#polycentered

[fatehbaz]

Cities can no longer be thought about as bounded territories [...]. They are entities massively disaggregated and distributed across space and time [...].

It begins with three urban vignettes:

[One dimension]

1.   In Johannesburg in 2000, politicians came up with the controversial idea of defining an ‘urban edge’ to the city as a cordon to secure its perimeter and contain urban sprawl. This took the form of a line on a map, reactivating a rather ancient idea of the city as a bounded territory, with policy infrastructure (not walls) separating inside from outside, them from us, order from disorder and defining an interior for administration, taxation and servicing purposes. In 2011, Johannesburg rescinded the urban edge as a policy instrument because it exacerbated the problems it set out to solve. It allegedly pushed up land values within the urban perimeter, relegating poor communities to live outside its boundary and the line was simply routinely adjusted year on year to incorporate earlier approved urban developments beyond it. A fixed line urban edge was shown to be unworkable.

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[Two dimensions]

2.  Graham Shane illustrated his essay, “The Emergence of Landscape Urbanism,” in The Landscape Urbanism Reader with Cedric Price’s famous 1982 diagram, ‘The City as an Egg.’ Price characterised the ancient city as a hard-boiled egg arranged in concentric layers within its shell or walls; the industrial 17 -19C [17th to 19th century] city is portrayed as a fried egg, its perimeter deformed and extended outwards by railway corridors; and the post-industrial city is drawn as a scrambled egg – polycentered, granular, lumpy, uneven, with a morphology of enclaves and isolated building typologies.

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[Three dimensions]

3.  This version of the city remains grounded and two dimensional. In 2011, Adam Frampton, Jonathan Solomon and Clara Wong presented a three dimensional version of the city [...] [a] graphic analysis of Hong Kong titled Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook. Whereas in most cities of the world, the city is a composition of figure-ground relationships and the ground plane is the datum of urban life, in Hong Kong, they argue, this is not the case. The city is a result of a combination of “top-down planning and bottom up solutions … played out in three dimensional space.” A continuous network of elevated or underground pedestrian passageways, stairs, escalators, elevators and footbridges pass through malls, office lobbies, train stations, bus stations, ferry terminals, public parks etc. [...]. The city is, quite literally, ungrounded, emerging as a topological continuum, where atmosphere, or “microclimates of temperature, humidity, noise and smell” generate urbanity, direct circulation and make place. [...]

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Thinking (and visualising) the ways cities mobilise resources, alter weather patterns and serve as attractors of people and things makes it clear that they operate as interconnected entities in an all-encompassing, though discontinuous and uneven, urban system. […] Cities today leak out of all such enclosures. [...] [W]hen I turn on a light switch in London, I might tap into the fossilized remains of plants and animals sedimented under the North Sea millions of year ago; the polystyrene cup I drink my morning coffee from  is itself a by-product of liquefied dinosaur bones, otherwise known as  oil, and will outlive me by 400 years in a distant landfill. [...]

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Lindsay Bremner. “The Urban Hyperobject.” Geoarchitecture. 24 August 2015. [All photos also from the article.]

[digitaltrand]

Singapore wants more people living inside its business districts

Singapore wants more people living inside its business districts

The city-state will continue to build so-called polycenters, or local business districts, in addition to the main central area, so more workers can stay closer to home, the Urban Redevelopment Authority said in a release of its long-term plan on Monday. June 07, 2022 / 06:47 AM IST Paddlers row past the central business district, at Marina Bay in Singapore, on Sunday, Oct. 3, 2021. Singapore is…

[studio-helsinki]

Books about Playground

Reading about Playground....

Liane Lefaivere+ Döll, Ground-up City, Play as a design tool

PIP(Participator, Interstices, Polycentered) principle of Aldo van Eyck

Richard Dattner, Design for Play

theory of play (psychological and social) and adventure playground and cases

Lady Allen of Hurtwood, Planning for Play

adventrue playground adopted from Denmark to the UK

Gabrielea Burkhalter, The Playground Project

every playgrounds so far and today’s practices, particularly LUDIC group

Paul Hogan, Playgrounds for Free

Karl Linn’s socially relevant design, public spaces and communal life

Aldo van Eyck, the playgrounds and the city

Le Corbusier, Kinder der Strahlenden Stadt

....

and more people and keywords,

Karl Linn, M. Paul Friedbert, Group Ludic, Riccardo Dalisi, Colin Ward (’The child and the City’), Palle Nielsen, Isamu Noguchi...

[fatehbaz]

“Cities” - or, in their 21st Century manifestations, urban megaregions and agglomerations - exist beyond 3 dimensions: Their influence spans both time and space, they utilize tangible physical resources but also exert invisible power over culture, dictating the lifestyles of people living hundreds of miles away in rural hinterland.

Here’s an except, where scholar of architecture Lindsay Bremner demonstrates the inadequacies of thinking of cities at 1-, 2-, or 3-dimensional scales and describes the process of realizing that cities exist at incredible scales

It begins with three urban vignettes:

[Hypothetical one-dimensional cities]

1) In Johannesburg in 2000, politicians came up with the controversial idea of defining an ‘urban edge’ to the city as a cordon to secure its perimeter and contain urban sprawl. This took the form of a line on a map, reactivating a rather ancient idea of the city as a bounded territory, with policy infrastructure (not walls) separating inside from outside, them from us, order from disorder and defining an interior for administration, taxation and servicing purposes. In 2011, Johannesburg rescinded the urban edge as a policy instrument because it exacerbated the problems it set out to solve. It allegedly pushed up land values within the urban perimeter, relegating poor communities to live outside its boundary and the line was simply routinely adjusted year on year to incorporate earlier approved urban developments beyond it. A fixed line urban edge was shown to be unworkable

[Hypothetical two-dimensional cities]

2) Graham Shane illustrated his essay, “The Emergence of Landscape Urbanism,” in The Landscape Urbanism Reader with Cedric Price’s famous 1982 diagram, ‘The City as an Egg.’3 Price characterised the ancient city as a hard-boiled egg arranged in concentric layers within its shell or walls; the industrial 17 -19C city is portrayed as a fried egg, its perimeter deformed and extended outwards by railway corridors; and the post-industrial city is drawn as a scrambled egg – polycentered, granular, lumpy, uneven, with a morphology of enclaves and isolated building typologies.

Cedric Price, “The City as an Egg.” Source: http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/534-the-eggs-of-price-an-ovo-urban-analogy

[Hypothetical three-dimensional cities]

3) This version of the city remains grounded and two dimensional. In 2011, Adam Frampton, Jonathan Solomon and Clara Wong presented a three dimensional version of the city, in the form of  a brilliant graphic analysis of Hong Kong titled Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook.4 Whereas in most cities of the world, the city is a composition of figure-ground relationships and the ground plane is the datum of urban life, in Hong Kong, they argue, this is not the case. The city is a result of a combination of “top-down planning and bottom up solutions … played out in three dimensional space.”5 A continuous network of elevated or underground pedestrian passageways, stairs, escalators, elevators and footbridges pass through malls, office lobbies, train stations, bus stations, ferry terminals, public parks etc. and replace the ground as the basis of urban life. The city is, quite literally, ungrounded, emerging as a topological continuum, where atmosphere, or “microclimates of temperature, humidity, noise and smell”6 generate urbanity, direct circulation and make place. To make sense of the complexity of this city spatially and politically requires thinking it as and through volume

Hong Kong, City with No Ground. Source: http://randomwire.com/hong-kong-city-without-ground/

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[But] today’s cities can no longer be thought about as bounded territories or even volumes at all.

They are entities massively disaggregated and distributed across space and time that generate profoundly different temporalities and scales than the ones we are used to and do not fit neatly into the nested spatial model of contemporary politics. Cities today leak out of all such enclosures.

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Lindsay Bremner, School of Architecture, University of Westminster. Geoarchitecture. 2015.