Urban Planning

How Chicago Brings Back Wild Nature Into the City

- Adam Clare

When thinking of Chicago you probably think of its famous architecture, and rightly so. In the future you may think of Chicago’s reclaimed land and eco-conscious landscaping. In the last few decades the city has covered rail yards and car parking with natural features (and art!), built new waterfronts where an airport used to be, and are currently expanding their riverwalk to include more natural features. The city’s skyline is a real treat and now so is the pedestrian realm.

Cities around the globe are looking to restore native ecologies, turning back the clock on the destructive landscape practices of past few centuries. The same is true for Chicago, which has a number of experiments along its shores to unbuild the city and find the most effective practices for doing so. In this video, we walk to a few of these sites and explore their techniques for unbuilding the city in order to give it back to nature. The five sites are: Northerly Island, the Field Museum, Millennium Park, the River Walk, and the Wild Mile. We look at each closely to see just how their before and after reveals changing attitudes toward living with nature.

Time to Rethink the Skyscraper

- Adam Clare

The climate crisis has us questioning where people live, work, and how they get between the two. We’ve known for decades that low density sub-urban living is horrible for the environment (and people’s mental health) because it detaches people from each other due to car-based transportation. Many have argued that skyscrapers are the needed alternative because high density living is good. Architects Declare have released a letter questioning this reasoning, they argue that six stories is the ideal height for people and for the planet. A city of six story buildings is good density, the best example being Paris.

The unavoidable fact is that, in terms of resource efficiency, the embodied carbon in their construction and energy consumption in use, skyscrapers are an absurdity. The amount of steel required to resist high windspeeds, the energy required to pump water hundreds of metres above ground and the amount of floorspace taken up by lifts and services make them one of the most inefficient building types in a modern metropolis. It could also be argued that skyscrapers further detach us from any meaningful relationship with the natural world. Above about ten storeys, balconies don’t work because it is simply too windy, so high-rise apartments are hermetically sealed – as isolated from nature as possible.

Read more.

Kids Love Living in Cities

- Adam Clare
Good Street from Streetmix

Urban places are already good places since they are more environmentally friendly than sub-urban places and have fantastic access to culture. Research in Toronto has revealed that children love cities too. In North America there’s a myth that suburban developments are better for children (despite the reliance on automobiles to do anything), and we need to address that myth. The way the Toronto-based researchers examined this was simply by asking kids what they like, and called it Kidscore.

The KidScore is both an engagement tool and a metric for evaluating the child-friendliness of urban places. It measures what matters
to kids in cities and towns, and was made by kids and experts with the goal of creating happier, healthier urban places for kids.
The objective of the KidScore is to push beyond the kinds of statements typically generated by child engagement processes and consultations, such as, “We want more parks to play in,” or, “We want a safer city.”

Read more.

This Parking Space Technique Holds 10 Times More Vehicles

- Adam Clare

bike parking

There’s a fiction that cars are needed in cities and we should provide parts of our limited land in urban centres so one person can leave their car. This fiction perpetuated by car brains hurts our cities and is really not good, to solve this problem the city of Rotterdam create a parking pad that fits more than one vehicle using the same plot of land. Yes, it’s a bike rack. A special rack. The bicycle rack is placed on a mobile platform that is the size of a single car. The city can then easily trial out new bike rack locations, gauge demand, and get local communities to support a permanent parking solution.

The idea came originally from planners in the city of Rotterdam, who were brainstorming ideas in 2015 to help increase biking in a neighborhood that had extra car parking. “We figured, why couldn’t we develop a bicycle platform in order to just test if there’s demand for bicycle parking in this neighborhood—launch it as a test and experiment to help change the mindset of people in this neighborhood,” says urban planner José Besselink. “We also thought it would help us in accelerating this transition because we know that eliminating car parking is a tough thing anywhere in the world.”
…
In The Hague, neighbors can request a platform for their own block. On one of the streets where bike parking was installed this spring, the project helped residents realize they wanted to do more, says Schutte. “The residents of the street want to go even further and are investigating whether there could be more greenery in the street and whether the street could be made car-free,” she says. “It has also made residents more aware of their living environment and that you can do something about it, together with other residents and the municipality.”

Read more.
Thanks to Mike!

How to Build People Focused Communities

- Adam Clare

A sustainable world is a walkable city. Over at the Sustainable City Show they talked to two people engaged in making cities walkable, car-free, and down right pleasant to live in. The mayor of Heidelberg and urban designer Chris Shears talked about their efforts to green their cities while also ensuring that old, backwards-looking, individuals understand that good urban living means people can get where they want when they want. The best design approach for cities is to ensure that all people can get where they need to go, and that they don’t need to go far.

The city is attractive. Downtown city is attractive. It has a future vision and now, it pays out what you have implemented, but you have to be fair. It was not the brutal story we tell them at the beginning. So, we were talking about green space, living attractive, downtown is wonderful to stay there with kids. So, you have space, you’re secure. If the kids go to school, they don’t have to fear that the kids were hit by a truck or whatever. If this is the message, it’s not against cars or against anybody. It’s for the future, and this is always a story because otherwise, you’re just working with environmentalists together and this is 50 percent, maybe 20 percent, but it’s not the — also not in the city council, the majority. So, that’s my clear mission. We have to go in this direction, but always create the feeling that this is a better city, a greener city, it’s more livable and so on.

Read more.

Scroll To Top