______________________________________________________________
Our Top 10 Placemaking Articles of 2016
Hace 8 años
viernes, 23 de octubre de 2009
jueves, 22 de octubre de 2009
Articulo: Retrofitting suburban cul-de-sacs: start with trails
"Desire path: A term in landscape architecture used to describe a path that isn't designed but rather is worn casually away by people finding the shortest distance between two points."A close look at any city park or green will typically reveal footprints that break away from paved walks, trails that countless pedestrians have worn into the grass. Such a trail is a desire path: the route people have chosen to take across an open place, making a human pattern upon the landscape." (Citing Lan Samantha Chang, in Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney.)
Articulo: Johannesburg Fights Taxi Driver Opposition to BRT Project Necessary for 2010 World Cup
Johannesburg Fights Taxi Driver Opposition to BRT Project Necessary for 2010 World Cup
October 6, 2009
» Arguments over government’s involvement in transportation put into question the role of transit in cities dependent on taxis and private buses.
South Africa will host the continent’s firstWorld Cup in 2010, and in preparation for the event, the city of Johannesburg has been rebuilding its transportation system with afocus on a new bus rapid transit network. But threats and shootings by members of the city’s strong taxi drivers union suggests that the project’s full implementation will not come easily. In a city that desperately needs alternatives to its traffic congestion, this kind of opposition is counter-productive.
Johannesburg, the country’s largest city with a population of almost four million, already offers commuter rail service in the form of Metrorail, which carries two million passengers daily. The Gautrain project, currently under construction, will eventually connect downtown Johannesburg with the capital in Pretoria and the international airport. But it will provide fast intercity connections and it will not be open until after the World Cup concludes.
The BRT project, called Rea Vaya, fulfills a different role: more local service to dense areas of the metropolis. Its first phase began operations last month, and when World Cup rolls around next summer, it will offer 86 km of lines and 100 stations. By 2013, as represented in the map above, the system will be expanded to 122 km and 150 stations. Unlike most “BRT” lines, Johannesburg will be getting the real thing in Rea Vaya: bus-only rights-of-way, high-level platforms at stations allowing level boarding onto buses, and pre-boarding fare collection within stations. In other words, it will be efficient and rapid and give the areas along its route an alternative to existing modes of transport, which take too long too frequently.
But taxi drivers in the area see the BRT as major competition, and they’ve been making their opinion known throughout the system’s development period. Several bus drivers have been threatened by taxi owners, and this week a guard for one of the system’s planners was shot in what appears to be direct action by a rogue gang of something equivalent to a taxi mafia. The United Taxi Association Forum, the union of drivers, denies association with any of the violence but it is clear that individual members are threatened by the creation of the BRT system.
While the violence in South Africa may be beyond the international norm, the reaction of taxi drivers to the implementation of a competing government-run transit network is relatively standard. Plans in Lagos for a light rail system, similarly, have been received negatively by drivers of the yellow buses that take most people everywhere.
To some extent, this opposition is reasonable: the BRT system will eliminate the means to make a living for thousands of taxi drivers in Johannesburg. In a country where unemployment is rampant, creating “efficiency” through better transit ultimately means cutting a number of people out of the job market, at least in the short term. Compensation probably should be made to the city’s taxi drivers, just to ensure that they’re able to transition to new careers.
Yet the lack of better urban mobility for the people of Johannesburg is a limitation for the city as a whole, keeping millions of people in traffic when they could be doing more productive things with their lives. Opposing the system ultimately means denying the population of an alternative to most inner-city commutes; using violence to threaten the network’s completion is a disgrace.
martes, 20 de octubre de 2009
Articulo: A Place Is Better Than a Plan
A Place Is Better Than a Plan
Revitalizing urban areas is best done through small improvements, not grand designs.
19 October 2009
The importance of small ideas to urban revitalization isn’t widely appreciated. Particularly in the most recent real-estate cycle, many planners, design professionals, and developers produced grand schemes instead. But profound change is more likely to result from a deeply considered idea that alters an essential component of an urban environment than from an elaborate master plan that requires abundant resources and considerable political capital. While some large-scale plans, like Rockefeller Center, are successful, most become impersonal, overbearing failures—or, even more often, are stillborn, the victims of the long process of assemblage, environmental remediation, community participation, zoning adoption, and the securing of financing.
For a striking example of the power of an apparently small idea, consider urbanist William H. Whyte’s suggestion that in public spaces, people prefer movable chairs to fixed seating. People like to control their own space, and movable chairs allow them to do just that. Movable chairs let people face one another and interact in different ways, not just the ones that landscape designers have in mind when they arrange fixed furniture. Having chairs scattered around sends a message of trust that people won’t steal them. And chairs’ historical associations convey the sense that a space is civilized and of high quality—like the European areas that use them, such as the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris.
Whyte first suggested movable chairs for Paley Park, a small park in Manhattan’s high-end Plaza District. After their success there, he recommended that they be a key element in the restoration of squalid Bryant Park during the 1980s. Some regarded that suggestion as naive; failing to tie down chairs amid the bustle and grunge of 42nd Street would surely spell trouble, they said. But the chairs—the same model used in the Luxembourg Gardens—were a key element of Bryant Park’s hugely successful reintroduction in 1992. One now finds movable chairs in public spaces across the country; in fact, many designers have chosen the same $30 chair that Bryant Park uses, apparently finding in its design something essential to its success. Most recently, movable chairs can be found in the recaptured pedestrian spaces in Times Square, though they are slightly different models.
Another small idea that produced an outsize effect in improving public places was the high-quality trash-can design employed in 1993 by the Grand Central and 34th Street Business Improvement Districts, which were run by the same staff as the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation. The idea of a well-designed trash can was unusual at the time; the Gotham standard was made of battered metal mesh. But an attractive trash can sends a powerful message that public spaces are well maintained and under social control, and as a result of its successful implementation in midtown Manhattan, communities across the country and in Europe have adopted the very same design. Other widely emulated ideas that grew out of the work of the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation and its affiliates include showing films in public spaces, using streetlamps that emit high-quality white light (as opposed to high-pressure sodium lamps’ yellow light), and planting gardens to soften streetscapes.
Campus Martius Park in Detroit is a dramatic example of how the Bryant Park model has been adopted elsewhere. Detroit is a museum of failed, expensive, large-scale urban fixes that were à la mode in planning circles at different times over the past half-century: a decrepit and underused people mover, the gigantic and isolated Renaissance Center, and the equally huge and isolated Comerica Park (sometimes derided as Comerica National Park), where the Detroit Tigers play. The stadium looks like a spaceship that descended on the city after the surrounding blocks were leveled and turned into parking lots. Campus Martius, by contrast, is Detroit’s liveliest and most humane public space. Based on Bryant Park, it is tremendously popular with pedestrians. The park includes movable chairs, a fountain, food concessions, regular arts programming, and high-quality horticulture.
Of course, urban planners are perfectly capable of ignoring the proven place-making techniques of the last 15 years. The park built atop Boston’s Big Dig, after the expenditure of billions of dollars, is a hot, forbidding wasteland on a spring day. There is nothing to draw visitors in: it contains limited, fixed seating, has no shade or water, and appears unprogrammed. While from a distance (and perhaps from an airplane) its design is attractive, from a pedestrian’s perspective it is cold and uninviting. When I visited this past spring, it was essentially empty, while adjacent attractions like the Quincy Market bustled with visitors.
Small changes are appealing for many reasons. They’re cheap, for one thing. Also, what works can be easily expanded, and what doesn’t work can be as easily terminated or altered. One successful food concession can become two; an unsuccessful stall selling local crafts can be replaced; a planter made from a material that discolors or chips can be replaced with a better one. Contrast that with grand schemes, which can attract broad opposition and be subject to complex political, logistical, and financial obstacles. Once an elaborate design has been committed to, backing away from it—or even altering it—becomes both politically and mechanically complicated. Further, planners have a limited capacity to predict how people will respond to their designs. The larger the project, the more likely unintended consequences become, and the more difficult it is to change course.
Above all, small ideas for revitalizing urban areas work, as the success of Bryant Park and its emulators has demonstrated. Why? Because, as Whyte (and Jane Jacobs as well) understood, people in public spaces respond to thousands of subtle visual and aural cues, and successful places manipulate these cues (often without premeditation) to provide familiar assurances of comfort and well-being. The cues prompt a person who encounters a new place to predict a positive experience there—above all, that he will be safe. The most important cues transmit a sense of order and social control. And the best new or restored spaces, like Bryant Park, Campus Martius, Discovery Green in Houston, and most recently the High Line park on Manhattan’s West Side, provide their patrons with the premonition of an enjoyable experience.
Those engaged in the work of downtown renewal and urban revitalization should always remember that truth. It will help them identify, and integrate into their projects, the helpful small ideas that can make cities more enjoyable places.
Andrew M. Manshel is executive vice president of the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation and was previously the general counsel of Bryant Park Restoration Corporation/Grand Central Partnership/34th Street Partnership. He is a director and the treasurer of Project for Public Spaces.
Revitalizing urban areas is best done through small improvements, not grand designs.
19 October 2009
The importance of small ideas to urban revitalization isn’t widely appreciated. Particularly in the most recent real-estate cycle, many planners, design professionals, and developers produced grand schemes instead. But profound change is more likely to result from a deeply considered idea that alters an essential component of an urban environment than from an elaborate master plan that requires abundant resources and considerable political capital. While some large-scale plans, like Rockefeller Center, are successful, most become impersonal, overbearing failures—or, even more often, are stillborn, the victims of the long process of assemblage, environmental remediation, community participation, zoning adoption, and the securing of financing.
For a striking example of the power of an apparently small idea, consider urbanist William H. Whyte’s suggestion that in public spaces, people prefer movable chairs to fixed seating. People like to control their own space, and movable chairs allow them to do just that. Movable chairs let people face one another and interact in different ways, not just the ones that landscape designers have in mind when they arrange fixed furniture. Having chairs scattered around sends a message of trust that people won’t steal them. And chairs’ historical associations convey the sense that a space is civilized and of high quality—like the European areas that use them, such as the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris.
Whyte first suggested movable chairs for Paley Park, a small park in Manhattan’s high-end Plaza District. After their success there, he recommended that they be a key element in the restoration of squalid Bryant Park during the 1980s. Some regarded that suggestion as naive; failing to tie down chairs amid the bustle and grunge of 42nd Street would surely spell trouble, they said. But the chairs—the same model used in the Luxembourg Gardens—were a key element of Bryant Park’s hugely successful reintroduction in 1992. One now finds movable chairs in public spaces across the country; in fact, many designers have chosen the same $30 chair that Bryant Park uses, apparently finding in its design something essential to its success. Most recently, movable chairs can be found in the recaptured pedestrian spaces in Times Square, though they are slightly different models.
Another small idea that produced an outsize effect in improving public places was the high-quality trash-can design employed in 1993 by the Grand Central and 34th Street Business Improvement Districts, which were run by the same staff as the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation. The idea of a well-designed trash can was unusual at the time; the Gotham standard was made of battered metal mesh. But an attractive trash can sends a powerful message that public spaces are well maintained and under social control, and as a result of its successful implementation in midtown Manhattan, communities across the country and in Europe have adopted the very same design. Other widely emulated ideas that grew out of the work of the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation and its affiliates include showing films in public spaces, using streetlamps that emit high-quality white light (as opposed to high-pressure sodium lamps’ yellow light), and planting gardens to soften streetscapes.
Campus Martius Park in Detroit is a dramatic example of how the Bryant Park model has been adopted elsewhere. Detroit is a museum of failed, expensive, large-scale urban fixes that were à la mode in planning circles at different times over the past half-century: a decrepit and underused people mover, the gigantic and isolated Renaissance Center, and the equally huge and isolated Comerica Park (sometimes derided as Comerica National Park), where the Detroit Tigers play. The stadium looks like a spaceship that descended on the city after the surrounding blocks were leveled and turned into parking lots. Campus Martius, by contrast, is Detroit’s liveliest and most humane public space. Based on Bryant Park, it is tremendously popular with pedestrians. The park includes movable chairs, a fountain, food concessions, regular arts programming, and high-quality horticulture.
Of course, urban planners are perfectly capable of ignoring the proven place-making techniques of the last 15 years. The park built atop Boston’s Big Dig, after the expenditure of billions of dollars, is a hot, forbidding wasteland on a spring day. There is nothing to draw visitors in: it contains limited, fixed seating, has no shade or water, and appears unprogrammed. While from a distance (and perhaps from an airplane) its design is attractive, from a pedestrian’s perspective it is cold and uninviting. When I visited this past spring, it was essentially empty, while adjacent attractions like the Quincy Market bustled with visitors.
Small changes are appealing for many reasons. They’re cheap, for one thing. Also, what works can be easily expanded, and what doesn’t work can be as easily terminated or altered. One successful food concession can become two; an unsuccessful stall selling local crafts can be replaced; a planter made from a material that discolors or chips can be replaced with a better one. Contrast that with grand schemes, which can attract broad opposition and be subject to complex political, logistical, and financial obstacles. Once an elaborate design has been committed to, backing away from it—or even altering it—becomes both politically and mechanically complicated. Further, planners have a limited capacity to predict how people will respond to their designs. The larger the project, the more likely unintended consequences become, and the more difficult it is to change course.
Above all, small ideas for revitalizing urban areas work, as the success of Bryant Park and its emulators has demonstrated. Why? Because, as Whyte (and Jane Jacobs as well) understood, people in public spaces respond to thousands of subtle visual and aural cues, and successful places manipulate these cues (often without premeditation) to provide familiar assurances of comfort and well-being. The cues prompt a person who encounters a new place to predict a positive experience there—above all, that he will be safe. The most important cues transmit a sense of order and social control. And the best new or restored spaces, like Bryant Park, Campus Martius, Discovery Green in Houston, and most recently the High Line park on Manhattan’s West Side, provide their patrons with the premonition of an enjoyable experience.
Those engaged in the work of downtown renewal and urban revitalization should always remember that truth. It will help them identify, and integrate into their projects, the helpful small ideas that can make cities more enjoyable places.
Andrew M. Manshel is executive vice president of the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation and was previously the general counsel of Bryant Park Restoration Corporation/Grand Central Partnership/34th Street Partnership. He is a director and the treasurer of Project for Public Spaces.
Suscribirse a:
Entradas (Atom)
