Without the state

Watch this space

I'm away from home again for the next few days so won't be posting. However I'm preparing something on two urban spaces in Dublin - Wolf Tone Park and a new public space in the Smithfield area. The picture shows a side lane in Smithfield near to the old Jameson's distillery. That metallic glint you can see is an old still used as the centrepiece of a small square - almost sculptural.

The Postcard test

This oldpost from Cool Town Studios describes a good test of an attractive urban place - basically would you buy a post card of the scene?

Libertarian Planning

An interesting dialogue between Christopher Alexander and Bruce Snider, editor of Custom Home can be found here.
The town under discussion is Northport, Maine.

Bruce

Unfortunately, most of them think things are perfectly fine the way they stand. Historically, the town has been very resistant to planning or land-use regulation of any kind. This is New England, and there is a very strong sense of, "Nobody's going to tell me what I can't do on my property." Also, many local families have been here for generations, living a very modest life. If they can finally make some money by selling a piece of the farm, then who could blame them? I don't think my neighbors want to see fundamental change, but their distaste for regulation makes the town easy pickings for developers and large retailers.

Chris

And what sort of regulation do you propose?

Bruce

A regulatory mechanism, protection, rules, something -- something, even if we don't know what it is -- to control the onset of development!

That's where I come up blank. I would say a comprehensive plan, but I've seen the results of comprehensive plans in other towns, and that's not what I'm after at all. There must be some way to steer the town's development so that we end up with a real town--with a town center, real neighborhoods, and so on--rather than the kind of centerless sprawl we see all around the country. I would like to think there is some mechanism by which we can accomplish this.

This dialogue is interesting because it focusses on the tension between the desire to physically make the world in which we live a better place and the loss of freedom which it seems is teh inevitable result - and more to the point it recognises that tension and doesn't resort to sloganising whether 'free markets' or 'better plans'.

Bruce

I recognize the contradiction in what I am saying, and it's something I struggle with. Clearly, the places I value most did not result from planning. I would like to get beyond the argument between those who favor development and those who reject it out of hand. That argument is frozen in place, and the resulting compromise is the lousy pattern of development we see, in which "undesirable" uses are segregated from places where people live and so become truly undesirable. What I seek, lacking the tacit consensus that guided the growth of towns like Belfast, is some way to generate a new consensus. A developer can hire Andres Duany to invent a town; how can a town a town invent itself, following the wishes of those who live there, protecting what they treasure most?

Edgier Cities

Via City Comforts a great article from Wired Magazine in 1995, which takes a science fiction like look at the future of some of the more unlikely candidates for building conversion.

When the first big, regional, enclosed malls start to become obsolete, the historic preservationists stampede to their rescue. Like the old movie houses of the 1930s, these malls of the '70s and '80s are incredible palaces, built when price was no object. The layers of marble and gilt, the Amazon-like gardens and three-story computerized fountains and waterfalls, the amazingly sophisticated lighting systems designed to create different moods for every hour of the day.... They will never be seen again. They have to be saved!

As what, though?

University officials realize these structures would make great campuses. The anchors, where Macy's and Nordstrom and Sears used to sell goods, become excellent lecture halls seating thousands of students. The smaller shops are turned into more conventional classrooms. The three-story-high promenades in the center make fine places for students to flirt.

The most elaborate of these regional malls are known as gallerias. They are originally marked by office high-rises poking through the middle and hotels bolted onto the sides of the mall. The office towers, of course, become the administration buildings - quaintly called Old Main - and the hotels make swanky dorms.

Outside, goal posts rise from the acreage originally cleared for development that was never built. Nearby office buildings no longer prestigious enough for their intended purpose are turned into rollicking group houses with the skull of the Grateful Dead, that antiquated symbol of defiance, at the top of the tower.

It's a bleaker future for the great suburban subdivisions though:

In the medium future, history seems to be going Irvine's way. The market for its walled burbclaves - featuring homes painted only in variations on the color of Caucasian skin - booms. So what if the $400,000 Spanish townhouses with their tiled roofs are so indistinguishable that the easiest way to find yours is to hold down the button of the garage-door remote until it makes a panel open?

So what if the neighborhood shadow-government, which rules with an iron fist in the innocuous name of community association, can control the color you choose for your front door or your living-room curtains? So what if it can prohibit washing your car in your own driveway or regulate what size dog you own?

This seems like a small price to pay in a period when uncertainty swirls and security - physical, financial, and moral - is at a premium.

How then, does Irvine come to ruin? Why do vines climb the elevator shafts and plywood sheath the windows?

Adaptation.

Irvine tries to prevent it. But over the course of a raucous century, Irvine goes downhill. First, the comptrollers of corporate America can't stand to alter their corporate palaces in Irvine. Put in a fireplace to make an office more homey? Retrofit a building with windows that open? Forget accomplishing that kind of radical change quickly in Irvine. If it's not in the plan, it's anarchy.

People interested in getting on with their everyday lives, meanwhile, find it simpler to live and work in less authoritarian edge cities. It's not that people don't love the safety and security of the walls that surround them in Irvine. It's just that as their lives change - as they marry, have children, retire, or become empty nesters - they have to move on because the plan for Irvine will not. People find it simpler to move than to fight, and the resistance movement that arises briefly is crushed by fines and foreclosures.

With the benefit of hindsight, people in the far-term future now view it as obvious that cities are not clockwork, but living organisms following the rules of biology. To thrive, cities must be able to evolve ingeniously. They must be able to adapt quickly to a changing environment.

Its a great article and well worth reading - thanks David for bringing it forward.

In some ways this is the world of William Gibson, but it also brings to mind a great article by Cedric Price, Peter Hall, Paul Barker and Reyner Banham, called Non-Plan, published in the much missed magazine New Society in 1969.

It isn't available on line as far as I can tell, but the next chance I have to get into a university library, I'm going to look it up again. I remember on reading it, the mixture of horror and fascination it evoked. I'd love to see a modern reworking.

City Street, Copenhagen

Not one of mine - taken from here

Restoration or repair?

I like this part of Bristol. It has lots of new buildings, but by and large they seem to have dropped into the area quite nicely. The point of this photograph though is that - apart from the patch waiting to be relaid, the surface has been repaired over the years and allowed to age. I would have expected the risk assessors to have condemned it years ago but instead it has been allowed to slowly mellow and settle in.

This is the difference between repair and restoration. Restoration loses the sense of antiquity. Repair accepts, indeed celebrates, it.

New life for main roads

Via the Neigbourhoods blog I found a new website from Transport 2000 called New life for Main Roads

Main roads are often noisy, polluted places, dominated by cars and dangerous for people on foot. But main roads are also the places we use to get to the shops, catch the bus, walk to the local park or visit the doctor. Most people use main roads every day to get to work or to walk to school. We need new life for our main roads! Main roads and high streets should be:

* Easy to cross where you want to cross
* Places for people
* Safe from traffic danger
* Green, clean and attractive

Material is still being added, including in September photographs which can be used to support local action.

I don't know why we make such a mess of our public spaces. Most of Europe seems to do infinitely better than we do. Look at the Project for Public Spaces website for lots of good examples

A computer is a machine for living with

A post at Cool Town Studios, draws a distinction correctly I think, between creating the ICT infrastructure - wif-fi network etc - and creating the right conditions for people to make use of it. This is something I've posted on before (I'll add the links later when I have time). I read the post immediately after another post at City Comforts, where David Sucher, again correctly, draws the distinction between site planning and architecture.

I'm probably stretching the metaphor a bit, but both problems stem I think from an obsession with making a statement - putting up a flashy building without consideration for the users is it seems too easy - I haven't seen Koolhaas' library in Seattle, but all the reports suggest that is what has happened there. The NY Guggenheim - which I have seen - is another case where the statement overpowers the use.

Similarly all the community based ICT projects I have come across are about infrastructure - creating internet facilities in schools, community centres or teaching pensioners how to use a PC etc are fine, but without giving anyone an idea of what they might want to actually do thay have little chance of acheiving anything for the community.

PCs and PC networks, the internet , etc are tools. Buildings are tools. Their utility as tools comes from being able to use them to achieve other things. While some people get off on knowing about the innards of their PC or complex software development packages, they are the minority and usually recognise that the rest of us have different needs. Unfortunately in the case of architecture and urban design, the geeks have not just taken over, they have redefined the subject in line with their obsession with style and presentation - at the expense of utility for the rest of us.

A good read on this is by Stewart Brand in his book How Buildings Learn. You can see a sample page here.

Brought To You By The Libertarian Sprawl Lobby . . .

I liked this...(nicked from Veritas et Venustas)

Dublin Statues and their nicknames

I'm told by a commenter on the original post that Patrick Kavanagh's statue has always been referred to as "The Crank on the Bank". A new name for the Spire is apparently "The Rod to God".

Thanks Paul