Research in Urbanism Series
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A road trip on European highways. Considering the spatial qualities of E75 and E50: A phenomenalist approach in the observation of spatial qualities of the E75 Barentsz Sea – Crete and E50 Brest – Makhachkala
Full text linkThis paper takes the reader on a road trip, travelling the longest highway routes of the European continent and drawing conclusions based on a methodology of practical observation. The paper introduces a phenomenalist approach to highway design research, based on using photos and observations as a source of evidence in its own. The research is based on twelve weeks of driving, shooting photos, sleeping along the road, eating only in road-side restaurants and interviews with waitresses and shopkeepers. There used to be a lot of attention for the scenic experience and spatial quality of highways. In contemporary designs, however, highways are regarded more and more as sewage systems: something not to be seen, heard or smelled. Functional aspects such as noise reduction and traffic capacity prevail above spatial design. This paper shows how different countries are coping with these conflicting issues. It shows best practices and how these relate to the contemporary practice of highway design in the Netherlands.The paper argues that a technocratic and economically driven approach to highway design is a poor and vulnerable strategy. The paper further demonstrates that contemporary design policy in the Netherlands, with a strong focus on the aesthetics of built structures, neglects aspects that have much more impact on the spatial experience. The paper zooms in on five aspects that heavily affect the spatial experience of a highway: the sense of travelling on one continuous route, the sense of surveillance and state control, the sense of being part of a high quality public space, the existence of educating elements along the road and the level of technology. The paper draws conclusions based on methodologically collected observations and translates these into recommendations for designers
The synergy between flood risk protection and spatial quality in coastal cities
Full text linkCoastal regions throughout the world are subject to flood risk challenges. This paper concentrates on the Netherlands; its coastline fulfils an important role in the protection of the Dutch delta. Due to the expected sea level rise, part of the Dutch coastline will have to be reinforced. Along most of the sparsely occupied coastline, the space needed for the reinforcement of the flood risk protection infrastructure can be found easily, either on the seaside or inland. However, some segments of the coastline have been built upon and are difficult to reinforce; buildings have limited the adaptability of the originally flexible coast. One of these locations is Scheveningen, a borough of the city The Hague and a seaside mass-tourism resort operating on a national scale. It is difficult to reinforce the borough’s flood risk infrastructure without significant restructuring. In addition to water-safety issues, Scheveningen faces social-economic challenges and needs a qualitative programmatic and spatial impulse. An integrated approach to spatial and flood risk design is essential to come to a qualitatively as well as functionally acceptable solution for multifunctional flood defences. This paper describes and demonstrates the approach and application of an integral ‘research by design’ study for flood risk management and spatial quality in Scheveningen. It is the result of a collaborative effort between spatial designers and flood risk engineers, who worked together in so-called ‘Delta ateliers’. Three different flood risk strategies (‘a sandy shore’, ‘a hard protection body’ and ‘a perpendicular dam’) are used as leading principles for integral designs in which both the spatial assignment as well as the long term flood risk protection assignment are addressed. This results in three different designs that are discussed in relation to their spatial potential and hydraulic efficiency. This applied research by design approach was considered very valuable–even essential–to feed the debate regarding the choice of a flood risk intervention. As a result, this approach will be continued throughout the Dutch National ‘Delta Programme’ that focusses on long term flood risk protection
Mapping flows: Switzerland as operational landscape
Full text linkDrawing on episodes involving the use (and abuse) of maps in Switzerland, this essay pertains to the geopolitical agency of cartography in the production of urban territory. Maps generate and maintain particular discourses about the world, whether factual or fictional, with very real repercussions either way for the territory depicted. The UN motion made by Libyan leader Muammar al-Gadaffi to wipe Switzerland off the map, for instance, discloses just how much sway the cartographic imaginary holds in global relations. Guillaume- Henri Dufour’s mid-nineteenth century map re-territorialised a loose coalition of fiercely independent cantons into that unified economic and legislative space known as ‘Switzerland’, while underwriting an infrastructural machine that remains as central to Swiss self-esteem as it is to the nation’s economy. More recent examples of the map’s formative authority come by way of two unusual bids made in 2010 to redraw the boundaries of Switzerland. The controversial map by Armed Forces Chief André Blattmann recast Europe as enemy territory in an effort to rekindle patriotic identity and legitimise the need for an army. Conversely, right-wing politician Dominique Baettig put forth an equally contentious map calling for the annexation of regions from neighbouring countries that would create a new Swiss megacity in the heart of Europe. Regardless of how it is mapped, Switzerland’s contemporary urban fabric hardly adheres to an immaculate image, manifesting instead a disjunctive amalgam of bits and pieces that operate according to their own rules and agendas. And with such territorial entropy increasing on a planetary scale, we might wonder to what extent the map actively shapes these conditions as an actor in its own right rather than only neutrally reflecting them. In any case, territory is never simply given, but is constituted through the polymorphous elements, relations, and domains of reference that it assembles. Whereas the map might continue to express what is done in the name of territory, we do not yet know what territory itself can do
Planning with water and traffic networks: Carrying structures of the urban landscape
Full text linkThe two networks strategy is a guiding model for planning and design that takes the networks of water and traffic as carrying structures. Its origin is in the early 1990s when it resulted from research by design projects aiming at the generation of tools for making urban development and the urban landscape more ecological. Reviewing practical experiences is one reason to look again at the strategy. A second reason is to explore the possible contribution to current debates such as those about complexity, landscape urbanism and landscape as infrastructure. The origin of the two networks strategy goes back to Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature and Michael Hough’s City Form and Natural Process. Inspired by them, the approach does not, in the first place, take nature and ecology to create limiting but carrying conditions. This asks for carrying structures. In the urban landscape there are at least three crucial fields of synergy between activities that ask for carrying structures: the territorial or spatial field or the area perspective, the activities related to flows that pass through these areas or the flow perspective, and the human activities involved in the plan and in the planning process or the actor perspective. The two networks create conditions for two multi-functional environments of synergy. The fast lane is the competitive profit-oriented zone where efficient production comes first. The traffic network is the carrier. The slow lane is the co-operation based non-profit oriented zone where water safety and quality, landscape and heritage, biodiversity, recreation and local food production are brought together. Here, the water network based on the drainage pattern is the carrier
Urban landscape infrastructures: Designing operative landscape structures for the built environment
Full text linkThis paper explores infrastructure as a type of landscape and landscape as a type of infrastructure. The hybridisation of the two concepts, landscape and infrastructure, seeks to redefine infrastructure beyond its strictly utilitarian definition, while allowing design disciplines to gain operative force in territorial transformation processes. This paper aims to put forward urban landscape infrastructures as a design concept, considering them as armatures for urban development and for facilitating functional, social and ecological interactions. It seeks to redefine infrastructural design as an interdisciplinary design effort to establish a local identity through tangible relationships to a place or region. Urban landscape infrastructures can thereby be used as a vehicle to re-establish the role of design as an integrating practice. This paper positions urban landscape infrastructure design in the contemporary discourse on landscape infrastructures. The space of flows, as opposed to the space of places, is introduced as an impetus to develop the concept of landscape infrastructure into a more comprehensive form of urban landscape architecture. Furthermore, this paper outlines a set of principles typical for urban landscape infrastructure design and suggests three potential fields of operation: transport, green and water landscape infrastructure. The design of these operative landscape structures is a crosscutting field that involves multiple disciplines in which the role of designers is essential
A bridge with a view a view with a bridge: Identifying design considerations for bridges to strengthen regional identity
Full text linkThis paper discusses design considerations for creating high quality infrastructural artefacts with an emphasis on bridges. The authors pursue a design study and analysis approach to highlight the specifics of infrastructure design for regional identity, based on their own work on a bridge ensemble in the Dutch Zaanstreek region. Two highlights of this work, the award winning Juliana Bridge and the wildlife crossing in Rijssen, are used to illustrate how to create good infrastructure design in sensitive contexts, without making use of neo-vernacular methods
Infrastructure as landscape as architecture
Full text linkIn a critical review this chapter shows how the Yokohama Ferry Terminal by Foreign Office Architects crossed the three distinct realms of ‘infrastructure’, ‘architecture’ and ‘landscape’. This key individual project dissolved disciplinary borders between the three disciplines and achieved new methodical grounds for design. It is a precedent in a general shift in the development of the design disciplines of the built environment. The single project shows how deep conceptual shifts affect the disciplinary assumptions that initially limited this task for architects–and how versatile the strategies of infrastructure and landscape are in architecture. While the Yokohama Ferry Terminal is at first sight simply a passenger terminal, it is also an infrastructural transport-related building, used most of the time as a garden-like public space. At first elaborating on definitions of the three terms ‘infrastructure’, ‘landscape’, and ‘architecture’, the article will question how plausible and useful these divisions between the categories are for designers, or if we should rather focus on the crossings of these divisions. A discipline that wants to be dynamic is to be explored at its edges as well as preserved in its core. Such crossings become especially relevant in ambitious projects. With this example at hand, this chapter explores the disciplinary framework and will touch upon design methodological definitions. The case study is valuable to show the full depth of field that architecture with landscape methods can have within contemporary architectural production and how landscape and infrastructure can merge in new kinds of public artifacts beyond object centered design. The themes that make the Yokohama Ferry Terminal’s form or ‘scape’ can be summarised under the term ‘flow’
A critical approach to some new ideas about the Dutch flood risk system
Full text linkDecisions on measures to improve a flood risk system are in part supported by general ideas about how the system works and should work. After the completion of the Dutch Delta Works around 1990, such new ideas regarding flood risk emerged. Some of these may be appealing at first, but appear debatable after a closer look. In this paper, fourteen such debatable ideas, familiar to most Dutch water professionals, are formulated and criticised, in order to find out what can be learned from them. The most important Dutch national flood risk policy documents since 1990 are reviewed for quotes that illustrate these ideas, complemented by scientific papers and other documents. These quotes present different expressions of these ideas, and their number can suggest whether they are broadly shared or marginal. In twelve of the twenty most important government documents, 47 quotes were found; in 26 documents of other types, another 39. Eleven quotes describe the idea that ‘water should not be our enemy, but our friend’. Fifteen quotes were based on the idea that flood protection entraps us in a dangerous ‘spiral of risk’, which can be stopped, 44 quotes are related to the idea that flood risk reducing measures should be ‘natural’ or ‘move with nature’. The remaining quotes illustrate other debatable ideas, such as ‘water should lead spatial planning’ and ‘rivers should not be squeezed into a corset’. The frequency of such quotes suggests that ideas about ‘water as a friend’, the ‘spiral of risk’ and ‘moving with nature’ have not been marginal. It is however difficult to determine how influential they have been in decision-making, since general ideas are not the only factors leading to decisions. The general critique to the three ideas is that they present preferred measures as generally logical conclusions without a systematic comparison of alternatives for particular situations. Behind the new ideas lies increasing societal interest for objectives like an attractive water landscape (water as a friend), reducing our dependence on technology (spiral of risk) and nature conservation and development (moving with nature). This analysis further suggests a couple of final remarks, which are hard to prove and are open for discussion
Mapping landscape openness with isovists
Full text linkPeople identify with landscapes and landscapes contribute to a sense of place and wellbeing. The landscape is therefore an important contributor to quality of life. New developments, such as urban and infrastructure projects and the expansion of large-scale agriculture, introduce many new elements into traditional landscapes, altering their visual appearance and perceived quality. These changes may have significant influences on people’s quality of life. In order to protect or enhance the visual landscape, changes in the visual landscape should be given explicit attention in landscape planning and policy making. Current improvements of measurement techniques enabled by GIS, and of highly detailed topographic data covering large areas make it feasible to describe the visual landscape with a high degree of realism without making many concessions to generality and objectivity.
The article proposes a procedure that describes the visual landscape, which takes advantage of improvements in measurement techniques, developments in GIS and availability of high-resolution topographic data. The procedure is developed for policy making and spatial planning purposes, and provides information about one specific aspect of the visual landscape, landscape openness. In the remainder of the article, first the concept of landscape openness is explained, then a method to model landscape openness is proposed. Subsequently, a procedure to use this model for policy making purposes is demonstrated. Finally the results of an evaluation of the procedure with policy makers are discussed
Visions of Belle van Zuylen
Full text linkThis is a story about an early feminist eighteenth-century intellectual, a proposal for a mighty skyscraper on the edge of a mid-size Dutch city, a chief government architect who was trying to find arguments to save the unspoilt views of the Green Heart of Holland and a group of researchers in the Netherlands Institute for Spatial Research. Historical references, unashamedly conspicuous architecture, present-day ideas on landscape conservation and planning policy are the main ingredients of the story. Why was the view of Utrecht in 2007 more widely discussed than Vermeer's View of Delft from 1660, and why were so many officials and politicians interested in the results of a highly technical GIS-based study by an institute many of them until then had hardly heard of?
As this article will make clear, even a largely academic study can have some tangible impact on a political decision-making process. In this particular case of the proposed (and controversial) Belle van Zuylen skyscraper, several seemingly unrelated facts and opinions came together. A succession of events worked in favour of the study that is the subject of this chapter: first, a proposal for an outsized building by the developer, then the rapid acceptance by a city eager to give its image a boost, followed by critical comments by the Chief Government Architect, who was backed up by his freshly installed cabinet minister. Suddenly, the skyscraper plan became something of a national issue, especially because the Green Heart of Holland, one of the most precious icons of the Dutch planning system, had come into play. In this situation, a study into the tower's visual effects was more than welcome for the policy makers involved in the decision process