Other Cities
March 16th, 2010
Visiting Chicago last weekend I thought it might be a good idea to take some notes for Spacing. This would be, I thought, in line with Matt Blackett’s 2007 post and Shawn Micallef’’s two posts from 2006, and after all isn’t it always a good idea to keep an eye on your sister (city)? So, in that spirit, here are some “do’s” from Chicago. Originally I thought it would be good to do an urban “do’s” and “don’ts”, but … I didn’t manage to come up with any “don’ts” in the end so looks like we’ll just have to make do with a list of “do’s”.
DO: Many tall buildings that relate to one another. While it is hardly an original point, it is always worth pointing out the vibrancy of a compact cluster of tall buildings. There can so much hesitancy in Toronto around building tall that it sometimes seems like we need to be reminded of the value of heightened density, even if only from a purely poetic perspective, never mind the practical aspects.
March 6th, 2010
Last month, I had the opportunity to visit Bogotá. As late as a year ago, I had never expected to visit Colombia, as it was not on my radar as an interesting - or safe - place to enjoy some time away. But a family wedding brought me here, and many of my preconceptions went out the window. The people are friendly, the countryside beautiful, and the security much improved. (It was especially nice to be so far south at a time when even the US south was suffering from a lingering cold snap.)
Bogotá, the nation’s capital and largest city (with a population of about 8 million), is also one of the world’s highest cities, with an elevation of 2600 metres. The city is spread out on a north-south axis, As Bogotá has grown, so has its transportation headaches. Like most Latin American cities (even including those with heavy-rail metro systems), the principal mode of public transit are private minibuses, which travel along all the major roads with the route posted on the windshield, merely a long list of neighbourhoods and landmarks the unscheduled service stops at.
Huge fleets of minibuses, stopping anywhere they are flagged down, aren’t exactly the most efficient mode of transport, though it can be convenient (and cheap) for passengers. Combine those buses (of varying age, upkeep and tailpipe emissions), with trucks, motorbikes, private cars and other street traffic, in a city surrounded by mountains, and you have a recipe for a smoggy, congested, mess. So the city, under the leadership of bold, clever (and sometimes near-dictatorial) city officials began to address it with a three-pronged attack: buses, bikes, and bans.
During the last decade, Bogotá took the lead of Curitba, Brasil, and began rolling out an advanced bus rapid transit system, called TransMilenio. TransMilenio solidified the Latin American tradition of high-concept BRT systems (which has been replicated in Mexico City to augment its already expansive Metro system) with a complex web of routes operating in exclusive lanes and serving fare-paid platforms in simple, modular, stations.
March 4th, 2010
Talk about putting Toronto’s walking issues in perspective — Toronto cycling activist Hannah Evans recently moved to Amman, Jordan to work, and posted this fascinating blog post about walking in that city. …
March 1st, 2010
Brantford city council recently voted to demolish three blocks of heritage buildings in the city’s downtown. Guest columnist Nigel Terpstra, of Urban Toronto, sent us this post about the situation.
Recently, the city of Brantford, Ontario announced its plans to demolish and remove forty-one structures from the south side of Colborne Street, in the heart of its historic downtown. The structures themselves date from 1850 to 1915 with the section stretching from 115 to 139 Colborne comprising one of the longest surviving collections of pre-confederation buildings in Canada. They represent a wide variety of architectural styles from the Beaux Arts of The Right House (1870), to the Georgian of The Shannon Building (1867), to the Edwardian of the Dominion House Furnishings Company (1915). Within that range are also included a number of Renaissance Revival, Second Empire and even Art Deco structures, all of which were created at different times, for different clients with different needs. They could very soon all be reduced to rubble.
February 4th, 2010
Standing on the platform of Hong Kong’s Tsim Sha Tsui station at 11:30 on a Tuesday night, watching crowd after crowd filter into already busy subway trains, you come to understand the importance of the MTR to the city pretty quick. On top of being one of the world’s most densely populated cities, Hong Kong’s geography (a crowded island separated by a busy harbour from a mountainous territory) poses unique problems to transportation planners. Mix this with a political climate that some claim to be amongst the most neoliberal in the world (the Hong Kong government moved heavily in the 90’s to divest itself of public utilities), and you have a very unique and fascinating transit system that is a hot bed for innovation.
The backbone of the system is clearly the MTR subway and rail system. The first line of which opened in 1979 and has since expanded to cover over 211km with 150 stations; although some of this expansion was accomplished through a takeover of the existing Kowloon Canton Railway (KCRC).
The subway is marked by several features, most notably its utilitarian design. Similar to Toronto, many stations are colour coded for easy recognition. Public art is not particularly common and food and drink is banned from the fare paid area. Glass barriers separate the platform from the track at all stations, and give the platform itself a much more comfortable and enclosed feel. The most noticeable characteristic of the system however is the ever-present crowds. This hits home the fourth and fifth time you hear the trilingual announcement reminding people to stand clear of the doors.
February 1st, 2010
The Star Ferry passes in front of Hong Kong’s electric skyline
Hong Kong is a ceaselessly amazing case study in crowd management. With space at an absolute premium, central parts of the city have relegated the pedestrian environment upwards, in an effort to meet the needs of both pedestrians and the buses and taxis that monopolize the city’s roads. Pedestrian infrastructure here is a futuristic monument to efficiency.
While pedestrian overpasses are common throughout the city, the centrepiece of the system is found in the area simply referred to as “Central.” Here, the Hong Kong government has mandated new buildings be connected to the overpass system and throughout much of the central business district pedestrians come into little contact with the ground. It is Toronto’s PATH system realized in a warm climate. As with the PATH, some buildings are better at accommodating the pedestrian flow than others, and signage can be patchy. You can really only properly negotiate the system when you learn to stop looking for signs and just go with flow.
The most impressive part of the system, however, is clearly the Central-Mid-Levels Escalator.
January 26th, 2010
The famous shopping street Nanjing Road in Shanghai, China
On a recent trip to China I discovered that one of the most striking features of Chinese cities, at least to the eye of a Spacing reader, is the difference in the pedestrian environment. In the midst of an upheaval of historic proportions, Chinese cities are caught between a rush to the car driven, bourgeois lifestyle of the west, and the pedestrian and cycling practicalities of its recent past. The Chinese paradigm for urban design in the country’s sprawling new districts seems committed to separating vehicle and pedestrian traffic, both through barriers and grades, in an attempt to preserve the walking culture while accommodating the car. Many interesting design features result.
In Shanghai and Beijing, it is the norm is to have sidewalks cordoned off from the roadway with barriers forcing pedestrian traffic towards overpasses. While pedestrian grade separation is most common at intersections, in Beijing it is also quite common mid-block. Beijing has adopted a car-dependent design of very wide avenues with multiple degrees of separation. Down the centre, several lanes of heavy traffic crawl through congestion while a low speed access road, parking and wide sidewalks occupy the storefront side of a barrier fence. Pedestrian flyovers here almost always have one steep staircase and one very gradual. The overpasses also often provide stairway connections to bus stops, a considerable investment in bus infrastructure.
What this setup gains in easy access for motorists it loses in attractiveness of the pedestrian environment as the pedestrian is distantly removed from the other side of the street. It also must cause obvious difficulties for the disabled. In many ways, it really seems that the human scale of the city has been lost, and it is not uncommon to hear Beijingers complain about the loss of the old city.
December 21st, 2009
Last week film artist Hye Yeon Nam produced a charming video of herself walking backwards through the Times Square area. Well, in …
December 10th, 2009
Although subway stations may not be seen as tourist attractions just yet, this may start to change. All over the world, transportation nodes are holding their own in the design and architecture industry, and soon Toronto will have six new stations by world-renowned architects Will Alsop and Norman Foster, which will hopefully compete. (Stay tuned for Spacing Radio’s interview with Alsop in January!)
Recently a number of creatively designed subway stations have come across our desks as Spacing, so to get inspired for Toronto’s new TTC lines and stations, we thought we’d share some of them with you!
In Los Angeles this fall, Lumenscape, a public art installation, was launched at the Wilshire and Western Metro Purple Line Station, serving as a bright gateway between the station and Solair, the mixed-use condominium building above. Designed by Rob Ley, of Urbana, and in collaboration with Lendrum Fine Art, the piece creates an “undulating environment of shifting coloured light.”
December 3rd, 2009
Cross-posted from Spacing Ottawa, by Michael Frojmovic
For those not familiar with local fare in Trinidad & Tobago, a mix of dried channa (chickpea), roasted peanuts and splitpeas is certainly one of the world’s great beer snacks. Accompanied by a cold Carib beer and a demi-caraffe of water served up in the air-conditioned lounge of the Hyatt Regency Hotel, they help nurse a tired pedestrian through the 15 minutes it takes to recover from an 30-minute evening walk through Port of Spain. Walking in Trinidad after sunset is not a common practice. If you travel on foot from New Town, through Woodbrook, to the Hyatt, you’ll face long stretches of empty streets, punctuated by the odd vagrant, without even a single honk from taxi drivers. Even as the sun sets, the humidity remains oppressive.
My own destination was Port of Spain’s newest waterfront development; specifically, the publicly accessible waterfront promenade. A waterfront city, Port of Spain was designed – much as numerous Canadian and American cities – with its back turned to the water. From a pedestrian’s point of view, the waterfront was separated by walled-in port facilities, and a major 6-lane arterial roadway (Wrightson Road) which functions as a highway.
