Highlighting urban design

The city of Edmonton has produced a nifty little guide to showcase nifty design highlights among its newest communities.

Entitled “Designing New Neighbourhoods“, the 48-page report is a product of the city’s municipal development plan, “The Way We Grow” which is itself part of a series of high-level plans for the next 40, 50 years as the capital city of one of the world’s energy hotspots.

Designing New Neighbourhoods highlights some of the best practices in the city’s newest areas such as Windermere & The Orchards in the far southwest, Summerside in the southeast, Lago Lindo, Schonsee & Griesbach in the north end of town.

Each highlight has a photo listing the neighbourhood feature, its location and nascent benefits to the surrounding community.

The accolades are categorized according to 9 major urban design considerations:

• housing,
• streets & public realm,
• parks & open spaces,
• natural areas,
• active transportation & transit,
• history & culture,
• commercial, retail & public facilities,
• food & agriculture,
• ecological design.

There’s a major emphasis on natural settings which is interesting given that a lot of people in Edmonton are talking about urban farming lately.

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Some might see unintended irony in oil field service workers bombing down the Anthony Henday freeway in their F-150s from the big box stores of South Edmonton Common to disembark and enjoy “new urbanist” practices of intimate, walkable neighbourhoods.

But when the majority of infill development in this city tends to be highrise condos, it only makes sense that these ideas would be put into practice where land is cheap and demand high.  Given that the capital city region is expected to add as many as 75,000 people over just the next five years I think its worth applauding anywhere pedestrian-friendly, close-knit public spaces can take root. Even if they are in the suburbs.

The city has invited feedback at www.transformingedmonton.ca.

Placemaking: Design vs. Place?

Is there a tension between design and place?

This thoughtful article from the Project for Public Spaces suggests there might be.  Naturally, it favours more of the place-centered approach but the interesting dynamic seems to be how much importance overall context is given in designing a new place.

A Design-Centered approach is “project-driven, discipline-based” and relies on a “lone genius” (i.e. Starchitect) to create “an all-or-nothing approach” that results in a “look but don’t touch mentality”.

Whereas a Place-Centered approach is “place-driven, community-based” and “looks for partners, starts small and builds up” to create an “accessible and inclusive” place that is “never really finished”.

Naturally some would quibble with what may seem to be arbitrary distinctions.  And of course there would be natural overlap between these categories. But it does raise an interesting point about whether designers left alone in their ivory towers and white hats might be missing something when it comes to building for their respective communities.

Can Design Solve an Urban Troublespot?

Here in my hometown of Edmonton, the heart of the public library system (the Stanley A. Milner branch) is about to undergo some frontal renovations to….cut crime?

There is talk of redesigning the glass entrance to the hulking concrete structure in part to conserve energy and beautify an otherwise utilitarian facade but the real benefit may be on cutting down the number of police-reported incidents and disturbances, which have ranged from 41 to 72 per year since 2009.

Would YOU borrow a book from HERE?

I can definitely see the need.  Being in the heart of downtown at the intersection of 102nd avenue and 100th street, the library sits along a major transit artery with buses from all over the city disgorging just a few feet away from the entrance.  Passengers there would notice the entrance is a popular spot with wayward youth, the homeless, transients, people with special needs and downright shifty characters.  This is especially true in the afternoon and early evenings when lurking miscreants can make waiting for the bus a downright unnerving experience.

Unfortunately this is more than just idle speculation.  As anyone can see (or could have predicted), Edmonton’s crime rate–especially for murders–has floated up just like the price of a barrel of oil in summertime.  All 48 for 2011 have been listed here (48 puts us only behind substantially smaller Winnipeg with its 34 murders for killings per capita).

While nobody has been stabbed to death after checking out “Henry and the Paper Route” the entrance to one of the city’s main civic institutions is still way rougher than it should be.  This is especially ironic given that the Library isn’t in some forlorn corner of a concrete jungle but sits opposite Churchill Square, the city’s central plaza.  Its part of our cultural cluster with Canada Place, the Citadel Theatre, the Winspear Centre for Music and the Art Gallery of Alberta all just a stones throw away to the east and Edmonton Centre and the city’s office towers just west of it.

Anyways, back to design.  The story suggests the library has already benefited from “crime prevention through environmental design” (or “CPTED”) with innovations such as access- and barrier-free entries and greater surveillance.  As you can see, the entrance is already a little forbidding with all the glass and concrete (imagine what its like when its pitch black and -30 outside!).  Now has this design and the resulting environment it’s created actually resulted in crime? Well that may be going too far but I certainly believe better physical design can make a space warm and inviting rather than compartmentalizing and restrictive.

This story coincides with the recent passing of James Q. Wilson, the famous political scientist behind the “broken windows” theory of crime (published in my fave magazine, The Atlantic Monthly in 1982). In a nutshell, Wilson posited that small crimes left untreated like broken windows, graffiti, litter and neglect allow, incite or encourage “larger” crimes in the same neighborhood like theft, assault, rape and murder.  New York City’s vandalism-scarred subway cars and whole neighbourhoods like New Lots Ave in Brooklyn personified this.  Many glommed on to this sense-making theory and it was one of the first reasons people gave for New York City’s (and America’s) dramatically falling crime rate in the 1990s. Since then other theories like the aging of the baby boomers, the receding crack epidemic and liberalized abortion laws have somewhat debunked the broken windows but I think it still makes a modicum of sense.

The Milner Library from the back, facing south.

So is the Stanley A. Milner Library a toxic, neglected environment? Hardly.  Enough people use the library to make it a busy thoroughfare and its staff are dedicated, friendly folks with an eye to what goes on just outside their doors.  Most of the worst activity is aggravating rather than dangerous. But there’s no denying that the entrance can seem more than a little threatening at the wrong time so I welcome any kind of remedial efforts there.

I suppose it’s not really that surprising though.  Just as libraries everywhere have had to reinvent themselves in the digital age, the Milner is increasingly home to a collection of community and social services–everything from housing non-profit offices to being a hub for employment information to providing services to the disabled.  Thus its to be expected that some of the most needy Edmontonians would flock to it everyday.  A single part-time security guard (albeit a beefy one, not just an emaciated rent-a-cop) helps keep order but it can still be a rough place.

Certainly a redesign can’t hurt.  The Milner’s a product of Edmonton’s brutalist concrete boom from the 1960’s and while there have been a couple of aesthetic touches, such as well-lit open spaces inside and two sculptures in Centennial Square in the back (one is a rather patronizing look at the aboriginal-settler relationship behind the fur trade while the other is a gift by the Indo-Canadian community  marking Gandhi’s birth), its largely an unlovable structure. Definitely a dowdy sister compared to the institutions listed above.

In fact we wouldn’t be missing much if someone knocked the whole thing down and rebuilt it, as was done with the Art Galley of Alberta, but I don’t expect anyone–philanthropist, politican or bureaucrat–to drop $70-$80+ million for a new building that mostly commemorates the old and in some cases, forgotten.