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streets
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onsite 19: street, streets and lanes, the straight and narrow, wide and busy streets in Prince Albert, Athens, Rome, Toronto; Yellowknife, Dublin, LA, NYC streets scribbling across the land, streets written upon streets we want, streets we need, streets we fight, and streets we fight for
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Brian Dyson Alana Young Efrosini Charalambous, Anna Papachristoforou Rita Brooks Eric Deis Joseph Heathcott Ivan Hernandez Quintela Paul Whelan Jennifer McVeigh Antoin Doyle on site review 19: street spring/summer 2008
streets proximities: telling comparisons between Mexico City and Toronto working in the interstices of Athens’ urban fabric taking care of our streets, slowly and with great concentration scorn Roosevelt Avenue traverses Queens, dropping off passengers on its way exhausted city people waiting, waiting for the bus, for shade, for hours curious Toronto: three jostling doorways fit the space of one modern entrance oh Calgary, in ruins and empty lots. Artists flee the wreckers yet again thin lines of bollards drawing out the city public streets turn private: turning them public again in the San Francisco night shading green acres of surface parking in the city of angels intensely local guerilla zoning on a lot-by-lot basis thinking of mat-building in Halifax: a site is ready and waiting ad hoc cities that come and go with the seasons, the weather and the time of day supremely logical street furnishings that promote civic love slips; slipping across the street the neonisation of Warsaw in the modern soviet era — beautiful, beautiful the permanence of the impermanent northern light and land of snow: a park in Yellowknife’s pocket three streets, three authenticities Porta Portuense: powerful impermanence Anatolian streets made private: just build a gate, add a room, make a cul-de-sac thinking ahead to future streets ignoring reality in Nunavut poor old Prince Albert back pages
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Chris Roach Lia Maston Drew Sinclair Matthew Neville Zahra Ebrahim Nathalie Hereux Lola Sheppard, Mason White Ella Chmielewska Sarah Zollinger Wayne Guy Gordon Stratford Danielle Wiley Havva Alkan Bala, Hassina Nafa Alfredo Landaeta
Robert Billard Tim Atherton
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Andrew King, Angela Silver
Rome, from a fast-moving camera
above: street party in Montréal, 2007 right: roundabout in Dubai, 2004
HOK Canada, Toronto WASA [Waterloo Architecture Student Association] and SWAG [Society of Waterloo Architecture Graduates] Manasc Isaac Architects, Edmonton
Canada Council Grant for Literary and Arts Magazines The University of Edinburgh Schools of Architecture, Cultural Studies and Scottish Studies Government of Canada Canadian Heritage program for Postal Assistance to Publications
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street, street smarts, street life: onsite 19
street life
photography | streets by brian dyson
attention complexity
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Portobello Road, London 1967 | Lonsdale, North Vancouver 1970 |
Anti-war march, Calgary 2003 West Edmonton Mall 2004
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infrastructure | framing urban space by alana young
property ownership control intention engagement
the public realm of daily life ...urban space is a representational medium through which everyone’s social life is lived, where its values are continuously being both read and written, often in creative and unexpected ways. Playful acts show people’s continued capacity for the invention, dis- covery, appropriation, contestation, reappropriation and expansion of the meanings that urban spaces can convey. —Quentin Stevens street lingo – looking for people
if one wants to understand a city, one must first look to the street. It is here in the inherently public realm that the story of daily life un- folds, a place where every occurrence has the possibility of becoming property of the public domain. The most seemingly simplistic of public spaces, the street is often the most revealing in its reading of a city. Not only is it a form of civic infrastructure the street constitutes the shared space of the collective body. Nowhere was this made clearer to me than during my time spent living in Mexico City. There, the street formed a physical manifesta- tion of the city and its people, constantly re-asserting itself under the immense pressures of everyday life. In a state of constant flux and apparent chaos, the street was ceaselessly transformed by its inhab- itants into a multitude of unanticipated forms and uses. Not only a place for transit, the street provided a haven for vendors of all types to sell their wares, for performers to create spectacles of the most death defying acts, and for self-proclaimed artists to exhibit and sell their latest works. At other times the street was converted into an unofficial stage for soccer fans relishing their victories in the World Cup, an outdoor gallery for various art and photography installa- tions, and even as a temporary home for thousands of protesters during election disputes. Being able to attract and support such a great number of non- conventional uses, it immediately became clear to me that the street, as a valuable public space, was very much alive and thriving. The continuous adaptations and transformations the street would undergo and the equally continuous number of active participants was truly fascinating. The rhythm of activity exposed countless hu- man behaviours and social trends, ultimately instilling an identity of place. Many contemporary theorists, architects, and urban planners have also recognized the street as an extremely valuable public space, acknowledging its key relationship to both the micro-scale functioning of everyday life and the larger macro-scale elements that create the image and identity of the city. Frequently considered an essential outlet for both collective and individual expression, the street must be re-envisioned as a vital public space of encounter and happenstance–a place of possibility that facilitates and stimulates engagement in the public realm. These ideas are studied extensively by Sophie Watson in ‘City Publics: The (Dis)Enchantments of City Encounters’, who acknowl- edges the challenges modern ideals acquire in contemporary society. In a time when design promotes uniform, standardised space she chooses to analyse a series of marginal sites where differences such as ethnicity, age, race and gender are not only recognised, but also celebrated. She argues for a civic realm which, ‘will go some way to destabilize dominant, sometimes simplistic, universalized accounts of public space and help us re-imagine urban public space as a site of potentiality, difference and delightful encounters’. (Watson 2006: 19). Constructing ‘normative’ public spaces, she warns, will ultimately lead to failure in their inability to recognise and incorporate change.
below: weekend street market in El Zocalo, the historic city centre opposite top: tent cities emerged overnight as protesters blocked streets and government buildings during the 2006 presidential elections bottom: even weekend markets were appropriated as platforms for political outcry
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In Ludic City Quentin Stevens also shares a concern for standardis- ing the everyday by examining the patterns and significance of play and diversion that often occur in the street. He suggests one should more carefully analyse the informal, undefined qualities of quotid- ian routine believing that, ‘play reveals the potentials that public spaces offer’. (Stevens 2007: 1). Play, in Stevens’ opinion, provides a critical reading of underlying social transformations and previous- ly neglected conditions helping to inform more responsive designs. The San Diego-based architect Teddy Cruz also advocates the power of marginal spaces and unplanned circumstances, allowing them to form an integral role in creating responsive environments. In a time when an architecture of homogeneity is commonly used to ‘reduce cultural difference and intensity into projects of beautifica- tion’, Cruz believes in developing architecture and public spaces that are more adaptive and humanising. He argues that it is not the grand architectural gestures that generate engaging places but rather the ‘negotiation between planned and unplanned, official and unofficial is really what shapes urbanism’ (Cruz 2006). Throughout Toronto one can find a variety of curious intersti- tial spaces and in-between places. Each site represents a part of Toronto’s social, cultural, political and economic conditions. One particular place of interest is the intersection of Jane Street and Finch Avenue in North York, a neighbourhood often referred to as the most dangerous in Toronto. In reality the crossing at Jane and Finch, a community that is home to immigrants from more than 120 nations, merely lacks a unique identity. The site is similar to many other disenfranchised public spaces, where street and parking lot merge into one massive, relentless field of asphalt, full of chaotic signage and towering apartment buildings. Instead of responding to the needs of the community the site is barren and uninspired, a tactic meant to mask difference and discourage non-conforming activity. Visits to the site uncovered various informal happenings. While some events that take place, such as the traveling carnival and the Sunday market are sanctioned and supported by the surrounding retailers, many other unofficial and often less than ideal events have become customary. Heavily used by cars and pedestrians, the inter- section is a common destination and transfer point for many TTC bus patrons. Due to its high exposure, some community members find it is an ideal location for acts of self expression and protest, while others use it as a meeting point before heading onto their final destinations or for the conducting of ‘business’ transactions. Taking advantage of the abundant space, some even momentarily park to make a phone call or jot down notes in their car before de- parting, and several large delivery trucks meet daily for their lunch break. While the parking lot adjusts to suit the users needs, there are countless ways to make it a more responsive and engaging public space. In a community of more than 55 000 inhabitants there is la- tent potential to harvest the abundance of fresh voices, which could generate a dynamic model for similar diverse communities, much in the spirit of Watson’s explorations. The answers are right in front of us; it is a matter of recog- nising the rich insights that experts like Sophie Watson, Quentin Stevens and Teddy Cruz have to offer. Rather than designing a place of uniform indifference, we should build spaces that celebrate the unrealised qualities of a site and its people. If the city is a place of unlimited possibilities, then the street must reflect it. p
Cruz, Teddy. ‘Teddy Cruz and The Urban Phenomena of Trans-Border Conditions’, American Institute of Architects, San Francisco Chapter, Architecture Radio Lecture Series , 26/02/2006. Stevens, Quentin. Ludic City: Exploring the Potential of Public Spaces . London & New York: Routledge, 2007. Watson, Sophie. ‘City Publics: The (Dis)Enchantments of Urban Encounters’ Questioning Cities . London, New York: Routledge, 2006. above top: truck drivers congregate in the parking lot for lunch bottom: a lone concrete bench sits waiting opposite top: a woman shouts and waves flyers at passersby bottom: a view of the desolate parking lot pedestrians must cross to reach the intersection
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street - scapes | monastiraki
force fields athens hybridity microscales complexity
by efrosini charalambous anna papachristoforou
sites of complexity in the urban field
spaces in-between
describing the street in terms of field, we inevitably move from the one towards the many : from individuals to collectives. The complicated infrastructures that emerge from the in- teraction of different situations of design, processes of self-organisation and expectations, transform the city into an agglomeration of autonomous structures. The dynamics of a crowd, of subjects wandering in the city motivated by complex desires and interacting in unexpected ways – as one more field of vectors in the streetscape – intensifies different experiences in particular moments of time, sustaining the generic form of the city. A city’s coherence and generic form is produced through the coexistence and interface of different conditions at a local level. Through a new reading that incorporates the complex behaviours of user-citizens and new dynamic actions, a city could be described as a collection of activities, as a field of forces. ‘City’ is a living organism that continually reorganises and readjusts itself as a com- plex system, where small local structures cooperate with global flows. Such a consideration requires an approach to the city from the inside, from its interior, tracing the ways the field develops, evolves and transforms and not to observe it from the outside as a distinct object, a material structure that remains the same, changes or disappears. The flow of action and rhythm of the streetscape, which is continuously equipped by arbitrary and ephemeral interventions, converts the space into a field of forces, where all seem to be in play. An excellent example of such a field is the area of Monastiraki in Athens. Monastiraki is an area in-between the noise of the commercial triangle of modern Athens and the tranquillity of the ruins in the ancient Agora. Monastiraki can be described as non-pure , because even though it is a space interwoven with the concept of the market, the real scenario that unfolds in its interior reveals a space composed by the coexistence of various ele- ments. Different functions, some even incompatible with each other, agglomerate in the same place, intermix and thus blur the notion of any clean or pure image. A mixture of scenarios and activities that overlap, diverse activities that many times appear functioning complemen- tarily can compose places whose identities cannot be determined with clarity. The boundaries of private activities are extended into and disrupt the street while the interior of the building validates an expansion of this same street. The continuous succession of private and public accelerates and lends the space a hybrid character. Thus an intermediate space is articulated, one that unifies diverse elements while respecting the identity of each, allowing their simultaneous presence and expanding the field of action. A space that embraces alternation and is capable of combining and blending, stimulates the progress and the succes- sion of events, amplifying the articulation of relations and relationships in the street. It is of great interest how the urban landscape of Monastiraki receives any new structure. Instead of occupying or totally replacing an existing building, the ‘new’ structure collaborates and adapts, incorporating elements of the existing structure. A ‘game’ between the past and the present, an intermediate situation, characterises the everyday experience in Athens. The augmentative evolvement is supported by mechanisms capable of articulating dif- ferent movements and events according to internal orders and external requirements. It is not a single geometric structure that is being imposed or that predominates – ‘the overall form is an elaboration of conditions established locally’. The conditions, the mixture and incorpora- tion, detected in the microscale, in the internal, are arranged by parasitic relations between the structural elements and the activities as well.
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Monastiraki ceases to be a homogeneous Cartesian place and constitutes the field that allows to desires of the subject to emerge — a field generated by conflicts, clashes and inter-crossing that eventually produce a large diversity of combinations, densities and intensities of experi- ence at specific moments in the extended field of the cityscape. The complex and flexible system that modulates space and articulates relations and events, extends the field of action, inviting the unanticipated, the spontaneous, the intimate, the erotic. Space transformed through such actions enables self-determination through continuous negotiations between individual expectations, desires and fantasies. Such space is an inter-media where each person can be defined and at the same time define his environment according to his desires. The changeable, unstable, precarious streetscape of Monastiraki is in fact a relational space, not only for taking a stroll in, but also for personal and/or shared stimulus. Here the interest of architecture is no longer in generating form; its value arises from the adoption of relations in space, dynamic actions and spatial situations that introduce a particular environment. The subject of our research is a flexible framework that embraces transformation and where the user himself activates his environment. Through an experimen- tal redefinition, architecture can turn to site . Working with the field, new qualities may emerge with the acceptance of complexity: design activates both visible and latent spatial dynamics leading to an architecture that responds to our desire to interact, to be activated, to interrelate. With this project of a digital art workshop, we are experimenting at Monastiraki, exploring a space of in-between which disputes the structural context. We do not encounter the ‘building’ as an entity, a self-referential object, but as a process of actions in the urban field; a transmitter of activities that feeds and feeds back the flows of the street. At the in- between space of building and city we are suggesting a broadened ‘street’ that interweaves with the building system. The folding of the ground detects new spaces of relation and action: joint with a vertical ground, a scaffolding, a superposition, a support of action. Between them, intermediate spaces emerge; new, strange spaces, spaces for the formation of new spatialities. This is an architectural project whose identity is almost ephemeral, an unfinished project in continual evolution. p
Tutor: Dimitris Papalexopoulos Thesis title: ‘New Media Art: cause for the formation of spatiality in the action field’ Tutor: Tasis Papaioannou National Technical University of Athens, 2005 references: Arjen Mulder and Joke Brouwer. TransUrbanism . NAI Publishers, 200 p.7
‘Private life spills into the street and its sidewalks, partially occupying them, appropriating them, transforming them, destroying them, becoming public life; public life expands into the buildings, exploring them, peeking into their interiors, revealing private life’. — Giannis Aisopos. ‘Identity Mutation’ Metapolis 2001- The contemporary (Greek) city , 2001.p200 Stan Allen. ‘From object to field’ Architecture After Geometry, AD , 1997. p25
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Streets shape the way that we think of our cities. They constitute most of our public realm, dwarfing the amount of space we devote to formal parks. They have enormous power to define the relative quality of our daily lives, yet for the most part all we seem to ask of streets is that they get our cars from one part of the city to another as quickly as possible. living streets urbanism | health , safety , beauty by ken and rita brooks speed traffic safety engineering friends
The Open Planning Project http://topp.openplans.org/
1 Asking little
Safety I remember an old ad campaign with a simple tag line: Speed Kills . Blunt and to the point, it captures a truism of safety: ‘a variety of factors may contribute to a collision, but the outcome depends on the speed the car is travelling’. 2 A British government study found that when vehicle speeds were reduced from 60 kph to 30 kph, pedestrian deaths dropped from 85% to 5%. 3 There are several ways in which living streets contribute to a reduction in the speed of traffic. Reducing lane widths to accommodate a multifunctional streetscape is one very simple and effective way. The city of Longmont, Colorado examined 20,000 collisions over an eight year period. They found that ‘as street width widens, collisions per kilometre increase exponentially’. Tree- lined streets also contribute to reducing traffic speed. Research has shown that drivers go up to 20 kph slower on a street with trees than they do on one without. 4 However one of the best ways to slow cars down is to have lots of people out on the street – socialising, entertaining, just watching their children having fun. David Engwicht, a traffic calming activist from Australia, refers to the effect that a spontaneous, vibrant, social street life has on traffic, as mental speed bumps . 5 Another interesting and perhaps surprising benefit of reducing lane width to slow cars down is that this helps to maximise the efficiency of the carrying capacity of roadways. The fact is that no matter how fast traffic moves, the number of cars a lane can carry stays roughly constant. You can’t move more cars by speeding them up, because the increased amount of space required between cars outweighs whatever gain you think you might make. A car lane reaches its peak capacity when cars are travelling roughly 40 kph (25 mph); that is, at a nice safe speed. 6
It is difficult to design a space that will not attract people. What is remarkable is how often this has been accomplished. —William Whyte 1
when we say ‘street’ we think river of asphalt . Turning 50% of our urban area to the passage and storage of cars has become normal. Lousy streetscapes don’t just happen, it takes hard work, a lot of money and the commitment of an astonishing array of enablers to suck the life out of streets. Our streetscapes are unloved not because they are neglected; love is irrelevant. Take another look at the image above, again. In a 20th century functional exercise, our streetscapes are in the hands of traffic engineers who distill streets to a single purpose – to maximise the unimpeded flow of traffic. Our streets are designed as traffic sewers. If we thought of our streetscapes more as living rooms and less as corridors, we would find ourselves a lot closer to fully utilising our streets as real public assets. We need to stop engineering traffic corridors and start designing living streets. Living streets are — 1. multipurpose public spaces that embrace walking, cycling, sitting, shopping, dining, transit and usually but not always, cars. 2. active social spaces for meeting, playing, entertaining and one of our favorite pastimes, people watching. 3. alive with vegetation, including trees and gardens just like the linear parks they should be. 4. beautiful, have clear spatial definition, express the character of individual streets and contain elements of surprise and delight. These characteristics of living streets have two interesting and interrelated consequences: they slow down traffic and they create inviting places for people to be. These may seem at first to be nice but underwhelming attributes but they have a lever effect on creating some pretty remarkable side benefits.
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TOPP (The Open Planning Project) builds technology to enhance the role of the citizen in democratic society. One of their projects is the New York City Streets Renaissance Campaign, the source of these images of an urban street and its transformation into a living street . They claim that ‘the time is long overdue for our great city to strike a better balance between traffic and the needs of pedestrians. The NYC Streets Renaissance Campaign aims to educate New Yorkers about potential transportation policy changes that will improve quality of life across New York City, promote a rebalancing of this public space away from private vehicles and toward community needs, demonstrate the widespread public support for reform on these issues and tap the potential of New Yorkers to re-imagine their own streets’.
The Open Planning Project http://topp.openplans.org/
2 Asking more
Good business Often unappreciated is the fact that living streets make great business sense. Jan Gehl, an urban design consultant, when discussing pedestrian zones in Copenhagen said ‘shopkeepers protested vehemently that it would kill their businesses’. 7 They quickly discovered that these fears were unfounded. Pedestrian traffic has more than tripled over the past 40 years and the pedestrian district is now the thriving heart of a reinvigorated city. When West Palm Beach, Florida converted several wide thoroughfares into narrow two-way streets, traffic slowed and people immediately felt safer walking. This increase in pedestrian traffic attracted new shops and apartment buildings, and property values along one of the town’s main streets have more than doubled. It is perhaps one of those things that is so obvious that it passes notice, but the most successful public spaces are the ones that attract people. Unless you have a drive-in store, pedestrians are the main ingredient of any business. By providing beautiful, distinctive places to be, sheltered by trees, safe and easily reached by a variety of means, you’ve essentially created a pedestrian magnet. And there is a symbiotic relationship between business and the creation of great public space. Each enhances the opportunities for
Trees on streets provide obvious health advantages. Lung-damaging particles and pollution are filtered from the air and replaced with oxygen. They also foster a healthy environment by moderating severe heat – providing up to 9°C difference between shaded and exposed streets, reducing noise pollution and conserving water. And it is not just physical well being that is at risk where we foster single purpose roadways over living streets, there are also psychological repercussions. Consider this sad statistic: ‘People in very high traffic areas have an average of 0.9 friends. This means that some of these people have no friends at all!’ 9 Moving forward If we switch our approach from engineering single purpose street- scapes – traffic corridors , to designing streetscapes as multi-functional ecosystems – living streets , we will foster a reincarnation of our streetscapes as inclusive, healthy, friendly, safe, environmentally thoughtful and economically sensible public space, not only useful for moving through and locating ourselves within the city but also delightful. p If we can develop and design streets so that they are wonderful, fulfilling places to be – community-building places, attractive for all people – then we will have successfully designed about one-third of the city directly and will have had an immense impact on the rest. —Allan Jacobs 10 1 Whyte, William. City . New York: Doubleday, 1988. p109 2 New Zealand Land Transport. Crown Entity, Governmnent of New Zealand, Minister of Transport. http://www.ltsa.govt.nz/index.html 3 Walljasper, Jay. The Great Neighborhood Book: A D.I.Y Guide to Placemaking. Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 2007. p56 4 Ibid. p120-1 5 Mental Speed Bumps. http://www.mentalspeedbumps.com/ 6 Kulash, Walter. ‘The Third Motor Age’ Places , Vol 10, N o 2 7 Walljasper, Jay. ‘Our Place in the World’ Ode Magazine , June 2005 8 Barber, John. ‘Reliance on Cars puts Commuters on Road to Fat City’ The Globe and Mail , Tuesday, April 24, 2001 9 ‘An Epidemic of Boldness’ Project for Public Spaces . http://www.pps.org/ 10 http://www.pps.org/training/info/transportation_training_course
the other. Health
McGill’s Avi Friedman notes ‘ Where you live, however upscale your community, could be killing you’. This is largely due to how we engineer streets to cater to car travel; ‘We have engineered out physical activity’. 8 The decline of safe, walkable streetscapes in North American towns is considered a major factor in our obesity epidemic and consequently our susceptibility to heart conditions and strokes. Living streets reverse this trend, providing seductive incentives to get out of our cars, making physical activity a pleasure and a part of daily life rather than a chore to be sweated out at the gym.
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Eric Deis, Scorn , May 14, 2008 http://ericdeis.com
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Scorn (detail)
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ringing the changes of immigration the World on Roosevelt Avenue infrastructure | transnational space by joseph heathcott diversity transitions opportunity flexibility urbanism
Intersecting these South Asian commercial streets, Roosevelt Avenue supports a variety of businesses operated by Mexicans, Ecuadorans, Hondurans, El Salvadorans and Columbians. These worlds overlap at the intersections, and blend along the blocks: Latino families frequent the Indian clothing and jewellery shops; South Asian parties pack tables at Mexican restaurants. English here is a lingua franca – a trade language that knits together intersecting street and commercial cultures. Transitioning from Jackson Heights to Corona, the com- mercial scene grows predominantly Mexican with the attendant street life, car-modification culture – bakeries, tacquerias , fruit vendors and shops blaring Bachata from tinny loudspeakers to entice customers. Finally, passing alongside Shea Stadium and crossing over Flushing Creek, Roosevelt Avenue enters Flushing, Queens, a neigh- bourhood that boasts one of the largest populations of Taiwanese and Koreans in the United States. As Roosevelt enters Flushing, it climbs a steep grade up to College Point Boulevard and simultane- ously separates from the 7 train, which descends into a subterranean tunnel. Roosevelt persists for ten more blocks until it terminates at Northern Boulevard on the border of Flushing and Murray Hill. The phenomenal ethnic diversity of this corridor is an unintended consequence of the haphazard urbanism of middle Queens. Rapidly built up from the 1920s through the 1980s amid the expansion of American car culture, the borough presents a confusing jumble of grid systems, block shapes, housing styles, land uses and street forms. Moreover, what Queens lacks in grand public spaces it more than makes up in the cheap, flexible architecture of commercial opportunity. Low-rise commercial blocks, strip malls, small shops and gas stations dominate the borough, providing infinitely fungible space for the establishment of ever-changing storefronts. Matching this variation, residential options come bundled in a full gamut of types – from small tightly packed single family and duplex homes to large apartment buildings, garden city co-ops, new condos and tracts of cape cod and ranch houses. It is precisely this relatively afford- able commercial and residential variety that has attracted large waves of new immigrants to Queens since 1965. And Roosevelt Avenue, while not designed with them in mind, provides a landscape flexible enough to absorb thousands of families from around the world with each passing year. Within this make-do framework of Roosevelt Avenue, daily users have fashioned a robust, cosmopolitan design laboratory. The multitude of quotidian actions along this street unfolds within a densely packed world of working and middle class families of diverse ethnicities, national origins and faiths. Despite their differences, the people that live in the neighbourhoods use Roosevelt Avenue as a supply chain for their households, as a public site of leisure and promenading, and as a conduit to the wider urban setting. Indeed, there is much to learn from the universe of interlaced yet subtle choices, selections and social relationships that unfold in the context of everyday urbanism on a bustling city street. p
the borough of Queens in New York City is the most diverse county in the United States, and Roosevelt Avenue its most diverse street. It transects some of New York’s most ethnically diverse zip codes, and exemplifies the immigrant city within its narrow corridor. Roosevelt Avenue provides a physical space wherein people from a staggering variety of backgrounds work out the daily rituals and routines of social interaction. It is a great cosmopolitan street and an important site for examining how the design of the public realm frames interactions across boundaries of culture, language and nativity. Roosevelt Avenue presents a superlative framework for the conduct of daily life. With its canopy of train tracks and steel girders, this street is a five mile-long room for strolling, shopping, gathering, gawking, hawking and talking. It channels a staggering variety of people beneath the 7 train, focusing their needs, desires, moods and idiosyncrasies and organising the clamour into a daily routine. More than anything, Roosevelt Avenue is a commercial corridor. The largest clusters of shops pop up beneath the stations of the 7 train such as Woodside, 74 th /Broadway, 82 nd /Jackson Heights, Junction Boulevard, Flushing – 12 of the train’s 21 stations connect passengers to Roosevelt Avenue. Thousands of small businesses line either side of the street and spill over at the intersections. There are unique storefronts, like the quilting shop, or the Tagalog-language tax office, or the headquarters of the Catholic Veterans of Foreign Wars. And there are hundreds of variations on themes, from tacque- rias and dry cleaners to discount household shops, furniture stores, diners, florists, grocers, electronics and music stores, clothiers and restaurants serving varied national cuisines. The street begins its life at the triple intersection of Queens Boulevard, Greenpoint Avenue and 49 th Street in Sunnyside, a leafy neighbourhood of recent immigrants from Russia, Eastern Eu- rope, Turkey and the Balkan states. The street then passes through Woodside with its tall apartment buildings and densely packed rows of shops triangulated around Roosevelt and Woodside Avenues and 64 th Street. Passing beneath the 69 th Street Station and crossing over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway viaduct, Roosevelt Avenue enters Jackson Heights and Elmhurst, two of the most dense and diverse neighbourhoods of Queens, with tens of thousands of cooperative apartments and densely packed row houses. Along this stretch of Roosevelt businesses, service agencies, street pamphleteers and vendors cater to people from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, Tibet, Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Ecuador, Columbia, El Salvador, Panama, Peru, Argentina and Mexico. The intersection of Roosevelt and 74 th Street is the epicentre for a virtual collision of cultures. Stretching north from Roosevelt on 73 rd through 75 th streets, immigrant families from India, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh have opened scores of restaurants, sweet shops, jewellery stores, cloth and cloth- ing shops, groceries, music-video emporia and a Bollywood theatre.
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infrastructure | props public support by ivan hernandez quintela
props habitation
waiting leaning help
i do not know if it is Luis Barragan’s fault, but Mexican walls facing the street tend to be huge blank surfaces. I have nothing against this aesthetic, but I do think that a blank public wall is not very inviting or inhabitable, and I am all for architecture that is inhabitable. As a response, I wanted to develop a project I call Public Support , an intervention that would make public façades into spaces of habita- tion. I took notes on how people lean against walls, whether is to rest, to wait for public transportation, or actually to find a place to sleep, and out of these notes I have shaped a series of bumps that could be stuck to facades where no urban furniture exists. The shape and height of where the bumps are placed insinuate possible positions for the body to take while waiting for the bus or a friend. As a result, what used to be a blank façade transforms into a comfortable surface to lean on. Public Support becomes a way to gain back the street, to make of that membrane that tends to separate the private from the public, the exterior from the interior, the house from the street, a more porous surface – an inhabitable surface. p can public façades become truly public? public support
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planning | property alignments , toronto by paul whelan
conflict concessions collisions consequences grace under pressure
crossing the grid
dundas Street meanders across Toronto’s orthogonal street grid leaving odd-shape lots and angles. Throughout its length the built response to its diagonal cut has created a variety of compromises as buildings twist to face the street while remaining aligned with the side property lines. This particular example is in the Junction area of Toronto, a prosperous industrial town from the late 1880’s through to its absorption into the City of Toronto in 1909. The earliest surveys of the Junction show the strain of builders trying to decide which property line should establish a building’s orientation. Over time the Dundas Street alignment has become dominant, but 2867 Dundas retains a vestigial memory of this alignment conundrum. The resulting convoluted shop entry optimises this site geometry to provide street frontage for three entries – apartment, bar and basement office. The incredibly demur bar occupies the most recessed and street-distant portion of this pocket of space. The decorative floor treatment, wood framed doors, glass displays and the brass and iron handrail are a necessary embellishment to entice passersby. The resulting space has become a semi-public extension of the sidewalk snaking into the heart of the building. p
above: Keele and Dundas in 1892, and today. right: plan of 2867 Dundas’s various entries. In The confusion created by Dundas Street for settlement and lot division is still evident. On the south side of Dundas properties align with the main Toronto grid except for this remaining building at 2867. The north side properties align with the idiosyncratic Dundas Street, connecting the physicality of the street-level world to the abstract world of surveying and city-making.
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creative destruction | the new gallery , calgary alberta by jennifer mcveigh and tomas jonsson
artist-run galleries development
protest identity
on the road again... artist-run galleries in disarray
The first site was the former location of the Brick furniture warehouse. After the store’s closure, the building was turned into a temporary winter homeless shelter, then demolished to make way for an additional driving lane for the trans-Canada highway. Next was Eau Claire, an area on the Bow river. In the 1980s, this older neighbourhood was replaced with a large shop-ping and entertainment complex. Never a commercial success, the complex is now slated for redevelopment as condominium towers. On 9th Avenue SW, the group stopped to examine what remained of the former New Gallery building. Halfway torn down on the day of the procession, the gallery’s rooms were sliced down the middle and exposed. Strangely, a single wooden chair was still perched in the space. Finally, a stop was made at the latest artist-run centres to be affected by the boom. The building that houses Quickdraw Animation Society and Emmedia Gallery and Production Society was recently sold to developers, and its tenants given notice to vacate. The following day, On the Road Again was taken to the launch of Homeless Awareness Week Calgary in Riley Park. The furniture created a social space for conversation facilitated by activists from the Calgary Housing Action Initiative. Citizens recounted their memories of the city and its transformations, as well as ideas for creating stronger, more welcoming communities. After a week-long exhibition in the centre court of Eau Claire Market, On the Road Again was disassembled and its components donated to city furniture banks. Though temporary, the project was a human-scaled intervention in face of the astounding rate of transformation happening in the city. p
in Calgary today, whole buildings are demolished overnight, leaving only rubble that will soon be cleared for the next development. Apartment buildings are emptied of their tenants and turned into upmarket condominiums. Homelessness and near-homelessness are at an all time high. Even small businesses and non-profit organisations are displaced as prices continue to increase. How do we absorb and adapt to this recurring cycle of displacement, erasure and transformation? How do we rebuild our homes, identities and communities when our physical environment is in constant flux? In Hollow City , Rebecca Solnit notes that ‘to have your city dismantled too rapidly around you is to have the relationship between mind and place thrown into disarray’. This dichotomy has been especially challenging for members of Calgary’s art community. Each of the city’s artist-run centres has a nomadic history, constantly recreating themselves in more affordable locations with the city’s boom and bust cycle. The New Gallery in particular, has taken temporary refuge in a storefront at Eau Claire Market shopping centre (itself slated for demolition) while its former quarters were razed to make room for a new office tower. On the eve of the building’s destruction, former Gallery director Heather Allen proposed an opportunity for artists to respond to the situation. The result was On the Road Again – a collaborative performance art project conceived by Tomas Jonsson, realised with the support of several community groups, and which took place from September 10 -23, 2007. During a public workshop at Eau Claire Market, wheels from bicycles, strollers and roller blades were installed on furniture purchased through the Calgary Dollars local currency community, along with found and donated pieces. The following weekend, a hardy group of artists and activists gathered with their hybrid vehicles at the top of Centre Street hill, the starting point for an endurance-length procession to commemorate sites of transition throughout the downtown core.
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territory control division appropriation boundaries
infrastructure | markings by antoin doyle
the fine lines of the public realm
[ bollard ]
Significant literary work can only come into being in a strict alternation between action and writing; it must nurture the inconspicuous forms that better fit its influence in active communities then does the pretentious, universal gesture of the book - in leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards. Only this prompt language shows itself actively equal to the moment. —Walter Benjamin, One Way Street
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the bollard is a prompt piece of building that relates the jurisdiction of control and bounding of site to the human body. It takes its function from other bounding elements – railings, fences and walls – yet its force lies in the space inbetween. A bollard connected by chains becomes a barrier, a vehicle for exclusion; its potential is capped and controlled. When left unfettered, it can be inhabited, its function is more fluid, its response more prompt and active. These bollards direct and channel through their combined collection, they control through co- operation. It is the inconspicuous gap between bollards that shows itself actively equal to the moment of the street. Within this regular rhythm and order, there is the opportunity to support an attachment to the city and a compatibility with the street. Unlike chain, fence and railing which represent an over-determination in the city to support a regime of control, restricting desire, habit and pattern, the gap between bollards presents a porosity of territory to the city’s occupants and allows an opportunity for action and innovation in the interval. The drama of the instant can exist in the intermission.
bush-hammered granite, bergamo, italy
polished marble, bergamo, italy
polished marble, bergamo, italy
reinforced concrete, dublin, ireland
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The diameter of modern steel bollards allows little opportunity for contribution on the street. A broader bollard, more column than baton, has the potential to expand to the moment, allowing for multiplicity of use. By increasing its weight on the street, it is better able to respond to the demands placed on it by individual and collective action. Its particular height, girth, strength and materiality allows people to sit, stand, lean, rest and act. Its initial function is invaded by other uses, responding to the spontaneity and instant of the street. In this way, the identity of the bollard is subverted from a tool of territory and exclusion to one of occupation and contribution. The structural redundancy and strength required in a bollard for safety and security, mean that even when compromised it can still function as a light, a seat, a stage, a podium. This bollard inhabits the commonplace yet illustrates a collision of functions and level of collaboration that is an indication of the level of substance and support that needs to be supplied to the street by architecture, building and design. p
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urban guerillas sociopolitical architecture of the public realm
street codes | san francisco by christopher roach
gentrification protest counter-culture POPOS guerilla urbanism
I [one] On the east end of 24th Street in San Francisco, stretching from Va- lencia Street to Potrero Avenue, is a world that is neither exclusively Latin American, nor definitively North American, but is particular to San Francisco and, more specifically, the Mission District. I can get fresh masa to make tortillas at La Palma Mexicatessen, sip the best cappuccinos at Café Venice, buy fresh produce from several sidewalk groceries, feast on tacos al pastor for a few bucks at Taqueria Vallarta or have a malted milkshake at the St. Francis Soda Fountain. Tree-lined, two-way, crowded with slow-moving traffic on a busy Saturday afternoon, I can still call out to a friend across the street and jaywalk safely to shake his hand. Both sides of the street are lined with small storefronts, catering largely, though not exclusively, to the resident Latino community. There are relics of a more distant past, such as the St. Francis, when Mission was a working-class neighbourhood of Irish, Italian and Scandinavian immigrants. There is also a creeping, eminent gentrification: sev- eral stylish cafés and boutique stores have cropped up to serve the growing white professional class that is moving into the affordable Mission neighbourhoods. At the other end of 24th Street, heading over the hill at Dolores Street and down into Noe Valley, is a different though not altogether alien world, where French bistros replace taquerias, and tandem strollers almost outnumber cars. At this end of the street I’m more likely to find artisan cheese and an expensive bottle of wine, or per- haps a nice pair of shoes, but I can still grab a greasy slice of pizza and watch a soccer game at the local pub. Punctuating the continu- ous row of small three and four-storey buildings is a small parking lot that becomes an upscale farmer’s market on Saturdays; further down, the local CalaFoods supermarket is set back behind its park- ing lot. Nonetheless, this end of 24th continues familiar, small- scale retail with a few storeys of housing above. The sidewalks are clean and most buildings have a fresh coat of paint, but there’s a noticeably more homogeneous and sanitised feeling on this end of the street. There are no murals, less graffiti, fewer street vendors, and I rarely hear a foreign language spoken here. These two ends of 24th street represent a kind of urban dialec- tic of use and culture representative of larger forces at work in the evolution of a city such as San Francisco. There are certainly streets that are more grand, and others more important in the city’s history and culture – Market Street, Mission Street or Columbus Avenue – but in these 24 city blocks one can still read an entire disserta- tion on the particularity of a place and time in the life of the city. A hermeneutical reading of streets reveals a fragment of the underly- ing code of our entire society. By parsing the language of the social, political, and economic structures embodied in our streets, they can tell us volumes about ourselves and the world we have made; both the delights and the dangers that we face. For if we turn the page to read another street, we may find that the tale it tells is not one of urbane diversity and harmonious civility, but one of dislocation, disenfranchisement and decay.
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2 [two] Our streets, as much as our buildings, are a physical manifesta- tion of our social and cultural values, especially those relating to the context of human settlement. Streets are, in their boundless ubiquity and variety of form, expressions of our attitudes toward communication, commerce, transportation, privacy, security, hygiene, dwelling, public speech, beauty, nature, geography, history and culture. As these attitudes shift and evolve over space and time, so do our streets, like a slowly evolving living organism. Streets are, even more than buildings, the most pervasive and essential physical embodiment of the public realm. 1 They are not just vessels and nodes in the circulatory system of the city, but are the fountainhead of civil society, and therefore one of our most precious physical and cultural resources. Streets are the public stage for our everyday lives as well as the singular events that mark the passage of a common history: battles and parades, protests and celebrations, markets and marathons, carnivals and funerals. On this stage we have played out the grand drama of our most cel- ebrated and infamous social conflicts, from the barricades of pre- Haussmann Paris to the Civil Rights marches and anti-war protests of 1960s America. But streets are also the theatre for the public performance of daily life, where we engage in the activities of civic Being, whether through commerce, recreation, spectacle, or speech. As Alan Jacobs notes in his seminal book Great Streets , ‘sociability is a large part of why cities exist and streets are a major if not the only public place for that sociability to develop’. 2 Streets are where the personal and the political flow together, and for many, streets are the only place where sociability, or even identity, can form freely. Particularly in modern societies that are dominated by a homogeneous popular culture, streets have been the locus for the formation and dis- semination of counterculture . In fact, contemporary North American counterculture is largely synonymous with street culture, whether in the form of punk, hip-hop, skateboarding, bikers or street gangs and their associated forms of music, dress, language, art and iden- tity politics. Most importantly, streets have historically been the locus for resistance , whether cultural or political, and resistance is a form of participation critical to the formation and existence of civil society. In our hermeneutical reading of streets, we find that resistance is still relevant, and necessary, because the physical and cultural space of our streets is threatened by the same encroachments of privatisa- tion, surveillance, commercialisation and negligence that face civil society itself. Just as we witness the sale of our public institutions and infrastructure to private enterprise, so too can we find in our streets a creeping erosion of the public sphere.
3 [three] Functionalism’s reign as the dominant paradigm of mid-century architecture and urban planning gave rise to a general philosophy of segregation of uses within the public right-of-way. 3 This, combined with the ascendancy of the automobile, left a decades-long legacy of robust traffic engineering and weak urbanism. Ironically, the functional separation of uses that was supposed to promote health, safety, and revitalisation of the modern city mostly resulted in less safety, more congestion, and bleak stretches of empty asphalt cut- ting through entire neighbourhoods. Despite the eventual outcry by Jane Jacobs and the reformations of the Preservationist movement (and later, the New Urbanists), our streets remain bloated by in- creasing volumes of automobile traffic, and marked by the remain- ing artifacts of elevated highways, vast intersections, narrower sidewalks and stranded islands of nervous pedestrians. Moreover, functionalist zoning regulations and redevelopment failed to prevent, and may have even enabled, the flight of the urban middle class to the suburbs, resulting not only in the physical decline of urban centres, but also in the decline of the remaining residents’ political power. Road building, once one of the great public works of the state, has now largely been turned over to private enterprise; our streets are increasingly entitled, funded, designed, built, maintained, policed and even owned by private or public-private entities. State and local governments stripped of funding and maxed out on their bonding capacity, can often no longer afford to build and maintain infrastructure and must turn to large developers to carry out the construction and administration of streets, public spaces and entire neighbourhoods. While these projects must go through the envi- ronmental review process and are usually handed over to the city or state upon completion, the profit motive inherently reduces the input citizens have on the form of their cities and communities. In the cases where these private entities retain ownership or admin- istration of the streets and public spaces they construct, even basic freedoms we expect to be self-evident in public spaces are called into question. As suburban flight has abated and as people and businesses have begun to return to downtown, political power over the planning process has once again shifted, but not into the hands of the long- time residents or cultural pioneers who created value where there once was none. Business and real estate interests have come to wield inordinate political influence over the urban planning process in cities that are experiencing an explosion of growth in the urban core. This is especially true in downtown shopping areas, where retailers’ perceived need to compete with the convenience of sub- urban malls drives them to lobby for policies that favour commerce
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