25 great ideas!

"The New Urbanism is a design movement toward complete, compact, connected communities—but it is also a generator of ideas that transform the landscape. Communities are shaped by the movement and flow of ideas, and the New Urbanism has been a particularly rich source of the currents that have directed planning and development in recent decades."

 https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2017/10/31/25-great-ideas-new-urbanism

UN's Sustainable Development Goals

The United Nations has created 17 goals and "provides a global blueprint for dignity, peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and in the future."  "The Sustainable Development Goals are the blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. They address the global challenges we face, including those related to poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace and justice. The 17 Goals are all interconnected, and in order to leave no one behind, it is important that we achieve them all by 2030."

For more information, visit https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/why-the-sdgs-matter/

While all the goals are important for cities since more and more people move to the urban areas, number 11 "make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable" is of particular importance to planners and designers.

Visualizing solutions

 

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Motivation!

Dan Pink's talk - from the video description "the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace".

What do you think?

DIY-ing cities

 

Book review from here:

http://spacing.ca/vancouver/2023/02/07/book-review-diy-city-hank-dittmar/

"Three critical examples from DIY City of the kinds of policy changes available to politicians, community organizers and planners in fostering small incremental change include:

Allowing Small Scale Development

In most municipalities, new development is regulated through a constellation of bylaws, whose primary purpose is to ensure new projects proceed in a way that reflects community values. However, when applied to smaller projects, these bylaws can play against a community’s goals for things like housing. For example, Dittmar cites examples in certain places where getting permits for new buildings is easier than retrofits to existing ones. By creating barriers for small projects, poorly designed regulations stymie small-scale builders who, in aggregate, have a sizeable collective power to make progress in adding new housing supply.

Encouraging Meanwhile-Uses

“Meanwhile-uses” are temporary activities that can take place in a space while financing and approvals are being arranged for more complex developments. This can take years for big projects, and unless there are clear incentives or requirements to maintain some level of activity, sites can sit empty the whole time. Meanwhile-uses can include those on bare ground or in existing buildings. Examples from Dittmar’s book include a variety of artisan and market spaces which can actually draw more interest to a site and create added value and a sense of place. If done well, meanwhile-uses can be incorporated into what comes next and continue the story. However, if meanwhile-uses are desired, they must be permitted, encouraged, or mandated.

Formalizing Informal Arts Spaces

Reducing barriers and regulations is a common theme throughout DIY City, but it is not to say that Dittmar wants to do away with them altogether. In most cases, building codes and bylaws were created to protect people from fire, earthquakes, electrical, or other potential hazards. However, a city’s most culturally productive sites can find and grow in some of its oldest and most at-risk buildings. Instead of condemning these spaces and removing them in the name of public safety, Dittmar argues that cities should recognize the value of these spaces and work with tenants to ensure they are safe. One grassroots tool is the D.I.Y. Harm Reduction Manual, a crowd-sourced manual full of recommendations designed to help organizers make their venues safer."

Image from here:

https://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2022/04/22/building-a-sustainable-city/

From the archives - walkability

"Walkability" is a word urbanists throw around, often with different ideas as to what it really means, or why we care about it. As a literal descriptor, being “walkable” simply means a place can be walked, in the same sense that “readable” means it can be read. There are different levels of walkability just as how asentencewithoutspaces is still readable, just less readable than a sentence with spaces."

"To measure if a trip is walkable, there are four factors we should consider: safety, distance, convenience, and comfort."

from:

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/8/6/what-makes-walkability

Urban planning 101

15 things you didn't know about city planning (probably) - lessons learned and a review of top urban planning books.

from: 

https://youtu.be/Walx0iQZfiY

Neighbourhood building blocks

"Neighborhoods vary a lot, but they have five basic characteristics. We keep these in mind when planning a new neighborhood or when carefully updating or restoring an existing one."

1. an identifiable center & edge
2. limited in size
3. a mix of land uses & building types & housing types and prices
4. an integrated network of walkable streets
5. sites reserved for civic purposes

from: https://www.doverkohl.com/blog/2020/5/10/every-neighborhood-should-have-these-five-things

Frank Lloyd Wright - the urban planner

"In this Our Changing Climate environmental video essay, I look at Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings through his sustainable and green architecture in his designs for Fallingwater and Usonian homes. Specifically, I dig into his ideas of organic architecture, Usonia, and Broadacre City, and look at buildings like Fallingwater in order to come to grips with the balance Frank Lloyd Wright strikes between a love for nature (and green living) and a desire for embracing new technologies."

6 Road Design Changes That Can Save Lives

"Six simple road design changes that can significantly improve road safety. These changes put people – not vehicles – at the center of design to reduce speeds, demand more awareness from drivers and create more opportunities for safe crossings. They can even help make cities greener.

1. Shorter Blocks

2. Narrower Lanes

3. More Roundabouts

4. Chicanes (or bump outs)

5. Speed Humps

6. Raised Crossings

Bonus: Compact, Coordinated and Connected Planning

from:

https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/10/6-road-design-changes-can-save-lives

Zoning 101

"Although invisible on land and inscrutable on paper, municipal zoning codes have a tremendous impact on the form of cities—and by extension, on the way people live in them. Today, these arcane regulations are seeing unprecedented levels of public scrutiny. After decades of embracing strict zoning rules, several cities and states want to relax them to make it easier to build housing and create more environmentally friendly communities. This edition of CityLab University offers an overview of zoning and defines the key terms related to it in America, so you can better understand the rules that are shaping your city and neighborhood."

from: 

https://www.citylab.com/design/2019/08/zoning-ordinance-definition-history-explained-city-laws/594913/

From the archives

"101 smart transportation solutions that can make our cities better."

https://www.curbed.com/2017/9/20/16317036/best-transportation-ideas-cities-transit

Twitter user: 21st Century City

Top tweets that caught my eye:

"Autonomous vehicles would probably need more space, as they would have to drive around empty to find the next passenger."

from: https://twitter.com/urbanthoughts11/status/976859613990670336

or: 

"Snow to visualize the crazy amount of unused carspace."

from: https://twitter.com/bicivikingo/status/978034705298853888

or:



"If you design your city for people instead of cars, your city will thrive - in terms of business, safety, efficiency, people's mood, health & so much more"

from: https://twitter.com/urbanthoughts11/status/974329230887653376

Peak Population?

"When will our global population peak? And how can we minimize our impact on Earth’s resources, even as we approach 11 billion?"

The right to walk

"Every person has the right to walk. Choosing to move on foot — to work, school, or the market — should be safe and easy for urban residents. Yet city streets are increasingly being built for high-speed, personal vehicles, with hazardous intersections and narrow or nonexistent sidewalks. In many cities, simply getting anywhere by foot has become a dangerous: thousands of pedestrians are killed on the world’s roads each week."



from: http://spacing.ca/vancouver/2018/02/08/video-vancouver-right-walk/

25 great ideas

"The New Urbanism is a design movement toward complete, compact, connected communities—but it is also a generator of ideas that transform the landscape. Communities are shaped by the movement and flow of ideas, and the New Urbanism has been a particularly rich source of the currents that have directed planning and development in recent decades.



One idea:
"Mixed-use urban centers. Why build a shopping center or "office park," an oxymoron, when you could build a town center or an urban center? Life is more than shopping. Some may find that hard to believe, but it is true. And businesses all over America are flocking to mixed-use urban centers, because that's where workers want to be. They don't want to be imprisoned in office parks for half of their waking lives."



from: https://www.cnu.org/…/2017/10/31/25-great-ideas-new-urbanism

Principles for creating great places

"Effective public spaces are extremely difficult to accomplish, because their complexity is rarely understood. As William (Holly) Whyte said, “It’s hard to design a space that will not attract people. What is remarkable is how often this has been accomplished.”

"In our 1999 book “How to Turn a Place Around,” PPS identified 11 key elements in transforming public spaces into vibrant community places, whether they’re parks, plazas, public squares, streets, sidewalks, or the myriad other outdoor and indoor spaces that have public uses in common. This was a key milestone in our history, as this book helped to launch and define the placemaking movement."

1. The community is the expert
2. Create a place, not a design
3. Look for partners
4. You can see a lot just by observing
5. Have a vision
6. Start with the petunias: lighter, quicker, cheaper
7. Triangulate
8. They always say, ‘It can’t be done’
9. Form supports function
10. Money is not the issue
11. You are never finished

For more information, visit: http://www.therenewalproject.com/11-principles-for-creating-great-community-places/.

Street design guide

"One of the central arguments made by the guide is that most street design prioritizes private motor transport over not only every other mode of transit but also over use of street space that does not involve transport. In contrast, the guide lays out a hierarchy of user priority that sees pedestrians as the most important users to consider with cyclists and transit, people doing business and providing services and users of personal motorized vehicles following in descending order."



"In the foreword to the guide, NACTO chair and former New York transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan said, “For the last century, streets around the world have been built around automobiles. Wide lanes for traffic and little room for people became the rules of the road in most corners of the globe, dividing cities, stifling economic growth and creating dangerous congestion. This guide marks the next step toward changing the old road hierarchy, with designs that save lives, prioritize people and transit, reflect diverse communities, and better serve everyone on the street.”

from: http://architectureau.com/articles/Free-global-street-design-guide-launched/

Better mental health through urban design

"Individuals residing in cities are more likely to develop a mental illness such as depression, anxiety or schizophrenia than those that live in rural areas. When individuals are suffering from a mental health illness, it affects more than just the individual - it impacts their surroundings as well. In this article we explore how cities not only affect mental health but also how designers can help reduce mental health illnesses related to urban design."

from: https://caddetailsblog.com/post/2017/3/20/xzf1wv7lsiu03d6npru0dexj31b5hj

also from:  https://qz.com/934976/mental-health-problems-of-people-who-live-in-cities-need-to-be-solved-by-both-urban-designers-and-health-professionals/

"But urban planners can design the urban environment in ways that systematically address mental-health opportunities. For example:

• Expanding access to green spaces—such as parks, street trees, or even office-window views of nature—has been proven to benefit mental health.
• “Active design” is not simply a physical health effort: Because regular exercise can be an effective way to address some forms of mild depression (as well as reducing anxiety and some of the symptoms of dementia, ADHD, and even schizophrenia), interventions like creating walking circuits in a park or installing safe cycling infrastructure can have substantial mental-health benefits.
• Positive social interaction increases self esteem and feelings of belonging as well as mitigating loneliness and anxiety. In order to encourage this, public spaces can install features like benches and chess tables to facilitate social interaction and provide settings for community activities."

Parks and the elderly

"Despite urban planners' best efforts to accommodate this demographic phenomenon, many public spaces like parks are currently lacking age-friendly infrastructure. This means that seniors miss out on the physical and social benefits that parks can provide."



"Creating inclusive spaces for all age groups requires an understanding of the different needs that elderly people may have compared with the typical target demographic of a park: children and/or families. One easy solution to making a park more suitable for aging individuals is to provide plenty of seating options, not only within the park, but also en route to the park. Unlike younger children who can sit on the grass (or spend most of their time running around), elderly people need spots where they can sit and easily get up from. When choosing seating arrangements, consider a variety of seats that can accommodate small and large groups, let an individual sit alone, provide conversational opportunities, and lastly be moveable."

from: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/3/23/are-parks-alienating-the-aging-population