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Back to the Past? Tram City, Motopia and Light Rail Commercialism in Canberra
Get PDFOne of the long-term trajectories in urban development since the late 19th century has been determined by changing modes of movement. Following the city of the pedestrian plus bicycle and horse & carriage and that of trams and railway suburbs, the rise of the automobile city saw the decline and often total disappearance of streetcar systems. Then, the 1980s experienced a wide-spread renaissance of rail transport. Futuristic projections have accompanied these visions right through to current developments around driverless cars and trackless trams. Based on the case study of Canberra, this paper analyses these projections and their legacy in terms of success, failure and portent. The original plans of the Griffins (1911-1918) had proposed a model streetcar city financially supported through income from the leasehold system. These ideas were supplanted by a Motopia vision, which morphed into plans for a linear city shaped by land-use-transportation studies – an automobile-dependent suburbia, yet with the potential for a rapid transit public transport spine. Light rail was eventually introduced in 2019. Financed through the sale of public housing and creating high-rise development along the route, this is resulting in a profound transformation of Canberra’s urban form with real-estate values as the central shaping factor.publishedVersio
Bachelor Programme in Town Planning and Urban Studies (Department of Architecture University of Palermo)
Get PDFUniversity of Palermo
38.11764569364875, 13.370073611262614
https://ror.org/04fz79c74The Bachelor Programme in Town Planning and Urban Studies delivered at the University of Palermo brings together the following aspects of quality in planning education:
— Academic curriculum:
• A sufficiently broad range of appropriate disciplines that introduces and integrates disciplinary perspectives to prepare the student for an effective planning career.
• A strong grounding in the spatial sciences encouraging the development of spatial skills and spatial sensibilities.
— Teaching pedagogy:
• The use of the ‘studio’ as a central pedagogical tool to encourage collective and experiential learning.
• The use of an appropriate range of pedagogic techniques through workshops to complement and target specific learning needs beyond the studio.
— Elements of distinctiveness:
• A distinctive focus on cultural heritage and architectural history both as a subject in itself and as a perspective for studio1based learning.
• A distinctive focus on the sociological aspects of planning to encourage socio1technical reflection and learning
Antifragile Practices to Design Social Dialogue in Contemporary European Public Spaces
Get PDFEuropean territories are crossed by an uneven transition that highlights a new geography of inequalities, fragilities, and fragmentations. Public spaces are one of the core features of European culture and today a number of events undermines their everyday body-scale dimension, exacerbating risk perception. This paper shows some preliminary outcomes of my ongoing PhD research, that digs a new spatial-relational strand involving the concept of antifragility. Introduced in opposition to the notion of fragility, antifragility describes the capacity of getting better from shocks taking advantage of volatility by dealing with randomness, disorder, and unpredictability. Holding this perspective, the paper deepens some specific antifragility features (i.e. the ability of learning from errors, the capacity of gaining from disorder –maintaining a certain degree of uncertainty–, as well as optionality and redundancy as methods to reduce shock exposure). The spatial value and design potential of these features is investigated through some remarkable public spaces recently built in Europe, so to show not only the potentialities of antifragility as a design issue, but also that public space is still the best environment in Europe to activate new urban dialogues –considered as the sum of social actions and spatial forms that co-design publicness.publishedVersio
Landing : How practices of temporary hospitality challenge urban spaces and policies
Get PDFPlanning for Transition – book of proceedings 31; 2Within the broad issue of migration, the paper discusses the conditions of intersection between the short temporality of the phenomenon and the longer temporality of urban spaces and policies. Along the migrant trajectory, the work particularly focuses on migrants’ landing, or first arrival. The research therefore addresses migrant populations who have a “temporary” perspective in their use of the territory and who cannot access certain urban services and opportunities. The paper considers the case of Milan and assuming the background of existing policies, the work draws on a qualitative observation of Milanese first reception, with specific attention to hospitality “practices”, broadly defined as unexpected uses of space, non-institutional actions, and unplanned answers by the Municipality. The observation unveils a general incapacity to structurally deal with the temporariness of migrants’ condition, often resulting in “exceptional” reception spaces and emergency-based policies; on the other hand, some actors and practices seem to provide a deeper understanding of certain conditions, suggesting new points of view on first reception issues and highlighting alternative paths. The work argues the urgency of a renewed and more complex definition of the temporary condition of migrant populations, and the relevance of existing practices as a starting point for discussion.
Keywords: migration; landing; first reception; MilanpublishedVersio
Master Programme in Spatial Planning (Faculty of Civil and Geodetic Engineering University of Ljubljana)
Get PDFUniversity of Ljubljana
46.04940971182202, 14.504605807443872
https://ror.org/05njb9z20University of Ljubljana
The Master Programme in Spatial Planning delivered at the University of Ljubljana brings together the following aspects of quality in planning education:
— Academic curriculum:
• A comprehensive spatial planning study programme with a strong knowledge emphasis on the land management dimension placed within a wider understanding of strategic and interdisciplinary spatial planning issues.
• A balance between planning knowledge and professional skills delivered through high6level courses in and around land use management and geoinformatics. Namely, it focuses on the provision of skills and abilities that enable the interdisciplinary exploration of various aspects of regional and local spatial development and land use towards addressing real6
life situations and demands.
— Teaching pedagogy:
• An assortment of teaching and learning approaches focusing on project6based learning, application of ICT and GIS, knowledge testing, seminar work and professional excursions.
— Elements of distinctiveness:
• An alignment with the Slovene tradition of interdisciplinary spatial planning practice, which carefully places different regional and local land management aspects and planning tools in relation to more strategic, as well as practical opportunities and challenges.
• Practical orientation to problem6solving supported by interdisciplinary planning knowledge and technical skills in geo6informatics applied to ongoing and future land6use changes
Characteristic of Flexible Space of Traditional Urban Street under the Concept of Healthy City : Case Study of Muslim Settlements in Xi'an
Get PDFHealthy city refers to a whole which is organically developed by healthy people, healthy environment and healthy society. It can improve its environment, expand its resources, and enable the urban situation to support each other so as to maximize its potential (Trevor Hancoc and Len Duhl). Xi'an Muslim Residential Area was formed after the Tang Dynasty and lasted more than a thousand years. Muslim settlements in Xi'an take mosques as the center and form a spatial pattern of Residence Around Mosques, which is continuing the traditional scale of urban street public life in China, and becoming an important carrier of people's emotions, life and communication space. Xi'an Muslims have a tradition of doing business which the front of the house serves as a shop and the back yard serves as a residence. Therefore, the commercial activities there often extend from the first floor of the house to the street, forming an important public living space. With the extension of commercial activity space, this kind of place gradually becomes a functional medium, which softens the rigid boundary between the building and the street, thus forming a flexible space. This flexible space forms the event carrier of historical memory or the space field under the stack of daily life, which emerges a sort of reaction to space actors makes Muslim settlements have unique social and spiritual cohesion. It strengthens the stacking effect of historical information in urban space, then it constitutes the cultural information field of human-space-place. Taking Xi'an Muslim Residential Area as a case study, this paper analyses the types, attributes, characteristics and elements of these flexible spaces by the methods of typology, investigation data and Mapping, aiming at exploring the design method of traditional urban street flexible space based on the concept of healthy city as well as the healthy settlements
Alternative discourse and narratives for institutional change in transport planning
Get PDFMega transport infrastructure is increasingly resisted by local communities throughout the world. Community resistance becomes successful if alternative discourses and narratives have been developed and linked with a wide range of like-minded actors and are advanced during the transport planning process. This paper explores discourses argued and presented by various stakeholders to advance and resist the Basin Reserve Bridge (BRB) proposal in Wellington, New Zealand as a part of the Roads of National Significance (RoNS). This paper critically reviews planning and policy documents, media reports and submissions to uncover distinctive arguments and narratives within five main storylines: economic storylines, safety storylines, environmental storylines, traffic and access storylines, and heritage storylines. The influence of discourses is discussed at political, institutional and social levels to provide a greater understanding of community resistance. This paper concludes that alternative discourse has the potential to break a path dependency in transport planning and create a foundation for a new policy path
Reach Homes - A Critical Extension of Dwelling
Get PDFThis paper formalises a nine month engagement with REACH Homes, a small startup that is testing decommodified modes of construction, non-monetary forms of tenure, reusing construction waste, and alternative methods of land acquisition to critique and ultimately overcome the housing problem in the UK - from within. The purpose of this paper is twofold, firstly I will situate REACH within the housing crisis through a brief history of UK policies, whilst setting REACH apart from other solutions that call for a rejuvenation of public housing. Secondly I will demonstrate REACH’s praxis through a selection of working examples that I have either been actively involved in or visited. These points allow me to argue that REACH reveals a holistic method for combatting the housing crisis which stops profit being extracted further up, or down, the supply chain; this holistic method is rarely being explored within housing activism.publishedVersio
“Stop the Child Murder”: How a grassroots movement for children’s safety formed a new paradigm in urban design
Get PDFDutch cities are nowadays considered among the most pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly in the world. However, back in 1971, pedestrian deaths by motor vehicles had reached record levels, with 3,300 people dead, 500 of whom were children. Following the tragic death of his young daughter in such an accident, a journalist wrote a polemical article, entitled “Stop the Child Murder”, which became a national sensation. With the same motto, in the densely populated district of De Pijp in Amsterdam, a group of children organized themselves to demand safer streets and to claim open space for play instead for car parking. In a documentary filmed locally, we watch children actively claiming their rights, putting up barricades to exclude motor traffic, standing up to adults expressing opposite opinions. Soon after, many local streets in De Pijp were transformed into “woonerven” (living streets), where children can move around safely and play in the proximity of their houses, thus setting the norm in the Netherlands. In the paper this historical case of a grassroots movement successfully instigating institutional change is critically presented in order to understand its local specificities and to extract useful lessons about the tools, agents and methodology of community based urban transformation.publishedVersio
Towards Post-Human Urbanism
Get PDF“Post-human” is, of course, a provocative concept in the context of architecture and urbanism, which have essentially based their ethos on designing and planning a “human-centred” environment. However, the concept is actually not as radical as it might seem: although it does question some of the taken-for-granted assumption of classical humanism, particularly the universality and a-historicity of human nature and the legitimacy of needs justified by this universalism, it is not a doctrine against human beings. Against the ideology of “cities for people” (Gehl 2010), post-human critique highlights the fluidity, the diversity and the contested nature of human identities. What makes this theoretical perspective relevant in today’s urbanism is the fact that the universalist human being is rapidly dissolving. The growth of multiculturalism is an unavoidable phenomenon in European cities as the result of immigration and increasing mobility of work. However, its perception in urban planning is by no means self-evident. Contemporary planning discourse is rather characterized by an almost systematic avoidance in this respect. It is this silence that will be studied in this paper, by using the method of archaeology of knowledge introduced by Foucault in his books Words and Things and Archaeology of Knowledge. An attempt is made to explain this observation with reference to the strong functionalistic tradition in the Nordic planning agenda and the tacitly adopted biopolitical definition of legitimate needs of the urban citizens. The Utopian ideology of a class-less planning for the ‘human being’, with its biopolitical undertones of biologically determined features of the population, will necessarily clash with new demands for culturally oriented, specialized services and spatial practices that multiculturalism necessarily entails. This is confronted with the seemingly ‘transparent’ and generalizable planning ethos that has remained unquestioned, hidden by the emphasis of physical planning along with social and cultural ‘soft’ policies. This study is part of a multidisciplinary project BEMINE: Beyond MALPE Coordination, Integrative Envisioning, carried out at the Department of Architecture, Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture