Look no further. It seems sprawl was at least partially to blame for Atlanta’s tornado. And that means “directly” to blame. Not in a “sprawl causes people to drive more, which releases more carbon into atmosphere, which causes climate change, which causes wierd weather related results” kinda way.  Sweet.

Despite advances in Computer Aided Design (CAD), miniatures continue to remain a usefull tool for both architects and planners.  Here are some good examples of models of Manhatten, Shanghai, San Francisco Bay and Chicago.

Here is a great article about urban planning and the work of traffic planners. It is particularily interesting to read because Wired (in my opinion) is a quite liberal publication, but the comments at the end are very diverse.  I suggest skimming through the article just to get to the reader comments.  They vary from “educated reflections” to “selfish banter”.

This looks like a promising new magazine on the topic of city planning.  Their global approach to the issues plaguing our cities is very refreshing. I particularly like their description of planning and architectural resources today :

“Often, the pure pleasure to read reviews of urban planning … written by renowned experts is diminished by the pretentious academic style”

The first issue will deal with industrial renewal.

Check out this video about the next president of the USA speaking on the future of cities in the midwest and the reasons why American cities in general are having trouble moving forward.  (as a side note, I love Obamas speeches and was lucky enough to be part of the 200,000 people crowd when he spoke in in Berlin) Although the clip is very brief, I was happy to see Obama mentioning Jacobs before anyone else.  Shows how cultured this man is.

My favorite part of the clip? The concluding sentence : “That will be part of the masterplan to rebuild the American economy”

Send an e-mail to jeunesurbanistes.sfu@gmail.com to register.

Here is a link to the summery of the day.

I love watching these TED Talks (“ideas worth spreading”) but I just recently came by this one by James Howard Kunstler that had me literally laughing out loud.  I’ve heard of his books (notably “The Geography of Nowhere” which I think I will be ordering.  I can see no better way to explain how funny this speech is then to spell out, with absolutly no context, some of the best moments.

0:27: The immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in America is entropy made visible.

4:20 : To create a place of character and quality, you have to be able to define space. If you stand at the Wal-Mart over here and try and look at the Target store over here, you can’t see it because of the curvature of the earth.

5:59 : In these (public) places in other cultures, people just go there voluntarily because they like them. We don’t have to have a craft fair here to get people to come here. You don’t have to have a kwanzaa festival. People just go because it’s pleasurable.

6:30 : A public place so dismal that even the winos don’t go there.

6:55 : There’s not enough Prozac in the world to make people feel okay about going down this block. …. This in fact would be a better building if we put mosaic portraits of Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein and all the other great despots of the 20^th century on the side of the building.

8.28 : This is a building designed like a DVD player; audio jack, power supply… you can see exactly what went on, 3 o’clock in the morning at the design meeting, 8 hours before the deadline, 4 architects trying to get this building in on time…. What was the conversation going on there? Because you know what the last sentence was: “Fuck it.”

11:05 : And then to make ourselves feel better, we put a nature band-aid on it. I call them nature band-aids because in America there is a general idea that the remedy for mutilated urbanism is nature. When in fact the remedy for wounded and mutilated urbanism is good urbanism, good buildings, not just flowerbeds.

12:31: Here you see on a small scale, the mothership has landed. R2-D2 and C-3PO have stepped out to test the bark mulch to see if they can inhabit this planet.

14:10 : Notice the porch here, unless the people living here are munchkins, nobody is going to be using that. This is really just a television, broadcasting a show 24/7 called “We’re normal”. But we know what going on in these houses: We know that little Skippy is down here loading his uzi, getting ready for homeroom. We know that Heather, his 14 year old sister is turning tricks up here to support her drug habit.

15:05 : These are the schools we are sending them to; “The Hannibal Lecter Central School”. There is obviously the notion that if you let the inmates of this thing out, that they would snatch a motorist off the street and eat his liver…. Notice that nature is present.

While completing my internship in Berlin, I learned quite a bit about the IBA (Internationale Bauausstellungen) (link in german), a German program of urban regeneration that took place in Berlin from 1979 until 1987. What I didn’t know at the time is that this particular venture in Berlin was neither the first nor the last of its kind in Germany. The first was in 1901 (!). One of the latest, and the subject of an exhibition at La Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, in Paris, was the IBA Emscher Park in the Ruhr area. Dating from 1999, the objective of this particular IBA was to reconvert a previously industrial dominated region into a mixed use residential area. Although the project seemed very interesting, and the difficulties affronted in its completion must have been numerous, I was very disappointed with the way in which it was displayed in this exhibit. I went down expecting to learn a little bit about the urbanism itself and ended up leaving after 15 minutes of flashing images and weird noises.

The display itself is very small and consists simply of a few projectors flashing random images of people, flowers, dancers, and occasional building. The “music” playing in the background can be best described as “canaries chirping on a construction site while hippies play drums”. Maybe I’m being to close minded about this thing, or I’m not artistic enough, but I simply don’t get it. I don’t understand what 95% of the sounds and images had to do with the project itself. I think this museum is frequented by many architecture students and professionals; I would love to hear what their take is on these types of shows. Does anyone else find that much of architecture is way too “artsy”? What ever happened to form following function? The reason I got into urban planning in the first place was because I felt that the environment people live in has an effect on their quality of life. I deal with tangible things like residential areas, pedestrian malls, mixed use parks and urban mixity. I even deal with social problems like drug abuse, urban violence and low cost housing. But I don’t really care if an architect used “hollow aluminum columns to represent the missing soul in today’s urban environments” (that is the most random idea I could come up with, and I’m sure I’ll see it in some building down the road)

I’m really not trying to be pessimistic about the profession; I just want to know if architects feel the same way about “everything having to have a meaning”. Can’t a building just be a building, a façade just be a façade and a column just be a column?

PS: In the back corner of the exhibit was a computer with the IBA Emscher website on it, it was by far the best part of this display. I just saved you 5 euros.

As one can tell from my previous posts, as well as from “What I’m reading”, I’m very into the New Urbanism (NU) movement in planning. It’s why I chose to apply to DPZ as an intern. So I began wanting to write about the NU in some way, shape or form. I wasn’t really sure at first how I was going to tie it into what I was doing in Berlin, but I knew that would be the backbone of my paper. I also knew I wanted to tie it into the “Quartier am Tacheles”, a NU project in Berlin, planned by DPZ – Miami and Duane Phillips (my boss in Berlin). Well, throughout my work at DPZ, Duane would send me out on these excursions, to learn more about the history of urban planning and architecture in Berlin. These were done in chronological order, starting at the beginning of the 20^th century.

The main idea of my thesis is to try and explain how a planning theory, based on an American model of urbanism, can have any sense in a city with such a rich and controversial history such as Berlin. My thesis is divided into 3 parts: In the first, I talk about NU itself. I explain the history, the actors and the movement itself. I more or less explain what is, or what isn’t NU. In the second portion, I go through, period by period, each “revolution” of planning and architecture in Berlin. As I do so, I keep referring back to the Charter of New Urbanism, to explain the differences or similarities between the two. Although it was very difficult to speak about a document written in 1996 when talking about communities built before even the First World War, I felt it was an important segway to the next, and final, portion of my thesis. Here I dealt with the actual “Quartier am Tacheles”, giving some history of the site, major players, and proposal by DPZ. To give you a quick idea of the Tacheles, it is a large block in the center of Spandauer-Vorstadt, former East Berlin. The actual building on the site was originally a department store, and before the building could be demolished in the early 90s, it was squatted by a bunch of independent artists. It remains that way today: half in ruins, half art gallery.

What DPZ proposes is in essence a complete gentrification of the site. High end hotels, offices, shopping and residential units would now occupy a large portion of the site. But what is so NU about the development isn’t only the mixture of uses and high density, but rather the fact that the entire plan could go forward without having to kick out the artists from their adoptive home. Although the plan isn’t without controversy, I felt it was a good compromise between both parties. Nothing is built yet but Im interested to see where this thing goes.