Urban Design - Threads and Connections
March, 2020
Urban settlements are complex arrangements of various physical and social systems in a landscape / townscape. The myriad of issue and activity thread connections develops relationships in turn animating settlements. Our informed values, attitudes and beliefs (VABs) drive our urban design choices and decisions. No two settlements are the same. The urban settlements of today are almost entirely a legacy of past design and practical decisions informed and influenced by conditions existing in previous decades. Going forward, changes will undoubtedly continue to occur in response to emerging issues and conditions.
The issues we face today in our urban areas are not new. Designers have been grappling with a bucket of common issues dating back centuries. Most relevant for us however, are the changes that have occurred over the past two hundred years as dramatic scale differences have emerged. Specifically, topography and landscape, settlement pattern choices, sensitivities to site characteristics, the functions and activities aligned with our urban settlements and the values, attitudes and beliefs (VABs) driving wealth creation and decision-making in conjunction with design principles, regulations and the changing availability of technologies have all contributed to the shape, scale and character of our settlements. While remnants of earlier designs from ancient, medieval, gothic and renaissance periods remain in some of our older urban settlements, the past two hundred years have just been so different virtually exploding some of the old areas and blanketing fringe landscape with modern developments.
Few of the designers at the outset of the past two hundred year development history saw what was to come. How could they know as no one had any experience with population increases as have been witnessed and with commensurate demands and acquisitions of emergent technologies and alternating periodic preferences? It was a new and exciting period of opportunities for wealth creation, urban settlement design and the band-wagon was fully occupied.
Along with our VABs and sharing the driver’s seat, energy in the form of fossil fuels and electricity enabled the array of changes we have witnessed in four dominant phenomena, wealth creation, pattern expansion, building shapes and scales and our mobility opportunities and choices. Those influences continue to dominate today, but now we are finding the whole effort has been quite misguided. Facing the brunt of all of these development changes, people and environments have suffered most of the degrading consequences although not everyone sees it that way and certainly many benefits have been added. Three important standout degrading consequences have been global warming, congestion and a dearth of well designed community places.
Climate change or global warming must be viewed from two perspectives, the ‘big picture’ level where huge areas are affected and the local area level where specific environmental and structural consequences can be observed. Around the globe clearly more and more damage is being done as the extremes of weather systems are becoming even more extreme and frequent. Temperatures are rising, in some areas for prolonged periods, climbing to levels beyond the safe range for humanity, other animals and flora. With temperature increases moisture content in the atmosphere is rising leading to greater rainfall, flooding, storms and storm surge in areas vulnerable to such increases. Sea levels are rising and in some areas droughts and wildfires are more likely. Insurance claims for weather related damages have risen significantly as we witness property and landscape damage including large areas of agricultural land in some locations. The previously one-in-one hundred year flood plains are more vulnerable today as are vulnerable coastal areas where around the globe a great deal of settlement has been established for many millions of people. If the modelling is correct, and so far it seems to be, the extreme consequences are at an early stage of occurrence. As the years and decades pass those extremes will increase and the vulnerable will be impacted to even greater degrees.
Another insidious development, more directly applicable to settlement, has been the drive to greater congestion supported and enabled by choices made over a hundred years ago and ramped up in the past seventy years. In many cities now the main streets and highways are clogged caused by choke points much like clogged arteries. Why has this happened? The capacities of our streets and highways have simply been over-whelmed by traffic. How has this happened? A much more difficult question to answer as there are multiple causes.
Settlement patterns, street and block arrangements, were established many years ago with the grid pattern dominating. Clearly a pattern allowing for movement in any direction has been viewed as a pattern of convenience. These patterns have simply grown over the years extending into new development lands. In Ontario early surveys established a macro grid pattern providing a template for the more detailed patterns to fit into. In the suburban areas variations on the grid theme do exist, but in the end the grid pattern prevailed. Topography and landscape has also had an impact, in some urban settlement much more than in others. Elevation, degree of slope, wetlands, water courses, beaches, soils and rock types and formations have had an influence, but drafting board designs in many instances have disregarded the difficulties and opportunities provided by environmental constraints by simply setting out a pattern across the landscape. So patterns have been set out and those patterns are what designers have been influenced by and worked with. They have created rules and regulations influencing the dimensions of streets, how traffic moves and where traffic can go. These principles became critical influences upon the values and attitudes affecting design configurations and possibilities. Patterns became the stage for what was to follow, but really no one anticipated what was to follow.
Growth in every aspect of our societies and cities has overwhelmed the street and highway system. The struggle to accommodate all the various street purposes and uses has been costly and only semi-successful. Gradually, incrementally the demands for street use have finally exceeded the capacity of the system to accommodate and cope and the inconveniences and dangers have multiplied. The core of this dysfunction lies with priority being given to car use, ownership and storage. These sofas on wheels, luxury and utility packages, have become household extensions and they are everywhere and are expected to be everywhere, causing congestion and slowing movement to a crawl. The system has morphed into a mixed use conundrum with a great deal of costly wasted space and time prone to having accidents including injuries and deaths for vehicle occupants, pedestrians and cyclists. Add in the noise, air pollution, including co2 emissions, the insurance costs and claims, a compromised public transportation system, pavements preventing in-ground drainage, compromised street appearances, excessive development including tower blocks along street edges, a prevailing attitude expecting to have door to door vehicle access, with delivery, repair and emergency services fitting in and clearly changes are required.
Many years ago now I was interviewed for a place in an under-graduate planning programme. I was asked in the interview, indeed it was the first question, “What is a city?” My answer at the the time was one word, “People.” All these years later I stick to that answer, but acknowledge the reality has become something different summed up by the words “technological settlement”. People have become the after-thought or maybe more appropriately the “add-on thought” and it shows. People have simply and largely become the users of technological designs, the acquisitors, rather than the focus of attention in our design solutions being first and foremost oriented toward human psychological and social requirements and preferences. In many ways we are more remote from our environments than ever before as we sit behind the wheel and live through a screen. In so many ways we now have to work through a technological interface, useful yes, but the practices are not grounded in people to people and environmental interactions and a great deal is lost in their absence. What would Camillo Sitte say today about what we have created? He did quote Aristotle in his book, The Art of Building Cities: “A city should be built to give its inhabitants security and happiness.” He then went on to say, “The science of the technician will not suffice to accomplish this. We need, in addition, the talent of the artist.” His book was published in 1889. I suspect he might just raise both hands in the air and not be able to say anything. Indeed, we have pursued the technological fix to such a great extent, it is now difficult to know where to begin to correct the technological monsters we have created.
All is not lost although the scale of the problem is huge and to rectify the urban imprint on our environments and in our psyche will require a tremendous willingness to reverse many of the habits, priorities and practices associated with the technological and human juxtapositions. Our goal should be stated as: To create well designed community places of “security and happiness” with an artistic flare by and for people. Taking such an approach would be transformative. To begin, we must simultaneously revise much while introducing an altered vision inherent in quality.
I believe the following 1st steps would go a long way in realizing many of the adjustments necessary in the long road toward more livable and responsible urban settlement.
1st steps
Motivated and diligent in practice of dedicating separated networks for: people (Pedestrians); non-motorized and very small electric vehicles; a comprehensive and responsive minimal cost if not free public transportation system; access and timing protocols for delivery and service providers; emergency service protocols; private and personal vehicle (car) restrictions concerning acceptable and unacceptable use areas and routes and parking controls with appropriate charges.
Create safe and attractive transfer nodes (facilities) where networks come together.
Where pedestrians are forced into multiple (mixed network) use arrangements, ensure they are fully protected.
Relax zoning regulations and thereby allow for irregularity in setback and side yard requirements. Make more stringent lowered height and density restrictions.
Allow for and encourage better building arrangements to achieve complementary association and the creation of networks of squares, courtyards, rooms and pathways designed to enhance architectural features and ensure pedestrian safety.
Protect important buildings, facades, places, landscape features and views and enhance the spaces, including the important structures and features, in which they are located including if appropriate and acceptable, the development of a building or buildings.
Avoid creating wind tunnel effects.
Protect and uncover the natural landscape to improve appearances and drainage capacities.
Designate, design and connect village centres in a network within the urban settlement pattern.
In order to enable and enhance any of the 1st steps proposals consider closing streets to avoid unwelcome and dangerous use and appearance conflicts.
Enable and encourage mixed use neighbourhoods to provide opportunities for the development of initiatives involving urban agriculture, the incubation of business ideas and initiatives and a more progressive relationship among all ownership interests.
Close non-essential streets, remove pavements and introduce green roads or other uses to reduce run-off, improve drainage capacities and to satisfy the purposes of the surrounding community.
Enable the designation of community properties.
Allow for increased residential densities through sensitive infill projects.
Re-purpose through re-design, the major highways to reduce traffic loads by creating public transit and solar electric energy corridors.
Embark upon a vigorous urban forestry programme to increase the number of trees and to replace trees lost to storms, disease or the inconvenience of location in view of a more important site use.
Conclusion
Without any sense of doubt, the reality and extent of congestion in our urban areas is the most important issue requiring attention. If this issue cannot be solved then neither will many other issues be properly dealt with as urban issues generally are contingent upon easing congestion in the present and in anticipation of even more growth to come.
In past ages of urban development the scale of settlement was relatively small. Designers had the luxury of time, space and opportunity to consider and plan for places of functional and formal integrity and beauty. Growth occurred slowly with considerable reference to existing settlement patterns and surrounding opportunities and constraints. Slowly at first and more rapidly with each passing decade during the past century-and-a-half the designer’s luxury morphed into the designer’s obligation to accommodate, by prescribed regulation, a technological value system with personal car oriented mobility as the core component. This tendency is not universal and in all locations, but the design obligations have been widespread and has brought congestion into many parts of our urban areas. The designer’s luxury will certainly not be rekindled any time soon amidst the pressures for more growth. There is an urgency to get it right and while many lessons can be learned from well designed urban settings created in past ages, for the moment if there is any hope to improve the livability of our urban settlements, then the congestion issue must be solved.