Defiant Imagination

Sustainable architecture in the townships rewarded

Carin Smuts has proven that sustainable architecture doesn’t have to be elitist. The South African architect won the second Global Award for Sustainable Architecture a few days ago in Poissy, France. Smut has been working for almost two decades in South African townships, where she builds low-cost housing and public buildings. She says her work is sustainable —she calls it “micro-sustainable”— because her projects are designed in collaboration with the local populations in order to understand their needs as well as the daily reality of the neighbourhoods.

Source: Le Monde.

Get out of Mysteria Lane and walk!

How walkable is your neighbourhood? Check it out at Walk Score. The website compiled a list of the best North American walkable neighbourhoods, by looking at their density, the proximity of its amenities and how easy it is to get from one point to the other. Why walk? Because it’s healthy and cheap. And the best walkable neighborhoods are often also the most enjoyable ones (they’re never located in the suburbs, is that a surprise?)

There is a farmer in each and everyone of us

The next big thing for urban dwellers is… gardening. We already knew about community and rooftop gardens, but recently, journalist and New York Times blogger Allison Arieff wrote about her experiment with vegetables in her own home. “It is truly growing into something that is wholly about collaboration, community and connection to food, to neighbors, to land,” she wrote. In Montreal, where I live, the neighbourhood committee Greening Duluth is organizing monthly markets where neighbours can sell the vegetables that they’re growing in their own garden. And an architecture firm is building an eco-project called Productive House where apartments and town house include a space to grow vegetables. Urban gardening is not just a trend born out of concerns about the environment, it is a movement in reaction to the lack of social interaction in cities.

Suburbia: The Economist got it wrong

Here’s another occasion to bug you with my interest for suburbia. The Economist has an article this week on America’s suburbs. It talks about their transformation, from homogeneous to heterogeneous. Whereas in the ’50s, most inhabitants of suburbia where twenty- and thirty-something white couples who were just sarting a family, it now includes a muti-ethnic population, as well as seniors and gay couples.
But the suburbs have also seen their roles changed and have become the center of the attention. More businesses and offices are moving there and some residents have abandonned their daily commute to the city centres.
Now the most interesting part of the article — in my opinion — is this little passage about suburbia’s detractors:

James Kunstler, an American urbanist, says they represent “the greatest misallocation of resources the world has ever known.” Richard Florida, an influential writer, sees them as incidental, at best, to cities’ highest purpose, which is to concentrate the young, creative folk who will come up with brilliant innovations. Now that America worries about global warming, the acres of bungalows and freeway exit ramps seem not just pointless but harmful.
Although much of it is nonsense, it cannot be denied that a little sheen has come off America’s suburbs in the past year.

Well, that’s a smart way to quickly go over what some urbanists and researchers have been dedicating their work to and spend the rest of this 2600-word article trying to persuade us that there’s nothing so wrong with the suburbs (“Walk around Willingboro in the evening and you will see homeowners mowing their lawns and children squirting each other with water pistols, just as they did when the neighbourhood was much more homogenous.” Oh well then where’s the problem?) So if the author is allowed to introduce Richard Florida as nothing more than “an influential writer,” then I can say without regret that this article is useless, shallow and plainly wrong. If you want to write about the suburbs, then write something meaningful.

An even greater Paris

French president Nicolas Sarkozy recently launched a consultation process with 10 renowned architects and with urbanists, researchers and engineers in order to come up with a plan for the after-Kyoto “Greater Paris.” The purpose is to create a coherent urban planning for the next decades that will incorporate the suburbs and beyond instead of focusing on the intra-muros city as is usually the case. Propositions will be submitted in the begining of 2009.

This massive initiative is already being compared to the achievements of the baron Haussmann, who in the 19th century tore down most of the existing buildings and redesigned the entire street grid and the architecture of the buildings, giving to Paris its current identity.

Read more about it in this Globe and Mail’s article.

The O.C. made in China

I don’t know if it’s a coincidence or not, but just after having read the article on suburbia in USA Today, I stumbled upon another article in the May/June issue of Good magazine (I haven’t found the online version) that addresses the same phenomenon. A community located near the Beijing airport in China has replicated California’s Orange County. Wealthy Chinese families who live in this gated area can benefit from huge mansions, SUVs and fake lakes.

But the Chinese O.C. is not entirely similar to the American one. The discrepancies between the two reveal a lot about the Chinese society. This extract from the article is a good example:

The idea for building a piece of the California Dream on the Wenyu River was born in the real California in the late 1990s. A Chinese developer named Zhang Bo was tooling around Orange County when he got that “if you build it, they will come” feeling—real estate-developer’s intuition. He and a friend decided to go into business together and their company, SinoCEA—a fifty-fifty joint venture with China’s one-party state—got to work. Peasants were shipped in from the Chinese hinterlands to build modern homes with the medieval construction techniques of the country’s manual-labor force. And though construction is now complete, during my visit, a crew is at work, renovating the clubhouse pool. Pushing wheelbarrows and wielding pickaxes in this Disneyfied landscape, they conjured up nothing so much as the Seven Dwarves.

Green development in Sydney

Inhabitat is reporting on Australia’s most sustainable development project. A new project spreading on 250,000 square meters located on the outskirts of Sydney is aiming for carbon neutrality, by using various energy-saving technologies. Prestigious architecture firms such as Ateliers Jean Nouvel and Fosters + Partners will be participating.

A short history of Suburbia

USA Today has an interesting article about suburbia. It explains that China is studying American suburbia in order to replicate it at home, and then continues with a short history and analysis of suburbia around the world. Other countries are regarding it as an ideal form of development but they are also starting to be concerned about its sustainable aspects. It’s interesting to look at all the research that is going on about suburbia and al the ideas it is generating.