General media thread for architecture, urban planning and design

[tomh009]

(By the way, I'm in Japan right now, and there is no street parking in cities.)

They're smart and build these sort of things instead. :'P

What's really cool is that they even do this for bike parking. There are a few automated, underground bike garages there which are fascinating.

There are lots of tiny little neighbourhood parking lots, too. And conventional bike parking lots at and near train stations.

[ac3r]

Yeah and you can lock your bike up and in most cases be assured nobody is going to steal it (tho it happens). There's a lot more respect for fellow citizens there.

[ac3r]

University of Waterloo School of Architecture professors Adrian Blackwell and David Fortin, and members of the Architects Against Housing Alienation (AAHA) organizing committee will share the planning in progress for c\a\n\a\d\a's official representation at the Venice Biennale for Architecture, opening on May 20, 2023– "Not for Sale!"–an architectural campaign that makes demands for de-commodified and deeply affordable approaches to housing across the country.

Architects Against Housing Alienation (AAHA) is a collective of architects, activists and advocates fighting against housing alienation and working to create socially, ecologically and creatively empowering housing for all. This campaign will represent Canada at the 2023 Venice Biennale of Architecture, where they will launch Not for Sale! an architectural activist campaign for non-alienated housing, rejecting the concept of property and financialized forms of architecture. AAHA’s mission is to instigate an architectural movement to mobilize all Canadians to join the call for safer, healthier, and more equitable housing.

[ac3r]

This month, the Centre Canadien d'Architecture has a new selection of books on architecture/planning/infrastructure theory available. See the following Instagram story linked below or visit their website for more info as well as to access their entire online bookstore. They have a really good selection of titles which cover all sorts of topics.

Architecture is a public consideration here at CCA. This month, our book selection surveys the many directions it is taking in society: children, beginners, graphic designers, artists, environmental activists, emerging professionals - all disciplinary facets and peripheries must be explored.

• Irma Boom: Book Manifest. Walther König, third revised and expanded edition 2022
  
• Faire – To look at things – Volume 12 (#42-43-44-45), Faire, 2023
  
• A book on making a petite école. Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, MOS Architects. Actar Publishers, 2023
  
• Make do with now: New directions in Japanese architecture. Yuma Shinohara and Andreas Ruby. Christoph Merian Verlag, 2022
  
• Absolute beginners. Inaki Abalos. Park Books, 2022
  
• Architect, verb: The new language of building. Reinier de Graaf. Verso Books, 2023
  
• Aldo & Hannie van Eyck: Excess of architecture. Kersten Geers, Jelena Pancevac Walther König, 2023
  
• Vers un art de l’anthropocène: L'art écologique américain pour prototype. Bénédicte Ramade. Les presses du réel, 2022
  

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stories/highli...467235029/
Books: https://cca-bookstore.com/collections/books

They also offer a large selection of e-journals which I highly recommend and are entirely free through an open access platform: https://cca-bookstore.com/collections/e-pub

[danbrotherston]

Well, it's not a book, but 99% invisible's latest podcast about the story of how the Dutch got their bike lanes is very good.

I'm sure most of you have heard the story before, but their retelling is still worth a listen. As all 99% pods are it's got a well constructed and compelling narrative, but on a technical level it does a great job of describing the conditions and circumstances which led the Dutch to reject cars. They don't mention how much luck was involved, but I can forgive that.

It's also interesting because at least their positioning is that much of the move to safer roads was motivated by drivers hitting kids. In North America we instead took away our children's freedom, it didn't change that car crashes are the number one killer of kids (unless you live in the US and then guns have overtaken cars...because...well...sociopathy at the highest levels), but it does change how we feel about those deaths.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/d...-is-niets/

[neonjoe]

The creator of the Transit Timewarp Facebook page and book is doing a slideshow and presentation at the KPL this Saturday.
https://transittimewarp.com/blogs/news/g...r-8th-2023

His photography often shows that despite how much things seem to change, they also stay the same.

[neonjoe]

Really, even if not ideal, Go and the region should work to put a Stop at the Fairway Terminal or move the Sportsworld stop there.
It’s still relatively close to the highway, it has a park and ride lot, plus far more buses and ion converge there.

[Acitta]

There is a lot of discussion in this forum complaining about bad design. These articles are relevant in that regard.

From the Outside In: A Conversation with Naama Blonder
The architect and urban planner reflects on coming to Toronto as an adult immigrant — and harnessing an outsider’s perspective.

Can Public Policy Fix Canadian Architecture?
An exploration of how the bureaucracy of procurement shapes design — and how civic culture shapes bureaucracy.

[bravado]

Join us on Friday, September 15, 2023, at 6:30pm at 15 Main St Cambridge for the opening reception of "Commuting Communities", an exhibition of undergraduate student projects from the Winter 2023 semester showing visions for increasing housing densities at future ION stations in Cambridge that are inclusive, affordable, and safe, while beautifully strengthening a sense of community. The focus of the studio was to consider what it would take to achieve Equitable Transit-Oriented Development (ETOD) around each station, including planning and financing strategies that could lead to more inclusive neighbourhoods, factoring in important issues like affordability, reconciliation, and biased gentrification.

This event is FREE and open to the public, so we look forward to seeing you there!

The exhibition runs from September 15th-29th, 2023, 4:30-7:30pm daily.

https://uwaterloo.ca/architecture/events...on-opening

[ac3r]

I'll have to check that out! I haven't been to the architecture campus in a few months.

[danbrotherston]

I wasn't sure where to put this, but it seems to fit here...

Oh the Urbanity have put out an interesting video about density, as a metric.

I've always had issues with "density" as a metric because it means almost nothing about the experience of average people. The video does a great job explaining why, and also introduces a new density metric that does a much better job evaluating density of a region. It's pretty interesting!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85ris-gl...heUrbanity

[ac3r]

For anyone who has children, there's a fun book you can get that through brainstorming exercises, teaches them about cities and urban planning by Antropology 4 Kids. The book is available free as an e-book although you can donate via Patreon if you wish to support A4Kids! There is no print version from what I can tell, so you'd need to print it out. They also offer some other ebooks for children on other subjects such as privacy, anarchism, beauty/aesthetics, protest movements and so on.

Also linked is a short article/interview by Arts of the Working Class who spoke to the creators of the organization and how the workshops they held worked.

What is a city? How is it constructed? Let’s together imagine a city in which you and I would love to live!

This is a book about cities – how unexpectedly different they were in various countries and times. It is also a book about cities that never existed, but someone dreamed of them or feared them.

It contains many pictures, including drawings and graphic art, some dating from as far back as the Middle Ages, illustrations from science fiction books and pictures from movies, and drawings I myself and my friend the architect Sam Chermayeff made. There are also maps of cities that children invented. As with the other books in the series, there’s a lot of room for you to draw in and put your dreams and fantasies on paper. You can start right away, building the city in which you’d love to live.

Cities Made Differently - Arts of the Working Class

In the following interview, Vera Mey and Nika Dubrovsky discuss their shared experiences as part of the conference series “Challenging Capitalist Modernity,” in which Dubrovsky had taken part on behalf of her organization, Anthropology for Kids. This conversation reflects on Dubrovsky’s experience at the workshop in collaboration with Kurdish activists, touching on themes of urbanism, community, and imagination. The conference took place in Hamburg, Germany, from April 7-9, 2023, and under the title We Want Our World Back, focused on the arts, education, and construction of democratic confederalism.

City - by Nika Dubrovsky and Vera Mey. To download, click the ⇓ below the cover image on the website.

Additionally, here is a brief elaboration on an in-person workshop that utilized the book: https://a4kids.org/workshop-future-city/

[ac3r]

Last week's The Economist newsmagazine had an article on how NIMBYs - despite their pro-environmentalist rhetoric - actually increase environmental devastation with their opposition to new development.

A shopkeeper’s son smashes a window, causing a crowd to gather. Its members tell the shopkeeper not to be angry: in fact, the broken window is a reason to celebrate, since it will create work for the glazier. In the story, the crowd envisions the work involved in repairing the window, but not that involved in everything else on which the shopkeeper could have spent his money—unseen possibilities that would have brought him greater happiness. The parable, written by Frédéric Bastiat, a 19th-century economist, sought to draw attention to a common form of argument, which has come to be known as the broken-window fallacy.

If the window were to be broken today, the crowd might have a different reaction, especially if they were nimbys who oppose local construction. Their concern might be with the “embodied carbon” the shopkeeper’s son had released when breaking the window. The production of a pane of glass can require temperatures of more than 1,000°C. If the furnace is fuelled by, say, coal, the replacement window would carry a sizeable carbon cost. Similarly, the bricks, concrete and glass in a building are relics of past emissions. They are, the logic goes, lumps of embodied carbon.

Conserving what already exists, rather than adding to the building stock, will avoid increasing these embodied emissions—or so NIMBYs often suggest. The argument is proving to be an effective one. On March 12th the EU passed a directive requiring buildings constructed after 2030 to produce zero emissions over their lifetime. The city of San Francisco directs would-be builders towards an “embodied-carbon-reduction-strategies checklist”, which starts with the suggestion that they should “build less, reuse more”. Last month the British government attempted to quash proposals from Marks & Spencer, a department store, that would involve rebuilding its flagship shop in London, on the grounds demolition would release 40,000 tonnes of embodied carbon.

At their worst, such rulings are based on a warped logic. Greenhouse gases that have been released by the construction of an existing building will heat the planet whether the building becomes derelict, is refurbished or is knocked down. The emissions have been taken out of the world’s “carbon budget”, so treating them as a new debit means double counting. Even when avoiding this error, embodied emissions must be treated carefully. The right question to ask is a simpler one: is it worth using the remaining carbon budget to refurbish a building or is it better to knock it down?

Choosing between these possibilities requires thinking about the unseen. It used to be said that construction emitted two types of emissions. As well as the embodied sort in concrete, glass and metal, there were operational ones from cooling, heating and providing electricity to residents. The extra embodied-carbon cost of refurbishing a building to make it more energy-efficient can be justified on the grounds of savings from lower operational-carbon costs. Around the world, buildings account for 39% of annual emissions, according to the World Green Building Council, a charity, of which 28 percentage points come from operational carbon.

These two types of emissions might be enough for the architects designing an individual building. But when it comes to broader questions, economists ought also to consider how the placement of buildings affects the manner in which people work, shop and, especially, travel. The built environment shapes an economy, and therefore its emissions. In the same way as the emissions from foot-dragging over the green transition are in part the responsibility of climate-change deniers, so NIMBYs are in part responsible for the emissions of residents who are forced to live farther from their work in sprawling suburbs.

To most NIMBYs, the residents who are prevented from living in new housing are an afterthought. Yet wherever else they live, they still have a carbon footprint, which would be lower if they could move to a city. Density lowers the per-person cost of public transport, and this reduces car use. It also means that more land elsewhere can be given over to nature. Research by Green Alliance, a pressure group, suggests that in Britain a policy of “demolish and densify”—replacing semi-detached housing near public transport with blocks of flats—would save substantial emissions over the 60-year lifespan of a typical building. Without such demolition, potential residents would typically have to move to the suburbs instead, saving money on rent but consuming more energy, even if the government succeeds in getting more drivers into electric vehicles. Although green infrastructure, pylons and wind turbines all come with embodied carbon, not building them comes with emissions, too, from the continued use of fossil fuels.

Deciding such choices on a case-by-case basis makes little sense. Britain’s planning system, in which the government considers whether one particular department store will derail the national target to reach net-zero emissions, is especially foolish. The more sensible approach is to use a carbon price, rather than a central planner’s judgment. Putting a price on the remaining carbon budget that can be used for new physical infrastructure, as well as the services that people use in their homes, means that the true climate cost of each approach has to be taken into account. Under such a regime, energy-efficient homes close to public transport would be worth more. Those with less embodied carbon would be cheaper to build. Developers that demolished and densified would therefore often be rewarded with larger profits.

Targeted subsidies, especially for research and development into construction materials, as well as minimum-efficiency standards, could bolster the impact of carbon pricing, speeding up the pace at which the built environment decarbonises. What will never work, however, is allowing the loudest voices to decide how to use land and ignoring the carbon emissions of their would-be neighbours once they are out of sight.

[nms]

The CBC 2023 Massey Lectures are titled "The Age of Insecurity" by Astra Taylor.

In the second of her lectures, Taylor argues we need the right to various things, not just protection from threats.

Our constitution tells us what we’re protected against, but it doesn’t tell us a lot about what we’re entitled to. And it’s not enough to be granted the negative right against abuse without also having the positive right to receive assistance, or to possess civil and political rights without social and economic rights as well.

The wealthy barons of the past and present have defined what security means — for themselves — but the rest of us have fought for something else instead.

In that lecture I learned about the Charter of the Forest, (Carta de Foresta), the younger sibling to the Magna Carta that lasted until 1971.  Per Wikipedia, "The charter was a vehicle for asserting the values of the commons and the right of commoners against the state and the forces of commodification."

Among other points raised in the second lecture, Astra Taylor commented on other countries where government owned housing is a lot more prominent and as a result, more of the population is housed and can afford to be housed.  Among others, she mentioned Vienna, Austria where 25 per cent of the housing stock (220,000 units) is owned by the City government after nearly 100 years of investment.  There are a further 200,000 units that are indirectly managed by the City.

[plam]

Last week's The Economist newsmagazine had an article on how NIMBYs - despite their pro-environmentalist rhetoric - actually increase environmental devastation with their opposition to new development.

Also the issue with LEED seeming to not care where new buildings are located, right?