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Monday, January 31, 2011

reflections on ecological design




The human being is a living creature. He is a part of  nature itself thus follows a defined and known life cycle; this lifecycle is  the sequence of day, month, year through out the different seasons .

The cycles of a man's life  consisting of birth, up-bringing, marriage, fatherhood, retirement, death is the complete path for one’s life leaving away for his children and his grandchildren to continue this journey.This is the definition of sustainability on the inidvidual level.


His successors will also draw other cycles for their life that connects with who they are and their personas but also connected to their fathers, family, tribe , communities, nation.

These multiple life cycles form  society and through them and their lives that the continuity of the historical, cultural aspects of a society is preserved.


These social cycles have been the foundation of anthropology in understanding how communities and societies are formed.
These interrelationships unveil  the invisible connections of the communities to the way it constructs meanings of the space  with time through its activities  
In designing our  plans and thinking about our development frameworks of design schemes, wether we are practitioners,
planners,policy makers, there needs to be more awarness to the mental plans of the city as a reflection of  these cycles .

The city becomes an ecosystem that through obeservation will reveal to us  the interaction of the different activities within it.

Sequence is  in the ecological cycles of earth, flora and fauna as well as in the sequence of the day (dawn, noon, sunset, late night) and the seasons ( winter , spring , summer, fall). 

 Our urban ecosystem is connected to the wider ecosystem in nature and thus a bigger picture also needs to be considered when we talk about enviromental consideration - it is not only how much we are impacting the enviroment around us.

it is about also how the cycles inside our masterplans link to the bigger cycles of the context we are living in and to think about how we will reflect these nodes of linkages without making the plan too rigid that it can not allow for the community to retrace meanings and emabed it in the framework.
 
The human life cycle is centered on the individual by excellence .As a living creature, the human being moves, migrates, grows and changes and by consequence is not static.

So, the concept of human life is one that does not accept state in one location and one era. We need to under-stand this flexibility ,resilience and adaptibility as it becomes crucial to strive to it since it is at the core of sustainable development.

One must not confuse stillness and presence with statism because it is in stillness that one observes his achievement and contemplates its proceedings. 
Therefore, he must be present to do so meaning being alert and conscious .Consciousness in this sense is a faculty that one uses to optimize his cycle. Our plans become more tolerant in  providing the community places of stillness. 
places of meaningfull meditation as people strive not only to be engaged but also to disengage , not only to connect but also to disconnect.

 The human life is a journey through out space and time- it the series of small choices we make , which route we take, which district we live in - most of our choices are affected indirectly with the planning challenges and opportunities that our city provides.In this sense, the plan needs to be in line with the choices that the community is making on daily basis and call for also a reevaluation of these choices mitigating the one chosen by constraints and putting weight on opportunistic choices- ones that may enhance the experience of one's life inside the city.

This motion through out space and time begins from the moment the human being is reflected in his small travels such as his day going to work and leaving his home. Our plans need to account for the small journeys , how they will look like , what they will mean to the community.

So, Respecting cycles of activities, of flows,of seasons, of time and space would allow our plans might to last  more than the next generation. 

Saturday, January 29, 2011

landscape urbanism?new urbanism?smart growth? no-it is social media

density versus suburbs needs to be replaced by new social media and physical space

the debate goes on - landscape urbanism versus new urbanism.The interesting article published in Green building - in The Boston Globe (circulated on twitter through @space2place) gives insight how academia and professionals are in constant debate in what theoratical framework is more adequate to assist us in conceptualising urban space for the 22nd century. Two alternative views :the city as the place of flows and and as an ecological system that needs to be self sustainable or the diverse dense city that has a sense of place and community - Ecology and its sister theory of systems thinking versus Design and its sister theory of human rational reasoning

The dicussion focused on the alternative ways to tackle sustainability in its enviromental dimension within these two structures but missed to acknowledge the gradual rise of social sustainability driven by the proliferation of social networking .

not only sustainability - social media and crowdsourcing are dominating the new realities of the world we are living in-being human is expanding into tweeting,faceboking and sharing all sorts of stuff.


Viewing the change global governance, the impact that social media is having on our daily life and public sphere, there needs to be more debates wihtin the planning and design professions delaing in built enviroment to how we can benefit from the incredible potential that social media is giving us - on how connections and flows within the virtual sphere are forming? how these trajectories if analysed will feed back into design?thinking how our theoratical framework can accomodate for these new social dimension?how we can link up with infromation technology to advance sophisticated analysis tools that may help us understand and dissect the complexity of what cities are?

the ultimate success of being NEW ,urbanist or LANDSCAPE,urbanist or X-urbanist is about being able to accomodate for future realities now in the present and social media might become the dominant social reality

Monday, January 24, 2011

urban farming - new perspective

Should cities be self-sufficient? An argument for vertical ur... on Twitpic

Permeability - shaping how people move within cities


Permeability and crowdsourcing


Permeability is defined by the ability of the urban tissue to offer different routes, through and within it and measures opportunity for movement. Accessibility is a product measure of permeability; it is actually the product of the individual and the cadastral system the cadastral street patterns which is the layout of urban blocks shows the public space network and pinpoints pain areas that are blocking permeability in an urban area.

By defining the spaces that define the blocks ,we can analyze the nature of the tissue of the development.
By analyzing the tissue, we can understand better the relationship between the buildings and the space around them; this relationship will give us insight on their permeability.

Riba student winner award, restituted spaces ,Piotr Lesniak,University of Edinburgh Edinburgh UK
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Old Souk,Dubai - http://www.dubaiwall.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/old_souk.jpg
Visual permeability is the availability of vistas, which are the views corridors in a tissue

Physical permeability represents the ability to seek different routes .
The measure of permeability is the degree of the grid texture; finer grid permits higher visual and physical permeability than coarser grids.


Symbolic permeability links essentially to the mental map of the city for its visitors and residents-
it is the amenability of its tissues for new imprints-
new crowd courcing techniques are rewriting the way permeability has been deisgned - the sheer volume of information relating to how citizens view their city permeability means that designers ,urban planners and policy makers may be more and more challenged - 

NYC launched a competition last year AND GUESS WHO WINS- A WAY FINDING APPLICATION -this gives a real indication that permeability is one of the most important quality that citizen look in cities because it is what helps moveand experience its spaces.would be interesting to see what types of urban information such application might tell us ?

Thursday, January 20, 2011

So What is Accessibility for Public Spaces?

Public space should be accessible to and used by all. (Arendt ,1958) It is particularly important, as Fraser (1990) and Hartley (1992) argue, that by claiming that public space as an embodiment of the public realm, it should include and foster interactions between different groups of the society. It should also offer excluded groups an opportunity to claim their rights of representation within the general community.

Demographic accessibility refers to the link between the production activities of the space and the output generated to the entity operating it whether it’s a public or private agency. The production activities,  such as retail, can be analyzed through the formal and informal programs that the implemented design generates as well as the one designed for [N1] [N2] .The inclusivity of the public space is established collectively through the diverse groups that uses is to engage in dialogue, debate and oppositional struggles. Key aspects of inclusive public space are its suitability for gatherings and encounters and its accessibility as an arena through which privacy is contested (Mitchell 1995)>Inclusive public space also encompasses the range of wage groups it serves and being served to. Demographic accessibility is important since it allows for various perceptions of the space to surface. In fact, (Ramon, 2004) advocates that variables such as age, sex, social class and ethnic identity affect the way urban life is perceived[N3] .

Physical accessibility is defined by the nature of the network that links the urban space to its surrounding urban fabric. The nature of these networks , highway or a pedestrian street, can change their role from  linkages to obstructions facilitating or preventing exchange processes and therefore the inclusivity as a quality of Publicness. “Environments, individuals and/or groups perceived either as threatening, comforting or inviting may affect entry into a public space” (Tiesdell and Oc, 1998: 648).

Symbolic accessibility can be distinguished by the degree of users’ engagement with the space in terms of active/passive engagement. The nature and the scope of activities incorporated in the public spaces can either allow or prevent the emergence of spaces of representation. The impact of the spaces of representation vary depending on the flexibility of such a representation. If it is narrow, it would only allow for representations of selected groups, if it is wide, it would allow for overlapping representations and increase its circle of influence beyond the development to the city scale.
This could even extend to national scale especially in extraordinary events such as the place de martyrs in Beirut in becoming an arena for multiple representations for Lebanon over the past two years. By outlasting mortal lives, it memorializes and thereby conveys a sense of history and society (Arendt 1958). Public spaces are defined in terms of the social encounter and exchange “where groups’ interest converge ’( Borja and Muxi ,2001;Glazer and Lilla 1987;Vernez Moodar 1992;Sorkin 1992;Tibbalds 1992;Worpole 1992). It reinforces the collective identity of the community (Valle Del,1997; Franck and Paxson,1989;Gehl,1987;Lynch 960;Whyte,1980;Kenstler 1993;Ruddock 1996). 
Reinforcing residents’ feelings of belonging to the city is attributed to the actions that can be carried out in public space which reflects an opportunity to urban justice (Borja, 2000).



Thursday, January 13, 2011

regional boundaries drawn by phone


Sourced and adapted from http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Dec10/UKmap.html (Dec. 20, 2010)


An Analysis of phone calls shows how regional  boundaries could be ideally drawn by generating a map of regions of Great Britain in which people communicate more with each other than with outsiders.
Crowd sourcing technologies might change the way we view our boundaries , As Heidegger once said, a boundary is where reality begins it own unfolding ..
An interesting study coordinated between Cornell, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in the United Kingdom Analysed telephone calls in UK and generated a map in which the community/communication boundaries and patches were compared to  boundaries between admistrative regions . The map is a result of looking at a database of 12 billion calls over a one-month period, from which 20.8 million nodes and 85.8 million links between them were extracted. The map of the island was divided into 3,042 pixels, each 9.5 kilometres square- The main measure used was total call time between nodes in each pixel and those in every other pixel. The computer then automatically generated groupings among pixels until it found an arrangement that showed the most links within communities and the fewest between them.


"A community is something where most of the links are inside the community instead of outside," explained It was Steven Strogatz, the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics, that advised the researchers on how to analyze the data using an algorithm- The basis of the algorithm is on the number of links generated by phone calls inside a certain boundary – it is an interesting study since anthropology, sociology, mathematics and information technology experts all worked together to test our main hypothesis of a community – which is by definition an introverted group of people that share together values – mathematics interprets the quantity of the links generated by these values. IT will be more insightful to see if specific data mining on specific key words that relate to specific communal historical values can lead to the same results. .*
The research according to its instigator Dr, Strogatz saus that it could be applied in areas where conflict of boundaries cannot be resolved through technical ways such as surveying> this method seems to have a more basis into the social dimension as it relates directly to how people interact with each other and in that case it has a lot of capabilities if a historical dimension is also investigated.
Social science usually used observation – such as field trips and questionnaire in order to describe, analyse and study specific cultural and political organisations. It is here the overlay of geography that makes this research multi dimensional
The result is that the groupings coincided nicely with existing boundaries of administrative regions. The researchers came to the conclusion that "cohesive patterns within society promoting change in administrative boundaries and the latter, in turn, affecting human interaction."
Two main discrepancies from administrative boundaries were observed:

  1. People in eastern Wales communicated extensively with those around nearby cities in the adjacent region of West Midlands.
  2. Scotland communicated less with other parts of Britain.
  3. new "region" west of London was showing which is very close to a growing centre of high-tech industry
The research might be used in the economic analysis where seeing the amount of links between one district and the other, they concluded that "The effects of a possible secession of Wales from Great Britain would be twice as disruptive as that of Scotland, "as well as the new high tech node in London where it can become the future silicon valley of UK
The methods used in this research can be extended to cell phone records, credit cards or personal travel patterns which would measure more personal as opposed to business communication, or with credit card transactions or personal travel patterns,
The research will be very interesting since it is giving a new social dimension to what preciously known as geographical analysis – it is the overlap of the geography with social that will give transportation planners, policy makers, local councils and other city managers the possibility to see linkages on their blind spot- is not this what planning is ? Is not this one of the way we can use technology to assist us in sustainable planning?
  • The algorithm was developed by former Cornell researchers Michelle Girvan, now a University of Maryland physics professor, and Mark Newman, now a University of Michigan physics professor. The research is reported in the Dec. 8 issue of the online journal PLoS ONE. The Cornell algorithm is described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103: 89577-8582 (2006).

Monday, January 10, 2011

Sustainability Wins Award for "Jargoniest Jargon" | Planetizen

why research on public space is now more important for policy makers?


In an era of globalization, the role of public policy makers and urban designers is increasingly concerned in marketing their cities by advocating that they are integrated into the global map. Technology, and most precisely the upgrade of information technology sector, becomes essential in marketing the urban space as being connected with the global flows of capital, people (Porter et al. 2000 cited in Marshall 2003:18).
Subsequently, global urban projects described as  large scale developments built to accommodate high-end functions, are  increasingly initiated such as Cyberport (Hong Kong) ,Tokyo Rainbow Town, Muang Thong Thani(Thailand), Luijazui and the  Pudong Redevelopment Area (Shanghai),New Downtown(Singapore), Putrajaya (Malaysia) (Olds 1995,Marshall 2003).
 However, under the pressure of economic development and global agenda, Public spaces are increasingly privatized and purified   (Graham and Aurigi   1997, Graham and Marvin 2001).
As a result, investigating interventions that aim at providing inclusive public space in the context of a global agenda will provide linkages in between the growing urban research on the privatization of public space and the actual urban design practices and products.

Therefore, the study of possible urban interventions targeting the public space of suburban developments spurred by the global agenda is important.
These interventions need to be based on a conceptual framework that will synthesize the design attributes of  public space with the development goals set by the global agenda.
In particular, there needs to be a more thorough exploration on  how the purification and privatization of public space can be reversed through urban interventions that can benefit from the recent growing research on retrofitting suburbs that share the same attributes of global projects .
In addition, the analysis needs to take into consideration how public space were conceived  in the context and the reasons behind the particular design and policy decisions which lead to the particular characteristics of these spaces.
Importance of  global projects
Research on Globalization developed intensively (e.g. Castells 1989; Harvey 1989; Giddens 1990; King 1993; Sassen 1991) during the last decade although it is believed to start during 1970’s (Waller stein 1974; Castells 1989; Harvey 1989; Giddens 1990; King 1993; Sassen 1991).
However, the focus of the research was on mainly economic and political processes that generalized globalization debate into abstract forces affecting the urban space. Global projects are emerging concepts that deal with the specificities of the urban space being remodeled to respond to global agenda. As such, they offer an opportunity to investigate specific articulations in space and time.

Urban research on globalization based on a locale is needed as it provides new directions in term of being more empirical and specific and leading to practical interpretation of theoutput of the design process .
 
§  Importance of the study  public space
Although privatization of public space has been researched on since 1980, the research focused more in identifying the problems and ills of such a privatized ’’public space’’.
Starting from a more activist perspective, there needs to be more  thinking on interventions that capitalize on existing research and address the possibility of the success of such interventions within the global context.
The  approach will be essentially more multidisciplinary as public space is defined by integrating multiple layers in terms of anthropology than sociology, urban interventions formulated shall offer the opportunity of a holistic integrative approach

Thursday, January 6, 2011

urban developments - urban space vital to city development

            GLOBAL PROJECTS

The literature review chapter tackles three main themes that formulate the conceptual framework fro intervening to retrofit Big Urbanism projects influenced and intensified by globalization – I call them Global Projects
THIS IS  about defining global urban projects” as an emerging concept with its related challenges and investigates the forces that have lead to the sterility of their urban spaces. The public space definitions have been studied through different disciplines .Each discipline has studied its primordial characteristics and offered a partial perspective depending on the layer of analysis tackled. Few cases of research have attempted to present a comprehensive view or an overreaching concept (Low 2000). 
Global Urban Projects

Global urban projects represent the local articulation of global processes with the physical space of the city. They represent the materialization of the globalization forces in the urban territory. They are referred to as the “new urban form’’ (Forbes 1999, Lin 1994) that links city regions, or spans across borders or even become an extended ‘’metropolitan regions’’ (Rohwer 1995, Marshall 2003)

Their spread encompasses the five continents although most of the literature focused on their emergence in the Asia –Pacific region (Olds 1995, Marshall 2003).Most of the public spaces in these projects suffer from such as Pudong Area China.

Absent urbanism is reflected in the absence of a deliberate articulation of the physical and non-physical characteristics of urban space which Results in the absence of the link bonding it to the encompassing public realm of the territory it occupies. Thus, the space is not enabling multiple meanings and facilitating multiple perceptions or readings by its users. It becomes flat, purified and abstract.
Global urban projects sprang out of the political, economic and cultural forces of globalization. The below section will try and analyze the entrenched aspects of these forces contributing to the absence of urbanism 


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Is economics the reason why the disconnection happens? 
Global urban projects are seen as a marketing tool to put their host cities on the global map .In order to make foreign capital move efficiently, the projects disconnect themselves form their hosts and become isolated from the complexities of the territory surrounding them.
In the emerging urban economic base, cities compete mainly in terms of global competitiveness and connectivity which are the main criteria to determine their status (Short et.al 2003). In order to claim a position in the urban hierarchy, these cities establish global projects (Friedman 1995). According to Short (ibid.), the world city status is seen as a guaranteed enhanced level of prosperity in the contemporary urban economy (Dieleman 1994 in Short ibid.).
The connection to the global flow of capital means confining connectivity to a global network of information and people that are essential to sustain the activities of these nodes. The dependence on the foreign direct investment and the relocation of transnational companies make it essential to remove risks associated with local conditions.
Castells (1989) argues that ‘the suppression of places by the network of the information flows is essentially to avoid the complicated different layers of the urban space’. Therefore, developers of such spaces are taking advantage of the liberalization policies and consumerism by developing the spaces and the infrastructure supporting these spaces as a closed network .By filtering the boundaries of these projects and enhancing global connectivity via transportation and information highways, they risk a disconnection from the local context (Graham and Marvin 2001).
This disconnection will impact the life and life cycle of the urban spaces created in the global urban projects since they will become only a transient space for Multi National Companies  employees or Foreign Direct Investment guests. This transient character and the lack of connection with the existing fabric and community render their urbanism absent.
The dislocation and disconnection form the urban life of its host city, impacts negatively the input of these projects into the culture of the city.

Why their connection to the Cultural Dimension is lacking and is important to be restored?

The research proved that in practice these projects, although implemented due to the cultures diversity of either the consultants working on the project or the investors developing them, lack the multiplicity of spaces needed for representation and interaction. Although policy makers emphasizes the role of economic forces and political forces in the success of global projects ,their sustainability can not be attributed only to economic factors such as accessibility to global networks or agglomeration of producer services firms.
Current research stresses on the importance of social and cultural factors in their economic long term life  (Lee1995; Budd 1995; Amin and Thrift 1992, 1994).Global urban projects are essentially dependant on people. In his study of the Asian global urban projects, Olds argues that at the origin of the capital flows and mega urban developments between Hong Kong and Canada, lies essentially a cultural flow facilitated by the influential Chinese families and multinational consultants migrating Global projects are directly influenced by the cultural globalization that has been facilitated by the continuous flow of ideas, information, commitment and values across the world (Waters, 1995).
1.       Epidural (1990, 1996) propose five dimensions of these global cultural flows:
2.       -Ethnos capes: The movement of tourists, refugees and guest workers
3.       -Medias capes: the international flows of printed media
4.       -Techno capes: the spread and distribution of technologies
5.       -Financscapes: the flows of international capital
6.       -Icescapes: the flows of political ideas and values.

Another factor that proves the importance of the social and cultural aspects of these developments is the importance of livability or what is referred to formally as “Quality of Life”. This is depicted in the quantitative models developed by international institutions such as World Bank and IMF; Quality of Life encompasses aspects such as availability of public spaces, open spaces as well as the array of cultural activities available .It is the absence of these spaces that impedes these projects from achieving sustainability and fostering social and cultural interaction (Knight 1995).. The reason for this could arguably be a disconnection from the local dimension resulting in lack of spaces of representation and therefore the absence of urbanism in the spaces of these projects.

Contested territories

Sassen argues that the corporate culture as a representation of expertise neutralizes the urban space by ordering it through technology, economic efficiency and rationality. The main actors are the ‘’business elites’’ who establish their identity by “aestheticizing urban space to overshadow the aspects that need to be controlled (Murray, 1995; Zukin 1991, 1992, 1995). Sites become designed for one user group mainly business elites and employees providing spaces which can host them  without taking into considerations the  needs of other surrounding communities that are disregarded The issues of representation are key to understanding how various types of firms that are not associated with globalization or information economy are excluded. These are referred to ‘’contested representations of globalism’’ (Hannerz 1991).The representation of the city is merging with aims of boosting the city world status. These representations, either external or internal consumption, emphasize on the needs of the corporate new class: the city as a place of social justice, democratic participation or creativity is therefore silenced.
’This new managerial class colonizes exclusive spatial segments that connects with one another across city, country, world; they isolate themselves from the fragments of local societies’’ (Castells, 1989).

Sassen (1994) argues that there is a new space emerging that is calling for a new transnational identity. It is placed in the center because of its unique location and is considered transnational because it is connected to distant places .It is coinciding with Massey’s (1993) call for a ‘’progressive sense of place’’ that is global by linking itself to places beyond.
Although these flows have enabled the formation of a globalized culture, their articulation between each other and the local context lead to their reinterpretation and reinvention as subverted micro narratives (Appadurai 1990). In this sense, globalization is not a one way process, it adapts culturally to the local settings. However, differentiation does not occur in between societies. Instead, differences occur when clashes are produced between local cultures and imported ones (King, 1997).
Hence, Globalization as it advances will create hybrid spaces whereby the local and global fabric will fuse together and produce spaces that celebrate diversity while creating its unique narratives to the host city it belongs to.




What‘s in it for the developers to care so much about inclusive public spaces? Why it is it a big issue?


When the space is abstracted and purified through rationalization, it ceases to acknowledge that attractive urban spaces throughout famous cities have always been sordid. Peter Hall (1989) deduced, after reviewing planning theory of the twentieth century, that’ Great cities have never been earthly utopias: they are place of stress and conflict, messy places, sordid places but places nevertheless superbly worth living in’’ (ibid: 998).

Moreover, such acute privatization of public space can lead to the loss of the same security that the global agenda strives to protect. Examining the psychological implications of the decline of the public realm,  Senett (1974) notifies that this turning inwards undervalues the importance of class and community relations with strangers, particularly those that occur in cities.

Third, inclusive public spaces add to the quality of life, an important indicator in global marketing strategies, by enhancing opportunities of a more vibrant social life. Zukin (1995) elucidates the importance of public spaces because it reveals   how the city receives strangers and integrates them into their social life.  Where the public arena gives way to mingling with strangers, urban spaces are transformed into scenes of the civic life. Boyer (1994) highlights the importance of everyday street life and ordinary places of collective assembly that initiate the emergence of a shared public culture which the new consuming places fail to infuse. Furthermore, she points out that this level of every day practices construct ’social vitality and cultures of socialization, talk, negotiation and understandings’ (ibid: 260).  

Fourth, face to face encounters is still an essential component in increasing creativity and reducing economic costs of insecurity.  Stressing on ‘’the extraordinary social nature of modern economics’, Thrift and Olds (1996) argue that ‘’in volatile and globalizing economies , trust ,reciprocity and face-to-face relational networks become centrally important to many economic practices’’.

Fifth, Hybrid public spaces will cut on costs.   By encouraging the sense of belonging for a variety of social groups, such space will also increase economic potential by increasing social relations between different groups and therefore enhance employment opportunities in minority enterprises, third sector services, local education and technical centers. Hall (1995) views such diversity as producing better conditions for ‘economic adaptability since cultural mixing would allow innovative business formulas and practices’ (ibid cited in Amin A et al.1997:423).Diversity in the urban areas contribute culturally and economically to a vital style of life which will sustain social cohesion, mobility and opportunity (Castells 1989).

Roundtable -CEO for CITIES-The Rockefeller Foundation and Crowdsourced Cities

Yesterday, a group of urbanists, technologists, designers and urban planners gathered at the offices of the Rockefeller Foundation to discuss the future of the crowdsourced city with the paricipition of  CEO FOR CITIES . Four presentations focused on forecasting the benefits, tensions and pitfalls of mining the data that humans generate as they go about their daily lives at a variety of scales — global, national and urban.
Sunny Brown  was brought in to  facilitate graphically the roundtable into three murals - doodling was used to bring patterns and words together.