Archigram, Walking City

Archigram is a group of pop-inspired young London architects in the 1960s

Founders:
Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron and Michael Webb

The Walking City, Ron Herron, 1964

The concept of Walking City is to build intelligent buildings or robots that can walk in the cities. In addition, these buildings can also plug into stations for people to get from one pod to another, and also to replenish their resources.

The real life examples now, although not a literal building or robot, but still have the same concept as the Walking City. This includes trains, boats and cars.

Plug-in-City, Peter Cook, 1964

The plug-in city, although was never built, but was an inspiration to future city planning, a combination of technology and society. Many drafts were drawn and among them was the "Plug-In City" by Peter Cook. It is a fantasy city whereby many molecular residentials, like cell units, are connected to a main mega structure like how it is plugged into it. The transportation, and other services can be provided by movable giant movable cranes installed. 

http://www.archdaily.com/399329/

Task 4.4

Water's Role in a City

Bill Stowe is the CEO and General Manager of Des Moines Water Works


Water and water's role for people
Water holds an important role in everyone's lives, let alone cities. Unfortunately, the quality of water are deteriorating the water needs to be safe to drink. The process of water is becoming difficult. In places where rural and urban comes together, water quality is bad and that is where companies like the DMWW will come to use their latest technology to purify the water. Water being central in city of the future as well as the past, and will continue to be of such an important character. In America, drains and watersheds take up alot of space, most of them agricultural, in the future, more of them will become urbanized. They get water from surface water from Des Moines river, and engineering and science technology played a big part in providing people with clean water. Managing water in an island is getting more difficult with plant waste discharge, agriculture; urban, rural and suburban.

Task 4.3

Bicycle Urbanism

Florian Lorenz is an ecological designer. He has a strong interest in transportation and prime focus on urban cycling. He has been the head of research at Smarter Than Car (STC).

His idea mainly focuses on building a city for bicycles. Planning has to adapt to mobility, private vehicles are dominating the roads. People are finding markets in mobility in urban cities. Biofuels compared to conventional fuels, bicycles compared to other transportation. Last 30 years we used non-renewable energy, but with growing population, limited resources are forcing us into switching to renewable energy.
A layout of city has to change to be sustainable, to adapt to the usage of resources.
Florian went to China to study how bicycles can be a mean of a transport. However he realised that the once hailed "Bicycle Kingdom" is eroding and more and more people are getting cars. He studied how people cycle, and why the bicycle culture is eroding so fast. Bicycles there were used not only as a mean of transport but also used as shops, delivery, crafts and services, in a spontaneous and adaptive way to the city. It provided the people to make a living in their city. In 1980s, 58% of trips are in bicycle.

Diagram of traffic flow in a local city and Beijing

In contrast to other countries, Beijing has hose traffic might be chaotic, but it shows validity to the place, more freedom to move around, increasing mobility. More direct ways are more efficient. Urban cycling decreases carbon footprints. Bicycle not only is a mean f transport but also becomes a trend. Valuable approach for cities, challenges against high demands for transport, traffic congestion.

Task 4.2

Successful City Building

Mayor of Vaughan City

Mayor Maurizio Bevilacqua 
Vaughan, Canada

He constantly mentioned that human connection helps to make a city work. Despite the stats and information of the city is given to him when he first started off, he felt empty. What does this information mean? Dream, build, make things real. He then went on to study the senses, as stated by him sensory based planning. It is important to observe the surroundings, the human experience and feelings is the most important. The human connection is the thing that makes the city vibrant, working. Developments in cities worldwide cant work out because they lack human connection. People need to be engaged and a part of it. They seek connection with the society, they need the sense of belonging in the city. Many developers forget about the connections, they just build buildings, spaces and no sense of collective purposes. A good city makes is people feel like they are one. Manifesting the collective, promoting what's important to self that can embrace the community. One thing he also mentioned which I would strongly agree to is that engaging people is important, the lack of engagement makes people feel unfamiliar, cold. While planning a city, designers need to study why people are happy in some neighborhoods but not others, what people feel in their spaces.

Spirit of humanity = ideal citizenship

Task 4.1

The Edible City, Shawn Harrison

Shawn Harrison

Shawn Harrison, a founder and co-director of Soil Burn Farms, came up with starting a farm in a city. It was a simple ideal. He mentioned that resources are needed to feed the growing population in th
e society, 1 in 6 Americans are food insecure. The community needs food.
60% of Americans die from diet related. Many are disconnected from the food, and he feels that the people should know the source where the food came from. Food is important since we existed, food is our lives.
In the span of 200 years, the people who were on the agriculture dropped from 90% to 2%.

The project aims to:

• Harvest in Sacramento City. The city has the perfect conditions to grow food
• Feed the hungry people with the harvest
• For the school, school has budgets and the food can provide the nutrients to the generations
• Legalize the production of food in urban, to sell and educate
• Economy, provide the people with jobs that is working
• Designing a city that connect with food, education value of the places we live and work

Overall, the project aims to promote healthy, long-term well-being.

Urban Design Factors and Guidelines

Fig 1.1  Aerial view of Brasila, Brazil

Brasilian Syndrome

Brasilia is one of the most famous modernistic cities, completed in 1955.

Weakness:
It has no human scale. What looks from the aerial view, bare green plot of land, actually doesn't look nice on human level. The planning was planned from an aerial view (floor plan) and not designed from human scale.

Fig 1.2 Panorama view of Brasilia 

Brasilian Syndrome is to design a city from the aerial view.
(also known as "bird shit architecture" by Jan Gehl) used in cities like China and Dubai.
Architects are more focused on the forms than the design of the surroundings and the environment.
Jan Gehl mentioned that the architects are twisting their architecture, capturing their imagination, but it is not the right way to plan a city. The architects are not planning according to the needs or the likings of the residents but to show off their creativity and idea of a utopia. Higher skyscrapers is causing scale confusion in cities. He also mentioned that people like to walk in a place with more human scale than a place without proper human scale.

Important points of architecture is the interaction between lives and forms but not only the forms itself.
As mentioned by one of the lecturers in school:

"It is not the design that defines the environment but is the environment that should shape your design.

Maybe that's a reason why site analysis always comes first in projects.
Well, as the city grow bigger, more people moving from rural areas into cities. These people can be a benefit to the city's economy. Soon cities will lose its cultural and historical identities because it is more important to house the people who are living in the cities.

Bicycling

Over the years, more and more countries, states and cities are encouraging their people to cycle. Despite building more parking lots and spaces for bicycles, it is still economically friendly as riding a bicycle can save resources and money for the country, and time for the user.

Reference:
Fig 1.1 https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPcV8B6DACjcWIr62PDEFf6DDeAfsRaVFEvX1y66i6giks0KZQivu4LqPSM6MU1o6U-CZ_6wNjfE8Bx_RZoUa2WECXu2SE-6KIYXV3UJALRk5B0qzkTYfyHputBF92vLJB7jdT6OuLj9AY/s800/Brasilia.jpg
Fig 1.2 http://wikitravel.org/upload/en/thumb/f/f0/Bras%C3%ADlia_Esplanada_Pan.jpg/400px-Bras%C3%ADlia_Esplanada_Pan.jpg
http://evworld.com/press/cycling_wheels480x319.jpg

THE BIG RETHINK: URBAN DESIGN

Sutainability- The Big Talk

By 2050 it is predicted that 64.1% and 85.9% of the developing and developed world respectively will be urbanized.

With growing population in the urban cities, the basic design principles slowly shifts towards improving quality of spaces and life, providing the people with necessities and comfort. Every city in the world wishes to have a stable economy and well-being for its people. Thus, sustainability has became the common topic among designers to develop the cities of the future.

One of the movements introduced to improve the qualities of life is the Slow City movement (Cittaslow)

Cittaslow

A movement to decrease the speed of life (the traffic, pace) to:

• making life better for everyone living in an urban environment
• improving the quality of life in the cities
• resisting the homogenization and globalization of towns around the globe
• protecting the environment
• promoting cultural diversity and uniqueness of individual cities
• provide inspiration for a healthier lifestyle

Imagine yourself in a vehicle. As it moves, you realize that it is hard to see the surroundings clearly because everything is moving too fast. But when it slows down or comes to a stop, you can see everything clearly, detailed. The same applies to our perspective in life. Naturally when everything slows down, we are able to appreciate even the slightest details in our surroundings, people will tend to be happier.

Buildings nowadays are built in a sense they no longer continue the characteristics and historical values of the city. Cityscape can be shaped by the humans, but in turn they will also affect the people. It is a cycle whereby the people and spaces both defines one another. A good urban design retains the city's character and history even when striving to improve, with the aid of modern technology. It is a smart mixture of the past, present and the future.

It is the balance between its people, economy, character, and sustainability.

Radiant City

Radiant City

Le Corbusier

A movement

Radiant City:

• Green spaces
• Symmetry
• Skyscrapers

A radiant city is a city made to work well under sunlight, as its name suggests: RADIANT

http://www.cuepe.ch/html/plea2006/Vol1/PLEA2006_PAPER987.pdf

An article shows how the radiant city works during daylight compared to Paris.

"At the core of Le Corbusier’s plan stood the notion of zoning: a strict division of the city into segregated commercial, business, entertainment and residential areas. The business district was located in the center, and contained monolithic mega-skyscrapers, each reaching a height of 200 meters and accommodating five to eight hundred thousand people. Located in the center of this civic district was the main transportation deck, from which a vast underground system of trains would transport citizens to and from the surrounding housing districts. 

Similarly to the Green City Movement, the planning of the city consists of the main necessities in the centre of the region, with the residential and sub-commercial surrounding it. However, the difference between the two styles is vastly different. Green City Movement focuses on nature more than buildings whereas Radiant City is more of a hardscape city. The tall skyscrapers contribute to the concrete jungle, fitting a wide diversity of community into one single building.

"The housing districts would contain pre-fabricated apartment buildings, known as “Unités.” Reaching a height of fifty meters, a single Unité could accommodate 2,700 inhabitants and function as a vertical village: catering and laundry facilities would be on the ground floor, a kindergarden and a pool on the roof. Parks would exist between the Unités, allowing residents with a maximum of natural daylight, a minimum of noise and recreational facilities at their doorsteps.

Hotel Le Corbusier, Marseille

Singapore's architecture can be deemed similar to the architecture of Radiant City; tall, concrete and over-populated. The infrastructure connecting the buildings are of grid in Radiant City. 50 metres in height will be about 16-17 storeys high, which are now commonly seen in urbanized cities, like Singapore's HDB. Also, these buildings have facilities built in, like commercial-residential buildings we commonly see in Singapore.

Key Movements of Urban Planning; Green City Movement

Garden City Movement

Sir Ebenzer Howard

Founder

Garden City Movement is an urban planning technique which is first founded in 1898 by Sir Ebenzer Howard in United Kingdom.

His idea of the movement was to allow people and nature to live in harmony.

Basically, Sir Ebenzer Howard dreamt of creating a utopian city that

• ·         involves people living, growing, breathing in the fresh air, in the gifts of Nature
• ·         solves the problem of overcrowding and dirty city
• ·         to combine the elements of urbanization and rural areas
• ·         neither too large to deprive it of country character nor too small to erase the presence of social intercourse

The Three Magnets illustration of the relationship between: Town, Country and Town-Country

Early Influences

"Air and space, wood and water, schools and churches, shrubberies and gardens, around pretty self contained cottages in a group neither too large to deprive it of country character, nor too small to diminish the probabilities of social intercourse." (Edinburgh Magazine. Dec. 1848.)

 

Satellite Town 

Singapore was formerly known as a "Garden City", recently changed her title to "City in a Garden", is a vision set by the NParks for Singapore. As her title suggested, it must somehow be related to the Green City Movement, the whole city is designed and planned according to the style. To my surprise, URA came up with a new concept called the Satellite Town. It was an adaption of the "Ring Concept Plan" where facilities stand and surround a body of water with greenbelts tucked in between.

Queenstown was named in commemoration of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953

"The concept of a satellite town began with the conceptualization of The Concept Plan of 1971 by the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA). It adopted the “Ring Concept Plan”, which “envisaged the development of a ring of new high-density satellite towns around the central water catchment area, with each town separated by green spaces and a system of parks and open spaces.” Low- and medium-density private housing would be built beside these towns and there would be provisions for industrial estates.”

 - See more at: http://blogs.nlb.gov.sg/ask/singapore/2484#sthash.y0c0bZR9.dpuf

Queenstown was the very first Satellite Town to be established in Singapore, then later on Ang Mo Kio..
What these estates have in common is that they have all the necessities within the estate itself: cultural facilities, town council, residential, education etc.

So it's a planning-ception! Satellite Town within a Green City.

http://www.singaporecitygallery.sg/images/wmQueenstown-Book.pdf

Now Green Cities doesn't only mean to have pockets of green in the planning, but also to be eco-friendly and sustainable.



http://liverpool.metapress.com/content/c18131177l7l8x30/
http://www.rickmansworthherts.freeserve.co.uk/howard1.htm#sna
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_city_movement
http://www.library.cornell.edu/Reps/DOCS/howard.htm
http://www.es.a.u-tokyo.ac.jp/lep/thesis/98D_murakami-e.html
http://www.celsias.co.nz/article/what-do-new-zealands-futurologists-think-our-citie/
http://blogs.nlb.gov.sg/ask/singapore/2484
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_city_movement