Yet another city with ambitious plans for the future (remember the Stockholm article a couple of days ago). Paris commissioned 10 design teams “to transform Paris and its surrounding suburbs into the first sustainable “post-Kyoto city,” a reference to the treaty on climate change, with an expanded Métro system and sprawling new parks.”
The plans are the result of a nine-month study commissioned by President Nicolas Sarkozy, and use transportation and parks as transformative urban design tools – an interesting similarity to Minneapolis and the Metropolitan area in general at a time when transportation in particular is expanding at a rapid rate and could transform the area, if planned and designed right.

A wonderful NY Times article featuring an area in Stockholm not too dissimilar to Minneapolis’ own transit crossroad section of the North Loop.  The article highlights design ideas for the area, and concludes with a call to “Think Big”!

This article from the NY Times describes the proposed transformation of the Manhattan Farley Post Office into the ‘Grand transit entrance to New York’ – part of the redevelopment of Penn Station, considered one of the great projects to have ‘enormous benefits for the entire region’. The article describes the government lead effort, the collaboration between city, state and Port Authority, and the selection of developers to help realize the larger project. Senator Schumer is looking for $100 million in stimulus money from the high speed rail and Amtrak stimulus budgets.

Here is a follow-up editorial.

Hennepin County Regional Rail Authority contracted the services of transit experts HDR to facilitate a week-long workshop to develop a conceptual plan for the inter-modal facility.  HDR has taken a robust and comprehensive look at the area around the transit crossroads – looking at a variety of scales – and developed concepts for a transit hub on various sites, reflecting multi-modal transit development best practices. This is the culmination of an enormous amount of work, and is an exciting and thought provoking presentation. Click here to see the presentation.

Check out this great article written by William R. Morrish, Professor of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban and Environmental Planning School of Architecture, University of Virginia. Morrish developed the article following his experiences working in post-Katrina New Orleans, post-9/11 Manhattan, and in response to the 1993 Mississippi River flood. He eloquently makes the case for:

• Re-thinking the role infrastructure plays in our private and collective lives
• Developing a comprehensive, integrated and collaborative approach to creating new forms of infrastructure that express and meet the new challenges of our society, economy and environment
• Incorporating natural systems and processes as structural components of sustainable infrastructure

Morrish’s article is especially noteworthy, as we move into a unique period of global warming, fluctuating fuel prices, limited natural resources and changing demographics—all of which require a new approach to development at a time of limited government resources.

I have been following the debate over the re-construction of the 35W bridge and would like to bring some very important issues within the context of city building to your attention, in hopes that they will be considered during this critical planning and design phase.

As is often the case with such a large project as a bridge, enormous attention is paid to the political, financial and scheduling aspects of getting the project built, while the burden of design decisions are frequently marginalized, with the final product often mediocre.

We as a state must recognize the value of infrastructure in articulating the hopes and dreams of our community. Bridges in particular, because of their unique construction and location within the landscape, have come to symbolize these sentiments as well as contribute to the identity of a city and become destinations in and of themselves. The Goldengate Bridge in San Francisco, the Bach de Roda Bridge in Barcelona, Spain and the new Millau Bridge in the Languedoc region of France, are all optimistic, lasting testaments to a community’s pride, hope for the future and investment in innovation.

Minnesotans have a wonderful opportunity to celebrate the crossing of the Mississippi River, one of the world’s three greatest rivers, commemorate the tragic collapse of the 35W bridge, and anticipate the needs of our growing and changing population in the next 50-100 years, all embodied within a bridge design.

Rather than making hasty, short-sighted decisions, bring all the stakeholders to the table, collectively evaluate the community needs and opportunities, both current and future, and demand the highest quality design for our bridge. Ideally, a design competition should be held to solicit the best ideas and create an open dialogue. At the very least, stakeholders should require landmark quality design as one of the selection criteria for the design/build firms under consideration. We only have one chance to get this right – do we really want just another highway bridge?

Cc: Mayor RT Rybak, City Council President Johnson, Congressman Jim Oberstar, Chairman Peter Bell, Governor Tim Pawlenty

Urban design is not just benches, banners and bollards – it is a comprehensive, integrated approach to the design and development of the public realm and its relationship to private development. As a discipline it bridges architecture, landscape architecture, public art and physical planning.

Urban design is a process as well as a product. The process involves bringing citizens together to define the assets of a place, identify the latent or obvious civic connections at a variety of scales, and use a myriad of design tools to create a vision and implementation scheme for a functional, engaging, sustainable and beautiful public realm that supports a healthy private realm.

Using transportation as an example of how urban design works at a variety of scales:

Large Scale Connections: Large-scale transportation systems such as LRT provide wonderful opportunities to connect existing civic amenities as well as future development opportunities. Where these systems intersect creates an opportunity to make a grand civic gesture in the form of a transit station. The combination of creating logical transit systems that connect to current and future amenities and development, and transit hubs that are comfortable and engaging, contributes to an enhanced civic identity, improved quality of life for residents and visitors alike as well as economic vitality and a level of civic sustainability.

Medium Scale Connections: Transit hubs needn’t just connect single forms of transportation, but instead it can be the convergence of multiple modes, such as LRT, bus and bicycle. Bicycle trails can also be designed to connect transit to civic amenities, providing a totally different experience to other forms of transit. Rather than just creating a trail connecting one spot to another, the opportunity exists to make the trail an experience in itself, if what is located along it is considered. It doesn’t just have to be green, but instead could have uses along it such as shops, townhouses or public spaces oriented to the trail. Through integrated and thoughtful urban design, the trails can become safe, functional and exciting alternate transportation experiences within the urban fabric.

Small Scale Connections: A safe comfortable pedestrian environment will only enhance the urban experience and support economic development. Smaller, often left over spaces, such as alleys, can be transformed into mid-block pedestrian thoroughfares with restaurants and coffee shops with seating overflowing into the alley in summer and become brightly lit, shop lined protected walk ways that are more cozy during the winter months.

As the above examples hint, Urban Design is also about relationships between various physical features and how these relationships are articulated using tools like: building mass, orientation and materials, relationship of interior uses to the sidewalk, street type, climate, transportation and adjacent uses. The trick is in creating the vision early, with committed public and private support, and incorporating the ideas into all capital improvement and development projects so urban design doesn’t become an after thought but instead a cultural amenity.