Curating cities

'The Curating Cities Database maps the increasingly important and emerging field of eco-sustainable public art. It is developed as a resource for researchers, academics, artists, curators, educators, commissioning agencies and sponsors working in the field as well as those interested in promoting sustainability via public art. In addition to descriptive information, the database evaluates the aims and outcomes of each project as well as the external constraints (and subsequent negotiations) that influence the production of public artworks'. http://eco-publicart.org/

High Line takes a hit

It is very exciting to have Robert Hammond here in October for the Thriving Neighbourhoods conference. But there is a debate around some of the unintended consequences (though I am not sure that they have been well-articulated in this passage from Sahra Mirbabaee of the Sustainable Cities Collective):

The High Line has been a catalyst for gentrification that, according to Neil Smith, "is no longer about a narrow and quixotic oddity in the housing market but has become the leading residential edge of a much larger endeavor: the class remake of the central urban landscape." The project exudes a "cool" image of feigned neglect, despite the troubling irony in this aesthetic. Commodifying ostensibly lower-class spaces for supposedly higher classes is both patronizing and divisive. Liz Diller, one of the lead architects for the High Line, joked that "the great success [of the project] has been introducing New Yorkers to doing nothing." This comment rests on a key oversight: Not everyone earns enough from their work to afford even a few hours of "doing nothing" at the High Line. And would crowds of people without disposable income be welcome in a neighborhood increasingly structured around spending money? Some experience a sense of not belonging there, as one visitor remarked: "I felt like I was in the home of a neatnik with expensive tastes, afraid I would soil the furnishings."

It will be interesting to explore the High Line model within issues of gentrification and the cost of housing in October...

Alleys - a neighbourhood mechanism

A traditional hutong in Beijing. Image courtesy flickr user tsc_traveler.

Melbourne - where I live - is well-known for its alleys and the creative uses that they have been put to. This is a great approach from a non-profit in the USA (read more here):

Most alleys had simple utilitarian origins as ways to access buildings with goods and vehicles — especially where a socially decorous street frontage was desired. Commercial blocks in older American cities are often bisected by alleys. In Los Angeles, many retail streets have alleys for service and parking immediately behind the stores, with larger residential blocks behind. Residential alleys serve townhouse districts in Boston’s Back Bay and much of Washington, D.C., (but not New York). In Venice Beach, alleys make canals and “walk-streets” possible.Beijing’s hutong and Shanghai’s longtang alleys are the basis of the traditional residential fabric. These narrow lanes host a rich mixture of local functions, including access to the modular courtyard houses they serve. The explosive growth of Chinese cities has made these districts and their way of life something of an endangered species despite belated efforts at preservation.

Connecting energy and neighbourhoods

More from Rachel Armstead's paper for ICLEI....

Connecting Energy

The ICLEI Thriving neighbourhoods programme framework is based around 5 pillars.

The first is Leadership and Governance which addresses how the capacity of the local community, industry and government can be developed enabling them to take a leading role in driving the sustainability and vibrancy of their local area. The second pillar is Innovation which focuses on harnessing the creativity and ingenuity of a neighbourhood to make use of and develop innovative solutions, technologies and organisational structures. The third is Environmental Imperatives which centres on the management of climate change, natural systems and conservation. The fourth pillar is Economic Needs which addresses the productivity of the neighbourhood, the availability of jobs and businesses and people aspirations. The fifth and final pillar is Social Needs which is focused on social participation and equity, cultural richness and people’s sense of health and wellbeing.

We can approach community energy as one pathway towards the development of thriving neighbourhoods. Energy and community energy in particular possess certain characteristics which make it especially potent as a thriving neighbourhood development tool. The following outlines how community energy can contribute to the five pillars of thriving neighbourhoods.

Lifting Our Game 2013: Thriving Neighbourhoods in Action - NZ style

The Importance of Community

Rachel Armstead did some wonderful work interviewing colleagues around Melbourne - she has since left to do further work in the UK. Some of her thoughts follow...

The local community is becoming increasingly central as a focus for sustainability action in Australia. There are numerous recent sustainability initiatives and policies that address the unit of the community; the CSIRO Sustainable Communities Initiative, the Green Building Council Australia’s National framework of Green Star Communities, and the Australian Government department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency’s Community Energy Efficiency Programme (CEEP) to name but a few. 

Community as a key theme of current academic research and technical papers was also highlighted during the ICLEI annual Thriving Neighbourhoods conference held in November 2012.

These initiatives frame the community both as the beneficiary of sustainable development and as an agent of such change.

The community as a beneficiary of local government sustainability initiatives reflects more a change in terminology than in practice as local government is by definition in place to serve the local community. However, the local community as agent of sustainable development presents an interesting shift. 

Prof. Chris Ryan, speaker at the 2012 Thriving Neighbourhoods conference stated that a key characteristic of thriving societies is that communities are producing, not just passively consuming ‘[i]n the critical areas of life – in the provision of food, water, energy, mobility, shelter, information as well as in the power to shape development – thriving will see a shift of citizens to active roles in production and governance, a reversal of current trends that define the role of citizens as ‘passive consumers’.

For the average person who may not be particularly engaged with sustainability and self-sufficiency, the role of producer is a new one. In addition the act of working as a community rather than an individual – self-sufficiency where the self is a collective may also be a novel concept for many. Encouraging and coordinating such action is for many local governments and many communities unchartered territory and a there is currently a big learning curve being embarked upon. 

The importance of geography

Even in an increasingly global world (or perhaps because of it?), geography matters - so taking down a freeway is a big issue about communities, as reported from LA:

Taking down a freeway—as radical as that sounds—is not a new idea. Paris, Milwaukee, Seoul and New York are among the cities who’ve removed them. In San Francisco, two major freeways—the double-decker freeway that rounded the Embarcadero and the Central Freeway that cut through Hayes Valley—were demolished and replaced with surface boulevards after being damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta quake. These neighborhoods have since enjoyed a renaissance through freeway demolition that healed scarred communities.
In San Francisco, it wasn’t the earthquake that actually got the freeways taken down; there and in the other cities where such major pieces of infrastructure have been removed, it was the hard work of individuals who wanted to see something better in their city.
Changes in cities don’t just happen. People have to develop a vision for change, and convince others that such change is good. People with technical expertise need to weigh in to make sure the details work; politicians have to find the political will to make it happen. The people who had the vision in the first place need to hold on to that vision and push forward even when all hope seems lost.
San Francisco again finds itself with another opportunity to take down a freeway while creating major transportation infrastructure improvements in an important area of the city. Currently, the stub end of Interstate 280 creates a barrier between the developing Mission Bay neighborhood and Potrero Hill. At the same time, the Caltrain railyard—19 acres stretching from Fourth Street to Seventh Street between King and Townsend—divides Mission Bay and SoMa. These obstructions will worsen if current plans for California's high-speed rail proceed, forcing 16th Street and Mission Bay Boulevard into below-ground trenches beneath the tracks and the elevated freeway.

Brooklyn, New York City

The International Herald Tribune reported that 'New grass-roots efforts replace trickle down business-linked plans to revitalise neighbourhoods. One of the examples given was New Lots Ave, Brooklyn where the locals had supplanted cars for a people park. "New Yorkers deserve better...as with the public realm, the priority ought to be public service', said Ms Sadik-Khan, a local.  Learn more about neighbourhood action at the TN2013 Conference.

Conflicting land-use for sustainability

I can remember a bit of this from early days in St Kilda - bike paths and open space. Here is another version, reported by Streetsblog, with the need for housing close to public transport versus wild open space - both desirable in themselves. This process in Boulder, Colorado could be an interesting debate...

There’s a proposal on the table in Boulder, Colorado, to preserve 25 acres in the heart of the city for agricultural purposes in perpetuity.Space that could be used for people to live near high-frequency transit should not be permanently preserved for agriculture, says Zane Selvans. Image: Flat Iron BikeThe problem, says Zane Selvans at Flat Iron Bike, is that from a sustainability perspective there are better uses for such a big parcel of urban land. Selvans says the proposal — on a property known as Long’s Garden in North Boulder — is at odds with the city’s goal to become more walkable and livable for people.

Our recent trip to Auckland in New Zealand revealed the growth of small local community farms and gardens. Boston looks like it is going to connect this sort of growth to policy:

The city of Boston is laying the ground work to grow and simplify the process for urban farmingthroughout the city. Mayor Thomas Menino and the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) are introducing an amendment, Article 89, to the current zoning that would create opportunity for expandedurban agriculture activities such as rooftop farming and opening farm stands and markets.

THE FIRST PHASE OF THE MAYOR’S PILOT URBAN AGRICULTURE REZONING PROJECT INVOLVED ISSUING AN RFP SEEKING FARMERS TO CREATE A FARM ON TWO CITY-OWNED PROPERTIES IN SOUTH DORCHESTER. CITY GROWERS WAS SELECTED AND NOW OPERATES TWO FARMS IN BOSTON. (COURTESY OF CITY GROWERS BOSTON/FACEBOOK) 

Beginning in May, the Mayor’s office along with BRA launched a series of 11 neighborhood meetings to discuss Draft Article 89 with the public. This amendment change is part of the city’s larger Pilot Urban Agriculture Rezoning Project that was initially started in 2010: A group of farming experts and advocates were selected to participate in the Mayor’s Urban Agriculture Working Group to provide insight that helped inform a number of the recommendations included in Draft Article 89. This amendment tackles a range of urban agriculture issues from soil safety and rooftop and vertical agriculture to hydroponics and the care of animals and bees. Boston.com reported that the new zoning would allow for 1-acre ground-level farms in any neighborhood throughout the city, and then permit farms larger than one-acre in areas specifically zoned for industrial use. The amendment would also make it significantly easier for Bostonians to start a ground-level farm by requiring a special permit instead of mandating a public review process.
According to the BRA’s website, the Mayor’s Office and collaborating partners are hoping that this ambitious initiative will “increase access to affordable and healthy food, particularly for underserved communities” and “promote economic opportunity and greater self-sufficiency for people in need, including increasing the capacity of Boston residents and business and grow and distribute local and healthy food.”

Neighbourhood improvement and gentrification

Interesting views from Brent Toderian on the issue of neighbourhood gentrification, following Richard Florida's question: "if all economic development and neighbourhood revitalization is gentrification, how do we grow and improve our urban areas?"....

As the renaissance of cities and urban areas in North America continues, more and more neighborhoods are struggling with the challenges of change. Although the market's rediscovery of inner-city, walkable, mixed-use communities is an excellent thing in many ways, the word "gentrification" inevitably comes up in almost every discussion. But one person's gentrification is another person's revitalization, so the debate is always complex and heated.
Can you have revitalization, reinvestment, renewal without some level of gentrification? Probably not, as any perceived improvement in the eyes of the marketplace changes the economics. I do though, continue to believe that in planning for community change, there are reasonable levels of gentrification, that gentrification can be strategically managed, and that we can have "revitalization without displacement." In fact, this phrase has been the vision for Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (DTES) for years.
Gentrification that involves sweeping away the past, and the people, is by comparison easy - you often just have to let it happen. On the other hand, revitalization without displacement, protecting the low-income community as well as the built heritage in the context of change toward a more diverse community - that's much harder, and takes much longer. In every community where it's tried, and certainly here in Vancouver's DTES, it creates incredible tensions and struggles, and rightly so - vulnerable people's homes and lives are often at risk.

Seats as informal bump spaces

While in Auckland last week, I came across the fascinating blog of Denise and Dylan, who travelled around America in 2012, documenting their approach as they went. All with a strong neighbourhood focus - such as the following:

Seats as informal bump spaces

After great conversations with Ethan Kent (PPS) and Mike Lydon (Tactical Urbanism) I really started to notice the informal bump spaces in NY, and realised there had been many in the other cities we had visited too.


Take seats for example. Plenty of businesses provide seating of all kinds here. And not just cafes. Clothing shops, plant shops, design shops, even those catering for space cowboys! Often nestled in front of shop windows and accompanied by plantings and bowls of water for dogs, some are simply set against a wall, unchained, or designed to fit temporarily around the pavement trees. These pics are all from SoHo and they are colonised by people lunching, talking, resting and re-organising before being brought indoors at the close of business. Inviting eh?

It's got to be good for business I reckon and even cheaper and easier than reclaiming streets (esp if you don't ask permission! Can always seek forgiveness later if necessary :-)). Plus each seat provider gets to add a touch of their personality to the street (a form of street art even) and provide a small bump space for community connection too! 

Do no evil (at least consciously)

Thriving Neighbourhoods, of course, run the risk of pricing out the very people and process that made them "thriving". Tech Crunch reported on a recent event in California saw some direct action:

"Sick of high-paid tech employees driving up rent prices, protestors in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood held a “Anti-Gentrification Block Party” and beat on a Google bus piñata before cops broke up the crowd. The area has long been home to artists and Mexican-American families, but they’re being forced out as techies move in, their employers set up shuttle stops, and housing prices skyrocket.
Mission district blog Uptown Almanac’s Kevin Montgomery was on the scene. He describes 30 to 40 people assembled at the neighborhood’s 16th street Bay Area Rapid Transit station. The spot is one of the dirtiest in the city — in stark contrast to fancy Valencia street just one block over where software engineers frequent posh restaurants and pricey bike shops.Google, Apple, and Facebook all have shuttle bus stops in the neighborhood making it easy for their employees to live in the hip district while commuting south to Silicon Valley in style. The buses have become a symbol of gentrification. Dozens of police officers surrounded the rally, fearing it might devolve into violence. Last May a riot broke out in neighborhood with many businesses vandalized with “Yuppies Out” graffiti."

Partnerships in "handmade urbanism"

An excellent and thoughtful review of Handmade Urbanism: From Community Initiatives to Participatory Models by the Project for Public Spaces notes the importance of partnerships, especially cross-sectoral approaches:

The case studies, all of which were selected through the Urban Age program, highlight a wide variety of interventions in slums and favelas in Mexico City, Istanbul, Cape Town, São Paulo, and Mumbai. Presented together, they lead the reader on a journey through a potential place: a city where public spaces truly belong to the public, and everyone is encouraged to contribute. The analysis of these projects looks at each city through a five distinctly different lenses, discussing the role of citizen-led projects with community actors, government officials, academics, artists, and intermediaries, defined by the editors as “those operating at the middle level (between top-down and bottom-up interventions) intermediating scales, and different layers of knowledge and action.”
One of the book’s many detailed diagrams / Photo: Jovis 

Unsurprisingly, given this staunchly multidisciplinary approach, there is a heavy focus on the role of partnerships in driving success with bottom-up projects. The success of any public space relies heavily on a strong network of partners, from individuals to organizations. This is especially true of citizen-led projects because unsanctioned improvements often require substantial public support to avoid being dismantled for any number of bureaucratic reasons once they are discovered. Thus, almost every case study presented in Handmade Urbanism involves some interesting examples of people from different constituencies working together. More importantly, several illustrate the power of partnerships and collaboration to transform and expand the reach of the groups that participate.

Cultivating communities

A well-produced introduction to cultivating community by cultivating locally (albeit Canada):

How are communities raising serious money for green energy projects?

This article by Chris Goodall from The Guardian UK highlights the importance of community champions in raising funds for community energy projects. Read it here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/apr/29/community-raising-money-green-energy

My Neighbourhood

Create an animation of your own neighbourhood with this little app from the New South Wales Government property developer Landcom at:
http://www.landcom.com.au/mini-sites/my_neighbourhood/index.htm

Neighbourhood on vimeo

Two contrary places that are connected by stylistic features. It is about the metropolis New York City (USA) and the provincial Dessau (GER).  Based on the topic "neighborhood", the films about the both cities are shown in a double projection. This short film was created in the framework of the cooperation between the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences,  Department of Design Dessau, and the NYU. Watch it.....

Neighbourhood life

We had Jane Jacobs who wrote “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” The Death and Life of Great American Cities- and we now have...

Decoding how cities work: street level observations

"The promise of gathering the whole spectrum of information traces of city life and managing this amount of data dominates the new utopian views. This pursuit for a complete understanding of what happens in cities takes the form of a seductive approach to urban design and urban governance, and tries to take advantage of ubiquitous computing and situated technologies. Thus, the intersection of code and space emerges as a deterministic paradigm".

http://www.ciudadesaescalahumana.org/2013/02/decoding-how-cities-work-street-level.html?goback=.gde_2212683_member_217703217

Avoiding a Middle Class Revolution

Feed in tariff schemes for small scale renewable generation have been heavily criticized for being reverse Robin Hood – taking from the poor and giving to the rich (see George Monbiot’s polemic in the Guardian for a good example) but is this characterization fair?

Couple Buys a Sewerage Plant with Lottery Win ?!

In November Mark and Cindy Hill of Dearborn Missouri won $587 million in the lottery. Did they buy a private island or a Ferrari each? No they bought their community a new sewerage treatment plant.

A treasure trove of presentations

Thriving Neighbourhoods is a public space where – like all inspiring, vibrant places – there is a mixture of many different types of people and organisations: policy-makers, researchers, consultants, developers, social enterprises, community activists, content developers, communicators, sustainability companies, non-profit organisations, and local, regional, national, and international.

Each year, this diverse group gathers at the Thriving Neighbourhoods conference in Melbourne. In 2012, the presentations covered:

More mapping - the next front in neighbourhood approaches?

Toronto's 140 neighbourhoods have a massive and growing data set being developed for use by anyone free of charge - and provides a visual and accessible way to think about neighbourhoods:

Wellbeing Toronto is a new web-based measurement and visualization tool that helps evaluate community wellbeing across the city's 140 neighbourhoods. Using geographic information software, Wellbeing Toronto allows you to select, combine and weight the significance of a number of indicators that monitor neighbourhood wellness. The results appear instantly on easy to read maps, tables and graphs. This free tool supports decision making and seeks to engage citizens and businesses in understanding the challenges and opportunities of creating and maintaining healthy neighbourhoods. You can also find detailed demographic information about each neighbourhood, prepared by the City's Social Policy Analysis & Research Unit

Now this is what we need in Australia.... 

The Axis of Community Energy

Community as a tag has been attached to a number of very differently organized energy projects with varying levels of community involvement. Some projects have the community largely as a passive beneficiary, while in other projects - such as those run as cooperatives - the community acts as initiator, investor and project manager, while in other projects again the ‘community’ constituent can be rather dubious altogether. So what counts as a ‘community’ energy project?

Timing a walk as incentive

The excellent blog Polis reports on how the city of Pontevedra in northwest Spain has become a leader in walker-friendly urban policy over the past 15 years. One particular innovation of interest to neighbourhoods is their mapping of walking times between places:

To further improve walkability, Pontevedra's city council produced a map that visualizes the distances and travel times between key places on foot at an average speed of five kilometers per hour. Known as Metrominuto, the map has color-coded lines that resemble those of a subway guide. The pink line from Peregrina Square shows that it takes about 14 minutes to walk from there to the train and bus stations. Free parking areas are marked to encourage visitors to leave their cars outside the city center. According to the map, someone who parks in the free lot near the police station can get to Peregrina Square in less than eight minutes via Santiago Bridge. Metrominuto reminds residents and visitors that many automobile trips can be made in a more convenient, environmentally friendly and healthy way by walking.

Dreaming of fat maps

Eau Claire County in Wisconsin USA is a typical case of the increasing use of mapping to identify trends in neighbourhoods which can lead to practical action (but could they really have nearly two-thirds of their population overweight or obese? Really?):

To see if there’s a possible connection between obesity and the physical environment, the city is considering making a map showing areas where obesity is high...(and) if these neighborhoods have inadequate recreational amenities, a lack of nutritious food options or other physical barriers to fitness.

A roadblock to creating this map is that local-level data could be hard to come by...

The draft plan states the measure of this would be body-mass-index -- a ratio comparing height to weight. A BMI of 25 to 29.9 is considered overweight, while 30 and above are classified as obese.

A quarter of Eau Claire County residents are obese, according to surveys done between 2000 and 2010 by the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. Another 37 percent of county residents are overweight and 37 percent of county residents have a BMI below 25...

Wait, does Tarzan even have a neighbourhood?

The LA Times in the USA has a fantastic attempt at describing neighbourhoods, which uses interesting maps technology and their readers' direct involvement: to create an "objective" approach that takes into account local views. Some of the comments, though, were a little strange...

Powered by Leaflet — Map data: Copyright Google, 2011

This is how I always envisioned my Tarzana plantation.

— Edgar Rice Burroughs
about Tarzana
posted February 19, 2009 at 5:36 p.m.

What is Community?

Community has become increasingly central as a focus for sustainability action in Australia with numerous initiatives and policies targeting the community as both the beneficiary and the agent of change; for example there is the Sustainable Communities Initiative, the National framework of Green Star Communities and the Community Energy Efficiency Programme to name but a few, In short community is currently somewhat of a catch phrase within the field of urban sustainability policy - and intuitively it feels good. 

Community focused action seems to represent a positive step-change away from traditional top-down legislation towards policy that aims to empower people and give them ownership over their future - something rare in a world dominated by big business interests and in which the citizen is viewed largely as a passive consumer. But what is this unit we are aiming to empower? If we pause for a minute to consider what a community actually is, it all starts to get a little foggy.

Thinking about neighbourhoods

Why are we looking at neighbourhoods? And, indeed, what are neighbourhoods, exactly?

Researchers have no consensus on definitions for neighbourhoods. Dictionaries typically come up with the following:

neighbourhood US, neighborhood [ˈneɪbəˌhʊd]

n

1. the immediate environment; surroundings; vicinity Related adj vicinal

2. a district where people live

3. the people in a particular area; neighbours

4. neighbourly feeling

neighbourhood

noun

1. district, community, quarter, region, surroundings, locality, locale It seemed like a good neighbourhood to raise my children.

2. vicinity, confines, proximity, precincts, environs, purlieus the loss of woodlands in the neighbourhood of large towns

Researchers then try to modify the noun by using something like “walking neighbourhood”. This is sometimes supposed to be around 1 -2 kilometres in diameter from the home. Even this has been recently challenged as too large a space when matched to the actual walking habits of residents in a town in the UK.