#calthorpe

[ledepassionne]

Ivory Calthorpe.

[oliveryuchan]

Calthorpe Community Garden, Kings Cross, London, 2024, acrylic on canvas paper, 508x405mm, available

[veggiefoodieandy]

Introducing The Physician, Edgbaston. A new pub with grub.

Introducing The Physician, Edgbaston. A new pub with grub.

A few months ago I put out a post on my blog about The Physician on the Calthorpe Estate within Edgbaston Village. It is now open for business.

The building was once known as the BMI building and used to house the vast ‘Sampson Gangee Library for the History of Medicine’. But its heritage goes further back and is steeped in history. It is believed it was commissioned in 1863 when the Calthorpe…

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[the-past-is-too-small]

Carta del nuevo urbanismo: revitalizar las comunidades a tres escalas. Región-ciudad-pueblo, barrio-distrito-corredor y elementos que potencien los recorridos peatonales.

Congreso fundacional del New Urbanism, 1993, Alexandria. Andres Duany, Elisabeth Plater-Zyberk, Peter Calthorpe y William Futon

[dizitub]

Mecliste Calthorpe Tartışması

yeni http://www.sfk.kim/mecliste-calthorpe-tartismasi/

Mecliste Calthorpe Tartışması

Mecliste, çözüm süreci tartışması çıktı.

MHPli Özcan Yeniçeri, Dolmabahçede Öcalanın silah bırakma çağrısını okuyan HDPli Sırrı Süreyya Önderi Sevr anlaşmasını imzalayan İngiliz Amiral Calthorpea benzetti

Yeniçeri, Sayın Önder orada bu m

Kaynak: Kategori -> Siyaset Devamını Oku

[urbanvisionaries]

Can Design Save Us?

The July/August issue of The Atlantic featured a story on Lavasa, a newly designed city in India, by Jeremy Kahn. Kahn described Lavasa as Italian in appearance and wrote that it is hoped that the city will one day house 300,000 people, offer world-class amenities, and be home to firms representing “all of the knowledge industries at the heart of the ‘new India.’” What is so special about Lavasa, aside from it being an Indian city that looks like it should be in Umbria?

For one, it is a corporate city – it has been designed, is being built, and will be governed by private interests. Short of levying taxes and exercising police powers, Lavasa’s developer is serving as mayor, city council, and administration. They have hired a city manager and private security guards. They will provide water, sewer, garbage collection, and Internet connections for every home – services unusual to find in India.

Second, it is designed based on New Urbanism principles of walkability, green space, mixed use, and housing for a variety of income levels. Critics note that the portions of the city completed to date are priced out of the reach of most Indians though the developers claim that more affordable housing is planned. In a country not known for its urban planning, Lavasa is quite an oddity.

Finally, it is largely empty. Sales of the initial units have been brisk but construction has been delayed because of disputes with the Indian environmental ministry. Lavasa has everything but people.

This raises an interesting question: can a successful city be designed before the inhabitants arrive? Or must it be co-created with them?

Drawing from our readings, Peter Calthorpe and Richard Register each have great faith in their abilities as designers and in their particular design principles. Calthorpe, like the designers of Lavasa, espouses the potential for New Urbanism as the solution to many of the problems of the modern city. Register is critical of New Urbanism as not radical enough and puts forward his eco-city approach as the true solution to the sustainability of cities.

Can one person or one group have all of the answers? Is there one set of universal urban design principles waiting to be decoded like the Rosetta Stone?  If one believes, as I do and as Register held, that cities are complex adaptive systems, one must then accept one of the principles of such systems: no one participant in the system can comprehend all of the system yet each participant can comprehend some of the system.

In one random test, I recently visited the Uptown District infill project of Calthorpe Associates in Oakland, California. I was enthused by Calthorpe's book and was excited that one of his projects was just a BART ride away. Calthorpe’s website claims that the project “resulted in a 24-hour-community that improved neighborhood safety and spurred retail and entertainment activity on Telegraph Avenue and Broadway.” I was on both Telegraph Avenue and Broadway and they felt much more like the “rundown area” of Oakland that the project was supposed to remedy. It was 7:30 on a Monday night in October and the streets felt foreboding.

I wanted to look more deeply. Calthorpe, after all, built a project in an area that had been less than ideal for decades.  I turned to a widely cited article from 1966 in which Christopher Alexander examined the differences between what he called “natural” and “artificial” cities. Natural cities are those that have evolved over time, like London or Mumbai; artificial cities are those that have been planned as complete entity, like Lavasa. Alexander is highly critical of artificial cities saying that they are “missing an essential ingredient” and “wholly unsuccessful.” Kahn noted that he felt Lavasa was “unnatural.”

The shortfall, in Alexander’s view, is that designers and planners cannot grasp the complexity essential to a successful city. This is not from a lack of passion, education, or expertise. It is a limitation of the human brain rooted in a primitive need to simplify the world in order to survive. He describes the basic human organizational pattern as a tree, a relatively simple structure in which each element can only belong to one subset of the whole. A city by contrast, in Alexander’s view, is organized as a semi-lattice, a much more complex structure in which each element can belong to any number of subsets of the whole simultaneously. It is a structure that presents almost limitless possibilities for connection and arrangement. The semi-lattice represents a level of complexity that the human brain simply cannot duplicate in an act of planning.

In short, Alexander held that while more thoughtful and even inspired design may help it is not sufficient on its own to remedy what ails cities.

What do you think of Alexander’s argument and the research with which he supports it? How does it affect how you view the work of Calthorpe and Register?

Is insufficient design input the critical missing ingredient for the sustainable city – or must there first be a deeper, broader transformation of how people understand sustainability and systems? How might leaders bring people to see the system – and the solution – together?