cityofsound

Sketchbook: drawing The Shard's parking

A very short little note about a diagram we made yesterday. The fuller story is over at Helsinki Design Lab, which notes how my interest in The Shard tower in London was piqued by Bryan tweeting about the incredibly low parking rates they've achieved on that project. There are 87 floors, 72 of which are habitable, and only 47 car parking spaces (apparently mainly for disabled people, according to the project's lead architect Renzo Piano.) 

Shard render by AVR Studio (via Dezeen)

Working on very different developments here in Helsinki, on one of the city's primary strategic sustainable urban development sites, we know the city's parking directives can easily lead to a situation where you have a building with seven floors (we say "storey" in English, Americans (others?) say "stories", so I'm settling on "floors") generating a requirement for 120 parking places. Here, this usually has to go in a basement, which is good in terms of hiding the problem but very expensive to build (one of the more capital-intensive aspects, actually, which means you have less capital to spend on other, potentially more innovative or productive, aspects.)

The Shard's is an amazing result, and one apparently directed by then-Mayor Ken Livingstone. This also great to see—strong public governance shaping a strong outcome. Also rare to see, particularly in this game, where public officials are often more conservative and risk averse than their constituencies—based partly on misreading their constituents, due to lack of meaningful engagement, and based partly on cautiousness driven by the need to get re-elected—and through property developers who usually (with some exceptions) are never happier than when they can do what they did previously, and never unhappier than when they are being asked to do something differently. 

Sketch of Shard, possibly illustrating no parking, by Renzo Piano (Dezeen)

As I noted in a conversation that ensued on Twitter, I recall a major "sustainable development" in Sydney where the property developer's project manager for mobility had never actually been on public transport. This gives a sense of the industry we're dealing with here.

In the light of this absurdity, a little diagram immediately came to mind, comparing the size of the buildings and the volume of parking. Here's the first scribble on the whiteboard. Simple comparison of scale versus volume. (The top of the Shard wriggles because that's about 8 feet up the whiteboard and I couldn't reach!)

Journal: Ravintolapäivä, Restaurant Day, edible urbanism and civic opportunism

This screen grab of an iPhone app is interesting for a number of reasons. One reason is seemingly mundane, and concerns the procurement of such things, yet could unlock possibilities nonetheless.

The other reason is genuinely inspirational, potentially transformational even, and this post describes why, through both journal entry and essay.

The screen grab is from the Ravintolapäivä iPhone app. Ravintolapäivä is "Restaurant Day": each of the map's little green or black shields represents a pop-up restaurant of sorts. After starting in Helsinki a year ago, Ravintolapäivä's role is to suggest "a food carnival when anyone can open a restaurant for a day". 

Which it is, although this doesn't quite describe the genesis of the event, which came out of frustration with the effort required to set up a restaurant in Helsinki, of the kind that is open for more than a single day. (More on that below.)

Today, though, the sun was shining, the streets were full, and that frustration was long forgotten, given the explosion of invention on offer. While each of the little black shapes on the map above purported to represent a "restaurant", imagine "restaurant" in the widest sense of the word.

For instance, our first stop this morning was for breakfast served from a little wicker basket lowered from a first floor window into the group of waiting customers below. Euros are stuffed in the basket, and up it goes. You shout up your order. Breakfast comes back.

The string had a menu attached, featuring egg and bacon, or eggs benedict, in home-baked English muffins (both hot bacon sandwiches and English muffins are extremely difficult to come by in Helsinki.) This is, again, not exactly within the law, but if this is considered a problem, then I believe the saying is the law is an ass.

Journal: A walk in Schöneberg, Berlin: energy policy, gentrification, protest, and the humble joys of communal flower beds

I didn't think that a humble flower bed could have quite this effect. The verges - for they are numerous, every few metres - turned out to be the key feature of the streets of Schöneberg, Berlin, where I was walking with my colleagues on Friday morning.

We were being given a tour by Dr Dieter Genske (Fachhochschule Nordhausen, Universität Liechtenstein, ETH Zürich etc), one of Europe's leading experts on the relationship between cities, communities and renewable energy, particularly in Germany. And, it turns out, an excellent tour guide. Schöneburg was the subject of our tour as it is in the midst of an increasingly fierce gentrification battle, and so providing a concentrated demonstration site for examining civic action, urban regeneration and urban development.

And Germany was the subject of our visit as — perhaps with Denmark — it has the most interesting (and arguably most successful) energy policy in Europe and beyond. Germany has created an energy infrastructure which is, amongst other things:

• highly distributed and localised (minimising transmission loss);
• increasingly based on a diverse set of renewables (doubling its share of overall energy production from 10% to 20% in only six years); 
• generating hundreds of thousands of new high-value jobs in R&D, services and manufacturing; 
• and most interestingly of all, the infrastructure is majority-owned by communities themselves (individuals, small towns, villages, community associations.) 

This is part of a historic turn away from nuclear power and towards renewables for the country; importantly, described as part of an "energiewende" (energy revolution, or turnaround, roughly), a phrase that has echoes of German unification; and so the implicit idea that this is a national mission shared by all Germans.

We were there, as part of Sitra's Brickstarter project, to explore these relationships between systemic change, governance and citizen participation (we also saw Design Research Lab at Universität der Kunst, Renewables Grid Initiative, and Eclareon (more on all this on our Brickstarter project blog soon, as well as a quick post here explaining what Brickstarter is all about.)

Back to those verges. Schöneberg has as rich a history as any neighbourhood in a city that's seen more history than most, but the verges were the first thing Dieter pointed out. Almost every verge we saw was maintained by citizens — usually those in the adjacent block, or business — and this is agreed either formally, through asking the municipality, or informally i.e. just doing it without asking; "the Berlin Way", as Dieter had it.

Most of these flower beds are around the base of mature street trees (something else this neighbourhood benefits from.) Each is different, due to each block having different people in them. Simple.

Here a kind of meadow has formed in the middle of the road. Which cities would allow this?

Some are beginning to grow herbs and other edibles (of course, community gardens are rampant in Berlin at the moment. For example.)

Sometimes a cafe has built a wooden bench around the base of a tree (strong enough to resist late-night clumsiness) to act as a 'bar' for waiting customers on summer nights. Here we see the name of the adjacent cafe — "Soleil" — spelt out in flowers. (Should be on page one of any branding textbook, this one.)

It's an entirely small thing, and yet thoroughly inspirational. Of course, Berlin's governement is notorioulsy cash-strapped, and has been for years. Intriguingly, this does not seem to affect the city itself too much, which is as appealing as ever (a thought worth reflecting on, in terms of the hand-wringing over debt and austerity both here and abroad.) But it means the city has probably never turned down a request from citizens to look after their street.