Aikido Architecture

Ivan Hernandez Quintela

I like to think of myself as a Japanese warrior, who moves so slowly that you do not see me coming.
~ Ivan Hernandez Quintela,  
Ludens

In the martial arts of aikido, one learns to use an opponent’s strength to create one’s own strength. I like this because it offers tactics to people that might seem as the weaker player to confront bigger opponents. I have always thought that a similar tactic could be used in the practice of architecture – a practice where one single individual could impact the city one gesture at a time. This individual would work with his or her body, one spot at a time, but that each small gestures could be contagious, could be reproducible, could spread all over the city; a sort of acupunctural architecture where one invades one zone of the city but could actually get to affect a much broader area. One would use the existing patterns, habits and idiosyncrasies of the city towards itself.
 
I picture myself as an aikido-architecture practitioner and intervene the city with small projects called urban prosthetics. These projects attempt to shake the city one spot at a time. I would like to use one example to explain what I mean by aikido architecture. The Insinuated Furniture project attempts to call attention to a lack of pubic furniture in Mexico City at the same time that it draws attention to the way inhabitants empower themselves against it. The project consists first of walking around the city noticing architectural surfaces that people use to lean and rest their bodies even though such surfaces where not designed for that purpose. I then draw over those surfaces, with masking tape, silhouettes of familiar furniture, such as the silhouettes of a chair, a bench, a table or a bed in order to call attention to them. I feel that such an act makes visible the creativity that everyday users of the city practice.  I feel that my silhouettes could be drawn by anyone, and that soon, the entire city could be drawn over, making all surfaces inhabitable. I feel that such acts make anyone feel that they can conquer space. I feel that such gestures could provoke a new participatory attitude towards the city, where each inhabitant could construct little by little alternative ways to interact and inhabit their city. I feel that all of us have an aikido-practitioner within us waiting to be released – that all of us are makers of our city.  


Ivan Hernandez Quintela is a long term contributor to On Site – the first was in issue 4, a shade arbour framework for roadside vendors.  His studio, Ludens, is engaged in low cost, low technology, sophisticated thinking around furniture, education, community needs and urban social relationships.  Ludens' Learning and Innovation Network is written up in Architecture Record this month, and their RIA classroom project for rural Mexico will be in On Site 27, out later this spring.

Ivan Hernandez Quintela.  'Aikido Architecture.'  On Site review, no. 23 Springl 2010
©Ivan Hernandez Quintela and On Site review

First Dereliction, then Occupation. Architecture and the Unspeakable

John Szot

In this building proposal, a partially-completed building is temporarily abandoned and left at the mercy of New York City’s street writers and guerrilla artists to be provisionally occupied and abused without supervision. By exposing the raw structure to all the violence and rambunctiousness of a metropolis, this experiment allows us to capture activity and ideas that usually lie beyond the architect’s grasp in a manner that does not compromise their cultural currency. The result is an authentic slice of urban subculture that occupies a legitimate position within the urban fabric, and thus within the identity of the city.

This is an inversion of the typical life cycle of a building. Here, dereliction occurs before inhabitation. Therefore the final product remains unknown and outside the reach of conventional architectural documentation. In order to bring some degree of insight into the process during design development, the entire structure was subjected to a simulation in which we developed a narrative to describe the activity that might take place during the period of ‘induced dereliction’ and do justice to the subtleties inherent in this unlikely marriage.

links:  http://www.johnszot.com/archandtheunspeakable
http://www.mascontext.com
http://www.johnszot.com

John Szot    'First Dereliction, then Occupation.'  On Site review, no. 26 Fall 2011
©John Szot and On Site review

John Szot is a designer working in New York.  His work has been exhibited in Chicago, New York, Portland and the Netherlands.  He currently teaches architecture and digital visualisation at the Graduate School of Architecture + Planning at Columbia and is one of the directors of the Experimental Modern Arts Collective.

http://www.johnszot.com/archandtheunspeakable

Highway of Heroes: 65 overpasses on highway 401

arrival in Toronto

Christine Leu

The Highway of Heroes is a stretch of the 401 Highway between Canadian Forces Base Trenton and the coroner’s office at the Centre for Forensic Sciences in downtown Toronto.  It was renamed in honour of Canada’s fallen soldiers.
      Regardless of where a Canadian soldier is stationed, a soldier is repatriated at a ceremony at CFB Trenton, and then transported with a family and military automobile entourage to Toronto for an official autopsy.  The current count of fallen soldiers who have travelled this route is over 130.
      The Highway of Heroes began as a grassroots movement.  In an impromptu manner, people began to congregate on the 65 overpasses between Trenton and Toronto which represent the only safe and accessible opportunity for the public to pay their respects to the country’s fallen:  CFB Trenton is open only to family, military, dignitaries and media; the coroner’s office is also closed to the public.
    Despite the contentious nature of the Afghanistan War, the public ritual gained momentum and there were calls to officially name the route.  The big break was when an online petition was mentioned on morning radio airwaves.  The number of signees was a few thousand, but by 10:30am, the number had risen to over 9000.  A few days later on August 24 2007, the Highway of Heroes was officially designated by Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, in the midst of his successful re-election campaign.

Each overpass is different due to variables such as landscape, topography, adjacencies, span and the period in which it was built.  A few are exclusively for trains, but the vast majority is for motor vehicles.  Human occupation was not considered.  It is no wonder as overpasses are inhumane places – they are like standing in a blustery wind tunnel and a howling pit stop at the same time.  On a typical day, overpasses are used almost exclusively by motor vehicles to traverse the great divide that is the 401 Highway.
     Around the time the convoy is expected to pass, however, these overpasses are transformed into impromptu mourning grounds.  The east-facing guardrails overlooking oncoming westbound traffic are lined with locals: civilians, former military, fire, police, ambulance workers and the media.  There is a surprisingly jovial air as people wait – people chat while holding their Tim Horton’s double-doubles; others rig their Canadian flags to the guardrails.  Below, truck drivers honk their horns and drivers and passengers wave the peace sign; people on the overpasses wave in response.
     That air changes to respectful silence as the flashing lights of the motorcade appear on the horizon.  It takes only a few seconds for the police escort, hearse and entourage to pass.  Then the overpass community quickly evaporates until the next soldier’s death.

Leu, Christine.  'Highway of Heroes'  On Site review, no. 22 Fall 2009
©Christine Leu and On Site review

Velo-City

Chris Hardwicke

It’s Monday morning. You grab your gear and strap your bag onto your bike. It is cold and raining, and the traffic’s heavy, but it’s only a few minutes to the bikeway. Here it is. A quick lane change and you are pumping your way up the onramp and gliding through the entrance. The street noise falls away as you join the flow. Already you feel the draft of the other cyclists blurring past in the fast lane, their steady wind pulling you forward. You relax into the rhythm and the tension leaves your shoulders as you let down your defences. No more cars breathing down you neck.
You ride along, matching your speed to those around you and looking through the raindrops on the glass-domed tube at the panorama of the city. Up ahead, you see a friend’s familiar bike trailer– he’s taking the kids to daycare. Pulling into the slow lane you chat for a few minutes before they get to their off-ramp.
Soon the bikeway opens up, widening to six lanes as you pass the commuter train station. Hundreds of suburbanites on yellow bikes merge smoothly into traffic. As you cross a valley, high above the expressway, the sun breaks through the clouds. You shift down, and take the next exit to work. Checking your watch, you notice you are early again.
Welcome to velo-city.



Velo-city is a highway for bikes, a network of elevated bicycle roadways connecting distant parts of the city. There are three lanes of traffic–slow, medium, and fast–in both directions, each direction having a separate glass-roofed bikeway tube. The separation of directions reduces wind resistance and creates a natural tailwind for cyclists. The reduction of air resistance increases the efficiency of cycling by about 90 percent, allowing for speeds of up to 50 km/hr.
Because it is elevated, Velo-city can be located in existing highway, power, and railway corridors, adapting to the built environment while requiring no additional real estate. Bikeways float above intersections and fit into spaces where trains, subways, and roads simply can’t go due to their size, noise, and pollution. Light and compact (you can fit seven bicycles in the road space taken up by one car) Velo-city produces no noise or pollution, so it can run right beside or even into buildings.
For commuters, Velo-city delivers total travel times that rival any other form of high-speed transit, and it is active rapid transit. In contrast to the passivity of taking a train or a bus; it includes exercise as an essential part of an urban lifestyle. Personal independence is expressed in individual freedom of movement. By working as a parallel infrastructure connected to subways, railways, highways, and parking lots, the bikeways expand commuting choices, while reducing congestion on our transit systems and highways. Bikeways are the ultimate in efficient, health-generating rapid transit.
Maintenance costs for Velo-city would be substantially lower than the expense of keeping subways and highways in good operational order, because the weight and vibration of bicycles is considerably less than that of automobiles or railways. And because Velo-city is covered, the lane surfaces would be sheltered from weather distress.
The culture of a city is often defined by its transportation system: yellow cabs in New York City, bicycles in Beijing, streetcars in San Francisco, freeways in Los Angeles, double-decker buses in London, scooters in Taipei, vaporetti in Venice, cyclos in Ho Chi Minh City, and the Paris Metro. Modes of transport create interdependent relationships with urban forms and city culture. Think of the relationships between cars and shopping malls, subways and skyscrapers, streetcars and main streets, scooters and roadside stalls. Over time, Velo-city will create a cycling culture for the cities it inhabits: kiss ’n’ rides, shower facilities, cycling fashion shops, velodomes, bike parks, health clubs, cycle path stalls, repair shops, bike couriers, bike picnics, car-free housing and intermodal stations. Velo-city would simply give bicycles the same level of dedicated infrastructure that other modes of transportation have enjoyed.

The bicycle has been around for more than a hundred years. It was a brilliant, modern invention back then, and remains one today. Bicycle enthusiasts have always been tenacious and devoted. And now, perhaps, it is an idea whose time has come back – bicycles now outsell automobiles in North America.

Hardwicke, Chris. 'Velo-city' On Site review, no. 21 Spring 2009
©Chris Hardwicke and On Site review

Urban Guerillas

sociopolitical architecture of the public realm

Christopher Roach
I [one]
On the east end of 24th Street in San Francisco, stretching from Valencia Street to Potrero Avenue, is a world that is neither exclusively Latin American, nor definitively North American, but is particular to San Francisco and, more specifically, the Mission District. I can get fresh masa to make tortillas at La Palma Mexicatessen, sip the best cappuccinos at Café Venice, buy fresh produce from several sidewalk groceries, feast on tacos al pastor for a few bucks at Taqueria Vallarta or have a malted milkshake at the St. Francis Soda Fountain. Tree-lined, two-way, crowded with slow-moving traffic on a busy Saturday afternoon, I can still call out to a friend across the street and jaywalk safely to shake his hand. Both sides of the street are lined with small storefronts, catering largely, though not exclusively, to the resident Latino community. There are relics of a more distant past, such as the St. Francis, when Mission was a working-class neighbourhood of Irish, Italian and Scandinavian immigrants. There is also a creeping, eminent gentrification: several stylish cafés and boutique stores have cropped up to serve the growing white professional class that is moving into the affordable Mission neighbourhoods.
At the other end of 24th Street, heading over the hill at Dolores Street and down into Noe Valley, is a different though not altogether alien world, where French bistros replace taquerias, and tandem strollers almost outnumber cars. At this end of the street I’m more likely to find artisan cheese and an expensive bottle of wine, or perhaps a nice pair of shoes, but I can still grab a greasy slice of pizza and watch a soccer game at the local pub. Punctuating the continuous row of small three and four-storey buildings is a small parking lot that becomes an upscale farmer’s market on Saturdays; further down, the local CalaFoods supermarket is set back behind its parking lot. Nonetheless, this end of 24th continues familiar, small-scale retail with a few storeys of housing above. The sidewalks are clean and most buildings have a fresh coat of paint, but there’s a noticeably more homogeneous and sanitised feeling on this end of the street. There are no murals, less graffiti, fewer street vendors, and I rarely hear a foreign language spoken here.
These two ends of 24th street represent a kind of urban dialectic of use and culture representative of larger forces at work in the evolution of a city such as San Francisco. There are certainly streets that are more grand, and others more important in the city’s history and culture – Market Street, Mission Street or Columbus Avenue – but in these 24 city blocks one can still read an entire dissertation on the particularity of a place and time in the life of the city. A hermeneutical reading of streets reveals a fragment of the underlying code of our entire society. By parsing the language of the social, political, and economic structures embodied in our streets, they can tell us volumes about ourselves and the world we have made; both the delights and the dangers that we face. For if we turn the page to read another street, we may find that the tale it tells is not one of urbane diversity and harmonious civility, but one of dislocation, disenfranchisement and decay.


2 [two]
Our streets, as much as our buildings, are a physical manifestation of our social and cultural values, especially those relating to the context of human settlement. Streets are, in their boundless ubiquity and variety of form, expressions of our attitudes toward communication, commerce, transportation, privacy, security, hygiene, dwelling, public speech, beauty, nature, geography, history and culture. As these attitudes shift and evolve over space and time, so do our streets, like a slowly evolving living organism.
Streets are, even more than buildings, the most pervasive and essential physical embodiment of the public realm.1 They are not just vessels and nodes in the circulatory system of the city, but are the fountainhead of civil society, and therefore one of our most precious physical and cultural resources. Streets are the public stage for our everyday lives as well as the singular events that mark the passage of a common history: battles and parades, protests and celebrations, markets and marathons, carnivals and funerals. On this stage we have played out the grand drama of our most celebrated and infamous social conflicts, from the barricades of pre-Haussmann Paris to the Civil Rights marches and anti-war protests of 1960s America.
But streets are also the theatre for the public performance of daily life, where we engage in the activities of civic Being, whether through commerce, recreation, spectacle, or speech. As Alan Jacobs notes in his seminal book Great Streets, ‘sociability is a large part of why cities exist and streets are a major if not the only public place for that sociability to develop’.2 Streets are where the personal and the political flow together, and for many, streets are the only place where sociability, or even identity, can form freely. Particularly in modern societies that are dominated by a homogeneous popular culture, streets have been the locus for the formation and dissemination of counterculture. In fact, contemporary North American counterculture is largely synonymous with street culture, whether in the form of punk, hip-hop, skateboarding, bikers or street gangs and their associated forms of music, dress, language, art and identity politics.
Most importantly, streets have historically been the locus for resistance, whether cultural or political, and resistance is a form of participation critical to the formation and existence of civil society. In our hermeneutical reading of streets, we find that resistance is still relevant, and necessary, because the physical and cultural space of our streets is threatened by the same encroachments of privatisation, surveillance, commercialisation and negligence that face civil society itself. Just as we witness the sale of our public institutions and infrastructure to private enterprise, so too can we find in our streets a creeping erosion of the public sphere.


3 [three]
Functionalism’s reign as the dominant paradigm of mid-century architecture and urban planning gave rise to a general philosophy of segregation of uses within the public right-of-way.3 This, combined with the ascendancy of the automobile, left a decades-long legacy of robust traffic engineering and weak urbanism. Ironically, the functional separation of uses that was supposed to promote health, safety, and revitalisation of the modern city mostly resulted in less safety, more congestion, and bleak stretches of empty asphalt cutting through entire neighbourhoods. Despite the eventual outcry by Jane Jacobs and the reformations of the Preservationist movement (and later, the New Urbanists), our streets remain bloated by increasing volumes of automobile traffic, and marked by the remaining artifacts of elevated highways, vast intersections, narrower sidewalks and stranded islands of nervous pedestrians. Moreover, functionalist zoning regulations and redevelopment failed to prevent, and may have even enabled, the flight of the urban middle class to the suburbs, resulting not only in the physical decline of urban centres, but also in the decline of the remaining residents’ political power.
Road building, once one of the great public works of the state, has now largely been turned over to private enterprise; our streets are increasingly entitled, funded, designed, built, maintained, policed and even owned by private or public-private entities. State and local governments stripped of funding and maxed out on their bonding capacity, can often no longer afford to build and maintain infrastructure and must turn to large developers to carry out the construction and administration of streets, public spaces and entire neighbourhoods. While these projects must go through the environmental review process and are usually handed over to the city or state upon completion, the profit motive inherently reduces the input citizens have on the form of their cities and communities. In the cases where these private entities retain ownership or administration of the streets and public spaces they construct, even basic freedoms we expect to be self-evident in public spaces are called into question.
As suburban flight has abated and as people and businesses have begun to return to downtown, political power over the planning process has once again shifted, but not into the hands of the long-time residents or cultural pioneers who created value where there once was none. Business and real estate interests have come to wield inordinate political influence over the urban planning process in cities that are experiencing an explosion of growth in the urban core. This is especially true in downtown shopping areas, where retailers’ perceived need to compete with the convenience of suburban malls drives them to lobby for policies that favour commerce over public amenity: increased capacity for automobile access and more parking versus wider sidewalks, traffic calming and green space.4 This erosion of public space is furthered by the intrusion of advertising into every aspect of the streetscape. The cacophony of signage, billboards and advertisements on bus shelters, benches, kiosks, newsstands and sandwich boards has become so familiar as to be virtually invisible, and is accepted by many as the cost of having a robust and free market.
Retail businesses rely on pedestrian traffic for their sales and are particularly interested in creating an environment of safety and stability, leading to the propagation of security cameras and private security guards and fostering a culture of surveillance and control on the street that has a chilling effect on free speech and expression. This has a subtle and insidious influence on what is deemed to be an acceptable use of the street, or even what is viewed as appropriate public behaviour. Public actors in the theatre of downtown streets are encouraged, provided they generally abide by the script of the marketplace. As long as they’re shining shoes, selling jewellery, hawking a sale or entertaining for a coin they are accepted, or at least tolerated. But as soon as they try to speak out, stage a spontaneous protest or performance or just do something ridiculous, they’re harassed, asked for their permit or just whisked away.
Many of these downtown neighbourhoods were once predominantly populated by a particular ethnic group or co-opted by specific fringe cultures. As they are being gentrified, the very rituals, customs and events that marked the outward expression of these groups and gave these areas their unique identities are coming under attack. The new residents and businesses that have become their neighbours pressure the city to crack down on parades and street fairs, either banning them outright, imposing prohibitive security and permit fees or moving them to other non-threatening sites.5 These lively street events, once the inheritors of the spontaneous expression of humanity’s inner chaos called carnival, are now so scripted, controlled, surveilled and commercialised that they are either disappearing altogether, or becoming mere symbols of themselves. The only events that seem to survive are able to do so through corporate sponsorship, or are themselves merely commercial events masquerading as festivals or parades.6
Even our remaining public open spaces may not be as public as they seem. Another disturbing artifact of the privatisation of the public sphere is the creation of pseudo-public spaces that appear to be public streets or plazas, but are in fact owned or administered by private entities. In San Francisco, a number of ‘privately-owned public open spaces’ associated with downtown highrise developments have proliferated as a result of a zoning ordinance that grants developers more building area in exchange for providing a plaza, roof deck, or atrium space accessible to the general public.7 POPOS8 may resemble a public space, but look closely, and you’ll see the security cameras, guards, and subtle markers noting that your right to pass is by permission of the owners. These and other pseudo-public spaces are becoming a common practice nationally and worldwide, the result of a Neo-liberal reconsideration, or outright questioning, of the public sphere.9

4 [four]
How are we, as architects, to engage in this discourse of multifaceted and often competing interests claiming ownership of our streets? How can we act to restore balance to the architecture of the public realm?
Architects may think themselves powerless in this battle, that the content and form of the streets outside the envelopes of their buildings are best left to landscape architects and urban planners who can operate more effectively at the scale of the neighbourhood or city. Architects relinquish to urban planners the messy business of working with the political power granted to them to leverage the resources of both the government and private investment to map out and achieve long-term planning goals. However, the power of the urban planner has been weakened by a lack of capital resources, called into question by opponents of government authority and challenged by his own disenfranchised constituents. This situation calls for all actors in the urban environment, including architects, to reconsider their roles.

Sociologist Peter Arlt calls for us to consider the role of the tactician in urban planning. In his excellent essay ‘Urban Planning and Interim Use’, Arlt draws on military theory to contrast the strategist who has the power and the money to overcome any external conditions blocking the way, with the tactician who must engage circumstances and adversaries to achieve the goal.10 Arlt argues that because urban planners have the political authority to act as strategists, but no longer the resources, they must now act more as tacticians, or ally themselves with tacticians to achieve the same ends. This means working with actors in the urban arena who propose, and impose, interim uses for urban spaces that are seen as opportunities for action, commentary and change.

The classical interim user is the squatter, but whereas the squatters appropriate underused space as an essentially antisocial act, there is a new breed of cultural interloper who seeks to temporarily appropriate a public space as a site for art, performance or political commentary. These urban guerillas are the prototypical tacticians; they operate locally in territory that is familiar, with support from locals and popularity in the media, and most importantly, are highly motivated not by money, but by putting ideas into action. ‘Enthusiasm’, says Arlt, ‘is the capital of interim users, and urban planners should recognize this and use it tactically’.

Architect Ursula Hofbauer and artist/filmmaker Friedmann Derschmidt have been having breakfast with friends and strangers in Vienna’s public spaces for over ten years. They begin by setting up a table in a plaza, street or other public space, and offering coffee and sundry breakfast items to any passers-by who care to join in. The only requirement for participation is that their guests organise another similar public breakfast the next day and invite others to join in turn. In theory, this follows the logic of a chain letter, so what may begin with four people grows to sixteen the next day, then sixty-four on the third, and on the tenth day over a million people having breakfast in public. In fact Permanent Breakfast, which began as a game, public art performance and urban critique in 1996, has since grown to take root in many European cities, as well as New York and Taiwan. The point of Permanent Breakfast is not only to surprise and delight those who appropriate public space for their own means, but to directly engage in a discourse with the limitations, both perceived and actual, to public space. As Hofbauer and Derschmidt claim, ‘it is possible to precisely gauge the understanding of just how public a location is by observing the reactions of other users and ‘protectors’ of the public space. Permanent Breakfast thus becomes a sort of litmus test for the accessibility of public space. In carrying out such breakfasts, it is possible to reveal the superficial look of invisible spatial situations, such as private, formerly public spaces or publicly disguised private spaces’.11

In November 2005, a group of landscape architects, artists, and others calling themselves REBAR ‘rented’ a metered parking space in downtown San Francisco and transformed it into a tiny public park, complete with grass, a bench for seating, and a tree for shade. The park lasted only for a matter of hours, and was met with a mixture of ‘surprise, approval, joy, and indignation’, but, surprisingly, no one was arrested or fined.12 In the two years since this intial act of guerilla urbanism, the idea has exploded into something of an international phenomenon. On PARK(ing) Day in September of 2006, REBAR installed five more PARKs, and were joined by other groups who installed 16 more in San Francisco, 13 in Berkeley, as well as PARKs in New York City, London, and Rio De Janeiro. In 2007, PARK(ing) Day grew to 180 PARKs in 47 cities worldwide.13 According to REBAR, the purpose of PARK(ing) Day is to broaden the discourse on public space in urban contexts by creating a ‘temporally distributed network of public open space’ and by testing reactions to these interventions in a variety of socioeconomic situations.

REBAR has also collaborated with the performance group Snap Out of It on a project called COMMONspace to systematically evaluate and critique San Francisco’s privately-owned public open spaces. In this project, REBAR have mapped the 14 official POPOS in downtown San Francisco and run reconnaissance missions in order to probe the explicit and implicit rules that govern these quasi-public spaces. In conjunction with Snap Out of It, they have returned to these spaces to participate in various paraformances, or Situationist-inspired performances which begin with individual plausibly-deniable actions and scale up to full-sized occupations that engage the public as audiences and participants.14 Similar to Permanent Breakfast, these performances limn the boundary of where the public and the private both meet and conflict.

Permanent Breakfast, PARK(ing) Day, and COMMONspace represent successful examples of tactical urban planning which, in conjunction with more strategic projects, can have a long-term effect on providing public open space in our streets. As Peter Arlt states, ‘Interim use is always seen as a provisional measure rather than as a permanent solution, although it can also be a way of demonstrating a concept’s success in order to convince an investor that the chosen use could also provide a permanent solution’.15 Thus, there is a symbiotic relationship between the strategic and the tactical. The tactical act relies on action and immediacy to influence its audience, and this instantaneous public outreach can lay the groundwork for broader support for more long-term changes. Strategic methods, on the other hand, leverage this political will with capital investments to implement change on a larger scale, legitimsing the tactician’s goals, and drawing a new front for further tactical action.
On PARK(ing) Day in 2007, REBAR collaborated with Public Architecture, a San Francisco nonprofit dedicated to pro-bono work, to install four PARKs on Folsom Street. These included a dogwalk plaza, a beauty plaza sponsored by an adjacent cosmetology school, and a sidewalk plaza in front of Brainwash Café featuring a sixteen foot long table where participants and spectators were invited to sit and enjoy a temporary spot to relax, sip a coffee or chat. These PARKs were not strictly intended to be temporary, but rather were full-scale mock-ups of a series of permanent sidewalk plazas that Public Architecture has proposed to provide public open space along Folsom Street. As a result of this engaging community outreach, and their work with several municipal departments, Public Architecture has been awarded a grant from the city to construct a permanent sidewalk plaza in front of Brainwash Café, whose owner will provide ongoing maintenance and the remainder of the construction funds.
This and future sidewalk plazas are part of an overall vision that Public Architecture has proposed to the city for transforming Folsom, Howard and other streets in the South of Market neighbourhood to provide traffic calming, robust public transportation and much-needed open space. Their vision has many more obstacles to overcome before it’s fully implemented, but it has already gained traction with the city’s Planning Department to the extent that it directly influenced their inclusion of similar ideas in the adjacent Rincon Hill neighbourhood plan.16
Public Architecture’s collaboration with REBAR clearly illustrates how an interim use of space can directly inform the planning process to influence its eventual permanent use. Thus, through the implementation of tactical means architecture itself can act on its immediate context as well as at the urban scale to bring about strategic ends. These guerilla actions are currently taking place at the margins of architecture and urban planning, but we must co-opt them into common practice if we are to counteract the erosion of civic space in our streets. Alan Jacobs has said that ‘the best streets encourage participation’.17 In the context of the current assault on the public realm, it may be better said that the best streets demand participation. p

1 Jacobs, Alan. Great Streets. ‘In the U.S., from 25 to 35 % of a city’s developed land is likely to be in public rights-of-way, mostly in streets’. p6
2 Ibid. p4
3 Le Corbusier, for one, perceived an ever-stricter segregation of traffic as an essential affirmation of social order — a desirable and ultimately inevitable expression of modernity. To this end, proposals were advanced to build vertical streets where road vehicles, pedestrians and trains would each occupy their own levels. Such an arrangement, it was said, would allow for even denser development in the future. These plans were never implemented comprehensively, a fact which today’s urban theorists regard as fortunate for vitality and diversity. Rather, vertical segregation is applied on a piecemeal basis, as in sewers, utility poles, depressed highways, elevated railways, common utility ducts, the extensive complex of underground malls surrounding Tokyo Station and the O-temachi subway station, the elevated pedestrian skyway networks of Minneapolis and Calgary, the underground cities of Atlanta and Montreal, and the multilevel streets in Chicago. Wikipedia .
4 For example, San Francisco’s Proposition H of 2007, which was largley funded by downtown developers and backed by the Gap’s Don Fischer.
5 Some of San Francisco’s most popular outdoor events such as the Haight-Ashbury and How Weird street fairs, Gay Pride, Halloween and the North Beach Festival have recently been threatened by organised neighbour complaints and exorbitant fees from city departments. See Witherell, Amanda. ‘The Death of Fun’ San Francisco Bay Guardian, May 23, 2006
6 For the past two years, Larry Ellison’s Oracle Open World conference has erected a tent over Howard Street from 3rd to 4th Street for an entire week, complete with massive LED screens at each end. On November 22, 2004, the band U2 took over the streets of New York to shoot a video for ‘All Because of You’, the second single off their new How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.
7 Section 138 of the City of San Francisco Zoning Ordinance.
8 The term POPOS was coined by REBAR
9 Hofbauer, Ursula. ‘Horror Vacui’
10 Arlt, Peter. ‘Urban Planning and Interim Use” in Temporary Urban Spaces by Haydn, Florian, Robert Temel, eds. Birkhäuser, 2006. See also de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
11 Hofbauer, Ursula, & Friedmann Derschmidt ‘Horror Vacui’ in Temporary Urban Spaces by Haydn, Florian, Robert Temel, eds. Birkhäuser, 2006
12 REBAR estimated they provided an additional ‘24,000 square-foot-minutes’ of public open space.
13 All information taken from REBAR and their website www.rebargroup.org
14 Ibid. REBAR
15 Arlt, Peter. ‘Urban Planning and Interim Use’ p 39
16 Meanwhile, REBAR has also aadopted more strategic methods, handing PARK(ing) Day off to the Trust for Public Land, and advising the San Francisco mayor’s office on the city’s Better Streets program.
17 Jacobs, Alan. Great Streets. p9

Roach, Christopher. 'Urban Guerillas' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Christopher Roach and On Site review

The Streets We Need

mechanical and social developmentAlfredo Landaeta
Not so long ago, streets were very simple: no sidewalks, curbs, infrastructure or public transit, and without strict differentiation between pedestrians and other means of transportation. Ancient mesopotamian cities show narrow streets and cul-de-sacs that provided access to courtyards linking clusters of dwellings belonging to extended families or clans. Streets were not a continuous system connecting urban settlements but rather the minimum necessary space required to delineate distinct clusters. It is perhaps this concept of the street as the in-between that first tinted it with a social undertone, establishing such spaces as the meeting place, the political arena, the place of commerce.
Mediæval streets show a similar simplicity: street networks evolved, becoming more complex, intertwined and hierarchical in nature and, in many instances, actively incorporating trees and landscape as part of their design.
The street as a socially populated void with minimal technological attributions is still very much in use today. Informal settlements in developing countries, products of completely unregulated and unplanned development, usually generate dramatic streets and alleys, uncannily proportioned to the human scale, uncaring of accessibility codes or infrastructural logic. These spaces arise purely from the tension between the pressure of occupation and the need to circulate. There is an organic quality in these spaces that is clearly lacking in the formal city.
*
In many contemporary cities, streets have become flow: their value is not for what they host, but for how good they flush; the simplicity of the original void has been filled as an inevitable consequence of modern life, with a long list of stuff: parking, public transport lines (at times in exclusive rights-of-way), mail boxes, lamp posts, power lines, storm water channels – and all that just above the surface. Below grade is almost as crowded with water pipes, telephone lines, electrical cables, gas and sewage lines, fibre optics, metro lines, district cooling and heating, even grey water lines for landscape irrigation. In fact, streets are the de facto location for most of our ever-increasing infrastructure needs. To design a street these days is to necessarily accommodate, combine and reconcile all of these different requirements.

This mechanistic conception of the street as a device for the mobility of people, vehicles and services leaves little room for the street as a true public space. Good streets not only function as conduits for all types of transportation and services, they also must perform as social ground, negotiating transitions between zones and loaded with historical and cultural content.

The value of the street is based in the complex ballet of movements and carefully timed rhythms and sequences that it hosts (compellingly amplified and portrayed by fast-motion movies such as the 1983 Koyaanisqatsi) than in its spatial qualities. This exhilarating tapestry of movement and activity is the very definition of modernity; it is what draws rivers of people to urban centres and what simultaneously repels and attracts us.


Let us look at a typical mid-density neighbourhood street servicing a mixture of residential and commercial uses. Depending on the culture, context and climate we will find that the street, conceived as a technological device, is designed, calibrated and built with the intention of maximising the performance of non-human elements — the social component is often negated entirely. Differentiated strips for pedestrians, trees, vehicles and public transit facilitate the uninterrupted flow of traffic, justified by arguing that this clear separation is for the safety and congeniality of otherwise incompatible uses and activities. As such, the contemporary street is inevitably hierarchical and specialised, predestined at the design stage to fulfill a specific role within the urban continuum.

What happens if the initial assumptions established at the planning stage no longer hold true, or if significant technological changes begin to affect the behavioural patterns of people? What if political and cultural changes cut deep enough to affect the nature of its use, or if the basic assumptions related to the cost of mobility are challenged?
Our paradigms for developing and designing our cities, and by extension our streets, are currently under revision. Growing environmental awareness is placing great pressure on a way of life that is increasingly wasteful and responsible for our current state of environmental deterioration. As this awareness permeates the core of our values, changes will begin to accelerate. Streets will require as radical a redefinition as will our production-consumption-disposal cycle.

Wishful thinking? No. This transformation is of similar proportions to the one experienced when the industrialised world transformed itself into the car-oriented society of today. Car manufacturers in conjunction with the oil industry successfully lobbied for an aggressive highway system that put suburban development on steroids, making it not only a possibility but the preferred alternative to traditional urban life. This transformation was unstoppable; there have been very few other historical moments with such a concurrence of interests: the cultural perception of a better way of living complemented quite neatly by the interests of big corporations, swiftly backed up by politicians with the necessary regulatory backup.

Climatic change and emerging environmental awareness are creating a new alignment of interests based not on a perception of how we might live better, but on the assumption that such a transformation will ensure that life itself will continue. As research and scientific evidence amasses, the future looks bleak indeed. As pressure on leaders and political institutions to deal with global warming and environmental degradation increases, cities are likely to become the preferred ground for a fair number of initiatives — escalating oil prices and pollution levels demand measures that reduce car dependency, favour public transit and increase densities.

The potential for the most change exists in personal and public transportation – more bicycles on the road, more designated bike lanes. Bicycles and pedestrians will share the public realm with alternative mobility options such as Segways and electrical bikes, replacing some or most cars (even if alternative technologies reduce the nasty side effects of internal combustion engines, personal cars still require significant and unconscionable space to circulate and park while consuming massive amounts of resources for production and maintenance). Public transit can be diversified: high capacity buses with reserved lanes, people-movers along pedestrian corridors and personal rapid transit systems (PRTS), where small automated vehicles in dedicated lanes transport people directly to their destination. Streets, therefore, will be forced to accommodate different overlapping systems of mobility at the expense of driving lanes. As with most human inventions, accumulation of knowledge results in better and more elegant solutions.

It is impossible to know how streets and cities will evolve and change as society shifts paradigms; technology, education and social aspirations seasoned with ample doses of chance will play equally important roles in defining the emerging dominant trends. No matter how they develop, streets as design artifacts will have an obligation to be responsive to climate and location and, most of all, to be tailored to reflect local values and cultural standards. Streets should be the sites where people act in concert, as Hannah Arendt defined politics in its broadest sense. Maybe then, by understanding the streets as spaces of true social interaction, they will echo a new and better urban ideal.
Landaeta, Alfredo. 'The Streets We Need' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Alfredo Landaeta and On Site review

The cul-de-sac

private streets, public spacesHavva Alkan Bala and Hassina Nafa
The curving, narrow streets which give you the feeling of an old town may sometimes lead to somewhere or may not. A dead end road is not a cul-de-sac, neither is it a dead-and-street. It certainly isn’t the second one. It is obvious that a culture like this has not experienced such a dead end road. A young child who sits looking out of a window on to a dead end road will never get bored. This is the sitting room of the neighbourhood. Even though it may seem like the houses in the street are leaning against each other, once you walk through the garden gates you can feel the independence. Some are gardens, some are just backyards. Whichever type it is, it is just a sitting room with four tall walls around it but doesn’t have a ceiling. —Balamir 1994

cities are composed of buildings, open spaces between buildings and the streets that connect them. These elements are arranged in a way that reflects their culture. Cul-de-sacs in traditional Anatolian cities represent Ottoman as well as Islamic city culture. Although mediaeval European cities have similar dead-end streets, the usage and the approach to cul-de-sac phenomenon have been completely different. In the traditional urban texture of Anatolian cities the cul-de-sac is a semi-public street safe for children and a semi-private social space for adults: it is well known that crime is less predominant in such urban layouts: cul-de-sac in the Islamic/Ottoman context is to do with segregation, privacy through space, hierarchy and control.
In modern cities, cul-de-sacs are not much appreciated in streets designed for motor vehicles. Although the cul-de-sac has a function as a transitional space between public and private space, they are disappearing in modern cities.

concept
Cul-de-sac is defined in architecture and urban design literature as ‘the street pattern open only in one side and connected to other larger streets’. (Keles 1999), (Sözen ve Tanyeli 1992) (Figure 1).
In Western logic cul-de-sac triggers something not positive: dead-end street, blind alley, blind path are used alongside cul-de-sac, namely dead, numb, dead, lazy, sluggish, lethargic, shiftless, indolent ways (Keles 1999). Cul-de-sac is either a semi-private or semi-public road for residential groupings with only one-way access.

logique
Traditional Anatolian cities were organic, free, rhythmic, not geometric (Aru 1998). The pattern of traditional residential areas was 1-3 floors, having a courtyard belonging to house and a cul-de-sac, curved, narrow and full of bends (Aktüre 1978). The cul-de-sac pattern gives to users a sense of belonging, a territory where they feel safe and protected. The public, semi-public, semi-private and the private overlap (Stewing 1966) (Figure 2).

The growth of these cities occurred in two ways (Figure 3). The first way was the filling the gaps (graveyards and un-constructed areas) in the city pattern. The second way appeared as an expansion of urban settlement areas out at the edges (Raymond 1995).
Under Ottoman rule, people and animals that carry loads used the Anatolian city (Schwarz 1959) — cabriolets were either limited or used on the main road (Yerasimos 1996), hence the roads are generally narrow and change direction frequently (Schwarz 1959). Narrow and broad streets follow each haphazardly, their dead ends have short or long branches and widely varying widths.
Dead ends, divided from each other by gates according to their value and ethnicity, are a civic transportation system organised through closed districts. Ethnic or denominational differences hold the potential for social conflict. Such mixed districts are divided from each other by doors and walls that construct a cul-de-sac (Lapidus 1967), (Stewing 1966) (Figure 4). As well, neighbourhood and family relations affect urban patterns, particularly when a son gets married an extension is added to the house of the family. These extensions make a cul-de-sac by attaching two separate houses (Figure 5) — not legal but it in line with constitution and traditions (Yerasimos 1996).
Dead ends seen in Mediaeval cities (Mumford 1989), (Morris 1979), (Moughtin 1992) do not share the same peculiarities with the cul-de-sac of Anatolian Ottoman and Islamic cities. According to Stewing (1996), Islam attaches more importance to private property rights than public property as long as such rights do not directly harm other people, and it is Islamic city culture that defined the spatial and physical structure of the cul-de-sac. Islamic cities are not spaces one can bypass from one point to another, one quarter to another as one wishes. There is a soft, gradual and hierarchic transition from the most public spaces such as the mosque or bazaar, the square or large street through the garden gate to the most private spaces of garden and house. Oleg Graber defines Islamic cities as ‘human-faced’ where cold laws disguise humanistic warmth in streets (Armagan 1996). Although urban and rural areas are unplanned and uncontrolled due to absolute individualistic interests at the forefront in housing, and positioning according to parcel of land (Cerası 1999), this too is a reflection of Islam. Stefan Yerasimos (1996) in this context clarifies this warmth in a legal dimension.
The status of dead end is a wonderful example in terms of the priority of the rights of natural person. The partnership of property in dead end is not monotype; every resident is the partner of the property, which starts from the entrance of dead end and ends in the threshold of his house. Therefore he cannot enlarge his threshold towards the dead end without the approval of the other owners of the property. The area of the dead end, which is getting more private towards the inner area, becomes the private property of the owner located at the end. Social status of the street residents follows a decreasing order towards the open end (Yerasimos 1996).
In Islamic cities private property is more important than public property and the border concept is shaped through this understanding. The concept of boundary separating private and public property in Islamic cities is called fina, and is used in place of border, which means the progressive transfer from one unit to another. The phenomenon of cul-de-sac, turns the public area into private area in accordance with the fina enabling the transfer from one property to another in Islamic law (Yerasimos 1996). It is a kind of privatisation process of public usage based on the agreement of property owners of buildings that have a surface facing towards the cul-de-sac. (Stewing 1966, Yerasimos 1996). The owner of private property can occupy the street in front of his private property; moreover he can have the right to use this area permanently. Therefore, this street becomes his fina. Two neighbours facing one another may break off the road and divide it into two dead ends with the permission of the street residents. These two dead ends become the property of the residents. Thus, people in this area could privatise a public area.
Administrative, legal and economic alterations were observed in Anatolian countries under the rule of Ottomans after the 1839 proclamation of ‘Tanzimat’ which was a series of Western-influenced regulations (Denel, 1982). These alterations comprise the transforming of the traditional Ottoman city pattern into a grid by deteriorating traditional city patterns. The social logic which creates cul-de-sac has become ‘the other’, starting from the Tanzimat period. When new spatial hierarchies were taken into consideration, the modern city lost the cul-de-sacs as interface.

mots dernieres
Modern movements in architecture and city planning have contributed to the neglect of the street and its architecture. Le Corbusier was one of the main offenders claiming that streets no longer worked and we have to create something that will replace them. One of the significant problems of today’s cities is the sharp-edged transition between private and public space. The cul-de-sac has offered a traditional solution to this sharp-edged transitional problem, with particular buildings between public and private spaces, which provide soft, gradual and hierarchic transition.

Bala, Havva Alkan and Hassina Nafa. 'Turkey: the cul-de-sac. Private Streets, Public Spaces' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Havva Alkan Bala, Hassina Nafa and On Site review

Porta Portese

the evolution of a Roman street marketDanielle Wiley
Each Sunday morning, the Porta Portese market overwhelms the Portuense neighbourhood of Rome, spreading through streets, sidewalks and squares. Although its architecture consists of lightweight bancarelle, the market is one of Rome’s densest spaces. There are 1000 official vendors, but the Comune di Roma estimates the actual number to exceed 30 000. While the surrounding neighbourhood gives shape to the market, the market reciprocates by actively shaping its milieu. Over the past six decades, bus and tram lines have been deflected, segments of streets have been widened into piazzas, and the municipality’s ambitions to redevelop the neighbourhood have been stymied. The city and market are mutually constitutive, on a very tangible physical level as well as on a cultural one.
Porta Portese is Rome’s largest Sunday-morning market and also one of its youngest. When in 1943 the main avenues into Rome were bombed and blockaded, a spontaneous group of black market carrieri materialised, running private cars with contraband food and goods into the city. By 1965 the demography of vendors at the market had shifted. The new majority were Neopolitans who would spend six days trolling the Campagna region for wares, sifting through local beaches and farmhouses abandoned during the war. They would then arrive in Rome at midnight on Saturday to secure the best spots along Viale Portuense. Today, most clothing stalls along Viale Portuense are managed by recent immigrants from North Africa and India. Along Via Ippolito Nievo, established vendors of predominantly eastern European origin sell furniture, while contraband peddlers compete for space on the sidewalk, laying out CDs on sheets of cardboard. A recent wave of Chinese vendors selling home electronics and digital novelties reflects Italy’s new political relations with China. The shifting demographics, activities, wares and territorial boundaries in the Porta Portese market describe a facet of the city’s evolving identity.
The Porta Portese market is a loose space – relatively self-organising and highly adaptive. The market might serve as a vernacular precedent for the kind of event space that is de rigeur in contemporary architectural theory and practice. More deft than a formal piazza, the market responds to changes in the city’s cultural, political and economic conditions. This responsiveness may stem from the market’s paradoxical status as a marginal space within the city’s centre. The market negotiates many boundaries: the ancient Aurelian wall and its seventeenth century portal, an industrial riverbank of the Tevere, an edge of the mediaeval city and tracts of modernist post-WWII palazzi. Many contemporary urban scholars, including the Rome-based Osservatorio Nomade, argue that the peripheral zones of historic European cities have the greatest capacity to generate new urban forms, experiences and identities. The Porta Portese Market, although embedded in the city centre, has the qualities of an urban edge. The market’s generative capacity becomes apparent through its weekly transformations. Each Sunday morning produces a new iteration as the stall keepers negotiate their territory and adjust their wares according to season and fashion.
The idea of a street, square or market as an archetypal public space becomes contentious in view of transnational and cross-cultural dynamics in places like the Porta Portese market. Even the most basic precepts of public space come into question: what it is, where it is, who is it for, what it should do. Since the late 1990s, the diaspora of people between and within Italy, the EU, Africa and Asia have caused rapid shifts in the make-up of local districts in Rome, particularly in Esquilino and Portuense. This intense movement of peoples, at a global and a city scale, is paralleled by transnational flows of commodities, information, images and ideas — in Rome, which once maintained a mono-cultural image in the face of all contrary evidence, nowhere is this transnational mobility as evident as in Porta Portese market.
Those who participate in street life now carry with them a much greater diversity of historical models and different, possibly conflicting, symbolic expectations of public space. Some fear that the public sphere might become too fragmented to sustain a dynamic yet cohesive street life. Over and above the pressures of absorbing so many multiple interests into urban public space are the challenges that an expanding digital public realm presents to the street as a primary scene of encounter. The permeation of the city by communications technologies – which, in fact, make this mobility between the global and local possible - transforms our sense of place. Contemporary urban theorists suggest that the new role of public space is to reassert a sense of place by expressing local identities in relation to a globalised public domain. What does this prescription for public space mean for architects, who take the front line in making public spaces?
Vernacular precedents are valuable models for architects to study how these broad concerns play out in ways that are in fact very material and case-specific. The Porta Portese market, for example, demonstrates how layers of permanent and temporary structures, everyday practices, regulatory policies, and changing economic and cultural conditions can create a vibrant and resilient public space – one that is, in the end, very particular to Rome. Porta Portese also raises questions for how such sites are observed, mapped and, finally, interpreted in an architectural design. Architects might consider what investigative and representational strategies would be appropriate to a public space that, like the Porta Portese market, is best understood as an encounter between a place and its inhabitations – one that is extended through time and embedded in a specific cultural milieu.

Wiley, Danielle. 'Porta Portese:the evolution of a Roman street market' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Danielle Wiley and On Site review

A Tale of Three Streets

Oakville Ontario, Phoenix Arizona, Edmonton AlbertaGordon Stratford
Over the years I have had the good fortune to experience first-hand an eclectic variety of thoroughfares – Unter der Linden in Berlin and its elegant boulevard park setting, Dubai’s Sheikh Zayed Road with its frenetic array of look-at-me towers, Savannah’s Barnard Street and the genteel southern squares along its path, and Shinjuku District streets in Tokyo, amazing on a rainy night after watching Blade Runner with Japanese subtitles in a local cinema. I once thought that the only streets worth paying attention to were the classics, like stately Unter der Linden, but energetic upstarts like Sheikh Zayed Road and Shinjuku District have given me pause to consider what makes a street really work. It would be worthwhile to set aside the worldly destinations, and take a closer look at some less exotic locales such as Oakville, Phoenix and Edmonton.

My family spent several years looking outside Toronto for the right place to call home. One of our key goals was a community whose heart was not a shopping mall: it had to have a healthy downtown. In the suburbs this is not easy to find, and then we found Oakville.
Lakeshore Road in downtown Oakville has the feeling of a classic Main Street that has grown, changed over time and actually thrived. It has just the right width, the right bordering building height and mix of uses. It has a choice of shady and sunny sides and promenading is alive and well. There is a nice bit of traffic complexity with curbside parking, trucks stopping in the middle of Lakeshore to make deliveries and slow speeds to take in the sidewalk life. A transcending civic moment, thanks to a well-designed pedestrian square midway along the street, provides a fine outdoor living room for cultural events and midnight-madness shopping. All seems well but I feel uneasy. Lakeshore feels like an incomplete portrait of the community, lacking that vital grit that balances gentrification. If you want the true main street heart of Oakville, you need to mix well behaved Lakeshore with nearby Kerr Street and its rough-edged alter ego.

I was told that the only place worth visiting in Phoenix was the main street in Kierland Commons –everything else is just suburban. Kierland Commons is touted as a prime example of the newest wave of development in North America, the mixed use urban village concept. Having decimated the traditional downtown with malls and big box shopping centres, developers are now recreating the essence of what had been destroyed. But do they succeed?
Kierland Commons is an odd thing, a taste of live/work/shop/entertain urbanity surrounded by the low density sprawl that represents most of Phoenix. Its main street has all the right ingredients, borrowing heavily from the genetics of streets such as Oakville’s Lakeshore. The proportion of street width to building height is comfortable, it is attractively landscaped and shaded sidewalks promote pedestrian activity – in itself is remarkable given Phoenix’s usually hostile pedestrian environment. There is street parking and traffic is nice and slow. A small square borders this main street, for daily use and special events. According to reports Kierland Commons is a great success, probably because it possesses what people long for and the rest of Phoenix seriously lacks.
It’s convincing but undone by an essential missing ingredient, authenticity. Along the street there are too many of the same stores that you would find in a shopping mall, servicing is too neatly hidden away from view, the main street ends unexpectedly and the transition to the real world of Phoenix is abrupt. The street never transcends its feeling of a manufactured stage set with not enough there there. Perhaps time, more local shops and expansion to a critical mass of urban streets, blocks and civic spaces will make the difference.

When I started visiting Edmonton on a regular basis, I asked a local where to stay in the city. I was told Whyte Avenue is the place to be. Since then I have experienced this street in all seasons, during festivals, through NHL hockey finals and on regular days.
Whyte is a bit like an awkward teenager, almost an adult but oddly put together and with a good dose of attitude. The street is wide, making it feel like the car is king. The buildings seem too short and the sidewalks too narrow to adequately frame the space. Oversized auto dealerships with enormous neon signs fight for attention with a multitude of small shops. The closest thing to a square is the Tim Horton's parking lot, with its revving motorbikes and smell of exhaust.
The design part of my brain tells me that this is all wrong, but the rest of my brain differs – Whyte works! A big factor is the number of small, local, eccentric stores with comparatively few big chain outlets. There is a full mix of people making street life active, rich and sometimes unusual –such as the nose flute player, and sometimes dangerous – Whyte is a street that can party: once a perfectly inebriated stranger grabbed me on a sidewalk packed with thousands of fans after the Oilers won a quarter-final series.
This one street captures the pulse of its community, where nothing is done in small measure. I am slowly learning that conscious design is not always the mantra for saving the world and making it a better place. Successful streets are proving, to me, that adhoc authenticity and inconsistent conditions win over choreographed strategies.

Stratford, Gordon. 'A Tale of Three Streets: Oakville, Phoenix, Edmonton' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Gordon Stratford and On Site review

Inscription

marking our place on architectureSarah Zollinger
When we become lost in the cities we live in, we rediscover our place by responding to the stories that architects tell with our own marks — words and images that tell stories in the cities we inhabit. Writing one's name on a building claims space and makes place: it makes that building surface ours. Design cannot be spontaneous, but graffiti needs to be. Architecture may be hard and solid and slow, but writers move quickly. Writing names and identities onto the city is how we engage the slowness of architecture and put ourselves into the stories of the places we live.
Aldo Rossi's city is a collection of the architecture that makes it up: a human-built object, an assembly of artefacts; often a collection of the ‘nameless architecture of large cities, streets and residential blocks’1 — LA, Houston or Toronto—but when we look more closely a counter-definition starts to emerge. Lives lived within these architectures add layers to the palimpsest of a city. With architectures as repositories, cities are ‘the production and distribution of discourse, writing, including the bodily traces of a building's occupants, and its divisions of space, time and movement'.2 This ‘visual litter’ both private and commercial, is part of our dialogue with the city. Competing images and texts might seem entirely chaotic but ‘neither cities nor places in them are unordered, unplanned; the question is only whose order, whose planning, for what purpose, in whose interest’.3
When the modern city disregards the individual in an attempt to plan for the universal, graffiti, stickers and stencils are some of the ways that urban dwellers physically and visually make their individual presence known. This urban art is part of a long tradition of marking the places we live. It is the trace of people we know and things we can identify. Because of the marks made by others like us the city becomes ‘a place that we can identify ourselves within’. 4 Each mark is the trace of another person ‘…every graffito can … be seen and/or read as a miniature autobiography of a member of a society in the sense that the graffitist reveals a part of himself and his society in all that s/he writes’.5 This idea of autobiography is at the heart of graffiti and what makes it unique.
Graffiti is about naming: writing ones name in the city allows ‘an announcement of one’s identity [as] a kind of testimonial to one’s existence in a world of anonymity’.6 Whether it be to sign a contract, or write yourself a name tag, or tag a wall, ‘when one makes a mark, one leaves something of one's self behind’, claiming both identity and belonging.7 For urban youth in a culture of nameless-ness and identity-less-ness, graffiti is a route to belonging, not only in a group but also in a large and anonymous city.8 Naming and re-naming implies the creation, or re-creation, of self and serves as a means of empowerment.9 The subsequent marking of one's name on a public surface adds to this the physical claiming of space and the delineation of boundaries within the city. There is a sense of pride in seeing your name or the names of friends impacting the city. One belongs by marking one's presence.
In this, buildings, the collection of stories told by architects, become the backdrop. The anonymous walls of anonymous buildings become canvases where the average person comes in contact with the city and meets the moment when our lives can inscribe the rigid world that we live in. This is where the people that walk the streets make architecture human: flexible, changeable and where we urban dwellers, who live our lives in the shadows of buildings, push back at an unyielding architecture.

Zollinger, Sarah. 'Inscriptions: marking our place on architecture' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Sara Zolllinger and On Site review

Cliffside Slips

Mason White and Lola Sheppard: Lateral Architecture
The urban street traditionally united three physical roles: that of circulation, that of public space and that of built frontage and address.
— Stephen Marshall1

typological studies of traditional streets have tended to focus on the dimensional and qualitative characteristics of good street-making: the width of vehicular lanes and sidewalks, the presence of trees, benches, lighting and so forth. In such studies, the temporal and programmatic aspect of the street is typically overlooked. With the advent of the modern city, the street was reconceived as infrastructure in service of efficient mobility, effectively liberating road form from city block form and divorcing the street from its role as a programmatically charged, public realm. This phenomenon has reached its greatest impact in the sprawling margins of cities.

Cliffside Slips is a project that attempts to re-integrate mobility and the public realm through a reprogramming of streetscape infrastructure. The project centres on the crosswalk as a space capable of re-appropriation and new occupation. Like the sidewalk, the crosswalk has the potential to serve as an extension of the public realm. Akin to connective tissue, it invites a continuous urbanism across connecting thoroughfares.
Cliffside Slips is a proposal that will reconnect a neighbourhood and stimulate a retail zone bisected by Kingston Road, a six-lane arterial. The proposal uses a range of connections to stitch together a community that is divided physically, socially and economically. The retail and urban conditions of the road are asymmetrical; the buildings on the north side establish a recognizable main street form, while on the south side buildings are set back from the street in a strip mall typology. The six-lane main street presents more than a physical separation, it reinforces a psychological barrier between the north and south neighbourhoods reducing connectivity and discouraging urban vitality.

Urban Marina
The Kingston Road proposal takes cues from the fleeting informal urbanism occurring at the nearby marina beyond the Cliffside Village bluff. Cliffside Slips produces a new infrastructure / urbanism hybrid. The intention is to create a main street that translates the idea of docking, bridging, anchoring, and temporary occupation to incrementally convert the suburban strip in Cliffside into an urban marina of roving activity and vitality. Cliffside Slips uses an inventory of existing urban infrastructure elements that includes pocket parks, crosswalks, medians and temporary parking lot occupations to connect both sides of the street into a dense public space.
Pocket Parks
Pocket parks, places to rest or play, act as attractors along the street. The pocket parks, which could be rented or purchased by the City or the Business Improvement Area, take advantage of open lots or derelict properties in the area, adding value to the adjacent properties and the rest of the street. The program for the parks would relate to the adjacent businesses and arrangements for shared public-private space could promote activities such as outdoor cafes, playgrounds and other activities. Pocket parks are often extensions of the crossing slips and act as an urban attractor.
Crossing Slips & Medians
The crossing slips and medians act as the connective tissue of the village. Slips merge crosswalks and pocket parks, and are inserted along Kingston Road at intermittent locations. The use of slips slows traffic, encourages pedestrian fluidity between the two sides and makes a series of places each with a distinct identity. Depending on local conditions, these slips project differently; some connect to pocket parks while others connect across parking lots to the strip malls on the south side.. The crossing slips act as progenitors for anchoring temporary events within the large parking lots in underused times.

The existing median, currently an inaccessible island in a sea of infrastructure, is expanded to become a resting point and to serve as a linear green buffer, providing a more intimate scale of street, both on the north and south side. The median also accommodates the proposed streetcar along Kingston in the future, incorporating transit shelters and rest points.



Dockings
Dockings are temporary urban infrastructures that bring street life to the parking lots of the strip malls on the south side of the street when they are not being used. These urban insertions allow for larger, temporal programs such as markets, outdoor cinemas and festivals. These would serve as early catalysts for the project, attracting people and extending the retail life of the surrounding shops.

Incremental Urbanism
Cliffside Slips is an incremental project not a master plan. The project recognises that it is economically and logistically more feasible, in the short-term, to transform the public space of the street, particularly through program and temporal interventions, than it is to change the physical configuration of the built fabric. The crossings, slips, parks and occupations can be produced over time as the economy and culture of the neighbourhood changes and develops.

Public space is defined not solely by built form, but equally by program, event and infrastructure. Appropriating existing street infrastructure such as the cross-walk, the median and the parking lot, allows a shift away from the purely pragmatic function of movement control to suggest new ways of occupying the public realm.


1 Stephen Marshall. Streets and Patterns: The Structure of Urban Geometry. Abingdon, New York: Spon, 2005.

Sheppard, Lola and Mason White. 'Cliffside Steps' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Lateral Architecture and On Site review

Invetissements/Investments

Cote-des-Neiges, MontrealNathalie Heroux, Olivier Boucher and Gabrielle Nadeau
Côte-des-Neiges presents itself as an exemplary axis, representative of Montreal’s harmonious cohabitation of diverse populations. The axis is literally serviced and used by a heterogeneous population, of all ages, all social statuses and of all origins.
Here, the different cultural impressions draw themselves subtly by commercial activities where the local forces express themselves by densely setting up small establishments on the street. The path’s usage does not become less bounded, controlled and regulated, segregating commercial activity from that of the sidewalk and that of street.
Inversely, in many countries, particularly in Asia, the chaotic investment of the street blurs these limits and leaves the way clear for the social forces to saturate all available zones. This standpoint is in complete opposition to the North American attitude concerning the street, which favours the establishment of a controlled environment, and that opposes citizens’ freedom of organisation.
The work sites that are currently dispersed along Côte-des-Neiges road challenge the way that we apprehend the street, transforming the normally banal progression into a true obstacle course, temporarily disturbing the established order. These forbidden zones invade the street in a random and unexpected fashion; they form an ideal alibi for the construction of ludic social installations. Our proposition of using road works as deceptions allows for spontaneous, marginal or foreign practices by using a disruptive code accepted and assimilated by all.

Heroux, Natalie. 'Investments' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Natalie Heroux and On Site review

Bollards

the fine lines of the public realmAntoín Doyle
Significant literary work can only come into being in a strict alternation between action and writing; it must nurture the inconspicuous forms that better fit its influence in active communities then does the pretentious, universal gesture of the book - in leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards. Only this prompt language shows itself actively equal to the moment.
—Walter Benjamin, One Way Street

The bollard is a prompt piece of building that relates the jurisdiction of control and bounding of site to the human body. It takes its function from other bounding elements – railings, fences and walls – yet its force lies in the space inbetween.
A bollard connected by chains becomes a barrier, a vehicle for exclusion; its potential is capped and controlled. When left unfettered, it can be inhabited, its function is more fluid, its response more prompt and active. These bollards direct and channel through their combined collection, they control through co-operation.
It is the inconspicuous gap between bollards that shows itself actively equal to the moment of the street. Within this regular rhythm and order, there is the opportunity to support an attachment to the city and a compatibility with the street.
Unlike chain, fence and railing which represent an over-determination in the city to support a regime of control, restricting desire, habit and pattern, the gap between bollards presents a porosity of territory to the city’s occupants and allows an opportunity for action and innovation in the interval. The drama of the instant can exist in the intermission.

The diameter of modern steel bollards allows little opportunity for contribution on the street. A broader bollard, more column than baton, has the potential to expand to the moment, allowing for multiplicity of use. By increasing its weight on the street, it is better able to respond to the demands placed on it by individual and collective action. Its particular height, girth, strength and materiality allows people to sit, stand, lean, rest and act. Its initial function is invaded by other uses, responding to the spontaneity and instant of the street. In this way, the identity of the bollard is subverted from a tool of territory and exclusion to one of occupation and contribution. The structural redundancy and strength required in a bollard for safety and security, mean that even when compromised it can still function as a light, a seat, a stage, a podium.

This bollard inhabits the commonplace yet illustrates a collision of functions and level of collaboration that is an indication of the level of substance and support that needs to be supplied to the street by architecture, building and design.

Doyle, Antoín. 'The Fine Lines of the Public Realm: Bollards' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Antoín Doyle and On Site review

Scavenger Suit

clothes, trash, collections and random walks
Ivan Hernandez Quintela
I live in Mexico City and it has become my curiosity field, my ground of exploration. I live my body as a tool of perception and interaction during my city walks. Yet, even though it is through my body that I perceive, interact, and intervene the exterior, rarely has my skin been the one in direct contact with the exterior. Instead, it is my clothing that has acted as a contact tool, as a secondary skin.
Reflecting on my past random walks, where I would take pictures with my Polaroid camera of everyday conditions, events and incidents that would catch my attention, I started to feel like a flaneur, distantly observing the city through a scratched and apparently unfocused squared lens of two by two centimetres. I no longer wanted to feel so detached, so one day I had an idea of assembling a suit for myself, a suit that could help me collect objectual traces of the city. I thought of a suit covered with pockets, some big, some small, some with zippers, some with buttons; a suit that could hold all types of objects. I thought this suit could become not only a tool but a sign for my collecting. I thought that as my collection of objects found and stored in the suit’s pockets would grow, I myself would grow. I thought the suit would become a sign that I was not only keeping random objects as if I was an urban archeologist, but that the act of collecting these pieces was literally shaping me, transforming me, becoming (in a Delleuzeian way) me. As the suit became fuller, fatter, heavier, I myself would get fuller, fatter, heavier, not in a physical manner, but fuller, fatter and heavier with urban experience.
I have only taken a couple of walks using my Scavenger Suit, and so far, my collection consists of what anybody would define as a bundle of trash. I once read something on the lines of ‘show me somebody’s trash and I will tell you something about that person’, yet, I am beginning to have doubts about the final purpose and depth of my collection. I am still not even sure how my Scavenger Suit helps me as a collector, except that people on the streets look at me as if I am unstable, leaving me free to collect unbothered by questions about my intentions. Still, on thinking about culture in general, which I take it to be everything that we produce, consume and integrate into our daily life, I think of my Scavenger Suit as an appropriate tool for the everyday city walker. It is, in the end, through our clothes that we protect, project and veil ourselves from the other. It seems to me that that is exactly what culture attempts to do, to protect, project and veil for us a feeling of identity that sets us apart from the other. That if we were to unveil it, we would find we are completely naked underneath.

Hernandez, Ivan. 'Clothes, trash, collections and random walks' On Site review, no. 18 Fall/Winter 2007/2008
© Ivan Hernandez Quintela and On Site review