Building community and playgrounds in Central New York. A story in the local newspaper and video.
Posted in New York State, Parks | Tagged community build, playground | 2 Comments »
Medellín, Columbia, a city once known for catastrophic levels of drug violence and now considered by many to be “reborn,” was the subject of an article in the New York Times yesterday. New public architecture, infrastructure, and public space are noticeable drivers of change in this city, and the author, Michael Kimmelman, describes the physical changes and illustrates them with a slideshow. Kimmelman also calls our attention to an essential fact of urban renaissance – there has to be a mechanism for financing it. Medellín has a vehicle for transformation that no U.S. Rust Belt city has.
Medellín, by contrast [with Bogotá, a city now struggling to maintain its achievements], still counts on an almost fierce parochial pride, a legacy of decent Modernist architecture dating back to the 1930s, a cadre of young architects being aggressively nurtured and promoted, and a commitment by local businesses to improve social welfare that begins with the city’s biggest business: its state-owned utilities company, E.P.M.
You can’t begin to grasp Medellín’s architectural renaissance without understanding the role of E.P.M., the Empresas Públicas de Medellín, which supplies water, gas, sanitation, telecommunications and electricity. It’s constitutionally mandated to provide clean water and electricity even to houses in the city’s illegal slums, so that unlike in Bogotá, where the worst barrios lack basic amenities, in Medellín there’s a safety net.
More than that, E.P.M.’s profits (some $450 million a year) go directly to building new schools, public plazas, the metro and parks. One of the most beautiful public squares in the middle of Medellín was donated by E.P.M. And atop the slums of the city’s Northeast district, E.P.M. paid for a park in the mountaintop jungle, linked to the district by its own cable car.
Federico Restrepo used to run E.P.M., before he became the city planner under Mr. Fajardo. “We took a view that everything is interconnected — education, culture, libraries, safety, public spaces,” he told me, pointing out that while fewer than 20 percent of public school students here used to test at the national average in 2002, by 2009 the number exceeded 80 percent.
“Obviously it’s not just that we built and renovated schools,” he said. “You have to work on the quality of teaching and nutrition in conjunction with architecture. But the larger point is that the goal of government should be providing rich and poor with the same quality education, transportation and public architecture. In that way you increase the sense of ownership.”
Posted in Cities, Design Practice | Tagged architecture, cities, city planning, design, park funding, public finance, urban design, urban planning | Leave a Comment »
How to re-engage after a month of few blog posts due to the rush of the academic year semester schedule? I’m checking back with some of my favorite blogs to see what I have missed. Notable posts below.
- Flowing Data’s posts, here and here, on the political threat to the American Community Survey.
- Interactive data visualization by Maya Lin on the global loss of biodiversity, also noted in a Flowing Data post.
- On the Landscape Visualization blog, there is news that Trimble is buying Sketchup from Google.
- Planetizen has only one article about bicycles on its main page! But plenty on transportation in general and the requisite Richard Florida take on cities.
- Planetizen references an interesting Globe and Mail article on what Planetizen describes as “peak people” and the call for policy to increase immigration. And there’s an article on Medellin, Columbia, the surprising turn-around city where the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA) conference will be held in October.
- And, only one more for now (that Medellin article is distracting me) – the Pruned blog calls our attention to this:
Posted in Design Practice, Visualization | Tagged landscape architecture | Leave a Comment »
Justin Gillis, of the NY Times Green blog, is encouraging readers to watch the PBS 3-part documentary titled, EARTH: The Operators’ Manual, which is being broadcast by stations across the country this week. The part that caught my attention is where Gillis says that the series is not gloomy!
The host of the miniseries is Richard B. Alley, a climate scientist at Penn State with a gift for talking about his field in terms that ordinary people can understand. The basic idea is to lay out the problem of climate change in the first episode and then talk about how to fix it in the others.
Several points distinguish this documentary series, created with financial support from the National Science Foundation, from others on the subject. For starters, it is not gloomy! While Dr. Alley certainly conveys the sobering facts about rising emissions of carbon dioxide and what it could mean for the planet, he does it with a light touch and from interesting locales rather than beating people over the head with portents of doom.
Posted in Ag and Natural Resources, Climate | Tagged alternative energy, climate, climate adaptation, conservation, global trends, resilience, sustainability, trends | Leave a Comment »
Jim Robbins, author of a forthcoming book called The Man Who Planted Trees, has an op-ed in today’s New York Times that alerts readers to the mounting threats to trees and the reasons why the planet needs them more than ever. The lines below caught my attention, especially the repercussions from the Texas drought that I discussed in a post last summer.
North America’s ancient alpine bristlecone forests are falling victim to a voracious beetle and an Asian fungus. In Texas, a prolonged drought killed more than five million urban shade trees last year and an additional half-billion trees in parks and forests. [Emphasis added.] In the Amazon, two severe droughts have killed billions more.
The common factor has been hotter, drier weather.
Posted in Climate | Tagged climate, climate adaptation, drought, environmental protection, future, resilience, trees, urban heat island | Leave a Comment »
Image credit: personaldevelopmentplanning.pbworks.com
A 1992 article titled Wicked Problems in Design Thinking by Richard Buchanan in Design Issues journal is worth a fresh look, and, in fact, it continues to be cited by many authors. [A description and definition of wicked (and super wicked) problems can be found here.] I found the discussion of the communication gap between scientists and designers to be especially interesting.
Members of the scientific community, however, must be puzzled by the types of problems addressed by professional designers and by the patterns of reasoning they employ. While scientists share in the new liberal art of design thinking, they are also masters of specialized subject matters and their related methods, as found in physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, the social sciences, or one of the many subfields into which these sciences have been divided. This creates one of the central problems of communication between scientists and designers, because the problems addressed by designers seldom fall solely within the boundaries of any one of these subject matters (pg. 14).
Buchanan then speculates that the heart of the problem is the indeterminate nature of the problems addressed by designers. In other words, design problems are wicked because they are indeterminate.
Design problems are “indeterminate” and “wicked” because design has no special subject matter of its own apart from what a designer perceives it to be. The subject matter of design is potentially universal in scope, because design thinking may be applied to any area of human experience. But in the process of application, the designer must discover or invent a particular subject out of the problems and issues of specific circumstances. This sharply contrasts with the disciplines of science, which are concerned with understanding the principles, laws, rules, or structures that are necessarily embodied in existing subject matters. Such subject matters are undetermined or under-determined, requiring further investigation to make them more fully determinate. But they are not radically indeterminate in a way directly comparable to that of design (pg.16).
Buchanan further explains:
design is fundamentally concerned with the particular, and there is no science of the particular.
In actual practice, the designer begins with what should be called a quasi-subject matter, tenuously existing within the problems and issues of specific circumstances. Out of the specific possibilities of a concrete situation, the designer must conceive a design that will lead to this or that particular product. A quasi-subject matter is not an undetermined subject waiting to be made determinate. It is an indeterminate subject waiting to be made specific and concrete (pg. 17).
Buchanan explains how designers deal with indeterminacy through his theory of “placements” – signs, things, and actions organized by unifying ideas or thoughts.
This is where placements take on special significance as tools of design thinking. They allow the designer to position and reposition the problems and issues at hand. Placements are the tools by which a designer intuitively or deliberately shapes a design situation, identifying the views of all participants, the issues which concern them, and the invention that will serve as a working hypothesis for exploration and development. In this sense, the placements selected by a designer are the same as what determinate subject matters are for the scientist. They are the quasi-subject matter of design thinking, from which the designer fashions a working hypothesis suited to special circumstances.
This helps to explain how design functions as an integrative discipline. By using placements, the designer establishes a principle of relevance for knowledge from the arts and sciences, determining how such knowledge may be useful to design thinking in a particular circumstance without immediately reducing design to one or another of these disciplines (pg. 17-18).
I am particularly interested in essays like this one that explore the relationship between design and the sciences – natural, physical, and social. Landscape architecture academics often find themselves having to prove the value of design thinking in relation to the scientific disciplines that dominate university campuses. Explication of the unique role of design and its relationship to other disciplines aids this process. But, Buchanan’s work is just one perspective. Do any challenges to his stance come to mind? Or thoughts that expand on his work? Feel free to comment by following the link.
Posted in Design Practice, LA Education, Landscape Research, Reflective Practice | Tagged design, design thinking, disciplinary knowledge, disciplinary perspectives, landscape architecture, landscape architecture academics, research | Leave a Comment »
Blogging is suffering as the intensity of the academic year reaches a peak, and most of my attention is focused on wrapping up projects. But I have also been re-reading a number of urban planning and design texts as part of a seminar class I am teaching, and I will share some noteworthy bits here. Planners are aware of the charge/risk that the plans that they work so hard to develop may end up sitting on the shelf. Lew Hopkins, Professor Emeritus of urban and regional planning and landscape architecture at the University of Illinois, wrote about the this dilemma in his 2001 book (Urban Development: The Logic of Making Plans). I was struck by the observation Hopkins makes in the first chapter.
When I am asked what I do and respond that I am a planner, people say, “Well, we can certainly use you around here. There is no planning here.” Or “Planning is not working here” (pg. 5).
Hopkins goes on to say that he has heard similar statements in locations around the world and in places that are known for planning. He then speculates about why the perception is that planning is either nonexistent or has failed in many communities, getting to the heart of what planning can and cannot accomplish. His observations are worth keeping in mind as many of us work to improve communities through planning, even in the face of its limitations.
Citizens have very high expectations of what plans can accomplish and very vague notions of what a plan is or how it actually works. If they can imagine a better living environment in their locality, there must not have been a plan. If they think that government or private developers ought to have behaved differently, there must not have been a plan. To infer that the lack of planning is the explanation of all problems of human settlements implies that plans could solve all problems of urban development. Plans, however, can only do certain things and they work imperfectly even in these situations.
Successful human settlements require much more than planning. Some of the outcomes that people often expect of plans are more likely to be achieved by democratic governance or regulation, each of which also can accomplish only certain things and works imperfectly. In simplest terms, plans provide information about interdependent decisions, governance makes collective choices, and regulations set rights. Understanding these distinctions will give people reasonable expectations with which to use all three to improve human settlements (pg. 5).
Posted in Cities, Landscape Planning, Reflective Practice | Tagged cities, city planning, governance, planning effectiveness, planning implementation, urban planning | Leave a Comment »
