Category Archives: landscape planning

Urban design, GDP/capita and the theory of good city form

Is this the world's best city to live in?

This is the world's richest city. Do you want to live here? Where is it? Does it look really American?

Kevin Lynch wrote a book on the Theory of Good City Form (MIT Press, 1981). His criteria were vitality, sense, fit, access, control, efficiency and justice. None of the criteria are readily measurable and Kevin Lynch did not identify which cities best satisfy them. One imagines he would have given Boston a good position in the ranking of North American cities. Lynch does not mention sustainability – and doesn’t everyone want more money? And so shouldn’t GDP/head be on Lynch’s list? After all, its more measureable and one can even find a ranking of cities by per capita GDP on Wikipedia. It goes like this: Tokyo $1479/head, New York City $1406/head, Los Angeles $792/head, Chicago $574/head, London $565/head, Paris $564/head, Osaka $417/head, Mexico City $390/head, Philadelphia $388/head, São Paulo $388/head. I am surprised that the city at the top of the list is four times as productive as the city in tenth position. Boston is not in the top ten and nor are Edinburgh, Rome, Kyoto, Isfahan, Munich, Hangzhou or many of the other places admired by urban designers. Are we barking up the wrong trees? Or are there no connections between the quality of the urban landscape, the desirablilty of a city as a place to live and the economic productivity of the settlement? And what has size got to do with it? Peter Hall argues that the best size for a city is about 1 million people. The top ten list of cities by GDP suggests to me that bigger cities tend to be more productive. Here are the top ten cities by size: Tokyo, Seoul, Mexico City, Delhi, Mumbai, New York City, São Paulo, Manila, Los Angeles, Shanghai.

(Above photograph of Tokyo, courtesy riverseal)

Can sustainable urban design and landscape architecture help combat global warming?

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Designing urban landscapes for motor vehicles discourages human-powered transport

Watching Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth at one sitting led me to the following conclusions:

The film is excellent and has much to teach college lecturers, both about the analysis of complex issues and about the the use of words & images in presenting an argument.
Gore’s argument is weakened by his homepage link to a Buy Now button on climatecrisis.net – regardless of how he shares the profits. It makes him seem like a greedy evangelist on TV.
Gore’s list (below) of Thing’s You Can Do Now, is ultra-trivial and may have set back the cause by encouraging politicians to believe that little change is necessary. The film mentions population growth but it is not on the list, doubtless for ‘political’ reasons.
The best commentary on the issues comes from Justice Burton. He said the film is ‘broadly accurate’ but listed nine inaccuracies
A landscape approach to urban design can do more to combat climate change than Al Gore can imagine. We can and should:

use all roofspace: for vegetation, gardens, power generation or the daylighting of interior space
plan cities for extensive use of human-powered and solar-powered transport (above image courtesy TouringCyclist) – but see my recent post on White Commuting
compost as much as possible within the boundaries of each and every property
infiltrate as much water as possible within the boundaries of each and every property
make all buildings energy efficient, by orientation, vegetation, insulation, durability, daylighting, avoidance of lifts and escalators etc
design new homes so they can become home offices, when eCommuting becomes the norm, with a smooth transition from indoor to outdoor spaces with differential climatic and temperature characteristics

For landscape architects and urban designers thinking about new jobs and professional opportunities in sustainable urban design, the above are very convenient truths.

Al Gore does not say enough about urban design

Another ‘inconvenient truth’ ignored by Gore, is that the environmental impact of bottled water has been calculated, by SGWA, to be 1000 times greater than that of tap water. So ban it, as a small town in Australia has done: Bundanoon, in New South Wales. Perhaps the American language needs a new word: an ‘ingored truth’

Elevated cycling tubes for green commuters

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Proposed london cycle tube

I published the above image in 1996 with the comment that ‘At some point we may be able to have a network of plastic tubes, with blown air assisting cyclists in their direction of travel (Figure 7)’. The photograph was taken in Greenwich station and the ‘slot’ where the cycletube is shown has since been used to build an extension to the Docklands Light Railway (from Lewisham to Canary Wharf). I like the DLR but, still believing London needs an overhead cycletube system for green commuters, was delighted to hear a comparable veloway has been proposed in Canada (see illustrations below).

The user experience in a pneumatic cycletube would be sublime: quiet, beautiful, self-directed transport. There is an overland railway line from Greenwich to London Bridge. Bowling into the tube at Greenwich one could almost stop peddling and be carried along by air, gazing at the London panorama. Everyone would have a seat. Nobody would have to wait for a train. Journey times would be faster than by train because there would be no waiting and no stopping and no delay in exiting the station. One would glide from exit into the heart of one of the world’s greatest cities. relaxed, warm, dry and filled with the joy of life. There would of course be twin cycle tubes, with the bicycle flow and airflow in different directions.

Cycletubes could also help families negotiate difficult junctions and give them safe routes to school – though the tubes would obviously have to be integrated with the urban design.

Velo-city elevated cycleway from http://www.velo-city.ca/MainFrameset.html

Comment on the landscape aspects of the Mayor’s London Plan 2009

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Thames Area Strategy zones from the 2009-10 Mayor’s London Plan

You can download the .pdf and comment the draft of Mayor Boris Johnson’s London Plan 2009. The most interesting chapters, for me, are Chapter 6 on Transport and Chapter 7 on London’s Living Spaces and Places. The Gardenvisit website has a historical analysis of previous Open Space Plans for London and I have a special interest in Boris’s plan because he is the only politician I have ever voted for who has been elected. Briefly, my comments on the 2009 draft of the London Plan are as follows.

The section on Cycling is very welcome – and Boris won my vote by supporting this cause. I hope I live long enough to ride into the capital on a Cycle Super Highway, but since Ken Livingstone promised something similar when he was first elected I am maintaining a healthy skepticism. The policy that ‘to bring about a significant increase in cycling in London, so that it accounts for at least 5 per cent of modal share by 2026’ is insufficiently ambitious. ‘In 2003 fully 36% cycled to workplaces in Copenhagen whereas only 27% drove to work’.
The Blue Ribbon Strategy, also introduced by Livingstone, is very wise and very welcome. But it needs some tough political muscle behind it.
The Walking Strategy, based on my 1992 Green Strategy for London, is supported by Boris as it was by Ken, with thanks to them both.
The plan for a Hierarchy of Open Space in London is as irrelevant today as when it was first advanced by the GLC in 1969. I can only think that it survives because there is standard textbook a Town and Country Planning which supports this kind of absurdity.
The Green Belt and Metropolitan Open Land ideas are supported for the very good reason that there would be a public outcry if they were not supported. The fact that they have no obvious affect on planning decisions scarcely matters.
The Biodiversity Strategy is welcome. But there should also be a strategy for the diversification of open space types. London has far too much generalized public open space and not nearly enough specialized public open space. See blog comment on Urban parks, POS and landscape architecture.
The introduction of Thames Policy Areas, based on Thames landscape strategy, is welcome but does not go far enough. The Thames needs a Scenic Quality Appraisal and then zoning to show (1) zones where there should be a presumption in favour of conserving the existing character (2) zones where there should be a presumption in favour of changing the existing character – because the scenic quality is low. See blog comment on the Millennium London Eye.
An All London Green Grid became a supplement to the plan in 2011-2012

CONCLUSIONS ON THE LANDSCAPE SECTIONS OF THE MAYOR’S LONDON PLAN

1) The 2009 London Plan is qualitatively inferior to the 1943 Open Space Chapter of the Abercrombie Plan for London. The latter is obsolete in most respects but it had the great merit of taking a simple, clear and idealistic view of the problems and the opportunities. Abercrombie was a member of the Institute of Landscape Architects and had a deep understanding of the subject.

2) If the Greater London Authority is unable to afford the cost of expert landscape consultants, I modestly point them to the Green Strategy I prepared for the London Planning Advisory Committee in 1992. The Mayor’s London Plan is over halfway to adopting the principle of a series of overlapping green networks (for Rivers, Walks, Cycling, and Habitats). These layers should now be INTEGRATED on a Londonwide basis.

3) Town planners should not have responsibility for landscape and open space planning unless they also hold professional qualifications in landscape architecture. I do not know who wrote the landscape sections of the 2009 Draft but they do not read like the work of imaginative, well-educated and influential landscape planners.

Pythian Games and Olympic Games: culture and athletics

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The Olympic Games should be re-formed on a Delphic or Celtic model

According to Wiki the Pythian Games at Delphi: “were founded sometime in the 6th century BCE, and, unlike the Olympic Games, also featured competitions for music and poetry. The music and poetry competitions pre-dated the athletic portion of the games, and were said to have been started by Apollo.’

So the relationship between the games at Delphi and Olympia equates to that between Athens and Sparta. Athens had a fine balance between cultural and physical prowess. Sparta cared only for the physical and military. So my proposal is to scrap the Olympic Games and replace them with a new series of Pythian Games – which should balance athleticism with cultural competitions, including poetry, music, oratory and dance. It is not so much that these activities have value: it is that mind and body are part of a single organism and we should not over-develop one at the expense of the other.

Or, since the language and culture of Ancient Greece was Indo-European and Central Asian in origin, perhaps we should re-form the Olympic Games on the basis of Celtic festivals. The Celts represent another great Indo-European tradition and we could look to the Highland Games in Scotland and the Eisteddfod in Wales. Anything would be better than the cynical, commercial, drug-taking body-damaging, militaristic, mindlessness tedium of the modern ‘Olympic movement’.

Photo of Eisteddfod courtesy Sara Branch

Urban food production and urban agriculture

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This is called urban agriculture - but the food is not grown in a field (agri in Latin)

Cities can, should and will, I believe, become much more productive of food. A friend whose paved ‘garden’ measures about 20 sq meters is self-sufficnent herbs and in summer fruits. He has 16 fruit trees, all grown in pots, and produces strawberries and other fruits with a flavour far superior to supermarket food. He does not have to worry about chemical sprays. He contributes to the balance of payments. NO energy is required to transport the produce. His plants take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen. The vitamens do not have time to decay in storage. There is no need for a refrigerator or deep freeze to store the food. Tending the plants is good exercise. He provides ‘visual policing’ for the community while doing the work.

Why don’t more people grow their own food? Because most cities are not planned for urban agriculture, unless they are in Cuba.

Garden Design and Landscape Architecture

Gardenvisit.com