Creating a dense and green city
In February 2009, the City of Vancouver initiated a design competition, FormShift, inviting participants to imagine a dense green new urban development in the Vancouver region. The competition received 84 entries from 73 individuals and groups. The entries ranged from fanciful to facile and had some provocative challenges to city planners, developers and citizens.
Utopia was the order of the day for most entries, but some also drew attention to the fact that one person's dreamland is another's futuristic hell. The objective of FormShift was to shake things up. Brent Toderian, Vancouver's Director of Planning, pointedly includes the city bureaucracy along with developers and citizens among those who need to do some serious rethinking. He argues that the economic downturn provides leverage for the revolution that is required. "There's a real opportunity to change 'business as usual' right now,' he says.
The winner proposal RE-THINK SURFACE by Jeremy Sturgess, Sturgess Architecture, creatively mixes the use of all available surfaces for everything from power generation and urban farming to imaginative passageways and quiet public spaces for relaxation.
The competition also encompassed a Wildcard category won by Go Design Collaborative with the DENcity: INTENcity entry. The entry imagined an unlikely multi-storey mix of light industrial commercial and public spaces, including a public market with a green roof. The proposal also reanimated a controversial unused rail corridor with a streetcar.
Toderian hopes that the competition which attracted entries from as far afield as Rome, Rotterdam, Paris and Santa Barbara in a remarkably short six-week time frame, will become an annual event. "We've been lacking design competitions in Vancouver for many years," he says, adding that he sees such competitions as an important tool in a pressing matter. "Our mayor [Gregor Robertson] has challenged us to become the greenest city in the world in 10 years. If that's not a call to arms, I don't know what is."
For more information click here
Kommentarer
A correction, the City of Vancouver in partnership with the Architectural Institute of British Columbia, the regulating architectural agency in the jurisdiction, initiated, developed and held this competition and was proud to do so.
PDF's of the entire presentations of all the winning entries have now been posted:
http://www.formshiftvancouver.com/index.php?/results/winning-entries/
Let's talk about the "dense and green city". The image accompanying this piece is green, but it is not dense. Furthermore, it is not economically sound or buildable. Friends have pointed out that roof leaks would be rife. And that the reduction of the exposed building surface--a must to regulate heat loss and gain--is completely ignored by the architects.
Did the jury know what they were doing? It hardly seems possible judging from the 11 awards.
If the "idea" pictured here does not deliver on density, heat loss/gain or buildable economics, then how does it score on "greening"?
Like all the 11 awards (the only submissions we seen), Sturgess Architecture is missing the one element that delivers greening, cooling, bird habitat, protection from particulate matter, recharges the aquifir, corrects for human scale, and creates the sense of place.
The missing urban element? Continuous rows of tree planting on the street.
Jury selections take the same attitude to the all important public realm as the worst of our extant building products: they turn their back on the street. Missing street tree planting, the best and the most time-tested place to make green is put, well... over a barrel.
It's true that none of the entries shown had true "density" in the sense of an apartment building in a truly dense urban environment like New York or Paris. In the context of Vancouver however, an eight story building is almost radically dense.
With the addition you suggest of more trees and other green-roof elements like native grasses and factoring in some sort of cistern or other rain water collection, the Sturgess design could be quite nice.
WOW!!! People giving such a care and showing affection to tree really gives a good kick to the heart. We need trees for our lives for the sustaining of this planet. We should protect trees however it is wherever it is. I have been personally running this campaign to save ficus trees in my community. I have also been actively participating to bring awareness about the importance of trees to us. Hope everyone would think the same way.
Indsend kommentar