Under the term “urban renewal” we can find lots of different projects started by different entities (citizens, public authorities, developers) and with completely different visions. Some project will bring derelict industrial areas back to the city (as in Malley), some others will throw away most of the ancients inhabitants and look for completely new customers (as in the Flon), other projects will make little changes in order to improve the inhabitants’ lives without changing home values too much (as in the traffic calming measures along Avenue de France)…
Our speakers will review some examples of urban renewal,both in Switzerland and abroad, and propose a way to evaluate this kind of projects.
Monday 28 septembre 2009 – 20h00
Pôle Sud, Av. J-J. Mercier 3 (Place de l’Europe), 1003 Lausanne >>PLAN
Speakers: Sandra Guinand, researcher at UNIL and Pablo Cruchon, social worker at FASL.
Are you looking for your dream house? Is there something in (y)our city you’d like to be improved? Come and discuss at the Café Écoquartier: a meeting to talk about co-housing, eco-habitat and urbanism.
The Association Écoquartier waits for you on September 23, 2009, at 20.00 at the Café Restaurant de l’Ouest, Av.de Morges 119, Lausanne.
Wandering around the web, I discovered today a good news from Rome: A brand new BRT opening in the south-east of the city. The new infrastructure will start from ANAGNINA subway station and extend further east, passing through Cinecittà Est and Tor Vergata. All details of this infrastructure are here (PDF).
Almost all the line will run along a highway, with the exception of the first kilometer, along Via Ciamarra. In this first kilometer, some interesting interventions will be made.
Some days ago, at the conference “desperate houses” at the EPFL, I heard about a research, realized by the architectural firm Raumbureau, saying that, in the suburbs, around 1 over 5 houses is refurbished as office space.
If this tendence goes on:
Little by little, suburbs will become true villages with offices, shops, post offices, sall hospitals… (a similar project was shown at the conference),
Density is not the only solution to urban sprawl, other solutions (much more “open source”) are available,
The houses in Aigle, which I saw some days ago, can become something really interesting in a few years!
This month, everybody talks about suburbs (and about the prominent feature of suburbs, cars): some posts on RSR website (here, here and here), the last edition of the forumEcoparc: So, it’s the right moment to talk about this subject, and to propose a strategy to align autorities and developers’ interests.
1 – Complete the streets
First step, completely in the hands of public powers, is completing the streets. In many cases, people drive instead of walking because roads are designed for cars rather than for people. Let’s see some examples:
Aigle. Sidewalks are too small. Pedestrians are not protected from traffic
Aigle. Vehicles-only road
Aigle. Crossing forbidden (but people cross here anyway)
Aigle. Pedestrian underpass, not very appealing.
And here, some good examples:
Aigle. Trees, sidewalks and outdoor cafés.
Aigle. side street.
Aigle. Landscaped entrance to the shopping center (with bus shelter included)
The first two steps were were dedicated to public powers, the third one is dedicated to developers. Single-family houses and cars are, above all, industrial products, sold with a well-established marketing policy. So, mixed-use development should be marketed focusing on things that single-family houses couldn’t offer: common spaces, a vibrant community, walkable neighborhoods. At the same time, mixed-use development should keep the image of a customized house in a natural environment, image that made the single-family house so popular.
A good way to achieve this goal could be crowdsourcing: build a Cohousing or Coworking community, organize events in order to make future cohousers/coworker meet (i.e. a few-days trip) then go on all together to a developer in order to build our dream’s home. And the community could create new synergies and promote new features, like co-buying and mobility plans.
Today is Ada Lovelace day, a day in which each blogger should talk about a woman who changed the world in her field: a good occasion to talk about the person who gave the biggest contribute to contemporary urbanism, Jane Jacobs.
XIX and early XX century were the century of machines, a century in which the mainstream idea was the possibility to explain everything as the sum of a series of deterministic movements. Cities were explained on the same principles, and deterministic solutions were proposed to solve the problems concerning urban development.
Jane Jacobs was the first to show the limits of this approach, showing how it led to a car dependent, socially impoverished society. Against the deterministic approach of mainstream architecture, she proposed an approach based on life sciences, stating that cities grow in the same way as living organism do.
Most of her battles were against new expressways and neighborhood destructions, and now most of her ideas are supported by the new urbanism and complete streets movements.
In the last 50 years, we have built a massive amount of buildings, experimenting techniques and philosophies as never before. Reinforced concrete, cheap energy and cars allowed us a freedom to build that we never experienced before.
What shall we do with buildings that are growing old, need a massive renovation, but are a strong part of our heritage? Shall we save them as they are, adapt them to our comntemporary exigences, or admit they are too old and too expensive to be restore, and tear everything down?
In 50 years, will we regret our choices concerning the 50-years old buildings we decided to destroy, to keep or to renovate?
When we build our contemporary building, how shall we consider their future?
