's main promenade--one at Circular Quay, Sydney's principal ferry depot and a major transportation node; another fronting Sydney Town Hall (above); and a third adjoining the city's Central Station, the largest train station in Australia. Rather than imposing a new traffic pattern onto the street network, Gehl's subtle and incremental vision targets and connects these three existing focal points as a way of amplifying the core's existing strengths.

The quality of the pedestrian experience in central Sydney and by extension its entire urban fabric, is evaluated in a number of ways, spanning building height, microclimate, perceptions of safety, traffic patterns, and housing types. The graded evaluation of how building frontages throughout the core enhance or harm street life is particularly interesting.

Above: Gehl, in the middle of George Street.

The report emphasizes that the focus on George Street would introduce an important hierarchy to the central core's main thoroughfares, which they currently lack and that makes navigation needlessly difficult:

Transforming George Street into a "vivacious" promenade and shopping strip is critical to Professor Gehl's vision. Its 2.5 kilometres would be closed to private vehicles and dedicated to public transport and bicycles....

At the quay, the Cahill Expressway would be demolished (ie, like the Embarcadero Freeway demolition in San Francisco) and the railway station put underground to make way for a public square that would allow the half-million people who visit and work in the city every day to appreciate Sydney Harbour.

At Town Hall, the Woolworths headquarters would be demolished to create open space. The city council has already bought this and neighbouring buildings, and has long had such a plan. Pedestrians would no longer need to press a button at traffic lights. No one should have to "apply" to walk across the road, Professor Gehl says. It is a human right.

Walkers would no longer take a stop-start journey along George Street, the smog-filled thoroughfare that he says should be Sydney's main promenade. They should not even have to step down to the road at intersections with traffic crossing the city. It is the cars that should wait, he argues. Parking would be restricted to the edges of town.

Below, for context: a map of central Sydney, showing George Street, Circular Quay, Town Hall and Central Station.

View Larger Map

Read a draft of Gehl's report, here; well worth a look. Or listen to a couple of podcasts of Gehl speaking in Sydney over the course of the past year, here.

Back Alleys Up Front

The City of Chicago has unveiled a far-reaching and thoughtful plan to "green" its back alleys--all 1900 miles of them. Overlooked but essential components of the city's urban grid, the soon-to-be transformed alleys constitute one of the biggest streetscape overhauls in the country, ever:

If this were any other city, perhaps it would not matter what kind of roadway was underfoot in the back alleys around town. But with nearly 2,000 miles of small service streets bisecting blocks from the North Side to the South Side, Chicago is the alley capital of America. In its alleys, city officials say, it has the paved equivalent of five midsize airports.

Part of the landscape since the city began, the alleys, mostly home to garbage bins and garages, make for cleaner and less congested main streets. But Chicago’s distinction is not without disadvantages: Imagine having a duplicate set of streets, in miniature, to maintain that are prone to flooding and to dumping runoff into a strained sewer system.

The new surface consists of two parts: a porous concrete grid above, and a stone filtration layer below. While the porous concrete was formerly more expensive than traditional concrete, it is now cheaper due to increased production. As such, the price of the porous concrete grid plus the stone filtration layer is now roughly equal to ordinary concrete.

“The question is, if you’ve got to resurface an alley anyway, can you make it do more for you?” said Janet Attarian, the project’s director. In a green alley, water is allowed to penetrate the soil through the pavement itself, which consists of the relatively new but little-used technology of permeable concrete or porous asphalt. Then the water, filtered through stone beds under the permeable surface layer, recharges the underground water table instead of ending up as polluted runoff in rivers and streams....

The new pavements are also designed to reflect heat from the sun instead of absorbing it, helping the city stay cool on hot days. They also stay warmer on cold days. The green alleys are given new kinds of lighting that conserve energy and reduce glare, city officials said, and are made with recycled materials. The city will have completed 46 green alleys by the end of the year, and it has deemed the models so attractive that now every alley it refurbishes will be a green alley.

Aside from the obvious environmental benefits of such a plan, it's interesting to consider how making these behind-the-scenes moves can enhance the whole city at a greater scale. Imagine if all of those miles of newly cleaned up and redesigned alleys were places people actually wanted to be: not just a place for trash pickup, but a complete set of secondary public spaces, interwoven with the urban fabric. An exponentially expanded public realm.

Download the gorgeously illustrated Green Alley Initiative planbook: (pdf) (via)

Attention paid to the alleys begs the question of what new functions they could host, and the densification efforts of Toronto and Santa Cruz come to mind. In Toronto, one estimate puts the amount of units that could be added if the city's 2,433 alleys were all opened to residential construction at roughly 6,000. Surely allowing development along a fraction of 1,900 miles of alley in Chicago could yield a significant number.

Above, one very beautiful example of what I'm thinking: A laneway house in Toronto by Kohn Shnier Architects.