Our Urban Environment
Paths, edges, districts, nodes, landmarks
A collection of villages
Illa de la Discòrdia
Urban form and grain
One square mile of different cities' street networks, held at the same scale to compare the urban form and grain.
Names vs. The Nothing
This is the first site along the tour. In here we have a void. I remember the building that used to stand here, it was painted blue. Passing through it, you can imagine how us, as ghosts – should the building be standing here – would have to actually be invisible to pass through these walls and now it’s the reverse. The building is the ghost and we’re passing through these walls.
The linear city
The linear city was an urban plan for an elongated urban formation. The city would consist of a series of functionally specialized parallel sectors.
As the city expanded, additional sectors would be added to the end of each band, so that the city would become ever longer, without growing wider.
A dialogue between homogeneity and exception
All cities can be described as a dialogue between homogeneity and exception, and each strikes a particular balance that is at the core of its character.
Ground displaced upward
Imagine that our rooftops were parkland, that the area of ground occupied by buildings was, in effect, simply displaced upward. Imagine that the city enacted legislation requiring that the equivalent of 100 percent of the surface area of New York were to be green. A 100 percent requirement would not simply oblige green roofs. It would also demand that compensatory greenery be added to make up for such ungreenable areas as roadways, runways, and other unplantable places. Perhaps the requirement would be satisfied with road narrowings, cantilevered gardens, or green floors in buildings (utilities on the order of the mechanical floors that occur in almost all tall buildings).
Same name in the same basket
Does a concert hall ask to be next to an opera house? Can the two feed on one another? Will anybody ever visit them both, gluttonously, in a single evening, or even buy tickets from one after going to a performance in the other?
In Vienna, London, Paris, each of the performing arts has found its own place, because all are not mixed randomly. The only reason that these functions have all been brought together in Lincoln Center is that the concept of performing art links them to one another. The organization is born of the mania every simple-minded person has for putting things with the same name into the same basket.
A city cannot be a work of art
There is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: A city cannot be a work of art.
The kind of problem a city is
Dr. Weaver lists three stages of development in the history of scientific thought: (1) ability to deal with problems of simplicity; (2) ability to deal with problems of disorganized complexity; and (3) ability to deal with problems of organized complexity.
The history of modern thought about cities is unfortunately very different from the history of modern thought about the life sciences. The theorists of conventional modern city planning have consistently mistaken cities as problems of simplicity and of disorganized complexity, and have tried to analyze and treat them thus.
These loose notes
These loose notes are one possible description of our city. A city that, as in Constantin Cavafy's poem The City, is and always will be the same, in the same city again.
Strands of life
For the human mind, the tree is the easiest vehicle for complex thoughts. But the city is not, cannot, and must not be a tree. The city is a receptacle for life. If the receptacle severs the overlap of the strands of life within it, because it is a tree, it will be like a bowl full of razor blades on edge, ready to cut up whatever is entrusted to it. In such a receptacle life will be cut to pieces. If we make cities which are trees, they will cut our life within to pieces.
Natural and artificial cities
I want to call those cities which have arisen more or less spontaneously over many, many years natural cities. And I shall call those cities and parts of cities which have been spontaneously created by designers and planners artificial cities. Siena, Liverpool, Kyoto, and Manhattan are examples of natural cities. Levittown, Chandigarh, and the British New Towns are examples of artificial cities.
It is more and more widely recognized today that there is some essential ingredient missing from artificial cities.
Tree, leaf, house, city
"Tree is leaf and leaf is tree – house is city and city is house. A city is not a city unless it is also a huge house – a house is a house only if it is also a tiny city."
— Aldo van Eyck
To become completely lost
To become completely lost is perhaps a rather rare experience for most people in the modern city. We are supported by the presence of others and by special way-finding devices: maps, street numbers, route signs, bus placards. But let the mishap of disorientation once occur, and the sense of anxiety and even terror that accompanies it reveals to us how closely it is linked to our sense of balance and well-being. The very word "lost" in our language means much more than simple geographical uncertainty; it carries overtones of utter disaster.
Junctions
The junction, or place of a break in transportation, has compelling importance for the city observer. Because decisions must be made at junctions, people heighten their attention at such place and perceive elements with more than normal clarity. This tendency was confirmed so repeatedly that elements located at junctions may automatically be assumed to derive special prominence from their location.
A certain plasticity
There are dangers in a highly specialized visible form; there is a need for a certain plasticity in the perceptual environment. If there is only one dominant path to a destination, a few sacred focal points, or an ironclad set of rigidly separated regions, then there is only one way to image the city without considerable strain. This one may suit neither the needs of all people, nor even the needs of one person as they vary from time to time. An unusual trip becomes awkward or dangerous; interpersonal relations may tend to compartmentalize themselves; the scene becomes monotonous or restrictive.
A metropolis for hydrocarbons
An oil refinery suggests the image of a metropolis for hydrocarbons, the pipe manifolds like expressways, the distillation towers like skyscrapers.
Roads to nowhere
Among real-estate developers, straight lines and right angles went out of fashion sometime in the middle of the twentieth century. If you look at a town or a residential neighborhood laid out since then, you are more likely to find sinuous, serpentine roads—whether or not the topography offers any excuse for such curves. Many of these roads go nowhere: they are loops that bring you back to where you started, or they are cul-de-sacs. Making it easy to find your way through the network of streets is obviously not a high priority. This is an interesting development in urban geography: having redesigned the city to accommodate the automobile, we now search for ways to discourage people from driving on the streets.
Dead cities
If you can understand a city, then that city is dead.
NYLA
"See, what I've always liked about Los Angeles is that it's one of the least restrictive towns in the world. You can pretty much live any way you want to here. And part of that is because the place has no tradition and no history in that sense. It doesn't have any image of itself, which is exactly its loss and gain. That's why it's such a great place to do art and to build your ideas about culture. In New York, it's like an echo chamber: its overwhelming sense of itself, of its past and its present and its mission, becomes utterly restricting."
Tokyo
20 Minutes in Manhattan
A Book by Michael SorkinThe Death and Life of Great American Cities
A Book by Jane JacobsA City Is Not a Tree
An Essay by Christopher Alexander- Strands of life
- Impending destruction
- The right overlap
- The difficulty of designing complexity
- Political chains of influence
The Image of the City
A Book by Kevin Lynch- To become completely lost
- Apparency
- On the edge of something else
- Nothing there, after all
- Paths, edges, districts, nodes, landmarks
Soft City
A Book by David SimDesign of Cities
A Book by Edmund BaconA Burglar's Guide to the City
A Book by Geoff ManaughSuburban Nation
A Book by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk & Jeff SpeckAt Home: A Short History of Private Life
A Book by Bill BrysonUnderstanding Architecture
A Book by Robert McCarter & Juhani PallasmaaWhy I Walk
An Article by Chris ArnadeOn my first day I literally walk across the city, to the extent it can be done…The next day I do another cross town walk, but in a different direction, filling in the blanks from the prior day’s walk.
Then, over the next week(s), I walk between 10 to 20 miles per day, picking and choosing from what I have seen before, highlighting what I like, what I want to know more about, refining the path, till by the end of my trip, I have a daily route that is roughly the same.
While that is certainly not the most efficient way to see a city, it is the most pleasant, insightful, and human. I don’t think you can know a place unless you walk it, because it isn’t about distance, but about content.
Why buses represent democracy in action
A Talk by Enrique PeñalosaAn advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport.
Tilted Arc
An Artwork by Richard SerraIn the 1980s, Serra found himself in the center of a public controversy over his piece titled Tilted Arc. While it was the government that approached him to create the work for downtown Manhattan’s Federal Plaza, the unveiling of the piece in 1981 was met with sharp criticism. The monumental sculpture was said to disrupt rush hour and the pedestrians who had to cut through the plaza daily. To the dismay of art lovers, the 120-foot-long, 12-foot-tall Tilted Arc was ultimately disassembled in 1989.
Working with Brian Eno on design principles for streets
- Think like a gardener, not an architect: design beginnings, not endings
- Unfinished = fertile
- Artists are to cities what worms are to soil.
- A city’s waste should be on public display.
- Make places that are easy for people to change and adapt (wood and plaster, as opposed to steel and concrete.)
- Places which accommodate the very young and the very old are loved by everybody else too.
- Low rent = high life
- Make places for people to look at each other, to show off to each other.
- Shared public space is the crucible of community.
- A really smart city is the one that harnesses the intelligence and creativity of its inhabitants.
Towers in the Village
An Essay by Alfred TwuSince tall buildings have been around, there have been many ways they’ve fit into cities: towers in downtown, towers in the park, and most recently, towers on a whole-block development. Let’s look at a 4th way, the Tower in the Village.
Unlike the others, the Tower in the Village does not aim to be the center of attention. Instead, the upper floors are hidden behind a low front that fits in with the rest of the block. It faces a village green instead of a busy road.
Why highrise infill? Growing cities have two choices: 1) Redevelop a lot of sites to medium density, or 2) Redevelop a small number of sites to very high density. Highrise infill requires less demolition and can get more homes built faster.
Clues for software design in how we sketch maps of cities
An Article by Matt WebbGiven there’s an explosion in software to accrete and organise knowledge, is the page model really the best approach?
Perhaps the building blocks shouldn’t be pages or blocks, but
neighbourhoods
roads
rooms and doors
landmarks.Or rather, as a knowledge base or wiki develops, it should - just like a real city - encourage its users to gravitate towards these different fundamental elements. A page that starts to function a little bit like a road should transform into a slick navigation element, available on all its linked pages. A page which is functioning like a landmark should start being visible from two hops away.
The 99% Invisible City
A Book by Roman Mars & Kurt KohlstedtProposal to renovate a housing complex
A PhotographSimone and Lucien Kroll. Gennevilliers, France, 1990.
Cities and Ambition
An Essay by Paul GrahamCityspace series
A Gallery by Emily GarfieldPrimary series for imaginary map drawings, spanning 2008-present and using various materials and techniques.
Psychogeography
A Definition by Guy DebordPsychogeography is an exploration of urban environments that emphasizes playfulness and "drifting". It was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as:
- "The study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals."
- "A total dissolution of boundaries between art and life."
- "A whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities...just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape."
Title Cities
An Artwork by Nicholas RougeuxA book’s title page contains more than its namesake—including its author, contributors, publisher, and release date, and. Antiquarian books are known for having lengthy titles, especially those of a scientific nature. These books’ frequently unassuming title pages are gateways to a wealth of knowledge and the focal point of this project.
Title pages of antique influential scientific books covering a variety of subjects were coded and reimagined as colorful cityscapes based solely on their words to illustrate the unique body of knowledge readers would find within.
Boxes were drawn around each word of a title page and color-coded by its first letter (words beginning with “A” are one color, “B” another, and so on). Each title page has its own palette. Those boxes were then upended and arranged to form an abstract cityscape while maintaining their original sizes relative to each other.
Local Code: The Constitution of a City at 42º N Latitude
A Book by Michael SorkinLocal Code: 3,659 Proposals About Data, Design & The Nature of Cities
A Book by Nicholas de MonchauxLocal Code’s data-driven layout arranges drawings of 3,659 digitally tailored interventions for vacant public land in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, and Venice, Italy. The natures of these found parcels is as particular as the cities that house them — land under billboards in Los Angeles, dead-end alleys in San Francisco, city-owned vacant lots in New York City, and abandoned islands in the Venetian lagoon — but have in common an unrecognized potential as a social and ecological resource.
Urban Street Network Orientation
An Article by Geoff BoeingThis study measures the entropy (or disordered-ness) of street bearings in each street network, along with each city’s typical street segment length, average circuity, average node degree, and the network’s proportions of four-way intersections and dead-ends. It also develops a new indicator of orientation-order that quantifies how a city’s street network follows the geometric ordering logic of a single grid. These indicators, taken in concert, reveal the extent and nuance of the grid.
New Urbanism and Beyond: Designing Cities for the Future
A Book by Tigran HaasAll the buildings in New York (that I've drawn so far)
Introduction to Permaculture
The conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive systems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of the landscape with people providing their food, energy, shelter and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way.
About Permaculture
The word Permaculture is taken from the Latin Permanens–meaning to endure of persist through time and cultura–referring to cultures–coming together. Permaculture is an interdisciplinary design science in the field of sustainable system design, with sustainable defined as:
a system which over its lifetime produces energy equivalent to or in excess of what it consumes.
Permaculture ethics
Permaculture operates on three:
- Care of Earth
- Care of Species
- Return of Surplus to the first two
Using akido on the landscape
I have spoken, on a more mundane level, of using akido on the landscape, of rolling with the blows, turning adversity into strength, and using everything positively. The other approach is to karate the landscape, to try to make it yield by using our strength, and striking many hard blows. But if we attack nature we attack (and ultimately destroy) ourselves.
Permaculture principles
There are two basic steps to good permaculture design. The first deals with laws and principles, while the second is more closely associated with practical techniques.
The principles are inherent in any permaculture design, in any climate, and at any scale. They are, briefly:
- Relative location: every element is placed in relationship to another so that they assist each other
- Each element performs many functions.
- Each important function is supported by many elements.
- Efficient energy planning for house and settlement.
- Emphasis on the use of biological resources over fossil fuel resources.
- Energy recycling on site.
- Using and accelerating natural plant succession to establish favourable sites and soils.
- Polyculture and diversity of beneficial species for a productive, interactive system.
- Use of edge and natural patterns for best effect.
Design is a connection between things
The core of permaculture is design. Design is a connection between things. It's not water, or a chicken, or the tree. It is how the water, the chicken and the tree are connected. It's the very opposite of what we are taught in school. Education takes everything and pulls it apart and makes no connections at all. Permaculture makes the connection, because as soon as you've got the connection you can feed the chicken from the tree.
To enable a design component to function efficiently, we must put it in the right place.
Inputs and outputs
For things to work properly, we must remember that:
- The inputs needed by one element are supplied by other elements in the system; and
- The outputs needed by one element are used by other elements (including ourselves).
Each element performs many functions
Each element in the system should be chosen and placed so that it performs as many functions as possible.
Each important function is supported by many elements
Important basic needs such as water, food, energy, and fire protection should be served in two or more ways.
The wild energies
Sectors deal with the wild energies, the elements of sun, light, wind, rain, wildfire, and water flow. These all comes from outside our system and pass through it. For these, we arrange a sector diagram based on the real site, usually a wedge-shaped area that radiates from a centre of activity.
Elements are placed according to intensity of use, control of external energies, and efficient energy flow.
Turn them into cycles
Permaculture systems seek to stop the flow of nutrient and energy off the site and instead turn them into cycles, so that, for instance, kitchen wastes are recycles to compost; animal manures are directed to biogas production or to the soil; household greywater flows to the garden; green manures are turned into the earth; leaves are raked up around trees as mulch.
Time stacking
The British devised a system of farming in which pastures were broken up after the animals had been on them a few years. The pasture was plowed up and put into a high nutrient-demand crop, followed by a grain crop, followed by a root crop. One year it was left fallow to rest the soil. This was sustainable, but it took a long time to cycle.
Masanobu Fukuoka, that master strategist, deals with time stacking. He does not have to follow, because he never removes the main part of the crop from the soil. He starts the next crop before the last crop is finished.
The garden is a riot
In conventional agriculture, vegetation is kept at the weed or herb level using energy to keep it cut, weeded, tilled, fetilised, and even burnt; that is, we are constantly setting the system back and incurring work and energy-costs when we stop natural succession from occurring.
Instead of fighting this process, we can direct and accelerate it to build our own climax species in a shorter time.
There is no attempt to form the garden into strict neat rows; it is a riot of shrubs, vines, garden beds, flowers, herbs, a few small trees, and even a small pond. Paths are sinuous, and garden beds might be round, key-holed, raised, spiraled, or sunken.
We should not confuse order and tidiness
To the observer, this may seem like a very unordered and untidy system; however, we should not confuse order and tidiness. Tidiness separates species and creates work, whereas order integrates, reducing work and discouraging insect attack. European gardens, often extraordinarily tidy, result in functional disorder and low yield. Creativity is seldom tidy.
Perhaps we could say that tidiness is something that happens when compulsive activity replaces thoughtful creativity.
The number of ways in which things work
The importance of diversity is not so much the number of elements in a system; rather it is the number of functional connections between these elements. It is not the number of things, but the number of ways in which things work.
Species guilds
Guilds are made up of a close association of species clustered around a central element (plant or animal). This assembly acts in relation to the element to assist its health, aid in management, or buffer adverse environmental effects.
An edge is an interface
An edge is an interface between two mediums. Edges are places of varied ecology. There is hardly a sustainable traditional human settlement that is not sited on those critical junctions of two natural economies. Successful and permanent settlements have always been able to draw from the resources of at least two environments.
An edge is a sieve
The edge (boundary) acts as a net or sieve: energies or materials accumulate at edges, e.g. soil and debris are blown by wind against a fence; seashells form a line at the tide-marks on a beach; leaves accumulate at kerbsides in a city.
Everything works both ways
Disadvantages can be viewed as "problems" and we can take an energy-expensive approach to "get rid of the problem", or we can think of everything as being a positive resources: it us up to us to work out just how we can make use of it.
"Problems" can be intractable weeds, huge boulders lying on the perfect house site, and animals eating garden and orchard produce. How can we turn these into useful components of our system? Boulders on the perfect house site, for example, can be incorporated into the house itself, for beauty and as a heat storage system.
The quality of thought
It is the quality of thought and the information we use that determines yield, not the size or quality of the site.
Let the goals suggest themselves
There are several ways to start the design process, depending on your nature and needs. You can start out by defining your goals, as precisely as possible, and then look at the site with these goals in mind. Or you can take the site with all its characteristics (both good and bad), and let goals suggest themselves. Of the two questions—"What can I make this land do?"—or—"What does this land have to give me?"—the first may lead to exploitation of the land without regard to long-term consequences, while the second to a sustained ecology guided by our intelligent control.
Maps and observation
Maps are useful only when they are used in combination with observation. Never try to design a site by just looking at a map, even if it is thoroughly detailed with contour lines, vegetation, erosion gullies, and so on marked in.
Maps are never representative of the complex reality of nature. Remember, "The map is not the territory."
Reading the landscape
As we walk about a site and talk to people, we can note our observations. At this stage, we try to store the information we gain in some accurate way, carry a notebook, or a camera and tape-recorder, and make small sketches. The notes we end up with can later be used to devise design strategies.
We do not just see and hear, smell and taste, but we sense heat and cold, pressure, stress from efforts of hill-climbing or prickly plants, and find compatible or incompatible sites in the landscape. We note good views, outlooks, soil colours and textures. In face, we use (consciously) all our many senses and become aware of our bodies and responses.
Beyond this, we can sit for a time and notice patterns and processes: how some trees prefer to grow in rocks, some in valleys, others in grasslands or clumps. We see how water flows on the site, where fires have left scars, winds have bent branches or deformed the shape of trees, how the sun and shadows move, and where we find signs of animals resting, moving, or feeding. The site is full of information on every natural subject, and we must learn to read it well.
The group of blind mullahs
In a natural landscape, each element is part of the greater whole, a sophisticated and intricate web of connections and energy flows. If we attempt to create landscapes using a strictly objective viewpoint, we will produce awkward and dysfunctional designs because all living systems are more than just a sum of their parts. Our culture has tried to define the landscape scientifically, by collecting extensive data about its parts.
These methods are much like the group of blind mullahs in the Sufi tale, who try to describe an elephant.
If you have to do tedious work
If you have to stand somewhere doing tedious work, at least make it interesting.
The perverse arrangement of older houses
The main problem lies in the often perverse arrangement of older houses, which face the road rather than the sun, and in the mania for glass windows on all outside walls.
Always start at the doorstep
If you are having trouble knowing where to start, always start at the doorstep.
The American lawn
The American lawn uses more resources than any other agricultural industry in the world. The American lawn could feed continents if people had more social responsibility.
Why should it be indecent to have anything useful in the front half of your property or around the house where people can see it? Why is it low-status to make that area productive? The condition is peculiar to the British landscaping ethic; what we are really looking at here is a miniature British country estate, designed for people who had servants. It has become a cultural status symbol to present a non-productive facade. The lawn and its shrubbery is a forcing of nature and landscape into a salute to wealth and power, and has not other purpose or function.
The only thing that such designs demonstrate is that power can force men and women to waste their energies in controlled, menial, and meaningless toil.
From consumption to production
I see no other solution (political, economic) to the problems of mankind than the formation of small responsible communities involved in permaculture and appropriate technology. I believe that the days of centralised power are numbered, and that a re-tribalisation of society is an inevitable, if sometimes painful, process.
The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens.
People who force nature force themselves
People who force nature force themselves. When we grow only wheat, we become dough. If we seek only money, we become brass; and if we stay in the childhood of team sports, we become a stuffed leather ball.
To become a complete person, we must travel many paths, and to truly own anything, we must first of all give it away.
Eaves and sun