Each module in Designing Cities will focus on a different aspect of city design including: How Today’s City Evolved; The Ideas That Shape Cities; Tools for Designing Cities; Making Cities Sustainable; Cities in the Information Age; Preserving Older Cities; Designing New Cities, Districts and Neighborhoods; The Challenges of Informal Cities and Disadvantaged Neighborhoods; and Visionary Cities. Materials will be presented by the instructors and guest faculty from PennDesign through a series of five or more lessons per module, each typically 10-12 minutes long. The first lesson in each module will be a roundtable discussion among professors Stefan Al, Jonathan Barnett, and Gary Hack introducing the big issues associated with the subject. Each succeeding module will be a self-contained illustrated presentation of a set of ideas and images. There will be a list of suggested readings for those who wish to follow up on the ideas in each module. Everyone enrolled in Designing Cities will be expected to complete 3 assignments. These will be posted on the course site and they will be in the form of peer assessments. There will be a great deal to be learned from the ideas participants submit, reflecting cities of all sizes and circumstances across the globe so once you submit your assignment, you'll be able to see what your peers have done.
Assignment 1 Feedback
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En provenance du cours de University of Pennsylvania
Designing Cities
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À partir de la leçon
Making Cities Sustainable
Last week we learned about tools that manage the design and development of cities, including infrastructure investments, codes and design guidelines, financial incentives for better city design, and negotiations for common goods between those who build cities and those who make sure the public interest is served. These tools are even more important today, since climate change poses an acute threat to our cities, and the way in which our cities have been designed has been part of the problem.
This week we will deal with some of the most important ways of making our cities more sustainable. We will discuss topics such as ecological urbanism, transportation as a growth armature, managing water -including floods and water scarcity, and green infrastructure and renewable energy.
Landscape architecture has gained momentum lately as an important instrument of urban development. Landscape urbanism, ecological urbanism, and landscape infrastructure are some recent concepts about how to synthesize cities with nature. This is not simply about topography and trees, but more broadly about ecologically driven infrastructure, public space, and urbanization.
Transportation is more than moving people from place to place. It has the ability shape the form, function, and quality of life of cities. We will look at some of the ways in which transportation can contribute to the creation and continuing viability of great urban centers, using fewer resources.
As temperatures are increasing, glaciers are receding, ocean levels are rising, and storms are intensifying, how should we rethink the design and location of cities, especially coastal cities? As global warming shrinks freshwater supplies while populations continue to grow, how can we improve cities’ provision of water? We will look at some of the most important ways for cities to manage water, including how to fight water scarcity and prevent or mitigate floods.
Urban green spaces should not be seen just as places for leisure time, but also as a viable alternative to grey infrastructure. For instance, green roofs, bio swales, and constructed wetlands can perform such functions as storm water management and water purification. Finally, instead of using traditional energy sources in cities that contribute to heating up our atmosphere, we can achieve zero-carbon communities by using renewable energy from natural sources that are continually replenished, including solar power, wind, biomass and geothermal heat. Today, as the effects of climate change become apparent, cities around the world should increasingly build green infrastructure and use renewable energy.
Rencontrer les enseignants
Gary HackProfessor and dean emeritus
City and Regional Planning, PennDesign
Jonathan BarnettProfessor of Practice in City and Regional Planning
City Planning
Stefan AlAssociate Professor of Urban Design
City and Regional Planning
Welcome to this feedback session.
This is the first of three that we'll do over the course
of this semester on Designing Cities.
We're going to look at about a dozen of the many wonderful
assignments that have been submitted to us in this first assignment.
I should say that we tried to select assignments that
were a rich mixture of ideas.
We wanted ones that exemplified the kinds of
design that we've been talking about over the last couple of weeks.
But we also wanted to see how these things found their place in
cities of different sizes, cities of different levels of development, and
cities on different continents.
So what we have done is chose about a dozen examples.
And the examples aren't necessarily the best ones that we got.
They're ones that raise interesting ideas.
And so we'll each discuss one of these and we'll maybe have
some dialogue about it and then at the end, have a chance to sum up about them.
So the cities that we're going to look at, I'll just list them off so
that you know what's coming over the course of the session.
We're going to start with Thessalonika in Greece.
Then Gdansk, Bilbao, Madrid, Manhattan,
Iowa City, Calgary, Tokyo, Vienna,
Santiago, Cochin City, and Lusaka, and we'll do them in that order.
And they're roughly ordered from cities which are slow,
relatively slow-growing cities that have been built over long periods of time,
in which the design ideas have been overlaid on each other,
to cities that are in the course of exploding in today's environment, and
in which many kinds of design ideas are being applied to them concurrently.
So Stephen why don't you start with Thessalonika?
>> Yeah.
So Thessaloniki is a beautiful city on the Mediterranean sea.
So this student looked at modernist city design,
traditional city design and green city design.
So we can go to modernist city design.
Typical modernist towers, without any detail.
Then we can go to the traditional city,
it's a very dramatic axis coming through the city,
and on both sides there's a formal plaza,
notice the symmetry as well Within these plazas.
And then finally along the waterfront, there's this park and recreational area,
playgrounds, there's also lights that are powered by photovoltaics so
this is then an example of green city design.
>> Good, so the second city is Gdansk and people who live in Gdansk or
work in Gdansk must have an incredible affection for the city.
Because every year we get really terrific studies of Gdansk,
not only what's there today but what could be there in the future.
And this study of Gdansk looks at three different types of design ideas
that have been applied.
It starts with a set of ideas about things that are being done currently.
And it's under the heading of systems design.
It's a large stadium linked by bridges and
connections to other parts of the city.
Parking below, a great podium, and this is a single piece
of design that links everything together by integrating all of the public systems.
The second example is a modernist city design, and it's a residential area.
It could also be, I suppose, an example
of green city design in the sense that it's a series of towers in the park.
But this represents the predominant motive building Gdansk and
many other eastern European cities for about a 30 or
40 year period, starting after the second World War.
And finally, a wonderful example of a green city,
a garden city design, a residential area.
Very modest houses set in a gridiron pattern.
That's kind of a myth that this kind of design
requires you to have curving streets and romantic places.
This one's are very typical gridiron part of the city, but
because of the way the public spaces are landscaped, because of the openness of
the environment to the private landscape that's behind it, it's a green city place.
The next example is in Bilbao in Spain.
And of course everyone knows about Bilbao because of many of the modernist
interventions that have occurred in recent years and
the great cultural facilities that have been built there.
But this assignment actually tells a much more diverse and
interesting story about this city.
It talks about the traditional city design, the gridiron pattern that was
created, I think probably in the late 19th century, following the lead of
the examples from Barcelona which had huge impact on city design.
Square blocks, interspersed by small gardens and
other kinds of green spaces in it.
And it also catalogues the many ways that green city design
have been applied to Bilbao.
A green belt around the city, which is a whole regional strategy for doing that.
A garden suburb, an area that, much as the example we just talked about,
is individual houses set in a field of green, and the transformation
of industrial areas more recently into green city areas including the area along
the river, which was once used for shipbuilding and other kinds of things.
It's now become a great central park for the city.
And then finally, systems city design.
And this talks about an area of the city which has been allocated for
the very large new interventions, for a large convention and
exposition center, for a large shopping center,
all linked together by a set of high-capacity streets and pedestrian ways.
And integrated as a kind of extension from building to
building of one notion about how you move through the city.
>> Well I was going to talk about Madrid.
There is a very nicely presented project and
it clearly maps where each of the three areas of concentration are going to be.
And of course, the financial district these days is likely to be
a modernist concept.
And I think this is an excellent example.
It resembles, in some respect, La Defense in Paris,
where the towers are segregated at the end of a long access.
So, I think this is an interesting example of how modernist city design
plays out these days.
Madrid itself is in many respects, a modern city, because although it has
a long history, much of it was developed in the 19th and 20th century.
You, in those parts of the city you see what we would call a traditional city
design so you have all of, it is relatively recent construction.
You see the apparatus of the traditional city, the plaza and a lot of vistas.
The radial avenues.
And then I think the most in this particular project, the most interesting
example of all is the reclamation of the highways along both sides
of the river through the central part of the city, where in the 1970s, a highway
was put through with the different directions run on each bank of the river.
And this was a huge mistake.
Which blighted the areas around it.
And what has happened since then is that the, highway has been enclosed in a box.
And a park has been built over it.
And this is an example, it's not only green city design but it's an example of
reclamation of the city, by introducing, well of course in a completely artificial
environment nevertheless introducing green back into the city center.
It has made a huge change in the whole way that the city operates.
It has put pieces of a city back together.
The next example is Manhattan, and I was a little, Manhattan
is a city which grows very quickly, and the past is obliterated very quickly.
I asked myself when I saw that it was one on Manhattan I said what is the person
that does this going to do about traditional city design, and
the answer is Columbia University which has a traditional city design campus,
I think large enough that it can really legitimately be considered city design
as a completely symmetrical axial composition.
Around the library which is a central pavilion, so I think an excellent choice.
Then, Central Park, which was one of the earliest green interventions in a city,
in the sense that an area of the city which was already starting to develop was
made off limits to development and enclosed as a park.
And then completely redesigned so that the landscape, which may look natural,
is in fact a completely artificial landscape.
I created my landscape architects and
the consequence of that is also what served for a long time and
continues to be the city's, part of the reservoir system.
So that I think is a very interesting and effective choice for a green city design.
And Fredrick one of the designers of the park can really be considered in some
respects the father of green city design.
And then finally Rockefeller Center is an example of modernism.
You can look at Rockefeller Center and say that in some respects it's still
a traditional composition, at least it's three central buildings are axial.
But it's an interesting choice to pick on Rockefeller Center because
New York City in some respects is a prototype modernist city,
everybody looked at New York for inspiration for a city of towers.
Now Gary, you're going to take us to Iowa City which is a rather different
American city.
>> Yes, and even though I live in Manhattan and I love
dense urban areas, in fact in North America the real challenge is
often in smaller communities, and communities that are growing very quickly.
And communities which don't have the long legacy of high density development.
And so we've culled two examples here, one in Iowa City in Iowa and
one in Calgary in Alberta, Canada, both of them cities in the Midwest.
The areas before you reach the mountains in North America, and
each of which shows examples within the framework of these cities,
growing up over the last 100 years, of each of these kinds of development.
In Iowa city, the traditional city is the court house square.
This is actually an indigenous, I think American example of tradition
of cities in the Midwest usually attained their
character by having commercial districts that grew up around the court house.
Courthouse being not only the judicial center but the seat of government.
They where the city and town administration was located, and so
the traditional city is a square, and has a rim by a commercial space all around it.
And that's a kind of tradition which recurs from city after city.
Then overlaid on that is the modern city.
And the modern city is the city of boulevards moving out from the center,
buildings lining them.
In this case, I think some institutional buildings, in one of the examples and
some governmental and other administrative buildings in the other example,
lining these boulevards
which are the kind of armature of the new and modern city.
And then, much of the suburban areas, of these metropolitan areas
are organized as green cities is areas that are built in landscape.
This happens to be a very particular one in Iowa City, which is a,
a kind of peninsula that is surrounded on all sides by large amounts of landscape.
It I think has to do with the protection of areas of the city and from flooding.
And also the retention of green space.
But these housing units are almost all
facing onto parks of one kind of another and landscape.
And some of the buildings in fact even hang out over the green water and
open space.
In Calgary, the person who submitted this one catalogue,
what they called modernistic city design,
traditional and green city design.
Modernistic is an interesting twist.
It's, I think means that we have our own brand of modernism in this city.
>> Actually the term that I used in the lectures.
>> Did you? Okay.
So that's where it's.
>> Modern means now.
Modernistic means an idea of what's contemporary that's not necessarily
that recent.
>> That's right.
Yeah okay, so what's the modernistic
city the downtown area built on a grid pattern originally.
The original center of the city.
It came and grew with railways and
the commercial center that built up around it.
That's now a forest of high-rise buildings, not only for
offices and other commercial uses, but also more recently for residential uses.
And this submission also shows the ways of thinking about that,
of thinking of streets that have Heavy pedestrian flow is on them.
Some of the streets have actually been converted into pedestrian realms,
closed to traffic in recent years.
Other ones are used for mass transit moving through the center of the city so
that it also kind of has an overlay of systems that have been
identified over the more recent past.
The traditional city consisted of blocks with alleyways,
individual houses, some of them quite large, located along them.
And as it bumps up against rivers and
other places where the blocks can't continue, there are larger blocks, and
there are places that institutions and mansions, and other kinds of places could
actually Developed significant amounts of green space within that framework.
Then finally, there's the Garden City.
This is a very interesting example because in North America, so many of the large,
planned, suburban developments are actually a new kind of Garden City.
This person notes that it may have
begun with the Country Club District in Kansas City.
This is, in fact, a area that's being built around some lakes and golf courses.
These are the new green spaces, the new recreation spaces
that become the nucleus of the Garden City and then extensions of that as it
moves out into the residential blocks that surround it.
>> Next up is Tokyo, Japan.
So this is a very nice
exercise done by a student there, and we're going to look at the modern city.
If you want to find the modern city in Tokyo, you don't have to look very hard.
Because Shinjuku is very easy to distinguish from the rest of
the city fabric, which is traditionally low because of the earthquakes.
So notice the very high, kind of modernist skyscrapers
that are placed in this central business district.
Then we find an example of green city design, the garden suburb.
So these are relatively small homes laid out on green lots.
Apparently this is the Beverly Hills of Tokyo,
because the homes are quite large compared to other homes in Tokyo.
And then finally, Haneda Airport, an example of systems city design.
If you think about it, airports are really almost a form of a city,
because they're mixed use.
Millions of people go through them every year,
you can go shopping there, people work there.
There are also places to stay with hotels.
Then we're looking at Vienna, so a city in Austria.
So the first example is of a modernist city design,
in this case it's the Vienna International Center.
It's another central business district that was being planned
in the city in the 1980s.
So those days it was, building
these kind of dedicated office central business districts was quite common.
For instance, in Paris there was a similar type of development.
So, again, very easy to distinguish.
You see the large modernist towers all clustered together.
Then the Ringstrasse in Vienna.
So Gary mentioned in his lecture about the city wall as being
a very important form that was used in pre-industrial cities.
So in this case, in the 19th century,
the local municipality decided to take down the city wall,
because gunpowder had made city walls obsolete.
And it presented a huge opportunity to redesign that area, and
they did this according to then dominant 19th century city design.
Were probably inspired also by the renovations that
occurred in Paris, so we see very large parks and
pompous boulevards that start to form around the old city of Vienna.
And then, here we have the Donaukanal.
So it's an example of green city design with parks along the riverbanks.
And there's an interior island within this canal.
And this was one of the only students that did 04 categories.
So we have an example here of system city designs.
The Gasometer in Vienna.
So this was traditionally where gas was stored,
but then they renovated them and they're used for residential now.
So this is a form of adaptive reuse and we have one lecture especially dedicated to
this form of city design.
>> Santiago, in Chile, has a really interesting setting.
It's a little bit like a setting of Seoul, in Korea,
in that it's in a bowl within the mountains.
Rather than, as so many other cities are, a seaport.
And the plan
is a very traditional plan in the sense that it comes from the Law of the Indies.
Which was essentially a set of requirements for Spanish settlements
in the New World that was laid down by the central authorities.
And most of the cities in South America,
Central America, and a few in the western part of
the United States are derived from these instructions.
Which actually go back to Vitruvius' Books,
of one surviving text which we have from the Romans.
So you can't get a lot more traditional than this.
And so you have the original city plan and then you have
additions to it which are comparable, including one with a big central park.
And then, over time,
the city develops still following these traditional city forms.
You get the 19th century development of traditional city design,
where you have these circles and monuments and axial streets.
And then here's an example of a modernist city development.
See I say modernist, which I think, it's a very good example.
And then unfortunately, if we were giving,
these are excellent examples of modernist city design.
And we've had very good examples of traditional city design.
If we're giving this project a grade,
we'd have to ask ourselves where is the garden portion of this?
And where is, or systems?
We gave people the option of three out of four because it's not always possible to
discern each one of these.
But certainly for a city that's situated in the center of central valley of
a mountain, there must be some kind of green response to it somewhere.
But anyway, we now move to the Indian subcontinent of Chochin.
And we have, along the waterfront, an array of towers,
which is certainly a modernist city composition.
And of course, in modernism, you have the accentuation of the individual building.
What is interesting about this is that this is for the traditional city design.
Is what happened is that the port has been renovated
and a whole series of, I guess you would call them traditional architecture,
arrangements has been imposed relatively recently on this island.
And then finally, as an example of systems design, we have a new transit system.
And of course that definitely is an urban system.
The question is,
what is the effect of this transit going to have on the design of the city?
For certain, it will, those areas around the stops are going to develop.
What would be interesting with this part of this example
Would be to see whether the transit in fact has a system that,
system design effect on the city of Venice completed.
Gary, you were going to take us to Africa if I remember right.
>> Yes, the final example is in Lusaka in Zambia.
And it's actually a very interesting portrayal of this city.
This rapidly growing city.
But a city which actually has, if you look closely enough some
quite terrific examples of ideas about city design.
So the central corridor of the city, Cairo Road or
an area going into the central corridor, center of the city,
is in fact the modernistic area.
And like so many modernist areas in rapidly growing cities, it's a corridor,
major roadways on either side, each block developed with one or two towers.
There are office spaces above retail space,
sometimes housing above retail space and they march into the center of the city.
But, if you look at the plans of it there's kind of a traditional city design,
what's called a traditional city design which in fact
looks like a colonial era overlay on the city, almost.
Some of it really looks like garden city ideas, but corridors,
squares along and green spaces within those corridors.
And then radial and block-like
areas adjacent to them which are developed.
As I said you could have probably argued that some of these areas if we look
carefully at them are actually garden city design.
But the example that's offered for garden city design here is in fact a golf club,
subdivision with the green park and golf lakes.
At the center of the residential area assuming one of the outlying
areas of the city.
It's been there long enough so that the trees have grown up.
It really is a garden city.
And must be in fact one of the most desirable areas of the city.
So what do we make of all these things?
A tremendous set of ideas, one of these things that's very interesting,
I'd love to have Johnathan reflect on this, is that you can find these examples
all over the world I think that is one of the great things about this course,
is that we're able to have a kind of worldwide conversation about city design.
>> And it is quite amazing that designs, which were originally the ideas
of a relatively small number of people, spread all across the world.
And although globalization is now an international fact of great importance,
when you look at the law of the Indies, you can see that the colonization process,
no matter, leaving aside what our feelings are about colonies, one way or
the other, that there was definitely a channel through which ideas went.
So that the traditional city, migrated originally, sometimes, by fiat by
requirement and then later by emulation, particularly emulation of Paris.
I had not through about in a Green City, that the golf courses of Green City.
But of course what's happened, we were talking about this earlier That,
an idea which comes from Scotland, has suddenly become internationalized.
And everyone wants a golf course in their countries.
So it is definitely a form of urban design, that you transplant
an idea which was originally a piece of landscape in one part of the world and
try to reinvent it in a whole bunch of different settings and different climates.
Modernism is, we discussed earlier in the lectures, has had an amazing effect
all across the world from a set of ideas that really began less than 100 years ago.
Has now been accepted just about everywhere, and
accepted in a way that people don't even think about it.
It's just become the default way of designing cities.
System, we only ask for three out of four in this assignment because I think system
city design is actually rather difficult to discern because the system underlies
what's happening in the city as much as it expresses what's in form.
But I think we've had some really interesting responses in this assignment
from the guest on to the transit lines.
>> So one sees ideas being transported
with lightning speed from one part of the world to another today.
Stefan, you've looked at and worked in China.
Do you see examples of each of these kinds of designs in the new
development in China?
>> Yeah, so some of the examples we're going to talk about later in this
course about green design, sustainable design, so
there's a Chinese landscape architects that doing very interesting work.
And he's in building all these wetland parks that
reclaim the polluted rivers and purify the water.
So there's good examples, also a lot of bad examples of modernist design,
so you could sort of see, that this is dominant in most
Chinese and maybe large Asian cities.
Then traditional city design may be more in traditional city fabrics.
If you look at for instance, South Asia, in Delhi,
there's a lot of the city was laid out by the British as they were there.
So all of these forms, you can see in Asian cities.
>> One of the thing's that I think is very interesting is how these forms
both get adopted in a new culture but also get adapted in a new culture and
so it's interesting to me that in China, in Shanghai for example,
there are a series of new towns being built around the perimeter of it.
Each in the manner of how a town might be built in another place.
In England or in Sweden, or in Italy, or in other places,
and often they don't work very well for the Chinese way of life today,
but the way of life today is also changing, and
people in China are beginning, because of their resources and other things,
to live much more as they >> In the manner that
people do in other parts of the world.
And so there's an adaptation of people to
the ideas when they're moved from one place to another.
But then in five or ten years, also these new towns get adapted so
that they really do work in terms of the culture of the place.
And so you find new kinds of stores growing up.
New uses of streets.
Streets being adapted so that there are sitting places along them and
other kinds of things like that.
And so, this is a kind of process of globalization of ideas,
but also a process of adapting those ideas to individual places.
So thank you for the interesting projects that you submitted.
We were really pleased by them.
The quality of presentation on so many of them was excellent.
And even for those that we can guess are people who were new to this field
of city design, there were a lot of really interesting ideas that were submitted.
We'll see you again after the second assignment, and invite
you to use your ideas and continue this exploration of the places where you live.
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