Post-pandemic city

In How to Design a Post-Pandemic City on the Bloomberg CityLab blog, Alex Wittenberg writes: “…there’s a broad need to reimagine public space and devise socially distanced ways to navigate the urban landscape over a longer term…outdoor space will need to work even harder — hosting stores, performances, and all manner of public services.

A new effort focused on Baltimore is offering a set of solutions to public space challenges during the pandemic. The “Design for Distancing Ideas Guidebook” — a free document from the city of Baltimore, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Baltimore Development Corporation, and the city’s nonprofit Neighborhood Design Center — collects 10 plans for creating temporary, low-cost spaces that permit physically distant social interaction in urban environments such as streets, alleys, vacant land and parking lots. The selected concepts were drawn from a pool of 162 submissions from architecture and design firms; the plans were conceived around the needs of Baltimore’s neighborhoods, but could be adapted to cities anywhere.”

“These aren’t just design exercises: The winning interventions, which should cost between $5,000 and $100,000 each to construct, are set to be installed in 17 neighborhoods across Baltimore, supported by a $1.5 million investment from the city during the second phase of the project. The hope, project leaders say, is that they can also help channel resources into priority districts in low-income communities. Most of the 17 neighborhoods selected, Goold said, are in neighborhoods in East and West Baltimore that have suffered from chronic disinvestment. These aren’t gentrified districts that are currently full of restaurants and retailers: Oldtown, for example, has one of the highest vacant-lot densities among Baltimore’s neighborhoods; it’s now home to a long-vacant pedestrian mall.”

“This guidebook talks about how we can have principles that prioritize communities of color and communities that have been disinvested,” Pollack Porter said. “It is a tremendous opportunity to center equity and public health in how we rethink public spaces.”   

15-minute cities

How the ‘15-Minute City’ Could Help Post-Pandemic Recovery by Alex Wittenberg is a timely and compelling read from Bloomberg CityLab. Some key passages:

“The newly released Mayors’ Agenda for a Green and Just Recovery, released July 15 by C40 Cities, an international coalition of urban leaders focused on fighting climate change and promoting sustainable development, was developed by the organization’s Global Mayors COVID-19 Recovery Task Force…One core idea: Cities are the “engines of the recovery,” and investing in their resilience is the best way to avoid economic disaster. 

One of its recommendations has a more novel ring to it. The agenda recommends that “all residents will live in ‘15-minute cities.’” That term echoes the transformative ambitions of Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who has doubled down on car-free transit and pedestrian infrastructure in the French capital. Hidalgo made the idea that Parisians should be able to meet their shopping, work, recreational and cultural needs within a 15-minute walk or bike ride a centerpiece of her recent reelection campaign. The C40 proposal suggests that following such a model would help global cities live up to the document’s promise of equitable access to jobs and city services for all, and rebuild areas economically hard-hit by the pandemic.

It’s not a new idea: Inspired in part by urbanist Jane Jacobs’s philosophy that proximity makes cities vital, various planning philosophies, including New Urbanism, have promoted more dense, walkable development — and simply “putting things closer together” — for decades. But the C40’s embrace of the 15-minute city concept may be the most concise and catchy way to repackage the idea as a pandemic economic recovery tool.”

“It’s Paris, however, that’s been the poster child for this shift: The French capital swiftly moved to install a regime of “corona cycleways” to ease transit crowding and prevent traffic from surging back into the city as businesses reopened. Recent images from the city show an almost Copenhagen-like renaissance of urban bicycling. 

Adding this kind of infrastructure isn’t just about allowing people to be outside safely, says Montreal mayor Valérie Plante, whose city plans to add roughly 300 kilometers (186 miles) of temporary cycling and pedestrian paths this summer: It also supports local business. “We want to encourage people to buy local, and forget Amazon,” she said at a July 15 press conference.”

“…while resource shortages will be extreme, starting small can yield big changes, especially when framed as part of a larger stimulus plan. The speed at which pedestrian, biking, and scooter infrastructure has been ramped up during the pandemic shows how quickly things can change. Small tweaks to zoning or permitting for sidewalk cafes and cycling infrastructure can build momentum for larger shifts when budgets return.”

“A crisis does have a way of revealing what’s already broken,” Bosacker says. “If cities aren’t using the revealing nature of this pandemic, how it’s highlighting disparities and racial inequities, shame on them. As difficult as it’s going to be, it’s a real opportunity.” 

Related:

CBC Ottawa’s reporting last summer of Ottawa’s plan for the 15-minute neighbourhood:
Welcome to the 15-minute neighbourhood: Intensification key to city's official plan

“Ottawa's revised official plan aims to create a community of "15-minute neighbourhoods" that will transform the capital into North America's most liveable mid-sized city while planning for a population that will eventually double or even triple.”

“We can't continue to have our city be entirely people coming from far-flung suburbs downtown to work, and then back again.” - Coun. Jeff Leiper

Welcome to your world

Welcome-to-Your-world-HC-c3496167-199x300.jpg

I spent October 2019 in Montreal on a self-directed residency. I went with the question: how does the built environment affect how we think, feel and behave? I wanted to explore the idea that cities and people are systems that continually interact with each other. It was a stimulating month of walking, looking, absorbing, reflecting and taking photos. However, back in my studio in Ottawa, I found I was not seeing in my images what I had felt and perceived in Montreal. 

I then came upon Sarah Williams Goldhagen’s book: Welcome to Your World, How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives. ‘I began coming across scattered writings - in social theory, cognitive linguistics, various branches of psychology, and cognitive neuroscience - that intimated a new account of how people actually perceive, think about, and ultimately experience their environments, which of course includes the built world...a newly developing paradigm, variously called “embodied” or “grounded” or “situated” cognition, was emerging from the confluence of work in many disciplines, some of them in the sciences. This paradigm holds that much of what and how people think is a function of our living in the kinds of bodies we do. It reveals that most - much more than we previously knew - of human thought is neither logical nor linear, but associative and nonconscious. This still-emerging paradigm provides the foundation for a model and analysis of how we live simultaneously in this world, inside our own bodies with our feet on the ground; with other people; and in the worlds inside our heads, which are rife with simulations of the worlds we continuously imagine and reshape for ourselves. Human cognition, decision-making, and action are some admixture of all three.’

These ideas resonated with me and illuminated the series, Passages, that came out of the residency. This book is compelling, important - and highly readable.

Some favourite passages from the book:

“We respond to our environments not only visually but with our many sensory faculties - hearing, and smelling, and especially touching, and more - working in concert with one another. These surroundings affect us much more viscerally and profoundly that we could possibly be aware of, because most of our cognitions, including those about where we are, happen outside our conscious awareness. ...when we navigate and inhabit our environments, what and how we consciously think is inexorably bound up with our nonconscious simulations and cognitions, and with what and how we feel. Most surprisingly, our emotions, our imagined bodily actions, and especially the memories that we develop of them are embedded in our very experiences of built environments, and loom large in how we form our identities.”

“What the new paradigm of embodied or situated cognition reveals is that the built environment and its design matters far, far more than anybody, even architects, even thought that it did…..It holds a mirror up to show the worlds that we have made and clearly illustrates ways to remake our worlds to be less soul-deadening and more enlivening to human bodies and minds, communities, and polities.”

“Emphasizing how design shapes everyday experience, [Winston] Churchill declared that ‘we shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us.’”

“...contrary to what had been assumed for centuries, we now know that all our lives, our minds are changing and quite literally being shaped by our experiences in the physical environments in which we live.”

“...it turns out that, more often than not, it takes just as many resources to build a bad building - or landscape or townscape - as a good one.”

“In the wake of the cognitive revolution, we must recognize the reality that aesthetic experience, including our aesthetic experience of the built environment, concerns more than pleasure, so much more that the conventional distinction between architecture as the province of the elite, and building as the province of the masses, must once and for all be eradicated. From our perspective - the perspective of how human beings experience spaces, of how built environments affect our well being - such a distinction is incomprehensible and pernicious. The more we learn about how people actually experience the environments in which they live their lives, the more obvious it becomes that a well-designed built environment falls not on a continuum stretching from high art to vernacular building, but on a very different sort of continuum: somewhere between a crucial need and a basic human right.”

Links:
This is Your Brain on Architecture
Assessing Architecture Through Neuroscience and Psychology