Future-proofing Jane Jacobs
Jacobs against Constant Niewenhuys’ rendering of New Babylon
For the next two months, you can check this space for regular posts reflecting on chapters of Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The fine folks at the Centre for City Ecology have teamed up with Creative Urban Projects to present the City-Builder Book Club (CBBC)—a guided and scheduled online discussion, beginning with Jane Jacobs’ landmark tome of urban theory. Our purpose here will be to look at planning discourse past (Jacobs) and present (the discussion hosted by the CBBC through blog posts and discussion forums) and see how the ideas raised might be addressed in the design of Upper Toronto.
Please feel free to read along, and join the discussion on the CBBC site. Look for our first post on chapters 1 and 2 next Wednesday.
![It spanned on [sic] hundred meter high pillars straight across the American continent. Its interior combined all classical functions of urban life and was connected by a complex traffic system that was differentiated by speed, transportation and distances […] Alan Boutwell and Michael Mitchell described their project with the self-confidence and urgency that is characteristic of that time: This is our city. We have not sensationalized. All that we have described is feasible today.
—curators of Megastructures Reloaded describe the Alan Boutwell’s and Mike Mitchell’s Continuous city for 1.000.000 human beings (1969) via io9](http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyesolHsEk1qdsjzuo1_500.jpg)
It spanned on [sic] hundred meter high pillars straight across the American continent. Its interior combined all classical functions of urban life and was connected by a complex traffic system that was differentiated by speed, transportation and distances […] Alan Boutwell and Michael Mitchell described their project with the self-confidence and urgency that is characteristic of that time: This is our city. We have not sensationalized. All that we have described is feasible today.
—curators of Megastructures Reloaded describe the Alan Boutwell’s and Mike Mitchell’s Continuous city for 1.000.000 human beings (1969) via io9
Maisonneuve Magazine: Presenting Maisonneuve's first annual Genre Fiction Contest!
If you’re reading this, you probably have some utopian tendencies brewing. Put ‘em on paper and send ‘em in.
“La Sortie de l’opéra en l’an 2000” by Albert Robida.
Presenting: Maisonneuve’s first annual Genre Fiction Contest!
Starting now, Maisonneuve will run a literary contest every year, with the contest’s genre changing from year to year.
This year’s theme: science fiction.
(In future…
Join us at our next community consultation. We’re pairing with Making Room Community Arts and the Parkdale Village BIA on this one, and it should be an exciting return to the downtown core. At our consultations, we try to guide conversations in directions that are relevant to the specific community— so expect to share thoughts on the city’s connection to the lake, on gentrification, and on neighbourhood cohesion. See you then!
Segregating Flows, Animating Infrastructure
Chris Burden’s Metropolis II
An interesting conundrum we’ve encountered throughout our public consultation phase has been that there have been virtually no devoted car users involved in the process. At the same time, integral to the success of the planning of Upper Toronto is the participation of as many different notches on the spectrum of its future inhabitants—not just bike-riding folk who live in largely walkable and accessible neighbourhoods. In beginning to plan some incarnation of a transportation grid for the city, we are already noticing some biases that will make it a much easier city to live in for cyclists, pedestrians, and users of public transit, addressing the car either by banishing it from the city entirely, or by tucking it away from plain view. It’s already clear that we need an in-depth foresighting investigation into likely transportation futures, but for now we can only begin to build upon initial ideas pitched at our consultations.
One common thread throughout our conversations has been a push towards separating transportation infrastructure according to its designated mode of transport. For instance, our Don MIlls group suggested a privatized transit grid that would sit atop highways, allowing transit users to completely bypass traffic jams. A consequence of this design would likely cast a dark shadow over all private vehicles, who would be forced to trudge through tunnels and underpasses. Driving with the top down doesn’t sound so sweet any more. This calls to mind EPCOT’s tucking-away of vehicle traffic under the great mound of Disney World, which we mentioned in our post on nomadism. All non-pedestrian modes of transport -with the exception of electric vehicles- were to be routed underground, conveniently concealing the shameful legacy of the internal combustion engine, an ugly Untouchable relegated to the subterranean world.
Appropriately, Disney World itself is a kind of upperized* community. As John Jeremiah Sullivan notes, “The tunnels represent ground level. Everything else is built on top. Disney World is a giant mound, one of the greatest ever constructed in North America. When you’re walking around in the park, you’re about 15 feet above where construction began.” Though for Disney’s purposes, the underground acts as a backstage area for costumed characters on break, it serves as an ample metaphor for the way we draw distinctions between active and passive components of our urban environment, and illustrates our desire to hide imperfections in the networks and flows that make up our urban landscapes. (Have we mentioned the translucent sewage tubes pitched at one of our consultations?)
Alternatively, as proposed by our Idea Jam participants, citizens could flow through the new city by way of modular transport systems and moveable roads. Forget the jughandle and the MIchigan left—clumsy flaws in current transportation planning might just be obsolete in Upper Toronto. Imagine road components that reconfigure and click into place according to timed traffic patterns, perhaps themselves moving and urging the tide along. Combined with the advent of the self-driving vehicle, this has the potential to abolish traffic signals completely, submitting road safety and traffic efficiency at the mercy of a completely regulated, wired-in transportation network. All kinds of developments in this vein are already taking shape, from Peng Yu-lun’s design for a train that never stops at a station, to the highly efficient management of foot traffic through airports since the mid-20th century. In fact, as Matt Novak is quick to point out in this Paleofuture post, Albert Speer was designing walkways that kept pace with pedestrians long before transport hubs and museums harnessed conveyor belts and pallet-type walking strips. Maybe it’s time our pathways became more than just reinforced soil beneath our feet.
*Upperization: A term coined at our Idea Jam, to refer to the physical elevation of an existing community above its current built environment, or the upward construction of an existing landscape.
In the first installment of our year-end brainstorming reports, we talked about mobile architecture — that is, architecture that moves for us and eliminates the compartmentalization of the built environment into discrete functions, transportation infrastructure at one end and buildings on the other. Naturally, we’re not the only ones considering how we might upgrade future approaches to design to reflect the changes in our day-to-day lives that have taken place since industrialization.
Y Design Office proposes a modular high-rise for Hong Kong. The modules of Unit Fusion would each comprise a highly customized living unit that opens itself up to further alterations, with the added dimension of vertical mobility. Spanning a structural life expectancy of 30 years, the units will move to designated zones every five years, responding to the natural crests that occur in the ebbs and flows of the lives of households.
2012 — ??? — 2085
We have some things lined up in the next month:Mark Your 2012 Calendar
We Need Your Help
We have a lot of ambitions for 2012. It’s the year that we move into Phase II of the project, switching from straight public consultation into beginning to design and propose our city in the sky. This means continuing to run public events while also putting together smaller teams of people able to work in ideas in a more dedicated way. Here’s a taste of what we have in mind:
One thing we don’t mention enough on this blog is that we are actively seeking to grow our team. As our pitch goes, it takes a village to build a city. We cannot do this alone. We need support ranging from running this mailing list and transcribing notes right on up to organizing workshops—to say nothing of introduction to experts and communities that we‘d otherwise never meet. If you have time and any interest, we can find something that you’ll enjoy doing. We are particularly enthusiastic about talking to collaborators who want to run with an idea of their own. Please get in touch: info@uppertoronto.ca.
A City of Nomads and Building-events
Walking House, designed by N55
In Central Florida, nestled among 40 square miles of land dedicated to the pure expression of consumerist bliss and infantile indulgence lies the Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow. Never fully finished -and intentionally so- the utopian community was set up by Walt Disney as a showcase of the most recent human achievements and as a testing ground for new urban planning methods. To avoid the complications linked with mixing corporately-owned land with residential zoning, EPCOT was to offer rental-only housing. Without land ownership and permanent residency, we cast off current spatial understandings of political geography, as well as a slew of infrastructural regulations that manage necessities like waste and water. However, the framework of nomadism may offer a more flexible and user-centric approach to design — central to adaptive building types that may answer much of today’s sustainability rhetoric.
At our Idea Jam at ThingTank a couple of weeks ago, we brainstormed how we might future-proof Upper Toronto. How do we design a city today that will be relevant 75 years from now, when it’s ready for occupancy? One idea that came to the forefront was the questioning of land ownership and the significance of fixed sites as anchors for the built environment. With another million residents arriving in Lower Toronto within the next 30 years, home ownership in Upper Toronto will have to be rationed through enforced maximums and minimums, or nomadism will need to take the place of residency as an expression of citizenship and personhood. At our consultation at the Fairview Library, participants brought up the idea of having services come to residents, decreasing the amount of consumer-based commuting throughout the city— a system that could feasibly be sustainable given the proper demand. Though idyllic garden-city type developments were thrown around at this stage, the idea Jam participants took up this subject without prompt, proposing pneumatic delivery tubes managed through an online marketplace.
A stone’s throw from this is the idea of building delivery — another proposal from our Idea Jam participants. Imagine a mobile school building that arrives in your neighbourhood for the day, departing at the end to serve a community elsewhere. Echoing Archigram’s Walking City, this idea has been passed around in paper architecture projects since the early 20th century, but if you look closely, you’ll see it slowly taking form in today’s cityscapes.
Last week, Allison Arieff argued for a move away from permanence as a central tenet of architecture, pointing towards pop-up shops and food carts as just two of many forms of ephemeral architecture that have emerged and already become part of our everyday environment. The formulation of architecture as event rather than as space may just be the way to future-proof Upper Toronto. According to Arieff, without the confines of locational commitment, long-term engineering strategies, and building codes, designers may have more means to more quickly employ emerging technologies. Architecture-as-event would also rid of the limitations that develop alongside trends and place-types. Opening up building components to re-use, this attitude would allow users an equal part in authoring an architecture that is in effect an open work. The city would forever be what the citizens make it, moving with them and for them.
Phase I Updates
We’ve been busy.
So busy, in fact, that we’ve dropped the ball on reporting back to you after each of our events. Well, you can unclench your anticipation muscles and relax. Here’s what we’ve been up to.
On October 30, we had our most successful community consultation to date, co-hosted by Ward 33 Councillor Shelley Carroll’s team at the Fairview Public Library in Don Mills. Councillor Carroll kicked off the event, enthusiastically drawing connections between Toronto’s immediate need for foresight and our own agenda for thinking “on top of the box” and building a city our grandchildren will want to live in.
The primary aim of our community consultations has been to gather ideas from a wide range of Toronto’s citizens about what their needs are in their everyday built environment, touching upon what downfalls we might be able to overcome with future technologies. Participants gather in small teams of five, working on questions revolving around a theme assigned to each table. This time, we talked about public spaces, neighbourhoods, entertainment & tourism, and transportation. 
What has been most interesting through the evolution of Phase I of our project is seeing an ongoing conversation arise at a greater scale. As we talk to more people, commonalities emerge, and a problem that seemed to have no practical solution at a consultation is suddenly solved when we talk to an urban planner at a brainstorming session a month later. In November, we held a small experimental cartography workshop as well as a board of advisors meeting. The year cumulated with an Idea Jam at ThingTank a couple of weeks ago. All of these events have come together to form a strong foundation to kick off the design phase of our project, and we want to thank everyone who has been involved in any capacity thus far.
Stay tuned for a series of themed posts throughout the next two weeks, exploring some of the issues that have woven their way into our planning process.
Special thanks to Art Starts Villawayz for their talented youth artists, who provided on-the-spot illustration at the event; to Erica Jacobs for all of the photographs you see above; to Shawna Teper and Shelley Carroll for their organizational support; and to Sue, Kyn, Tom, Ella, Chao, Linda, Lucy, Musawir, Dahab, Michael, Ihab, Mohamed, Ian, Rob, Shelly, Mary, George, Kelsen, and Meccana for their bright ideas.
Recent talk at Upper Toronto (specifically at our very successful Idea Jam at Thing Tank last week—more on that later) has stumbled upon the problem of reconceptualizing the verticality and horizontality of our built environment. Rather than limiting Upper Toronto’s building stock to high- mid- and low- rise and keeping traffic on the streets below, why not sew a seamless built environment that allows for more efficient flows and emergent networks through the use of elevated connections and streets that pass through buildings, allowing vehicles to slow and dock where appropriate?
William Robinson Leign, “Visionary City”, 1908
