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 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

Guerilla gardening

Urban gardening

Regardless of whether you are an urban, suburban, or rural dweller, there is inevitably a patch of neglected turf in your neighborhood that might need a bit of TLC and greening. If you see hidden gardening potential between sidewalk cracks when others see decay and abandon, well then, you might be a budding guerrilla gardener and not even know it! The guerrila gardening phenomenon is currently sweeping the globe as folks are finding innovative ways to come together for the optimization of neglected land and paved surface area. It’s a turf war for some, or a poetic gesture for others, but either way, citizens are rolling up there sleeves to create gardens in the most unlikely spaces and places.

The term ‘guerrilla gardening‘ might scare off some, but the practice has a long history of both radical and community-building tactics. Liz Christy and the Green Guerrillas transformed an abandoned lot in NYC’s Bowery during the 1970’s and as the BBC recently reported, guerrilla gardeners are ’sowing the seeds of resistance’ in South London. Many ‘resistance gardeners’ consider themselves to be vandals of sorts but with plants or seeds as weapons, often operating covertly at night in empty lots or on public property that otherwise remains unkept or barren.

The Guerilla Gardening website has a friendly though subversive sort of tone, as it has gone from tracking the activities of “illicit cultivation around London” to being a “growing arsenal for anyone who is interested in waging war against the neglect of public space.” It’s troop digs are warm and inviting and ultimately about reclamation, beautification, and even growing food in public spaces (a political act in and of itself as we re-educate ourselves about viable land use). The lighter side of the guerilla gardening campaign would probably be community gardens or grassroots gardening, which also brings folks together (during daylight hours) for neighborhood improvement and local food security. Whether as collective green graffiti or as an attempt to reclaim the neighborhood and make improvements for all, guerrilla gardening is a form of eco-activism that is catching on despite its controversial methods.

+ Guerilla Gardening
+ Green Guerillas

Green roof cityscape

Cityscape of flowers

The answer to lost urban wildlife habitats could be found right above our heads thanks to Lindum Wildflower, a ready-made wildflower meadow perfect for ‘green roofs’, which is being developed and tested by Lindum in association with the Landscape Department at the University of Sheffield.

Lindum Wildflower contains a range of wildflower species growing in a biodegradable felt. Using patented Grassfelt technology, it is easy to install, as it can simply be rolled out onto a rooftop like a carpet. >continue

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www.turf.co.uk

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