#urbanism

I always advocated approaching the urban design issue in city with improving public spaces and pedestrian areas. There’s a lot that can be achieved just by focusing on few important elements such as the people who flood our streets.

In the past years we sadly witnessed the death of innocent people by the hand of radical Islamic terrorists who used vehicles to fulfill their nefarious plans. Public security is at its highest alert since the events of September 11 2001 in the United States, and perhaps we can now help cities both ways in terms of security and decor.

Governments can continue to spend millions on local security among hot-spots some cities might be vulnerable; police and army personnel are siding to keep communities safe across Europe during this wave of radical terror. However, we can make cities safe when we decide to use simpler approaches to limit traffic and potential threats in specific areas.

Common cement road barriers downtown Milan resemble Checkpoint Charlie in post-WW2 Berlin.

We don’t need to turn roads and intersections into Cold War security checkpoints, we just need to use urban landscaping tools and reshape them into spots that can blend within blocks and avoid any uncomfortable and insecure atmosphere among people. It’s important to create smart urban solutions that don’t trigger the population into believing there’s any threat.

A heavy cement flower pot is the best way to combine decor and security feature in one object.

Cities can safely implements large gardening objects like flowerpots made of cements to be placed where sensible gateways needs to be protected. The decor element of nature will play the advantage point while enhancing the security methods where needed.

These important and hefty pots are already everywhere used as decorative elements in many cities across Europe, some even have horizontal planks functioning as bench-element for pedestrian to use. This system is both eye-friendly and it doesn’t stand out as something alienating for the user to experience.

Any of these objects comes with a considerable weight that can improve the security of those city spots in need of safety; they act as dead weight to stop any moving vehicle by acting as physical barriers defending people. The plus side is they can be arranged to fit the decor and theme any city sports by changing pot size, weight, flora, pattern.

A selection of these pots placed according to the city’s strategic need has the full potential to stop any commonly driven vehicles to create disaster. People will be protected without knowing enforced barriers have been placed.

Los Angeles, CA [October, 2020]

Venice Glimpses a Future With Fewer Tourists, and Likes What It Sees

Let residents of Venice plan their own city to resist the plague of excessive commercial tourism! They have the “right to the city” — to work together to save the city from the destruction. Tourism is fine in moderation, but not to excess.

An October’s Afternoon, Venice

©️ Corinne Hetzel

Burrano Island, Venice

©️ Corinne Hetzel

tobermoriansass:

Western Architecture is Making India’s Heatwaves Worse

The Kuriakoses’ experience was an early taste of a phenomenon that, over the next few decades, spread across most of India’s big cities. As a more standardized international approach to building design emerged, many Indian architects abandoned the vernacular traditions that had been developed over thousands of years to cope with the weather extremes of different regions. The earthen walls and shady verandas of the humid south, and the thick insulating walls and intricate window shades of the hot dry northwest, were swapped for a boxy modern style. Today, buildings in downtown Bangalore often look like those in Ahmedabad, in the north, or Chennai, in the east—or those in Cincinnati, Ohio, or Manchester, England.

In the climate change era, that uniformity is looking like a mistake. Large parts of India have been stifled by a spring heatwave since April, with temperatures lingering close to 110°F for weeks in some places, and topping 120°F in Delhi this week, making it dangerous to go to work or school—all weeks before the official start of summer. Spiking energy demand for cooling has helped trigger daily blackouts in cities, and what AC units are running are belching hot air into streets, worsening the urban heat island effect. As such heatwaves become increasingly common and long-lasting, experts say India’s modern building stock will make it harder for Indians to adapt.

The architecture of Indian cities began to change rapidly in the 1990s, when the country transitioned to a market-based economy. As construction boomed, Western or globalized styles became the norm. The shift was partly aesthetic; developers favored the glassy skyscrapers and straight lines deemed prestigious in the U.S. or Europe, and young architects brought home ideas they learned while studying abroad. Economic considerations also played a role. As land became more expensive in cities, there was pressure to expand floorspace by eliminating thick walls and courtyards. And it was faster and easier to throw up tall structures using steel and concrete, rather than use traditional earth blocks which are suited to lower-rise structures.

The consequence of that cookie-cutter approach was to make buildings less resilient to India’s high temperatures. The impact of that once seemed minimal. It could easily be offset by electric fans and air conditioning, and the energy costs of cooling were not developers’ problems once they sold their buildings. “Where a home [built in the vernacular style] needs around 20 to 40 kilowatt hours per meter squared of energy for cooling, today some commercial places need 15 times that,” says Yatin Pandya, an architect based in Ahmedabad. When AC units are turned on to help people sleep at night, they release heat into the streets, which can increase the local temperature by around 2°F according to U.S.-based studies. During the day, depending on their orientation, glassy facades can reflect sunlight onto footpaths. “You’re creating [problems] in every direction.”

The shift away from climate-specific architecture hasn’t only affected offices and luxury flats, whose owners can afford to cool them. To maximize urban space and budgets, a massive government housing program launched in 2015 has relied largely on concrete frames and flat roofs, which absorb more heat throughout the day than sloped roofs. “We’re building hot houses. In certain parts of the year, they will require cooling to be habitable,” says Chandra Bhushan, a Delhi-based environmental policy expert. He estimates that roughly 90% of the buildings under construction today are in a modern style that pays little attention to a region’s climate—locking in increased heat risk for decades to come.

Similar shifts have happened in developing countries all over the world, with cities from the Middle East to Latin America taking on the “copy and paste texture of globalized architecture,” says Sandra Piesik, a Netherlands-based architect and author of Habitat: Vernacular Architecture for a Changing Planet. As the global construction industry embraced concrete and steel, local materials, designs, and technologies became displaced—with lasting consequences. “Some of these traditional methods didn’t undergo the technological revolution that they needed,” to make them more durable and easier to use on a massive urban scale, Piesek says. “We focused instead on [perfecting] the use of concrete and steel.”

[In Tumblr dashboard, click to embiggen video]

piercepenniless:

Shit, this is astonishing. Redrow, a luxury apartment builder, have made this creepy, completely dystopic, half-American Psycho advert for the new London they’re currently metastasizing all over the city. Its protagonist lives in a world of almost continual night, with the hungry eyes and dead affect of an Ayn Rand wet dream: his world is constituted of chrome, glass, a palette of white-to-taupe, a spatter-pattern rug and one book, a single book, on graphic design. ‘Luxury’ is so often a code for this – double-glazed, polished steel, hermetically sealed in the back of a cab. Our man does not have conversations, but stares out at the city from the fifteenth floor (he does a lot of staring). The concept of conversation is alien to him, though he is shown having a screaming argument; as you see from his inventoried shelves, he has a passion for objects and this is how he treats women, as well.

Flat-toned, void affect, social cancer in a suit: a model for London living. Here’s a curious honesty about it all: houses in the suburbs are marketed still for the smiling happy family, all oak tables and smiling coffee mornings (in zone 4, the dog never even barks, let alone bites). In the central zones, having been cleared of many of their inconveniences (families, communities, *life*), now deadboxes are marketed to the single (wannabe singular) sub-Thatcherite dweeb who manages his violence only on a balance sheet, who wants to take life, pin it, and crush it behind plate glass. Let us burn it down.

This is amazing. There needs to be a word for the kind of text that deconstructs itself, that contains its own negation so nakedly on the surface.

“They say nothing comes easy - but if it was easy, it wouldn’t feel so good. [Now I have to tell myself it feels good. It feels good. I am a valid human being]

*Cutaway to a shot of the cut-glass tumbler of whiskey he drinks each morning before work*

"To look over the city that could have swallowed you whole [ / that swallowed your soul], and say, ‘I did this’, [I allowed myself to be swallowed by dreams of achievement & accumulation that were in no way individual, however much I doth protest] and stand with the world at your feet [still so distant from me.]”

• Does this remind anyone else of American Psycho?
• 100% No
• COSMOPOLIS PSYCHO.

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