the experience of being in the air and zooming through and over a place ... the bicycle highline! [video width="640" height="480" mp4="http://www.re-architecture.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/P1070329.mp4"][/video]
cykelslangen! Eight years in the making.
http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/jul/14/bike-lanes-bridge-copenhagen-new-cycle-snake-cykelslangen
The bike culture is intense in Copenhagen. A complete bike infrastructure and flat terrain makes biking easy, safe and something EVERYONE does. I have seen a cargo bike with 4 young kids in it, a conservative man in traditional muslim clothing, women in spike heels, men in suits, and everything in between. As my colleague here said people imagine it like a vacuum cleaner: no gear needed to vacuum the house, just another tool you use in life. Bikes on trains, dedicated bike lanes throughout, a clear set of rules, and a compact city make it all work so that more than 50% of the the city is on bikes. Some main thoroughfares into the city have 35,000 bikes per day - more bikes than cars!! A new bike share is starting (white bikes) that is an e-bike with a built in tablet - high tech. Driving is a real hassle especially in the center city but biking is a joy keeping people healthy, fit, and on time. Even on the open roads outside the city there is a dedicated lane. Here are a few greatest hits:
Here are a few interesting articles about Zero Energy and the opportunities at the district scale. We must begin to think bigger than the individual buildings. As we think of clusters, blocks, districts, and cities new opportunities emerge. It can affect how we think of planning and design to consider the big picture - nut just in the creation of connected places but also environmental systems!
ULI (Urban Land Institute) Fall Meeting was last week in Denver. There is always such a huge array of offerings at large conferences and I am but one person but a few trends seemed to emerge from my observations and discussions with others: - Enrique Penalosa spoke of a radical re-thinking of the city and especially the suburbs. This is based on an intense introduction of open space, pedestrian-only spaces, transit, and density. He rightly suggests that the backward looking approach of New Urbanism is not equipped to deal with the opportunities and challenges of the present and future. New ideas about water, energy, biophilia, food, community, resources, transit, and culture make the traditional city need a substantial re-thinking.
- Many sessions, culiminating in the Bulder Urban Agriculture Tour in Boulder on Saturday highlighted the new opportunities to integrate agriculture directly into our cities and towns. Medians, left-over spaces, yards, and open space all become chances to bring food closer to where we live, create fresh local and affordable food and create a strong sense of community. It is a new definition of mixed use and provides a new way to think about space, place, and food. And it is the new amenity in communities: out with the golf courses, in with the gardens!!
-Health is the new gold standard of sustainability. This reminds us again that the ultimate purpose of the built environment is for people and to foster health on many levels. Current design practice and the planning of our cities can create disease especially obesity and diabetes brought about by inactivity. The best neighborhoods promote health by making movement mandatory and enjoyable - a natural part of daily living. And integrate local healthy food, And community.
Make sure you get your 10,000 steps a day. It keeps the doctor away.
Great Article about walking in all its forms!
After 2-1/2 weeks in China, it is interesting and striking to return back to Colorado and see in fact how much heavier and more impactful the American lifestyle really is. In the "Sustainable Urbanism"Seminar I am teaching at UC Denver this spring, we are exploring whether Denver can equal Manhattan's per capita footprint: that is reduce it from an average of about 15 per capita to 5. China, although one of the largest TOTAL national emitters, has a per capita footprint under 4 that is 20% lower than that of Manhattan.
Although much ink has been spilled about the changes in China: increase in roads, car ownership, suburban style develop traffic congestion, and the importation of disruptive Western models of development - which are all indeed true - after over 2 weeks there, it is also easy to see why the per capita carbon footprint levels are still 20% of those in the United States, the world leader in consumptive lifestyles. The translation from this metric to the experience of city dwellers is striking.
Many little and big things contribute to a less impactful lifestyle. I was in two heavily urbanized environments where in many ways the "Manhattan Phenomenon" rules: that is reliance on transit, smaller apartments, more mixed use, more density, more walkable. But many other aspects also struck me:
- All the buildings are required by code to face south so that ALL units get at least 2 hours of sunlight on December 21. This can lead to relentless and monotonous rows of parallel housing blocks but it also means that buildings are typically single loaded ( or have multiple stairways) such that all units have access to the south and north for sun and cross ventilation. There are few clothes dryers so that these south walls are also used to dry clothes in the sun. The north is often used for cooking and utility.
The challenge is to create communities and neighborhoods that do not fall into a relentless pattern but instead have the complexity and diversity and connectedness of real places. The older Shikumen (see earlier post) of Shanghai are one pattern but these are low rise. I saw a very interesting example in Zhujaiojao:
-many lobbies, public spaces, stores, and even private spaces (like the design studios at Southeast University in Nanjing) are not heated. People wear coats and use less energy!
-local food and markets abound. It is easy to walk to a market that sells good, cheap food. And services, and clothes and household items and noodles or dumplings
- Despite the increase in car traffic , bikes and electric scooters are ubiquitous. In many areas they are given a separate lane to ensure their safe and efficient movement -just liek Copenhagen. 2 cycle scooters are outlawed so it can be a very quiet scene indeed.
- In Shanghai, car license plates are auctioned with a $10k-30k cost as well as substantial taxes. After you have bought the car! This can discourage driving! Maybe Aurora or Boulder should try this.
So the challenge is for China to continue to modernize as they would like but perhaps they can "leapfrog" the US and not repeat our mistakes but create a more sustainable, livable, healthy, and high density environment with a much lower footprint that we are able to in the US. Many of these elements make the city much more livable: from the bikes, to the markets, to the south facing apartments. They are essential ingredients to bringing quality of life and place into a high density city.
It gave me hope for their cities and even gave me a few things we can emulate and learn from. Start with the bikes lanes! And the markets! and the ...
Here is a first pass by the students in my class that have put a clearer process on the methodology for a Neighborhood Carbon Calculator that I developed for the class. They are also developing a fill-in-the blank Spreadsheet that will be tested on 5 different neighborhoods in Denver as well as one in Manhattan. This is a presentation put together by Meg Scheff-Attenberry, Michelle Draschil, Kendra Matrician and Kevin Xu of CU Denver, College of Architecture and Planning. Comments appreciated! Baseline_midterm
I am teaching a seminar this semester at the University of Colorado, Denver, College of Architecture and Planning on Sustainable Urbanism. What is that you might ask ... as do I! But we are trying to find out and questioning the terms and approaches in the process. For one thing, the class is exploring the issue of scale and sustainability: at what scale can different 
aspects of the city be optimized to achieve the best results. While I am teaching all the elements that contribute to sustainable places, we are also exploring what are the best metrics to more rigorously assess a neighborhood's performance.
To that end, we are using carbon footprint as
one way to look at a neighborhood. What has been interesting is that there is a)no standard way to do this, b)it only tells part of the story, and c)there are so many unique qualities to a neighborhood that this metric can be mis-leading. But the neighborhood size is interesting since it is the lens through which we best understand our individual experience of the city and is of a scale that we can have an impact that is significant. So we forge ahead ... and try to invent a methodology. One group is developing an actual calculator - add data into a spreadheet and BLAM! a number comes out.
Each group is taking a specific neighborhood and looking at what sustainability means for it: from LODO to Elyria-Swansea, a new and old TOD and the Gates Redevelopment. They are then applying the calculator to understand what the Baseline Carbon Footprint is and then how it can be changed (Lowered) to meet that of Manhattan, NYC, the lowest in the country. How can Denver beat Manhattan!!
Stay tuned. Much more to come on this!!
I am teaching a seminar at University of Colorado at Denver on Sustainable Urbanism to graduate students in Urban Design, Architecture, Planning. One of the big questions is ... what does sustainable urbanism even mean. What is sustainability? Why urbanism? One of the explorations I am interested in is the idea of SCALE: what approaches are optimized at what scale? Often, issues are conflated where a clear examination of optimization for a particular aspect of sustainability is not considered. This includes what is the best scale to explore a whole number of issues.
A team presented last class comparing a number of dense cities and examining the pros and cons. these included NYC, Paris, Hong Kong, and Denver. While a theme of the seminar is that Density is "good", it was shown that there is not a linear relationship between Carbon Footprint per capita and density. While Hong Kong and Manhattan have higher densities, Paris (still quite dense) has the lower Carbon Footprint per capita. While that may be attributable to the amount of nuclear power in the French grid it it s also true that of the four cities it is not hard to argue that Paris is the most livable and humane. Good news for those who think that density, livability, and sustainability are not mutually exclusive!
More to come on the seminar in future posts