Self-sustaining communities in China

Micro-communities

War and conflict often bring about the destruction of architecture, however these forces can also result in new constructions that define a cultural identity and place.Stressed by China’s growing population, the Hakkapeople have been confronted with armed warfare for local resources since the 17th century. To remedy their situation the Hakka began building massive structures that could not only stave off intruders, but would also form amazing self-sustaining micro-communities complete with food storage, space for livestock, living quarters, temples, armories and more.

more>www.inhabitat.com

Jopo Helsinki bike meeting

A City of Jopos

For a long time car owners have had yearly gatherings for special brands. Now bike owners are catching up. The first bike gathering for Helkama Jopo-bikes was arranged in Helsinki. Photographer Roni Rekomaa took a cool photo of the bikers on their Jopos. Talk  about ultra-cool! /aitoa

More> HBL

Photo Roni Rekomaa

Rolling hills of housing

Green building in Gothenburg, Sweden

Kjellgren Kaminsky Architects New Heden project transforms a vacant city block is a self-contained sustainable city interspersed with cycling paths and walkways. Envisioned as a “green lung” for Gothenburg, Sweden, the development will introduce a beautiful expanse of fresh green space to an area currently consumed by parking lots and football fields.

LINK> Inhabitat

Kjellgren Kaminsky Architects

Professor Hans Rosling

The skill to give an interesting lecture (on statistics)

It is a true skill to give an interesting lecture on something that normally would make most people fall asleep; statistics on world health. We present to you professor Hans Rosling from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden:

Eric Cavalcanti – January 12 2009 wrote:

A brilliant communicator with a great message that could change how we view and inform ourselves about the world. I believe this kind of technology associated with the freedom of information Rosling advocates, and perhaps with future uses of the internet as a means for direct participation from individual citizens could dramatically alter the way we conceive of democracy.

Work concept inventions

The new standard: A Parecon workplace is possible

by Jessica Azulay at ZNet

A parecon workplace is possible. I have experienced one, and now I believe we can overcome capitalism.

The hierarchical workplace is an insidious institution. It is a powerful mechanism through which capitalism imposes and normalizes some of its most vicious values: It thrives on competition. It encourages authoritarianism and subservience. It rewards workers for their race, gender, education, output, age, conformity, and their ability to “work the system.” It is dangerous for individual empowerment and democracy, yet it is embraced even by most social-change organizations. It must be subverted.

The theory of Participatory Economics provides a framework for creating a new kind of workplace in present-day market economies. It shows us how to organize our work around a different set of values: equity, solidarity, democracy, and diversity.

Unlike some facets of the parecon vision, which may seem lofty and futuristic, the workplace model can to a great extent be immediately implemented. I say this with confidence because I have done it.

For four years, I, along with several co-workers, labored in a parecon-based workplace to produce a daily, online news publication called The NewStandard. TNS, as we called it, was 100 percent reader funded and not-for-profit. It upheld the highest ethical standards in the news industry and focused on the perspectives of people most affected by current events and government and corporate policy.

Our particular project was a less-than-ideal laboratory for parecon. At its peak, when there were six of us, we worked from four different locations, which made communication challenging. We worked grueling hours to meet daily publishing deadlines, leaving little time and energy for other aspects of our organization. And the funding pressures of the news and alternative-media industries kept our publication on the financial brink.

Yet we found even this to be a rich environment in which to stave off hierarchy. Using the parecon fundamentals—balanced job complexes, participatory decision-making, and payment for effort and sacrifice—we were able to experiment, invent, and reinvent until we found ways of operating that were increasingly efficient and fair.

> continue ZNet

> Radical Office Design Book

The street flow of architecture

Does architecture shape our surroundings and our behaviour

-or do we collectively shape our architecture?

The street was not wide, maybe four meters wide, and it was sloped up towards a small bell tower. The level change was realized as steps, so that street felt like an interior– a part of a public building or a church. And indeed at the fond of the street there was a the local church, to which outrage the local gay bar on the street set up a fiesta every Sunday at the same time as church sermon took place.

The space of the street was surrounded by four-five story buildings, that seemed to grow out of the same material as the street. Their architectural qualities were humble, one had an over proportioned balcony off center that was full of dry plants like a hairy mold on your face, another had bad cracks in the plaster of the façade resembling a very old woman´s skin. There were also new-builds in the street. One lot on the street had as an economical venture sold building right to wealthy Russians from Novosibirsk, and the Russians had built a luxurious, but slightly tasteless apartment building on the lot. Still something – undefined still by our modern architectural theories – kept the streetscape together like glue and made it hole.

What we noticed after a while after settling in at our rented apartment on third floor, was that the street was never quiet. Even by night you could hear apart from some traffic here and there, also sound of heels tapping the stone pavement, strange shouts you could not locate, and dogs barking.

By day the street was a stage for activity. There were small shops that poured out their products on the street for display, cramped by the small space they had inside. People stopped and talked to the shop owners while passing by. The butcher on the street had a peculiar way of greeting all elderly ladies with a bit too intimate hugs. White collar workers rushed pass the street on their way to work and home. The homeless loitered around. Young men played football on the street. There was a sense of liberties taken and given, an unpronounced allowing code of conduct.

The above writing is freely adapted from professor Panu Lehtovuori´s lecture “Calzada de sant´Ana”, but it could be a description of any street in Europe admired in travel brouschures for its genuinity. Why are we as trained architects unable to design a street like this today?

It’s a steet that encourages, not just allows people to be themselves. It forces to interaction with other people. Interaction is one of the main keys to happiness, if not one of the most crucial. All humans have a need to define themselves and their identitiy through others , through their reaction. Be the reaction admiration, schock, indifference, but we all crave that in some form. When the possibility to interact is taken away from you, you seek it trough the internet, through books, or through meditation or other. Human life is an exodus for recognicion, reaction or the lack of it. But it has to be tested. Every single human being seeks interaction. What architecture needs to do, is to give space for people to meet on the terms they define. Individuality wants liberty to have the freedom to choose who and how it interacts with, but individuality always needs to define itself trough others; if it only observes from the balcony above the street, if it stays in the shadow of the doorway, timid to step out into the limeligh, of if it takes center stage and becomes the hero or the antihero of the show called Calzada Sant´Ana.

Give and get in return.

The above is a story of a street in Lisbon Portugal – Europe. Thanks to professor Panu Lehtovuori and his “Calzada de sant´Ana”.

Keywords:

-Genuine

-Humble

-Scenography

-Noice

-Interaction

-Entity

-Street space

-Flow

-Choise

-Intimacy

-Freedom

-Tolerance (to balance your own freedom)

//aito

> www.urbanphoto.net

How to make a community as well as the space for it

To transform temporary available and under-used spaces

A renewed approach to architecture and urban planning cannot be initiated solely by centralised structures and governmental bodies. Doina Petrescu highlights the importance of ‘other spaces’, the temporary appropriation and use of leftover spaces and urban interstices, spaces of relative freedom, where rules and codes can still be redefined.

continue>www.re-public.gr

Risky play and treehouses

As architects we often get frustrated by building codes. Finnish building codes are strict, and cut in stone, there are no excuses made. A step higher than 40-50 cm; has to have a safety rail of 90 cm high. Apple trees in apartment building gardens; forbidden, raw apples can be toxic if consumed in huge quantities (and I mean HUGE). A staircase cannot be too narrow or too steep – ever. Etc, etc. By all these rules we think we make the world safer. But is safety first right? We are actually by eliminating risk, also eliminating part of life, and the process of learning. Learning gives you joy and confidence. And arent small risks so much more fun than someone telling you “play NOW!”.//aito

www.baumraum.de

Kids need the adventure of ‘risky’ play

A major study says parents harm their children’s development if they ban tree-climbing

A major study by Play England, part of the National Children’s Bureau, found that half of all children have been stopped from playing; climbing trees, playing conkers or taking part in games of tag or chase. Some parents are going to such extreme lengths to protect their children from danger that they have even said no to hide-and-seek.

‘Children are not being allowed many of the freedoms that were taken for granted when we were children,’ said Adrian Voce, director of Play England. ‘They are not enjoying the opportunities to play outside that most people would have thought of as normal when they were growing up.’

Voce argued that it was becoming a ’social norm’ for younger children to be allowed out only when accompanied by an adult. ‘Logistically that is very difficult for parents to manage because of the time pressures on normal family life,’ he said. ‘If you don’t want your children to play out alone and you have not got the time to take them out then they will spend more time on the computer.’

Voce pointed out how irrational some of these decisions were. Last year, almost three times as many children were admitted to hospital after falling out of bed as those who had fallen from a tree.

The tendency to wrap children in cotton wool has transformed how they experience childhood. According to the research, 70 per cent of adults had their biggest childhood adventures in outdoor spaces among trees, rivers and woods, compared with only 29 per cent of children today. The majority of young people questioned said that their biggest adventures took place in playgrounds.

Voce said Play England was determined to spread the message that children ought to be taking risks and that it is ‘not the end of the world if a child has an accident’. The latest study will be launched on Wednesday to coincide with Play Day, when hundreds of events will take place across the country to celebrate children’s right to play. It will show that play providers also feel the opportunities for children to ‘test and challenge themselves in play involving a level of risk’ have reduced over the past decade. They blame overcautious health and safety officers and the fear of litigation if children have accidents.

link> The Guardian

The city of voice – Wikicity

Wikicity

Vaarallisia ajatuksia - Dangerous Thoughts – that is something the guys at Demos like. Imagine year 2050 they say: most of the worlds population will live in “slums”; self-built cities. `This is our salvation!´ the men state. Wait a moment?

Wikicity is the city of voice. It’s the place of opportunity superior to the gold paved streets of another utopia, it is where opportunity is something you create together. It’s the place where man (hopefully woman, too…) can create his own surroundings. It is organised anarchy – extremely alluring. Dangerous? Risky? Naive? Optimist? Innovative? Hopeful? Progressive? Unpredictable? Brilliant? YES!

Look at what we have as an option: people more and more disengaged in decisions on their own lives, more and more distrustful of neighbours, more and more alone, embedded into a blanket of that everything in life is -so well organized-.

Roope Mokka of Demos Helsinki wrote an article on “Thinking Cities” for the Monocle alongside Alain de Botton, Richard Florida, Jonathan Raban, Ricky Burdett and Richard Alston. //aito

The idea of self-built cities is the greatest promise for urban development. The idea is that we open up the creation of cities in the same way we have opened the compiling of encyclopedias and online-media to allow anyone to contribute. It’s the same principle that many industries are using to open up their R&D, design and marketing processes to their customers and which also inspires “open source” software development. Co-creating cities is one of the few positive developments in a problem-ridden tidal wave of urbanisation in the 21st century. And it’s one that could make us happier.

The core issue is that cities no longer enable us to live out our dreams. We have changed, but the cities haven’t. They remain the final bastions of modernistic design where users are seen as the masses and individuals are an obstacle. Even suburbia (on the surface a tasteless, mundane, hypermarket-bound high-carbon lifestyle) offers more potential for self-expression. That is why we fleeing cities. To lure us back we need cities that give us a voice. We need to take democracy to the next level, where it recognises our individual needs and dreams.

Demos NOW, an urban think tank, has created the concept of City 2.0 (PDF) – an urban ecosystem of social innovation, governance and social risk funding. We want to turn the Helsinki Metropolitan Area into a self-built city; a hi-tech low-carbon “slum” with an unforeseen and unpredictable quality of life. A Wikicity.

yhteiskunta 2.0

The Bankside Urban Forest

Questioning common design on “safe” neighbourhoods

The regeneration of London’s Bankside quarter, most famous for the Tate Modern, is being accompanied by a public space strategy with an ecological approach.The Bankside Urban Forest is a proposal for a wholly new concept of urban green space networks and linkages.

This scheme for the London Bankside urban renewal has grown out of a strong sense that local residents perceive the area described in the scheme as being “calm”,“safe”, and enjoying a strong sense of local identity already. It is not the case, however, that labyrinthine means dangerous, as local residents confirm. Conventional public space strategies are often informed by safety concerns which suggest that large open spaces and long straight vistas must invariably feel safer. Yet many people find large, hard-surfaced landscapes threatening by their sheer lack of incident and anonymity. Local residents around Bankside find no contradiction between describing the area as feeling safe, along with praising the irregular network of streets and back doubles. What they do fear, however, is the “Manhattanisation” of Bankside north of Southwark Street, and the forest concept is one which it is intended will weave human scale and engaging pathways and networks linking old and new Bankside together. Local residents interviewed for this study have confirmed the importance to them of the distinctive irregular street patterns of the area, together with the many courtyards, railway arches, viaducts, bridges and alleyways. Thus, there were great strengths in respecting the existing labyrinthine set of streets and settlements, which inspired the idea of the Bankside forest.

Bankside is a densely populated and historic quarter on the southern bank of the River Thames in London.The area is being regenerated, with about 50 projects currently under consideration. Several illustrative projects (dark green) have been proposed to help bind the public space network together.

This proposal imagines the Bankside public realm strategy as an urban forest rather than a park. There is an important difference. The term park originates with the Latin parricus or French parc, both meaning enclosure. The early English deer-parks were royal hunting grounds and strictly policed, for instance, whereas the forest has always been regarded as a place of liberty and without distinct boundaries.
Over time, “forest space” has acquired a set of architectural and topographical associations with a sense of open-endedness and permeability, a place that can be entered or exited at any point at its edges, and which visually changes and re-configures itself as the traveller moves through it. Because of their organic origins, forests offer a multiplicity of paths, routes, changes of direction, as well as clearings, copses, streams, rides and allées. “A person should be able to walk through a forest on the way from home to work,” the architect Alvar Aalto once said.

“If forests appear in our religions as places of profanity, they also appear as sacred. If they have typically been considered places of lawlessness, they have also provided havens for those who took up the cause of justice and fought the law’s corruption. If they evoke associations of danger and abandon in our minds, they also evoke scenes of enchantment. In other words, in the religions,mythologies an literatures of the West, the forest appears as a place where the logic of distinction goes astray.”

Thus, there were great strengths in respecting the existing labyrinthine set of streets and settlements, which inspired the idea of the Bankside forest.

Though the forest idea introduces elements now associated with “greening the city”, and largely determined by ecological imperatives – to counter CO2 emissions, to lower ambient temperatures, to increase surface water retention and avoid flooding – there are equally important social and economic imperatives in the forest strategy too.

The intensification of existing public spaces allows for a hybrid of new urban forms. In Flat Iron Square, the existing café could be turned into a woodland hut built around the trunks of the mature plane trees.

In addition to strengthening the historical jigsaw of spaces and places, the forest concept also introduces a slowing down of time, based on the experience of irregular pathways and frequent and engaging visual incident. Urbanists have for some time now been drawing attention to the “overscripting”of public space in many urban regeneration schemes, so that all conflicts and loose ends are designed out, and the public are organised into patterns of use and timetables decided elsewhere. This disallows for that sense of wandering and of discovering a neighbourhood by serendipity. The very qualities for which we admire historic European towns and cities.

BANKSIDE URBAN FOREST, SOUTHWARK, LONDON, UK
Client: local stakeholders led by Better Bankside BID Company, including the
London Borough of Southwark,Tate Modern,Transport for London, Cross River
Partnership, Land Securities, GC Bankside LLP, the Architecture Foundation
Architects: Witherford Watson Mann, London, with Ken Worpole
Area: 1.7 square kilometres
Witherford Watson Mann were one of eleven competitors in an invited
competition.The framework was completed in March 2007, and launched
in September 2007.

London Bankside Urban Forest (pdf)

(link) bd on Bankside Urban Park by Witherford Watson Mann