SUSTAINABILTY
AND THE PUBLIC REALM
WORDS John Allan & Gary Marshall
Gary Marshall: Bachelor of 3-Dimensional Design Unitec, MLA Lincoln, Senior Associate at Jasmax
John Allan: Graduate Landscape Architect at Jasmax
IMAGES Meg Back
Sustainability of the public realm is an inherent part of place making. Contemporary ‘best practice’ approaches to public realm design in central city environments tend to focus on the prioritisation of pedestrians through the integration of traffic calming measures such as ‘shared spaces’ and pedestrian tables. Where possible, these spaces are accompanied with ‘green infrastructure’ elements like rain gardens and constructed wetlands.
While these approaches help to address localised effects such as automobile dominance of the public spaces and water quality, they fail to address deeper issues relating to sustainability such as fossil fuel dependency and the need for continued economic growth. This article describes how best to understand and intervene in a complex system such as the public realm and presents three emerging practices that challenge practitioners to think more broadly about how their designs contribute towards sustainability.
Corporate financial headquarters that are entirely dependant on the ongoing growth of the global market place appear through veneer of green (infrastructure) – literally
Sustainability – The Root Cause
“Instead of tackling our worldviews to address the problem of growth, we choose the symptom of climate change as the problem” (Logan, 2013).
The modern environmental movement gained prominence through a number of key publications - none more important than the seminal book The Limits to Growth (Meadows, Meadows, Randers, & Behrens, 1972). Published in 1972, this study used the most advanced computers of the day with the best data available to model the planets “behavioral tendencies” with regard to the variables of world population, industrialisation, pollution, food production and resource depletion. Three scenarios were tested, two of which concluded that the contemporary global economy would over shoot and collapse during the first half of the twenty first century. Repeated analysis has bought the same results and the fact that human civilization cannot grow indefinitely on a finite planet remains irrefutable (Diamond, 2005; Greer, 2008; Meadows et al., 1972; Randers, 2012; Tianter, 1990). 40 years on, the central premise of The Limits to Growth has yet to manifest within mainstream approaches to sustainability and many, if not most, ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ projects and design frameworks fail to recognise or respond to it.
In 1997, the lead author of The Limits to Growth - Donella Meadows - developed a theory identifying the most effective leverage points for intervening in a complex system – a point where a small change in one part of the system can have an instrumental affect on the system as a whole (Meadows, 1999). Meadows proposed twelve leverage points, organising them in increasing order of effectiveness. While it may seem counter intuitive, the least effective leverage points are ‘top down’ system parameters that tend to involve the ‘numbers’ and ‘structure’ of a system – the amount of land in conservation, the allocation of budget, the size of buffers, and the physical structure of the system. While these components have an enormous effect on defining the character of a system, they rarely affect the behavior of the system. Despite these observations most public realm design work attempts to intervene utilising ‘top down’ strategies. The most effective leverage points within a system are bottom up strategies concerned with the ‘DNA’ of the system and the nature of how a system self organises. In the case of human systems, including the public realm, the DNA involves ‘the goals of the system’, ‘the mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises’ and ‘the power to transcend paradigms’ (Meadows, 1999).
Meadows’ demonstrates that the most effective leverage points within a system are the underlying patterns that govern how a system behaves rather than the outward manifestation of the system itself. Put another way, the most effective leverage points within a system are those that address the underlying causes of how a system performs – the paradigm, values and behavior’s of people within the system rather than the effects of the system such as climate change, resource depletion, loss of water quality and biodiversity loss, or the dominance of the public realm by automobiles. This article maintains that based on the available evidence, the current paradigm and values that preference economic growth, coupled with fossil fuel dependence cause these effects (Greer, 2008; Meadows, 1999; Meadows et al., 1972; Tianter, 1990).
Designing The Public Realm - Contemporary Best Practice
Renowned architect and urban designer Jan Gehl states that “giving higher priority to pedestrian and bicycle traffic would change the profile of the transport sector and be a significant element in overall sustainable policies” (Gehl, 2010). The approach of putting people ahead of the cars in the hierarchy of transport prioritisation has appealing clarity and has worked to great effect in many city centres around the world, particularly those with an urban morphology pre-dating the automobile. This is evidenced in the growing interest in cities such as Copenhagen and Melbourne, which have been retrofitted to prioritise the life between buildingsi. Guided by a ‘Public Life Survey’ completed by Gehl Architects in 2010, Auckland has also just begun a similar undertaking in the quest to become the worlds most livable city. Gehl’s work demonstrates that provided that time and budget are available, top down strategies to upgrade the public realm can modify the attitudes and behavior of motorists towards pedestrians and cyclists. However, it remains unclear how pedestrianising an inner city affects broader regional mobility challenges such as congestion, or societal dependence on fossil fuels for the movement of goods and people.
Current trends in contemporary placemaking also suggest that most practitioners agree with James Corner’s approach to the public realm. With a focus on brownfield sites, Corner views the current shift in ‘first world’ cities from an industrial economy toward a service economy, as an opportunity for ‘a totally new landscape of leisure’ (Rhodes, 2012).
These brownfield remnants are the accepted detritus of industries left redundant as cities everywhere continue to outsource labour, materials and manufacturing to low cost, offshore alternatives. While a number of Corner’s earlier writings and theoretical designs demonstrate a refined understanding and application of ecological systemsii, his more recent built work seems less concerned with these ecological processes and ignores the broader socio-cultural systems and economic processes that create the brownfield sites in the first place.
These brownfield remnants are the accepted detritus of industries left redundant as cities everywhere continue to outsource labour, materials and manufacturing to low cost, offshore alternatives. While a number of Corner’s earlier writings and theoretical designs demonstrate a refined understanding and application of ecological systemsii, his more recent built work seems less concerned with these ecological processes and ignores the broader socio-cultural systems and economic processes that create the brownfield sites in the first place.
For all their appeal, these pedestrian scale, walkable, ecologically considerate,
‘leisure-scapes’ are unquestioning of the societal behaviours and values of economic growth, globalisation and fossil fuel dependency. In many cases these ‘best practice’ public realm strategies prescribe pedestrian priority and urban renewal in order to improve the economic competitiveness of the city and are justified on the basis of economic growth through increased consumer spending. For example, the ‘Pedestrian Pound’, a recent report commissioned by British charity organisation Living Streets, claims that making places better for walking can boost footfall and trading by up to 40% (Lawlor, 2012). Increasingly, these projects appear not as life changing innovative public spaces but as stage sets for high-end global retailers and corporate headquarters that provide few benefits to residents and fail to trigger the more effective leverage points within the system – Auckland is no exception.
‘leisure-scapes’ are unquestioning of the societal behaviours and values of economic growth, globalisation and fossil fuel dependency. In many cases these ‘best practice’ public realm strategies prescribe pedestrian priority and urban renewal in order to improve the economic competitiveness of the city and are justified on the basis of economic growth through increased consumer spending. For example, the ‘Pedestrian Pound’, a recent report commissioned by British charity organisation Living Streets, claims that making places better for walking can boost footfall and trading by up to 40% (Lawlor, 2012). Increasingly, these projects appear not as life changing innovative public spaces but as stage sets for high-end global retailers and corporate headquarters that provide few benefits to residents and fail to trigger the more effective leverage points within the system – Auckland is no exception.
Because these strategies rely on centralised, top down approaches to planning, design, funding and implementation, they engage the least effective leverage points in a system. Worst of all, public realm strategies that fail to recognise underlying causes unwittingly contribute toward a positive feedback loop that continue to reinforce the economic processes that generate brownfield sites and will continue to undermine efforts towards designing a public realm that can contribute towards sustainability in any meaningful way.
Where Corner, and other ‘landscape urbanists’ such as Alan Bergeriii appear to be comfortable accepting the inevitable urban decay that results from the pursuit of growth, others are exploring public realm strategies in cities that have been less successful in making the transition to the service economy. The poster child of declining cities – Detroit, is faced with such challenges. To many, and rightly so, these challenges are seen as opportunities ‘to re-think the civic landscape as a greater system with the potential to be reproductive, generative and structural’ (Desimini, 2013). Through her work at StossLU, landscape architect and theorist Desimini proposes productive and multi-functional landscapes that clean air, water and soil, make healthier urban environments, and generate resources for food, energy, commerce, and habitat (Desimini, 2013). Desimini’s approach maintains the green infrastructure of Corners ‘leisure-scapes’ and adds a layer of utility to the
landscape - highlighting its productive potential – suggesting uses such as urban farms, algae-culture, aqua-culture, hydroponics and energy fields.
landscape - highlighting its productive potential – suggesting uses such as urban farms, algae-culture, aqua-culture, hydroponics and energy fields.
Robert Thayer, landscape architect and theorist observes that as transportation using fossil fuels becomes increasingly expensive, a shift will inevitably occur - ‘more local goods will be created and consumed, it remains to be seen whether this contraction in the scale of the instrumental landscape will be matched by more localised ownership, or by continued globalisation of corporate systems of production and distribution’ (Thayer, 2004). Thayer’s observations regarding localisation of economies highlights the potential of Desimini’s utilitarian, productive landscapes and offers clues as to where public realm practitioners should be applying their trade.
The work of StossLU in Detroit remains reactionary and like many other approaches to the public realm relies, for the most part, on ‘top down’ mechanisms for validity, funding and implementation and the question remains how similar strategies can be implemented to build resilience in cities to transition into a post growth phase and shift toward more localised communities.
While the design of our public realm will never exclusively affect ‘system change’, the following design strategies offer insights into how public realm design can trigger the most effective leverage points that, intended or otherwise, highlight emerging practice and suggest future directions and considerations for sustainable placemaking in the public realm.
Public Realm Design – Emerging Practice And Future Directions
The following emerging practices and future directions are loosely organised into the overlapping frameworks of Tactical Urbanism, Adaptive Muddling and The Commons.
Tactical Urbanism And Adaptive Muddling
“A great many small experiments must be conducted, and quickly. Many need to be far-reaching; some will fail, but all will inform a larger process of societal adaptation to a new biophysical reality” Raymond de Young and Thomas Princen.
Tactical Urbanism couples temporary interventions in the public realm with long term planning by developing low-cost, low-commitment, incremental changes to the city with the intention of leaving in place or implementing permanently, those interventions that work. An approach described as ‘Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper by Project for Public Spacesiv.
One of the most recognisable examples is the ‘parklet’, which emerged out of the now global ‘Park(ing) Day’ event. In San Francisco a number of parklets have proven to be valuable assets for adjacent retail stores, cafes and the general public, inspiring council to create legislation to retain them and encourage the creation of morev. In this instance, tactical urbanism provides a bottom up mechanism for implementing Gehl’s pedestrianised city and allows citizens enact their democratic right to express a change in values at local scale.
The Enabling Cityvi initiative emerged out of Toronto Canada in 2010 and has been documenting how participatory democracyvii can influence the public realm through ‘place based creative problem solving’. Where most public realm strategies rely on the governance of representative democracy, Enabling Cities highlights the inherent advantage of incremental change made by local citizens within their own community. Their goals include celebrating the creative community and using public spaces as sites of experimentation, highlighting numerous tactical urbanism projects.
Adaptive Muddling, a framework developed by Raymond de Young and Stephen Kaplin that recognises the trial and error process of muddling through a problem, is an inherent human quality and forms part of our evolutionary success. To recognize that design is in essence muddling, allows us to take risks and accept failures as learnings. Adaptive muddling first requires acknowledgment of the problem that tends to be ignored or denied – the limits to growth - and the implementing at a small scale, multiple ideas simultaneously in order to explore, test and refine them. Rather than simply testing incremental and marginal change, adaptive muddling emphasizes experimentation and “encourages exploring, and thus pre-familiarising, for life-changing adaptations” (de Young & Kaplin, 2012). Where Tactical Urbanism provides a strategy for design intervention in the public realm, Adaptive Muddling provides the lens needed to focus on more effective leverage points of a
system – values and behaviours.
system – values and behaviours.
The Commons
A commons approach to governance is based on shared resources ‘that are neither the private property of separate owners nor the property of a single public entity. Rather, the participants in a commons serve collectively as stewards for managing shared resources’ (Brecher, 2013)
Working largely in Buffalo, Academics Deborah and Frank Popper suggest that the time has come to embrace some form of negative growth. Their Buffalo Commons project and later their Smart Decline concept starts with the acceptance of resource constraints – a change in economic paradigm - which in turn enables structural interventions that allow a city to more easily ‘Reorganize space; remove unneeded infrastructure; rethink transportation, energy, and food options; encourage industrial and other heritage tourism; and, above all, rightsize themselves in authentic, resilient ways (Heinburg & Lerch, 2010). Popper’s work demonstrates that meaningful responses to sustainability emerge and are enabled through a change in values relating to physical constraints. This change in values enables new models of shared ownership and co-governance that can lead to innovative strategies to landscape management and regeneration.
For example, ‘Blotting’ is a Smart Decline strategy that allows landowners to purchase unused adjacent lots for a nominal cost to allow for amalgamation of lots over time while concentrating the remaining built infrastructure in strategic locations. While blotting is no doubt far from the minds of most Aucklanders today, an evolved version targeting underutilised inner city spaces, such as the many carparks distributed throughout the city centre, could offer a promising strategy for the ‘ambiguous’ spaces that Manuel de Sola-Morales argues will play a ‘more significant role in everyday social life’.
In his ‘Hypertrophy of Public Space’ theory de Sola-Morales asserts that ‘the good city is one that is able to give a public value to what is private’, imagining a city where the public and private realm are indistinct by ‘bestowing an urban public character on buildings and places that would otherwise remain solely private’ (de Sola-Morales, 2008).
In his ‘Hypertrophy of Public Space’ theory de Sola-Morales asserts that ‘the good city is one that is able to give a public value to what is private’, imagining a city where the public and private realm are indistinct by ‘bestowing an urban public character on buildings and places that would otherwise remain solely private’ (de Sola-Morales, 2008).
Conclusion
Sustainability of the public realm is an inherent part of placemaking. Many if not most contemporary green and environmental design initiatives and public realm practitioners fail to address the underlying cause of the many challenges we face today - our current economic paradigm and fossil fuel dependence in particular - instead focus on the effects that manifest themselves in climate change, resource depletion, loss of water quality and biodiversity, the dominance of the public realm by automobiles etc. Meadows’ leverage points offer a framework for considering where best to intervene in a system. The emerging practices and future directions of Tactical Urbanism, adaptive muddling and the commons, while divergent in their intent, highlight a range of common themes. In particular, they question our current behaviors and values and leverage small scale, bottom-up initiatives that emphasize experimentation and the practical application of theory. These frameworks provide fertile ground for future place making initiatives in the public realm of our inner cities.
i Søholt, H. (2004). Life, spaces and buildings: Quality criteria for good public spaces and the working methods dealing with public life. Paper presented at the Walk21-V Cities for People, Copenhagen, Denmark.
ii Terra Fluxus in: Waldheim, C. (Ed.). (2006). The Landscape Urbanism Reader. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Or various writings in Corner, J. (Ed.). (1999). Recovering Landscape. Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
iii Berger, A. (2006). Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
iv Project for Public Spaces website: http://www.pps.org/reference/lighter-quicker-cheaper-a-low-cost-high-impact-approach/
v‘ Pavements to Parks’ parklet policy and manual - http://sfpavementtoparks.sfplanning.org/parklets.html) Park(ing) Day involves design teams reclaiming one or more metered parking spaces for a day to create a ‘parklet’ (http://parkingday.org).
vii Participatory Democracy, sometimes called Direct Democracy, is where citizens vote directly on policy decisions, rather than electing an official who makes the decisions. See Ross, C. (2011). The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Can Take Power and Change Politics in the 21st Century. New York: Penguin.
References
Brecher, J. (2013). A Legal Blueprint for Ecological Survival. Retrieved from http://onthecommons.org/magazine/legal-blueprint-ecological-survival
de Sola-Morales, M. (2008). A Matter of Things. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.
de Young, R., & Kaplin, S. (2012). Adaptive Muddling. In R. de Young & T. Princen (Eds.), The Localization Reader: Adapting to the Coming Downshift. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Desimini, J. (2013). Wild Innovation: Stoss in Detroit. Landscape Urbanism, 04: Rethinking Infrastructure(Spring).
Diamond, J. (2005). Collapse. London: Penguin.
Gehl, J. (2010). Cities for People. Chicago: Island Press.
Greer, J. M. (2008). The Long Descent: A users guide to the End of the Industrial Age. British Columbia: New Society Publishers.
Heinburg, R., & Lerch, D. (Eds.). (2010). The Post Carbon Reader. California: Watershed Media.
Lawlor, E. (2012). The pedestrian pound: the business case for better streets and places. In Just Economics (Ed.). London: Living Streets.
Logan, M. (2013). Stranger in a strange land. Retrieved from http://prosperouswaydown.com/stranger-strange-land/
Meadows, D. (1999). Leverage Points: Places to intervene in a system. Hartland: The Sustainability Institute.
Meadows, D., Meadows, D., Randers, J., & Behrens, W. (1972). The limits to Growth. New York: Universe Books.
Randers, J. (2012). 2052: a global forecast for the next 40 years. Vermont: Chelsea Green.
Rhodes, M. (2012). For Creating Intimate Green Spaces out of Industrial Urban Blight. Retrieved from http://www.fastcompany.com/most-innovative-companies/2012/james-corner-field-operations
Thayer, R. (2004). Sustainable City Regions: Re-localising Landscapes in a Globalising World. Landscape Review, 9(2), 13-25.
Tianter, J. (1990). The Collapse of Complex Society. London: Cambridge Univesity Press.
References
Brecher, J. (2013). A Legal Blueprint for Ecological Survival. Retrieved from http://onthecommons.org/magazine/legal-blueprint-ecological-survival
de Sola-Morales, M. (2008). A Matter of Things. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.
de Young, R., & Kaplin, S. (2012). Adaptive Muddling. In R. de Young & T. Princen (Eds.), The Localization Reader: Adapting to the Coming Downshift. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Desimini, J. (2013). Wild Innovation: Stoss in Detroit. Landscape Urbanism, 04: Rethinking Infrastructure(Spring).
Diamond, J. (2005). Collapse. London: Penguin.
Gehl, J. (2010). Cities for People. Chicago: Island Press.
Greer, J. M. (2008). The Long Descent: A users guide to the End of the Industrial Age. British Columbia: New Society Publishers.
Heinburg, R., & Lerch, D. (Eds.). (2010). The Post Carbon Reader. California: Watershed Media.
Lawlor, E. (2012). The pedestrian pound: the business case for better streets and places. In Just Economics (Ed.). London: Living Streets.
Logan, M. (2013). Stranger in a strange land. Retrieved from http://prosperouswaydown.com/stranger-strange-land/
Meadows, D. (1999). Leverage Points: Places to intervene in a system. Hartland: The Sustainability Institute.
Meadows, D., Meadows, D., Randers, J., & Behrens, W. (1972). The limits to Growth. New York: Universe Books.
Randers, J. (2012). 2052: a global forecast for the next 40 years. Vermont: Chelsea Green.
Rhodes, M. (2012). For Creating Intimate Green Spaces out of Industrial Urban Blight. Retrieved from http://www.fastcompany.com/most-innovative-companies/2012/james-corner-field-operations
Thayer, R. (2004). Sustainable City Regions: Re-localising Landscapes in a Globalising World. Landscape Review, 9(2), 13-25.
Tianter, J. (1990). The Collapse of Complex Society. London: Cambridge Univesity Press.
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