Assignment
Choose an uninviting public place in your neighbourhood whose layout and structure make you feel uncomfortable or unwelcome. This may be for any reason and must not be restricted to traffic. There may be social issues, or safety issues such as criminality. Maybe a space has been taken over by tourism, by taxis or maybe there are just too many claims so people start encroaching on each other. Many of these issues, planners or designers can do nothing about, but as far as the spatial dimension is concerned, we can use our skills to propose solutions.
There have been several private sector projects in downtown Nanaimo that have made considerable contributions to its urbanization. City Hall transportation and urban design policies — especially in the areas of walkable neighbourhoods and neighbourhood public places — have not kept pace. In Assignment 5 in the Technical University of Delft on-line course, Urban Design for the Public Good: Dutch Urbanism, I have proposed a solution to a public space on our City Hall's formal grounds that is presently used only to park a few cars and extends to and eliminated what was once the adjoining sidewalk. I have proposed the creation of a new public square on the site. This square would take advantage of the view from here across downtown to the harbour and be a very welcome addition to the steadily densifying Old City neighbourhood.
Before
Proposed
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Looking spatially at Nanaimo's mobility and transportation systems with inputs and outputs, storage and using a "circular urban metabolism" approach and the principles "reduce, reuse and recycle."
ASSIGNMENT
See your city or town as an ecosystem with inputs and outputs. Choose one flow with a particular relevance for this ecosystem. The assignment is to analyze this flow. Not in a quantitative way, but in a spatial way. What are the inputs and outputs? Where do they enter, stay and leave your ecosystem? Where do spatial problems arise? Try to visualize them in the way shown in the Definition part of this tutorial. Draw a miniature or simplified version of “your town” in the diagram below.
You can use the subsoil, the surface or the sky above to represent your flow. Try to think of spatial solutions or improvements using the circular urban metabolism approach in which you try to “reduce, re-use and recycle” your flow. Please note: this is an explorative exercise. It is about generating spatial ideas. Your contribution may be speculative!
Pinterest Assignment 4:
Urban Metabolism
A lot of people self-identify as “fiscal conservatives.” These folks are often enthusiastic supporters of $10 - 15M spent on a single intersection. This surprises me as in my view these spends are the most wasteful of all our allocations of public funds. Our public investments in mobility infrastructure have a responsibility, as do all public investments, to return a clear benefit to the greater public good.
It’s said that “a well-defined problem is already half solved.” The problems being addressed when intersections are given a make-over are usually little more than a few fender-benders and seconds and minutes lost in our rush to get from here to there. Northfield Road is the latest example with construction at the Parkway and imminent for the Boxwood, Bowen Road and Island Highway intersections.
Cost of these projects totals $10s of millions and won’t solve the problem. That’s because the problem properly identified is two-fold: The BC inter-city Provincial Highway system lands here in a residential neighbourhood via BC Ferries at Departure Bay. This traffic has to flow through Nanaimo neighbourhood streets to reconnect with the highway system. The other part of the problem is one of urban design and transportation planning — Nanaimo has not designed and built alternative mobility modes. No credible effort has been made by the City to reduce the number of trips which require the use of a private automobile, to reduce the number of cars on city streets..
So take a fresh look at the problems we face as drivers. Here’s 2 suggestions. 1. Take a bus, walk around, ride a bike. The view looks very different than the one through the windshield of our cars. You’ll no doubt find these inefficient even unsafe. Consider that investment in these modes and better land use planning might return far greater benefit to the public good. And 2. Familiarize yourself with the concept of “induced demand.”
Induced demand is "the great intellectual black hole in city planning, the one professional certainty that everyone thoughtful seems to acknowledge, yet almost no one is willing to act upon.” — City Planner Jeff Speck
