Spot of admin, forgive me. I'm doing a presentation at Creative Social tomorrow night (Thursday 14th May 2008), here in Sydney. This particular edition of Creative Social is organised by my friend Tim Buesing, and forms part of a wider global network of workshop-style sessions and presentations aimed at creative directors. I'll be doing something around these themes of urban informatics, or how information and communications technologies are re-shaping all things urban: form, everyday life, planning, wayfinding, architecture, public space and so on. Keynote is glaring at me from the dock, below, so I'd better get to it shortly.
I gave a precursor of the talk at a public lecture organised by University of Technology Sydney, a couple of months ago. I was invited by Adrian Lahoud, and it formed part of an excellent series of public lectures around architecture and urbanism. If you're at a loose end in Sydney tomorrow evening and would prefer an alternative to my talk, you could do worse than go and see the next installment in the lecture series, delivered by none other than the Lord Mayor of City of Sydney, Clover Moore MP. She'll no doubt be majoring on their recently launched Sustainable Sydney 2030 strategy, much inspired by Jan Gehl's recent report for the City of Sydney. I'll post my own thoughts on all that soon enough.
For my lecture, I essentially 'performed' my Street as Platform piece, augmented with candid pics from a recent trip to Melbourne. I think it worked well, as a kind of freeze-framed narrative, in terms of conveying how much the street weighs these days, as Bucky might say, when you take into account the largely unseen digital communications. I called it The Not-So-Quiet City this time, as a nod to Aaron Copland's lovely 'Quiet City' piece of 1941, and to play up the sensory design aspects. This was partly due to it being a roundtable on 'Atmospheric Urbanism', where I was presenting alongside the excellent Nadia Wagner, a researcher in 'urban olfactics'. Her work is absolutely fascinating, and most Pallasmaa. The reason I think the two lectures worked well is that we got some absolute corkers in terms of questions afterwards, many of which have been percolating through my mind ever since. And I'm still not sure I have particularly concrete thoughts on them. "What is the creative challenge for architecture, in response to all this?" was one intriguing question in particular, a googly bowled by the ever-thoughtful Lahoud. (He's organised a follow-up roundtable too.)
Next week, Duncan Wilson and I are attending the Pervasive 08 conference here in Sydney. Our position paper was accepted by the workshop on Pervasive Persuasive Technology and Environmental Sustainability
and so Duncan and I will be taking part in that, alongside a bunch of international researchers and practitioners in this area, such as the likes of Eric Paulos, Paul Dourish, Tom Igoe et al. I'm looking forward to the whole conference hugely and hope to post our paper shortly, including reflections on the workshop.
One of the workshop organisers is Marcus Foth of QUT (previously, here), and in June I hope to be attending a related conference at QUT, organised by their Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI). Called Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons, the workshops on 'Broadband innovations and the creative economy' and 'Creative Industry development agendas: design as value-add' look great. Richard Allen of Cisco is a particularly good addition to the cast of speakers (see also Henry Jenkins.)
Do get in touch if you're in town at the same time, or want more info on any of the events. More news to follow, and then a return to your usual programming.
The following is a quick survey of new informational approaches to transport, hinging on individual behaviour and engagement via public data. We'll travel from wifi on buses to designs for timetables embedded in the fabric of stations, stopping off at trams in Google Maps and proposals for roboscooter sharing schemes.
Data, transported and shaped by the internet, is increasingly becoming a primary way that people expect to engage with public transport in particular. Engage, as in access and navigate through transport service information, but also explore and understand the transport service itself. This last aspect might sound initially far-fetched - “Why would people want to explore their transport networks?” - but many of these examples indicate that people do. They often go well beyond basic communications initiatives like integrated transport systems and into genuine two-way and many-to-many network-based interaction. Whilst they can do little to help if the eventual public transport service itself is poorly run, built over a well-run system (such as Helsinki’s or Zürich's) such systems might increase satisfaction amongst existing users and attract new users.
Further, engaging with the energy output of transport is something people may directly engage with too, to help shift behaviour. Studies elsewhere, such as Pacific NorthWest National Laboratory of the Energy Department indicate that when exposed to the effects of their behaviour in terms of domestic energy use (electricity, water, gas etc.) via simple PC-based feedback tools, people may change their behaviour, leading to a 15% reduction in peak load on utilities. (And more might be achieved than that, through more sophisticated and better designed schemes.) Will this carry across to transport energy?
So, here are transport systems where usage data has become available - or could become available - and is then built upon, as a way of exploring whether various ‘live dashboards’ of transport across a city will engender new levels of engagement with transport. And whether this will increase awareness of personal behaviour and impact on emissions accordingly.
Some of the examples will have been seen before, so I’d be interested in any further examples you might have of urban informatics applied to transport - please add examples/thoughts via the comment form at the bottom of this post.
This discussion is part of a series of interviews conducted for Arup’s Drivers of Change programme. See Drivers of Change for more information.
I met Tristram Carfrae at Arup’s Sydney office, which sits in a couple of storeys of a fairly anonymous block on Kent Street. The anonymity is typical for Sydney’s ultra-business-like CBD, but so is the casually wonderful aspect – in this case, overlooking the vast Barangaroo development site on the side of the city’s CBD, and the splintered skein of deep harbour out towards Balmain, criss-crossed with ferries and functioning as the occasional water-berth of the ocean liners, great white slabs of floating architecture that add a temporary residential function to the port, before moving on east to Hawaii or north to Hong Kong.
We sit in the reception and talk for a couple of hours, over a few plastic cups of instant coffee, and just behind a model of the National Aquatic Centre, the building designed by Arup, led by Carfrae, and Australian architects PTW with Chinese partners CCDI, and that opened in Beijing just over a month ago. Known colloquially as the ‘Water Cube’, it’s being seen as a new masterpiece of structural engineering, already enjoying a flurry of publicity that will only increase in fervour when the Games start this winter. But Carfrae's career extends well beyond the Cube, and he's generally thought to be one of the leading structural engineers of his time.
We talked about the Cube, and the changing practice of structural engineering that informs such projects, and how this is radically changing architecture, building and cities. We chewed over multidisciplinary working and design processes in general, as well as techniques new and old. I’ve organised this piece into loose themes, as the conversation jumped around a little.
There’s an extraordinary - and rather British, I must say - kerfuffle going on over the future of the Robin Hood Gardens estate in London at the moment. Essentially, the building, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson (aka The Smithsons) and completed in 1972, is in danger of being pulled down. Margaret Hodge, a UK culture minister, appeared to back the demolition of such buildings, suggesting a digital model could capture the essence of a building in its stead. She said:
“When some concrete monstrosity — sorry, I mean modernist masterpiece — fails to make the cut despite having expert opinion behind it, let’s find a third way. This is the 21st century — a perfect digital image of the building, inside and out, could be retained forever.”
I left London before I got to experience Robin Hood Gardens in the flesh, but I hugely admire the work of the Smithsons, for both their thinking and practice (such as the Economist building in central London, which I have experienced). Along with Cedric Price, Reyner Banham, Archigram and a few others, they provide a historical framework for much of the technologically-enabled and culturally-informed best practice of today.
Robin Hood Gardens, in an area of East London so historically rich you can almost hear the psychogeographers whispering, is essentially a concrete megastructure housing project that’s been in need of such attention for most of its life. Carelessly built and serviced, the design never stood a chance.
Long before the GLC disappeared, TLC for such buildings had disappeared. Recently, a handful of enlightened property developers have discerned the public appreciation of brutalism moving in the right direction, but at glacial speed. Here, demolition plans appear to be moving a little too quickly, nosing well ahead of public opinion and this critical rearguard.
But Building Design is quite right to point out the importance of the building in terms of design history, and also its latent opportunities for re-development (and the iffy process going on around the building). There’s nothing inherently flawed in such structures - and of course Hodge’s line about concrete is extremely revealing, as is the subtle giveaway of a very British insecurity over ‘expertise’. With some of that expertise, allied to willpower and a smarter framework that sees the development as an ongoing bit of work, Robin Hood Gardens can be turned around, and should provide a counterpoint to some of the lazier development blighting that part of London.
“When this was first built it was very modern and people were fighting to get in here. It was very cleverly built,” she says. The way it has upside down maisonettes, you never hear noise from anyone else. And the nice thing is that every room has plenty of light — one wall is all windows and you’re not looking into someone else’s house. I don’t think these people who are proposing thousands of new homes for this site have a clue.”
RHG needs a lot of work but it is an eminently saveable building.
I’m not in favour of preservation for the sake of it. We should demolish buildings that have outlasted their use, and replace with better or more suited to the needs of the time. These new buildings should have a sense of their likely life-span. (Cedric Price was once asked what to do about York Minster, and he replied “flatten it”. Buildings that have outlasted their use should be disposed of “like a worn-out pair of Hush Puppies”, he suggested.)
But RHG is important is in at least three ways, particularly in the context of Britain: an example of British modernism (and local culture needs more working examples of this), ambition and optimism (ditto, described by Peter Cook as “strange English romantic”) and apartment-based, high-density, affordable housing (ditto again, and that passes the CP test, as many cities need good examples of this more than ever.)
Building Design’s campaign has already drawn in an extraordinary list of support, almost a who’s who of contemporary architecture and urbanism. While their simple comments-based petition system is not exactly watertight, it appears to be hugely successful in terms of garnering a groundswell of opinion.
It’s odd to see one’s name alongside that of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Zaha Hadid, Tony Fretton, Alain de Botton, Patrick Keiller, Benedetta Tagliabue, William Menking, Peter Cook, Iain Borden, William Mitchell, Joel Sanders, Stefano Boeri, Joseph Rykwert, Hugh Pearman, M Christine Boyer, Toyo Ito, Richard Meier, Ricky Burdett, Ted Cullinan, Kenneth Frampton, and hundreds of others. (You can sign the petition here, before March 7th) (See also Richard Rogers, who has written to the culture secretary Andy Burnham, and BD's and The Guardian'sJonathan Glancey.)
Sensing they’re onto a winner in terms of their relevance and influence, and maybe saving the building while they’re at it, Building Design is ramping up their activity, publishing article after article. It’s great to see an architectural magazine trying to make a difference in such concrete (ahem) fashion. Given the issues with existing built fabric in our cities - far more problematic in terms of sustainability than new building stock - you almost wonder whether campaigns such as these are the contemporary equivalent of Arts & Architecture’s pioneering Case Study Home program of an earlier age. I wonder what The Sesquipedalist will make of it?
“On most counts, Robin Hood Gardens should be a prime candidate for listing. It is the only housing built by architects who devoted much of their lives to the discussion of dwelling at various scales. Among architectural thinkers around the world today, these architects are seen as the most important to have worked in Britain in their generation. This is heavy weight to put against counter-claims that the buildings were not built as first designed, and experienced social teething problems owing to the almost universal post-industrial problems of the early 1970s in Britain.”
“Emphasis should be put on the place-making quality of this housing, heroic towards the Blackwell Tunnel approach, embracing towards the nurturing mounds of the green space between the snaking block, where a big sky opens amid the scattered street patterns of the East End. As for resident satisfaction, the present Bangladeshi population seems to have no problem about inhabiting these monumental cliffs, in a way that the Smithsons would surely have recognised as a fulfilment of their intentions.”
“This is no Holly Street or Aylesbury Estate, best destined for the dustbin. The pressure is on, and someone must decide whether or not we are going to look like international idiots who let Robin Hood Gardens fall prey to the bland machinery that calls itself “regeneration”, while effacing the useable legacy of the welfare state.“
The Park Hill flats in Sheffield indicate a partial precedent for Robin Hood Gardens. Also inspired by the Smithsons (and Le Corbusier before them), they were built in 1961, from designs by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, on the site of tenements so rough they were known as ‘Little Chicago’ in the ‘30s. Unfortunately, that malaise didn’t seep clear of the ground with the destruction of the tenments, and seems to have carried over into the new development. And particularly when the British lack of facility with modernism - save a few shining examples - led inexorably to poor implementation, careless use of materials, and little ongoing servicing. And thus, the flats quickly gained an unsavoury reputation.
When I were a lad in the Sheffield of the early 1980s (cue Hovis commercial), the Park Hill flats were the stuff of legend. Playgrounds would buzz with lurid stories of what happened over at Park Hill - and the city’s other high-rise social housing, at Kelvin and Hyde Park. Though the story I remember is the rather tamer tale of a TV set being chucked out of the window, from one of the higher storeys, my mind’s eye constructing the slow heavy fall and sudden implosion on concrete. It was as if simply living there was like being in a cold, damp Northern version of Beirut under siege, glancing nervously up at the silvery sky as you scurry between blocks, darting for cover and hoping not to see the silent, graceful arc of a television approaching your head. It wasn’t like that, of course, though it was certainly not pleasant (As with RHG, Ian R. Taylor, in a book I once reviewed, did find firm evidence of ‘community’ there nonetheless.)
I visited once, going to see my first girlfriend’s grandmother, high up in one of the blocks. I don’t remember much detail, but I do remember how distinctly different it felt to the suburban late-1890s semi I was living in over the other side of the city. Not better or worse, just different way of housing, subtly reinforcing the importance of these developments in Victorian cities.
“Park Hill was awarded a Grade 2* listing in 1998. Although an important milestone in the development of Modernist housing theory in post-war Britain, the public incredulity which greeted the award spoke volumes about the success of Park Hill and its 'streets in the sky'.”
Public incredulity knows no bounds of course, particularly when stoked up by the often architecturally short-sighted British media. Ill-considered lists of Britain’s most hated buildings hardly help. (How is Channel 4's Demolition progressive broadcasting, exactly?). In this sense, Building Design’s primitive petition with its untidy collision of expertise and punter, is perhaps far more democratic form than Demolition, even given that it’s preaching to the converted?)
Now, the Park Hill flats are being ‘re-made in Sheffield’ (clever, that) by developers Urban Splash. Europe’s largest listed building - which is an odd honour really - will be re-vamped to provide nearly 1000 apartments close to the city centre, with a third affordable and two-thirds, well, un-affordable presumably. (It’s the presence of the latter that will shift public opinion round on the matter, you watch.) Lee Garland’s photography, if a little sombre, indicates the muscular presence of the building - even more so when you see it in situ, banked back on the hill overlooking the central train station and city centre. It’s a powerful building, and with the care and attention that Urban Splash will lavish on it, it’s easy to imagine the building transformed.
I’ve seen many of Urban Splash’s conversions, particularly their early work amidst Manchester’s former textile warehouses and mills in the mid-’90s, and they’re usually pretty good renovations. It’s also interesting to see them now taking on brutalism, instead of the rather 'easier' warehouse conversions (which may be desirable now, but were also marked for demolition a generation earlier, apparently beyond redemption.)
Elsewhere in Britain, the Brunswick Centre in London, covered here before, may need more careful curation in its choice of retail and services, but is full of life for the first time in years and really seems to be working. Erno Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower has also gone from “eyesore” to “desirable” in the last decade. The Barbican and South Bank still feature in those ugly contests, but are increasingly being recognised as the gems they are.
Park Hill benefits from proximity to its city centre, a short walk away. As with the Brunswick, Barbican, Trellick and many others, being surrounded by good urban fabric helps. It’s a simple note, but absolutely key, and remains a problem in the case of Robin Hood Gardens. The surrounding context also needs to be addressed for the building to work - social, informational and physical - for this kind of high density living can easily reinforce an urban core, and is less well suited to the being sited on a periphery. East London has enough presence for it to work, and RHG is connected to the centre(s) of London fairly well but it will need careful local orchestration nonetheless.
Yet it can still work there. Wöhnpark Alt-Erlaa is situated outside the centre of Vienna, but with enough inherent density to anchor itself. That’s the promise of the megastructure. It’s on a different, more ambitious scale - it contains no fewer than 5 schulen, 4160 balkone and 7 schwimmbäder, most on the dach - and that, plus the integrated U-bahn, would make all the difference.
It does, of course, appear to be extremely well-built, benefiting from the Mittel-European comfort with aligning modernism and craft that was all but alien to Britain. Most of all, it will be well-run too, with a mix of residents (it's not strictly social housing). Again, the ongoing servicing and maintenance of these buildings - of both built and social fabric - will make the difference.
Back to RHG, and Stephen Bayley weighed in too, noting that “Robin Hood Gardens has been a social calamity” and reiterating that the Smithsons’ building was indeed flawed, but those flaws were embedded by the builders.
“Alas, their architectural reach exceeded the grasp of the builders and Robin Hood Gardens suffered from the start with a singular lack of commodity and firmness …”
He’s rather brutal himself, no pun intended, when apparently suggesting that the building rather suffered from its tenants:
“As Marx asked, does consciousness determine existence or does existence determine consciousness? Or to put it less correctly, do the pigs make the sty or does the sty make the pigs?”
Personally, I suspect the tenants were let down by the implementation of the building, and lack of ongoing service - as well as the post-industrial context Powers refers to - rather than any inherent piggery.
Bayley continues:
“(But) Margaret Hodge's remarks about concrete are ignorant prejudice. Concrete is a fine material, but needs maintenance and care as much as marble and oak need maintenance and care.”
Too right. And so to those comments of Margaret Hodge, and particularly her idea of preserving the building through a digital model. Here, again, is what she said (in Grand Designs magazine, perhaps the most influential British architectural periodical of its day. BD reproduced the article.)
“When some concrete monstrosity — sorry, I mean modernist masterpiece — fails to make the cut despite having expert opinion behind it, let’s find a third way. This is the 21st century — a perfect digital image of the building, inside and out, could be retained forever.”
Leaving aside her value judgement on modernism - which speaks volumes by itself - and the cultural relativism elsewhere in the article that underpins her notion that modern architecture shouldn’t be judged in the same way that 'historical' structures are, it’s this ‘digital image’ comment I find fascinating.
First of all, that particular train of thought could obviously be applied to any building. If I decided, say, that Tower Bridge or all of Poundbury were particular eyesores, would they too be replaced by digital models? Bayley spots this a mile off:
“The minister herself declares that historical purposes may be served by a detailed digital record of the building, an argument which could, I think, with equal force be applied to Uppark, Windsor Castle or Stonehenge.”
You might expect City of Sound to be the kind of place that extolled the virtues of digital modelling, and indeed I do. Building information modeling (BIM) and computer-aided design (CAD) have already revolutionised building, and the immense benefits are yet to be fully realised. Increasingly tidying up the more inefficient and unsustainable practices of construction, once BIM truly extends into four dimensions, generating and broadcasting data about the ongoing use of a building (incl. delivering the instructions for its de-construction and recycling) a more sustainable architecture can be realised. And once the building becomes a platform for other communication, from personal to civic, and if that scales up to a neighbourhood and city level, then we’re really going places. Truly revolutionary.
But I don’t think Hodge is talking about that. I think she imagines some kind of 3D fly-through. Perhaps wearing goggles. But she, and we, should be clear about the limits of models too. In no way do they - and we can even say, will they - approach the experience of a building. Simple as that. A cursory reading of Pallasmaa will make that clear. Few models can deal with the peripheral, never mind the multi-sensory experience of being there, and never mind the multi-layered historical weight of a place or space. Digging further into her Merleau-Ponty isn’t something I imagine Hodge does of an evening, any more than I do, but if she were to, she might reconsider her strategy of replacing buildings with “digital records”.
Experiencing a building in the flesh is so different to constructing and studying a digital model, that it’s frightening that Hodge - a culture minister - could even think to suggest it.
I recall walking into a small, very old cathedral in Milanese side-street, I think, lured by the sound of the choir, and once inside I hear their voices conjoin with the wails of black-clad kneeling women, rocking backwards and forwards near the altar, and sensing the sheer physical presence of that sculpted block of sound hanging in the rafters of the immense vaulted roof over my head, light puncturing the gloom through stained-glass windows and illuminating the sparkling motes of cool dust floating around me, some microscopic elements falling on to my tongue and fusing taste and smell with those being inhaled in my nostrils, the interior rushing away from my body as I begin to stand upright and breathe it all in, having ducked through the small threshold into its cavernous innards, my eyes adjusting to the gloom and slowly revealing the detail in the polished wooden pews that a million hands before mine had touched. All that, and more that I don’t have the words to describe, in a transition from outside to in, over a few seconds … And equivalent sensations might be enjoyed in a grain elevator, a converted power station, a public administration building, a swimming pool, a side street of SoHo at midnight, a small house in Tokyo in the early morning, a square in Melbourne at midday, a summer house in Finland at dusk, or in practically any kind of building. You will have your own examples.
Well, I’m sure a digital model will exist for that church, but I’m not sure I’ll get that same sensation when I click on it.
Let’s quickly put to bed this idea of digital models replacing a building. They can augment a building, and are certainly invaluable in design processes, ongoing running of buildings, education, heritage and a thousand other worthwhile pursuits. But they are not simulacra, for buildings exist.
So well done to Building Design for bringing this sorry bit of politics to the foreground of at least the architectural press, and good luck to them with their campaign. As a fan of the Smithsons’ thinking, and of several of their buildings, I'd like to see this pioneering architecture cared for.
Here’s the bullet-pointed version that cabinet ministers may be more used to:
Park Hill, Brunswick, Trellick, South Bank, and Barbican all show that British modernist buildings that were once though beyond salvation can be turned around.
Other high-density housing megastructures elsewhere indicate they can be done well in the first place, if carefully constructed and serviced.
Concrete is one of the most useful, pleasing and thrilling of materials.
Digital models have immense value, but not as replacements for buildings.
A few recent entries attracted useful responses, and several contemporaneous links opened up new angles on similar subjects. I thought I’d pause briefly to tie a few of these loose ends together.
The “Shinkansen to Melbourne …” story on the potential for a Very High Speed Train (VHST) link up and down the east coast of Australia generated a fair bit of buzz, and some extremely useful comments from readers. Several comments provided detailed reasons why it would be difficult, though none of them convinced that it shouldn’t happen. Have a read and let me know what you think - particularly if you have further insight or experience on large infrastructure projects of this nature. To me, it feels like a case of ‘when not if’, but a concerted effort is clearly required to help people here believe that.
Partly, this will be enabled by moves elsewhere - in that the road and air alternatives are not only being seen as increasingly out-of-step with the times, but shooting themselves in the foot (if indeed a transit system can have a foot to shoot itself in). Road traffic congestion in and around Melbourne is now reaching the breaking points also witnessed in Sydney and Brisbane (with some talk of congestion charging at last, even if not officially. It’s mildly instructive to read this piece from Mayor John So from only 2006, boasting of how ‘the car is welcome in Melbourne’, and then reflect on these subsequent and ensuing woes; and so different in tone to the Gehl proposals for Sydney’s CBD). The train service in Sydney is now being used so heavily that it’s at bursting point - almost necessitating the use of ‘push men’ - despite clear evidence of some years of under-investment. Ditto buses, which desperately need further investment but are still heavily used. This at least indicates that Sydneysiders are not that averse to public transport.
The item also featured briefly in The Architects on Melbourne's Triple R (cheers Rory). It’s just good to hear this being discussed, and most fervently by those who have experienced the likes of the Shinkansen and TGV. To be clear about the piece: I’m not anti-car or anti-plane. Far from it. I find the New Urbanist rhetoric that attempts to expunge the car from the urban memory to be wholly misplaced and not useful, and air travel can refresh the parts other modes of transport simply cannot reach. It’s a massive shift of balance that’s important, towards the likes of a tripartite framework for rail (VHST interstate, loca/regional and then inner-city); augmented by smarter bus networks (see Curitiba, Bogota and beyond), as well as an overlay of quality pedestrian and cycle networks. Ferries, monorails, integrated ticketing systems, the lot. This, augmented by minimised air travel, and car-use that is, primarily, recreational (as Iain Borden has recently suggested). It’s about redesigning the city for public transport, and redesigning public transport for the city (see also Mitchell Joachim) - and that includes rapid links throughout the spaces in-between the cities. Infrastructure is in the news a lot at the moment, not least due to China’s extraordinary expansion, and Infrastructure Australia has recently been announced (chaired, intriguingly by a former BA boss). So watch that VHST network-shaped space, I reckon, not least for an interesting debate.
“The Street as Platform” garnered even more attention, not least because William Gibson and Bruce Sterling both linked to it. (I think I just need RU Sirius and Rudy Rucker now, to complete my Mondo 2000 Panini sticker collection. Younger readers will have no idea what I’m on about.)
With startling serendipity, Adam Greenfield happened to post a piece at almost exactly the same time, detailing his ‘central dogma’, related to his forthcoming book, and discussing many of the same ideas and issues, but from a usefully different angle. Do go and have a read (and his follow-up, which is indeed ‘On the same side of the street’). Molly Wright Steenson has also started a useful blog, which looks like it will frequently cover the work of City of Sound pin-up Cedric Price, and specifically his Generator project. One of her posts reminds us of the fundamental importance of designing the social and operational frameworks around technological systems, a point I was very keen to make in "The Street ..." (see also recent Economist articles on e-government; this sense of redesigning the systems and organisations around technology, when designing a technological system, is a generally sound tenet.)
I’ve had very useful conversations around much of this, so watch this space for more developments on the ideas in “The Street…” and PWTE soon, I hope.
And finally, an update on the Best Urban Places project. James, Russell and I are knee-deep in good, honest production issues for the first issue now - we’ll give a further update on that shortly. In the meantime, the group keeps growing and the photos keep coming. Please do keep them coming in, ideally accompanied by your short introductions, as issue 2 is already being set up nicely.
Welcome Planetizens
and thank you, that's an honour. If you're wondering where to start, here's a fully
subjective top 25: popular, recent,
favourite or otherwise, skewed towards design, planning and urban development.
Alternatively, check the Postopolis!
category, for a series of reports from last summer's architecture and
urbanism-orientated event I helped organise at New
York's Storefront for Art and Architecture.
There's a lot of interest in high-speed rail networks at the moment, with good reason. European networks are beginning to form a continental grid of high-speed trains, and Japan's supreme bullet trains of the Shinkansen are being exported. Interest in reinvigorating the USA's Amtrak is being discussed seriously for the first time in decades. London's St. Pancras finally delivers. (And what is the design of new Macbook Air, if it's not a Shinkansen 500 nose welded to the backside of Porsche 928S, as if Luigi Colani was grinning away in some dodgy East End garage, glowing oxyacetylene torch in hand ...)
Meanwhile, Monocle also has a new film up - one of my favourites thus far, I must say - covering the train journey from Istanbul to Van, on the way to Tehran. Our correspondent Saul Taylor produced a wonderfully atmospheric little mini-doc, capturing exactly the dislocating sensation of those long train rides across Eastern Europe.
My own Eastern European train journey from Sheffield, via the Netherlands, to Budapest in 1991 is still a vivid memory. I've been lucky enough to experience many great rail networks. Doing a lot of business with the IHT last year meant many meetings in Paris, a very swift and easy ride away from London (it's even faster now). I recall the magnifiqueTGV from the north, down to Marseille; extremely fast, through beautiful terrain, and smooth as silk. Getting the train down the north-west coast of the US, from Seattle to Portland, was a not terribly comfortable ride but through the most sublime landscape imaginable. A hot dusty train from Milan to Pistoia gave me a clear sense of Italy's country and city, before I really set foot in it. The Shinkansen in the (entirely affordable) first class Green Car from Osaka to Tokyo was perhaps the pinnacle, sitting back in an armchair and watching Mount Fuji slide by, reaching phenomenal speeds yet gliding gracefully, attendants bowing to passengers upon entering and leaving the carriage. Yet Swiss railways, on simple trips along the edge of Lake Zürich, are the best examples of service design I've ever seen.
As a non-driver and only occasional flyer, the train is by far my preferred mode of transit. It's easier to work on a train, to relax and read, to stroll to the restaurant car (again, watch the Monocle film on the journey to Tehran for a particularly fine, if old-fashioned, example of the restaurant car in action.) Sleeper trains, if operated by Deutsche Bahn and not the generally woeful British rail companies, can be a wonderful way to travel longer distances in real comfort. They're safer too, if run well (the Shinkansen hasn't had a single passenger fatality in shifting 6 billion passengers over its 40-year history, including through earthquakes and typhoons).
My European roots might be showing here, but the New Rail Revolution isn't limited to that continent. Juergen Kornmann of Bombardier - one of the world's biggest train manufacturers - told Monocle about the investment in rail elsewhere.
"It's those emerging markets - India, China and Russia especially. They're making huge investments in infrastructure. They have a big need for new material, and this means very good business. Russia has an urgent need for freight rail infrastructure because they have such huge distances within the country, from the mines in the east to the population centres, and Europe, in the west. In India, passenger traffic has increased as more people move to big cities. In China, it's both."
The options for trains are increasing too. Over and above the Shinkansen, Deutsche Bahn has a fleet of ICE trains, which can reach speeds of 300km/h. Generally, an all-electric line would be the way to go.
So high-speed rail cuts across countries with vast open spaces as well as densely-packed Europe. And now we are either just post-peak oil, or thereabouts depending on who you read, the other benefits of trains over cars and 'planes barely need stating. (Again, read the Treehugger interview with Andy Kunz if you do want the stats on how much more energy efficient trains are.)
But it's not just about efficiency. There's a romance to the train journey that has never been fully captured by the aeroplane, save those early heady days of flight, and the initial commercialisation of airways (see Evelyn Waugh's Labels for an example). The road movie has a certain panache, admittedly, but is usually defined by an existential solitude. Flying is usually defined by anxiety and fear, whereas the train by intrigue, chance, possibility, cameraderie, romance, and travelling rather than arriving. Examples abound, from Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train to Georges Simenon's The Man Who Watched The Trains Go By to Greene's Travels With My Aunt, and many others. See also the films, such as Strangers ..., The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes from Hitchcock alone. You will have your own favourites.
The posters of Tom Purvis, those GPO films of the London to Brighton route, numerous great pieces of music. A nostalgic point admittedly, but what a different class of cultural production, as if the imagination is stoked by the train more than any other mode of transport.
Moreover, trains can be amongst the most thrilling examples of industrial design, train stations our sublime secular cathedrals, rail bridges our finest creations in civil engineering, and so on. So this isn't at the 'knit your own scented mung bean' end of sustainability; rather, gleaming future cities ascribed with high-quality, high-tech mass transit.
Except here in Australia.
Many think the Australian economy will be shielded from recession by China, and it's currently running at a fairly hefty budget surplus. Either way, spending on infrastructure works is one way of dealing with productivity during global economic slowdowns. So there's money. And sure enough, the Australian government is looking at infrastructure.
"Cabinet also decided yesterday to go ahead with plans to establish Infrastructure Australia, a body to co-ordinate public and private investment in areas such as ports, roads and railways."
Yet the train network has long since departed from the popular imagination, and that's the major issue (economic capacity to invest in infrastructure is really a question of will, which is in turn a question of culture). In fact, Australia might just have been a little too new for it to really have ever landed, as a concept. Even though my initial observations suggest that large areas of Australia's cities are given over to rail and related infrastructure, many will see this as ripe for redevelopment (e.g. the certainly very good CarriageWorks development of the Eveleigh Rail Yards.)
Certainly, this is a car-based culture, just as with the US. Yet it's significantly without that cultural memory of the long arms of iron railroad, hardwiring America out of its mid-western plains (described most wonderfully in Jonathan Raban's Badland.) The interior of Australia is still largely untouched by industrial development, and will always remain so. Politically, the governance model has been left in an unhelpful position, indicating the careless negligence with which rail has been treated. Rail networks were created and run by the states, rather than the federal government, even leading to different gauges of track being laid down from state to state, apparently. They're still run by state-based companies, which means you sometimes still have to change trains to get from Sydney to Melbourne, an incredible state of affairs in 2008.
Of course Sydney to Melbourne is no small journey. Australia is such a vast country, based around effective city state economies, that a constant series of flights shuttle back and forth between cities almost every half-hour, providing hour-long journeys between Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. The iconic drives take a day or so, if done by car, which people seem happy to do.
But neither of those modes of transport are tenable going forward, for mass transit, from almost any perspective you'd care to mention. To be clear, cars and planes will still be valid options, just not for the vast proportion of the travel required. The road journeys - the Great Ocean Road, the Grand Pacific Drive, the Pacific Highway - will still be tourist experiences, quite rightly. Infrastructure like the Sea Cliff Bridge in New South Wales will always provide visceral experiences of Australia's beautiful terrain, almost second to none.
But the roads need to be replaced as as the platform, no pun intended, for mass transit. They're barely suitable for freight, and certainly not suitable for business travel. A AUS$3.6 billion upgrade to the Pacific Highway alone is a lot of money to spend on a short-term solution.
In comparison, the train wins out in almost every possible future scenario. Leaving aside that small matter of peak oil, trains are far more comfortable to work in, as long as the space plan is generously laid out (again, don't look to British trains here). Wireless and mobile networks are far easier to implement on trains than in the air. And they deliver you from city centre direct to city centre, as opposed to depositing you well outside the outer suburbs with another journey ahead of you (never fun rushing from the airport to a meeting in near-tropical conditions.) Moreover, as Kunz points out, it's easy to integrate interstate trains with an urban light-rail/tram network, in a three-tier system of national, regional, local.
I see the opportunity for a primary southern- and eastern-coastline based network, connecting Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, with a tangent shooting off to Canberra, and a possible stop at Newcastle. These are all classic 'city pairs', in the language of high-speed rail network planning. (Perth and Darwin are just too far to connect on this line directly, but should be served by long-distance high-speed sleepers, with the level of comfort and service achieved by the Deutsche Bahn City Night Line. Lines exist on these axes already, run by Rail Australia essentially for tourists - the Ghan (bottom to top, Adelaide to Darwin, 3000km) and the Indian-Pacifc (the 4300km from Sydney to Perth via Adelaide)).
Let's call this new network the Southern Cross Line, as Melbourne's excellent re-worked Spencer Street station could be its centre-piece (it's a fine station by Grimshaw, and winner of the Walter Burley Griffin award for Urban Design in this year's RAIA awards. It indicates the fine opportunity for quality in civic architecture the railway station presents).
Just as that station attempts to suture Melbourne's CBD together with its Docklands, the high-speed rail network would genuinely connect most of Australia's major cities. Roma Street in Brisbane and Central Station in Sydney would both need a re-vamp (yet Elizabeth Farrelly in the Herald suggests a way forward for the latter in Yuval Fogelson's plan to sink Central underneath Sydney's inner-west.)
(For fun, I've dashed off a simple identity, drawing on the best elements of the Australian flag set on the turquoise of the accompanying ocean, then indicating how an animation could warp the constellation slightly to indicate the major destinations (below), a sequence of pearls along Australia's coastline. The Commonwealth Star remains on the logo, alongside the Southern Cross, indicating this wider national sensibility connecting the city states. This bending of the Southern Cross stars towards the cities relates to the maps of Europe warped by high-speed rail I posted about before. I've half a mind to re-draw Australia on that basis, indicating a pinning of the fabric pulling towards this densely-packed south-east corner. And of course a train with a hooter like the Shinkansen (top) surely deserves a pimple.)
It barely needs pointing out that this 'Southern Cross Line' would also instantly be amongst the most beautiful rail journeys in the world, particularly given a few show-stopping bridges and viaducts hugging the coast as much as possible, yet also easing through lush pasture and rocky outcrop, tinder dry plain and damp rainforest.
The trains should quite simply be imported Shinkansen bullet trains. Taiwan have bought the first exports (700 series) from Hitachi (video of Taiwanese tests below). Russia are interested, for their Trans-Siberian Railway. China has taken a joint-venture approach, modifying bullet trains built by Kawasaki. Even the UK has ordered 29 aluminium Javelin trains, from London to Ashford for the 2012 Olympics (possibly overkill given the UK's small footprint. Unless they give it a bit more of a journey, it'll be like tethering a greyhound on a very short leash.) So the Shinkansen import model is alive and well, and if elements of Japan's service culture and attention to detail in branding and service design (certainly a little more thought than my five-minute sketch above) can be imported too, all the better.
Australia has imported wisely from its Asian neighbour in the past - its peerless architecture is heavily influenced by Japanese tradition through the work of Robin Boyd, Roy Grounds et al, and its cuisine likewise. There's no harm in doing a bit more importing here.
From Tokyo to Fukuoka is 1,174km, and the N700 bullet trains do that in five hours. Melbourne to Sydney is roughly 900km and currently takes around 10 hours. Sydney to Brisbane is 1000km and currently takes around 13 hours. Both services run essentially 1 train per day. With Shinkansen, and newly built track optimised for high-speed, you might guess that Melbourne to Sydney would take around three and a half hours, and Sydney to Brisbane around four hours, and you could run them on the hour. That's getting comparable to flying time, as trains have far quicker check-in and can deliver you from city centre to city centre.
This 'Southern Cross Line' can run alongside the Gahn and the Indian-Pacific, which remain great tourist services. And of course, cars and planes are still part of the mix. It's just that, given the circumstances, the balance now has to shift heavily, back towards the train.
So I call on Mr. Rudd's administration to spend some of that budget surplus - which could be around AUS$18billion - and build a national high-speed rail network. Reorganise the governance to be a federal network, as rail is inevitably an interstate issue. Buy the trains from Japan and lay down the track. Create a network that people would be thrilled to use; would be proud of, as the Germans, French and Japanese are proud of theirs; that would ultimately make them leave the car at home and the plane on the runway. Rudd is right to have made broadband networks one of his administration's priorities, but this is a different network, a different level of investment - and return on investment - altogether. It's a new network for Australia.
A real-time dashboard for buildings, neighbourhoods, and the city, focused on conveying the energy flow in and out of spaces, centred around the behaviour of individuals and groups within buildings.
A form of 'BIM 2.0' that gives users of buildings both the real-time and longitudinal information they need to change their behaviour and thus use buildings, and energy, more effectively. An ongoing post-occupancy evaluation for the building, the neighbourhood and the city.
A software service layer for connecting things together within and across buildings.
As information increasingly becomes thought of a material within building, it makes sense to consider it holistically as part of the built fabric, as glass, steel, ETFE etc.
INTRODUCTION
This is a somewhat overdue write-up of my talk at Interesting South, November 2007. For expediency, you could watch the video of the presentation. (It's 10 minutes long and punctuated at the end by the intro to 'These boots are made for walkin''). This is the extended write-up with notes, references and slides.
Caveat: I've often seen this site as essentially sharing my sketchbook, so please bear in mind that what follows is no more than a sketch, and series of notes, rather than any attempt to envision a fully-formed product. Any attempt at the latter would entail these sketches being tested by a more coherent design and research process. For now, this is simply a sketch, a kind of un-built architecture (for it is architecture, of a sort), and a simple, not necessarily innovative, idea drawn up for a swift 10-minute presentation at a highly multi-disciplinary event. Please take it in that spirit. I'd like to see something like this realised as a product on the market, which is part of my rationale for publishing here. In other words, feel free to make this - or some version of this - a reality yourself. If you find that the central idea doesn't ring true, I've written in such a way that you may still find some of the references or thoughts useful.
Essentially, the idea is for a system that makes previously invisible aspects of people's behaviour visible, in order to help change individual and collective behaviour. In this case, the primary drive is towards leading a more sustainable personal life, encouraging less consumption and more contribution, also taking into account the context of your behaviour in wider neighbourhood and city. By tracking your energy and resource usage, and playing this off against possible contributions made through generating energy or resource, systems are able to build simple aggregated profiles for these aspects of a person's or household's behaviour. Using popular techniques drawn from social software, these profiles provide users with historical trends for their behaviour, and allow the profiles to be compared, contrasted and recombined with those of others. By opening up these data feeds through APIs, within appropriate ethical and privacy frameworks, unforeseen applications of this information can emerge, even enabling the 'gaming' of consumption and contribution profiles, encouraging civic and sustainable behaviour through competition. By conveying this information through multi-sensory feedback and persuasive visualisation distributed across discreet domestic interfaces, the effects of a person's behaviour can thus be discerned in the everyday.
It's a kind of real-time, responsive, itemised bill for all the different kinds of primary resource usage (electricity, gas, water, transport etc.) in your life, which also takes into account the contributions you make. A sustainable lifestyle, leaving aside the thorny definition of such a thing, could at least become a little bit more tangible.
As it concerns this somewhat over-used word 'sustainability', I wanted to start the talk with the following image of the Sydney Morning Herald to indicate that I was less interested in apocalyptic headlines or hectoring people into submission, and more interested in giving people tools and information to encourage positive behaviour, and to explore ways of taking personal control of a more sustainable way of living (More on 'Apocalypse Sydney' here).
"The house is cold, someone keeps turning the lights off, and the greywater toilet is blocked again. As a way of life, sustainabilty often sounds grim. The media don't help: they tell us we have to consume our way to redemption. The shopping pages are filled with hideous hessian bags; and ads that used to be placed by double-glazing cowboys now feature wind turbines, and solar roofs. Adding mental discomfort to the mix, politicians scold our bad behaviour as if we were children dropping litter. And preachy environmentalists expect us to feel guilty when we fail to embrace their hair-shirted future with joy."
So this is an idea to make sustainability something personal, intimate, meaningful and orientated towards positive contributions, as well as connecting the individual's actions to the wider urban context.
Clem Jones seemed like a decent man. A dedicated republican and Labor party stalwart, he died aged 89 on Saturday 15th December 2007. The press are widely crediting him with 'building Brisbane', which is now the fastest-growing city in Australia and the 'Third Metropolis' finally forcing the traditional cultural capitols of Sydney and Melbourne to sit up and take notice.
Queensland Premier Anna Bligh says Jones was "the father of modern Brisbane ... his lifelong civic contribution and love of the city of Brisbane was unsurpassed ... Clem will long be remembered for his vision and commitment to transforming Brisbane from a conservative country town to a vibrant and cosmopolitan city." Local boy and new Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd - another sign of Brisbane's currently rising star - said "Clem was a longstanding personal friend of mine, a great source of support and encouragement and friendship."
He may well have been the key catalyst in transforming Brisbane in the latter part of the twentieth century. The city is increasingly unrecognisable to that described by those who saw it in the '70s and '80s. Wealthy from numerous sources, a strong hi-technology-oriented industrial base, with an increasingly well-respected university and research sector, the best new art gallery and library in Australia and currently the country's most innovative architecture scene, a wonderful sub-tropical climate and handy for the jaw-dropping Queensland coast, increasingly good restaurants and fabulous local produce, a tree-covered hilly topography on which the extremely liveable suburbs sit, and with the distinctly Asian aspect that most Australian cities should have.
There is still a residual sense of the earlier Brisbane in the culture, of course, as these things take generations to shift (more on this later). The city had to come a long way too, from the frankly unbelievable Joh Bjelke-Petersen years. But the character is now orientated towards an educated, cultured, outward-looking and sophisticated city - a world away from the 'Brisvegas' that the out-of-touch in Sydney and Melbourne would still tag the city with, albeit with an increasingly insecure note in their voice.
Jones, as lord mayor for 14 years from 1961, pulled the city's socks up and set the scene for all of this. But along the way Clem Jones was also the man who pulled the trams out of Brisbane in 1969. By all accounts, no-one was particularly happy that last day of the trams, except a few of the traffic engineers.
As a replacement, Jones and his administration embarked on the vast road-building schemes that now define the modern Australian city, and all to no avail. Brisbane is horribly clogged with car traffic, no matter what. Just as Sydney is. And that, perhaps more than anything, holds both cities back from fully realising their modern vision. Jan Gehl's recently announced plan for Sydney's centre is not without its flaws - listen to his lecture from September to see where it comes from - but a pretty close version of it needs to be implemented in Sydney, and Brisbane should do likewise, though spreading the ambit of the plan over the sprawling city's outer suburbs.
As with most cities, the trams were a part of the urban infrastructure that resonated long after their demise. The great Brisbane writer David Malouf suggests that the city is still marked up with the ghosts of the tramlines:
"The city is conceived of in the minds of its citizens in terms of radial opposites that allow them to establish limits, and these are the old tram termini: Ascot/Balmoral, Clayfield/Salisbury, Toowong/The Grange, West End/New Farm Park, to mention only a few; and this sense of radial opposites has persisted, though the actual tramlines have long since been replaced with 'invisible' (as it were) bus routes. The old tramline system is now the invisible principle that holds the city together and gives it a shape in people's minds." [David Malouf, 'A First Place: The Mapping of the World', Southerly, vol.45, no.1, 1985. Found in The Third Metropolis by William Hatherell]
That's such a beautiful evocation of the city's form that it seems churlish to wonder how many people today, a generation later, would sense those radial opposites. Malouf's imagery is so strong that it would defy simple quantitative measurement, and by repeating it here I'm hopefully reinforcing the image one more time. However, today's Brisbane has very visible swollen arteries - principally Coronation Drive into Riverside Expressway, and the ICB (Inner-City Bypass) - rather than invisible principles, and they appear to do little to hold it together.
Jones did what he thought was necessary - albeit advised by American planners, apparently. Certainly, someone had to lift Brisbane into the post-war period. Before Jones, many of Brisbane's roads "even those just a kilometre from the GPO", reports The Australian, breathlessly - were "uncurbed and unsurfaced dirt". Admittedly the dirt roads weren't tenable and Jones's administration sorted all of that. But in doing so, it fully orientated the city towards the car. There's an in-built prejudice against public transport around this. Jones was quoted as saying that his ideal was for the working man to be driving his own car, not catching a tram. This is where Australia looked to American values rather Mittel European or Asian, and for the worse. There are clearly spatial similarities between Australian and American cities, but I'm yet to perceive the swing back towards public transport seen across the US west coast, from the Bay Area up to Portland and Seattle (never mind New York City, which might be a special case). It's not a party political issue either; Jones was solid Labor, though his sentiment was close to Margaret Thatcher's infamous statement: "Any man who rides a bus to work after the age of 30 can count himself a failure in life."
Hear we see not only Thatcher's near-psychotic levels of misanthropy but also, crucially, her lack of long-term strategic vision. The question now is, at what point will we be saying "any man who doesn't ride a bus won't be getting to work".
Jones was far less destructive than Thatcher but either way, an entire car-centric infrastructure will now have to be taken apart, bit by bit, and reconstructed with mass-transit systems in the ascendancy. As with Sydney, that realisation is not widespread yet, and the culture is so ingrained as to actually prevent people from thinking there could be another way. The dramatic flourish in Gehl's plan for Sydney, pulling down the Cahill Expressway across Circular Quay, is described by the Sydney Morning Herald's urban affairs editor as overly "drastic and impossible".
Frankly, that's the unconsciously defeatist talk of someone who's spent too long in their city's skin, and can't think the the unthinkable. Equally, in Brisbane, it seems people can't think of another solution to near-fatal levels of individual car traffic than building more roads. Listening to Gehl's talk, they'd hear that building more roads only leads to more traffic, a pattern we've seen many times over. Almost every day in the local rag, the Courier Mail, you'll read of a simple unfortunate accident causing hours of chaos throughout a system organically interconnected through necessity rather than strategy. They even have a 'Stop the carnage' campaign, due to the increasing number of road deaths on Queensland's roads. These are all symptoms of the same spiralling metastasis you see when systems run at overload (see also Heathrow, the world's worst airport). Yet the solution offered up - despite the carnage, even - is usually tunnels, bypasses, bridges, while rail and bus services suffer from the bad management often seen when implicitly deprioritised.
Sadly, the shrill new urbanist agenda doesn't help change people's views that often. It's overly orientated towards the pedestrian, and needs to find a way of handling moderate levels of private car traffic as well as mass transit and pedestrianisation. Equally, some of those elevated road systems can be amongst the most thrilling aspects of modern cities, particularly Brisbane's Riverside Expressway (section pictured top), which is virtually a big-dipper casually sweeping out over the river. It's going to take far more imaginative campaigns than we've seen thus far - it's a hegemonic battle, ultimately - alongside serious build around mass transit systems and related infrastructure, hard and soft. And even then the strongest clear message will probably be peak oil.
"The size of a city determines its need for a metro system. Cities of a few million people—or those anticipating huge population growth—really can't do without a mass transit system. But cities of one or two million inhabitants can choose between a subway and a surface tramway, which costs far less but also runs more slowly."
But I'm not sure it's that well understood - simply a case of choosing between subway or tramway. Of course, there are now plans to for the trams to return to the 1.8m strong Brisbane (the person holding that 'you won't see this again' sign in 1969 was wrong), along with bus systems weaving underground and around the centre. Bike lanes are emerging, albeit threaded through some of the busiest and most dangerous roads in the country. These are usually seen in addition to road-schemes, rather than as progressive replacement. So it's a start, but hearing the currents in everyday conversation in this city, people have yet to understand the scale of change required to the city, that quite shocking sense of dismantling the entire infrastructure.
It's too simplistic to blame Jones or his administration - as a New World city boss of the 1950s and 1960s, almost anyone would have seen cars as a first order object to organise around. Only the already dense cities of the Old World were fortunate enough to have the right form for mass transit (even then Paris, New York, London, Boston, Barcelona et al did their best to slice their fabric apart with roadways, turning their backs on rivers or harbours, only to have to now re-build.) Yet even with a shift towards private ownership of cars, there was no real reason, strategic or economic, to pull the trams and light rail systems out of cities, and certainly no need to go as far as Jones or Thatcher suggested.
So. Brisbane is potentially beautiful and Clem Jones seemed like a good man. He helped shaped what's emerging as a great city, and now is not the time to speak ill of his generally valuable work. Yet it's symptomatic of the lack of understanding of the ills of the modern Australian city that few people are pointing out the flaws in building Brisbane around the car.
Repeating my hasty sketch, intended to indicate sounds bouncing through a space ('wavetracing') after Arup's SoundLab, it's easy to mentally reconfigure that to indicate wind - although of course the engineering actually being carried out here is far more precise, and wind has quite different characteristics to sound.
The engineering on the Southwark project is by Brian Dunlop Associates and Gas Dynamics. Dunlop says:
"There’s plenty of data for photovoltaic performance in urban locations but very little regarding urban wind power. From a planning point of view, we want to put to bed fears over noise and vibration, and so far the results have proved positive." Dunlop does add, though, that there is an enormous amount of data to be analysed. “The equipment used collects information every second using sophisticated software created by Gas Dynamics,” he says. "At the moment South Bank University is analysing data gathered from the first three months."
Arup's engineers are also modelling the way wind moves through open urban spaces, which sounds impossibly complex. Arup's Rupert Blackstone:
"Modelling urban wind movement is a real challenge. It’s almost impossible to be predictive because every environment has local characteristics that affect air flow. The surface roughness — meaning the variation in height of a neighbourhood’s buildings — has a huge influence on the wind resource available. There’s really no point in extrapolating from meteorological data — you have to be location-specific in your analysis.”
Wind turbines, as with other renewable energy sources, are only likely to increase in number throughout urban space, and personally I'm all for them. I've never quite understood arguments against their introduction - a few messy bird-kills here and there aside - and have personally almost always found them aesthetically appealing. I recall Justin Good's piece for Design Observer, when he almost systematically 'proved', in that way philosophy doctorates do, that "wind farms are objectively beautiful."
However, the article was predicated on the most likely current siting for wind farms - rural environments - and so hinged on the suggestion that people found wind farms unappealing as they resembled modernist sculptures, and so "don’t want the ideology of high modernism disrupting the very different order of the natural world."
In urban environments, smaller vertical axis wind turbines can look like modernist sculptures and all the better for it, perhaps more universally at ease in this setting. With some of the newer wind turbines on the market, they're not a million miles away from the Alexander Calder or Barbara Hepworth sculptures that we see at the Fundaçion Joan Miro or pinned to the side of John Lewis in Oxford Street.
This is perhaps due to their unwieldy size thus far but also, I think, a cultural association between renewable energy and 'the great outdoors', which is entirely false and actually problematic. As with water tanks there's an irony that most renewable energy products appear to be designed for properties in rural settings or at best on the fringes of urban sprawl. Whereas, of course, most people live in cities, in areas that are the highest contributors to greenhouse pollution. I'd like to see small elegant turbines intended for domestic use in tighter urban context.
That's why it's so interesting to see the experiments at Elephant & Castle. As Monocle reported last month, on some days Denmark achieves all its electricity demands via wind power - with an average of 20 percent. The blades developed by leading Danish company LM Glasfiber are 61.5m long, travel at around 300km/h and pull 9Gs. Not exactly what you want atop your house. But the Windspire, Helix, and particularly the Quiet Revolution, designed for small scale wind generation in cities, are developments that just might. Indeed, Quiet Revolution is almost designed to take advantage of the turbulence found in urban settings - or at least not be impaired by it.
Their projects include a QR5 to be mounted on top of a listed building on Southwark Bridge Road; planning permission granted, installation in "late 2007".
See also these seven turbines planned for the top of a development in Croydon. (Has all of south London been turned over to a giant test-bed for wind power or what? Wouldn't be a bad thing.)
Quiet Revolution's display turbines are also interesting, comprising LEDs embedded in the blades, combining renewable energy with informational possibilities - hopefully carried a little further than simple branding (an obvious display would be amount of energy contributed, in the spirit of the presentation I gave last week at Interesting South). I'd also love to know what they sound like. I suspect, in the spirit of positive soundscapes, that they would sound fantastic, actually. Should it necessarily be a quiet revolution?
We look forward to hearing more about these projects, and their impact on surrounding neighbourhoods, and also to a further refinement of their design, derived both from the sculptural lineage noted above and the huge variety in urban conditions found worldwide (wind may be the same force everywhere, but the spatial characteristics, cultural capital and related environmental conditions certainly aren't. Will we see cities such as Chicago and Wellington increasingly talking up their windiness?)
Do add a comment if you know of similar projects (perhaps even, dare I suggest it, outside of south London).
Finally, returning to the first point, modelling wind through these spaces is just one of the numerous fascinating developments around urban modelling - extending increasingly sensor-based models of buildings, generated and maintained throughout the lifecycle of a building and known in the trade as building information modelling (BIM), up to the scale of cities, aka city information modelling (CIM). So as well as developmental tools, speculating as to potential environmental behaviour of buildings and spaces, some of these systems could be built as real-time feedback loops, indicating the behaviour of urban spaces in real-time. It's a burgeoning loosely-defined field at the moment, running from indices of air pollution, water pollution or informational behaviour through to these live 'field recordings' of wind or sound. As the Building Design article suggests, "an enormous amount of data" can emerge from recording the dynamics of urban wind power, but our ability to now process this data - and then make sense of it through information design - has given us new possibilities for assessing the behaviour of urban environments.
It's also not without problems, as models are just models and not reality, and as such are limited in their expression of territory and have various patterns of power or ideology coded within them - a great editorial by Flavio Albanese in Domus #908 made a similar point about maps, recently - but when used imaginatively and with well-informed civic value in mind, we begin to have ever-more useful tools that may enable us to sculpt wind, sound and other elemental forces for the benefit of cities and citizens.
That's why it's so interesting to see the experiments at Elephant & Castle. As 
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