The Liebling Haus in collaboration with feld72 is launching a Call for Ideas for the Catalog of Possibilities – the aim is to explore the potential of public space, during the pandemic and beyond, and to think together about future uses of (urban) open space. The Call for Ideas is supported by the Austrian Cultural Forum Tel Aviv.
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The Call for Ideas for the Catalogue of Possibilities is more than a competition – it is a collection of ideas that aims to become a tool for public discourse on the resilient city of tomorrow, committed to public welfare. A catalogue providing practitioners and conceptual thinkers with the opportunity to express their ideas and to be both seen and heard.
How can we use public space collectively in this “new” normality?
Which structures are needed in times of social distancing?
Which places support us in taking care of each other?
What is your idea for the resilient city of tomorrow?
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Proposal for Caring Infrastructures for the public space
The Covid-19 pandemic acts as a catalyst to reflect on existing structures, organisations and habits in the public space. It provides an opportunity to create sustainable, positive change in our cities with an impact that will be felt far beyond the crisis. The Liebling Haus in collaboration with feld72 invites all interested architects, artists, conceptual thinkers, scholars, urbanists, and creative individuals from all backgrounds to submit a proposal for Caring Infrastructures for the public space. We aim to foster essential everyday aspects of a civilised society, often overlooked at the height of the pandemic, and to create shared focal points in the city.
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Proposals should be generally situated in the public realm and are not limited by geographic locations, although there is a special focus on the cities of Tel Aviv and Vienna. When submitting the proposal, any medium can be chosen to visualise and describe the idea. Selected projects will be awarded in the following categories with a total amount of 15,000 Euros:
- CARING INFRASTRUCTURE for Tel Aviv
(to be realised in Tel Aviv’s public space) - CARING INFRASTRUCTURE for Vienna
(to be realised in Vienna’s public space) - CARING INFRASTRUCTURE Idea
(not to be realised, no geographical restriction)
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Deadline of submission: April, 30, 2021
The Call for Ideas started on January 25, 2021. All entries must be submitted to the Catalogue of Possibilities by 12:00 pm CET on April 30, 2021, using the submission form. All submitted proposals will be published on the website. Project participants will retain all rights to their ideas and designs.
Proposals will be evaluated by an international interdisciplinary jury, consisting of representatives of the partner organisations and the cities of Tel Aviv and Vienna, as well as invited experts. The final decision on the outcomes will be publicly announced in June, 2021 on the website.
For more informartion read the Call for Ideas.
Mobility at the next level: More and more metropolitan areas are discovering cable cars as a means of transport in inner cities. Pioneers in this regard are conurbations in Bolivia and Mexico, which are already showing how its possible to move through urban areas far removed from the noise and stress of the streets and traffic jams. Especially where cities are growing, numbers of commuters are increasing and existing transport systems are reaching their limits, cable cars could establish themselves as a new form of environmentally friendly mobility.
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Urban areas are growing and encountering new challenges. Cities are getting louder and louder, traffic is increasing, streets are getting more congested and the air is getting more polluted. These are all factors that affect people’s quality of life. More and more cities around the world are therefore looking for alternatives to cars, buses and trains in order to find answers to their traffic problems. Planners are increasingly advocating inner-city cable car systems as a means of mass transport: What has primarily been used in mountainous areas to open up valleys is now beginning to provide traffic relief in cities as well.
Cable cars around the world
Cable cars can connect nodes within transport networks and expand a city’s transport infrastructure, for example by linking rail networks on the ground or extending tram lines that don’t go far enough. They are therefore considered an ideal complement to existing mobility systems and can solve urban challenges at a new level. Examples in South America show that cable cars can help to prevent traffic gridlock: The Colombian city of Medellín has successfully installed cable cars as a means of transport since the turn of the century, and the Bolivian capital La Paz and its neighbouring city El Alto now have the longest inner-city cable car network in the world, which is over 30km long. In Taipei (Taiwan), a 4km-long cable car has been running from an underground station to the entrance of the zoo since 2007. 24,000 passengers use the system everyday, which adds up to 2,400 people per hour in each direction of travel.
London has also successfully solved some of its traffic challenges through the use of a cable car: Since June 2012 visitors have been able to glide across the Thames at a height of almost 90 metres. Work on the “Air Line” took just under a year, and it now connects Greenwich with the Royal Docks, offering views of the Olympic Park, Canary Wharf Finance Centre and Thames Barrier flood control structure. Built for the 2012 Olympic Games in order to link the various Olympic arenas, the cable car was subsequently made available to commuters and tourists. During his first ride on the cable car, London’s Mayor Boris Johnson enthused that he felt like Yuri Gagarin. Everyday passengers silently float over the United Kingdom’s capital city, leaving the noise and hecticness of the streets behind.
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Urban cable car boom
A big advantage of cable cars is also a reduction in nitrogen oxide pollution compared to cars, buses and trains. Another important advantage is speed: Cable cars can travel at 21km per hour, which buses cannot manage during rush hour, and even trams only reach a speed 19km per hour. Construction and operation of cable cars is also more cost-effective than trams or underground trains: The first cable car line in Medellín – which has more than 7 million passengers per year – supposedly paid for itself within a year. The global leader in cable car construction is the manufacturer Doppelmayr. The Austrian company from the Vorarlberg had record sales of 935 million euros during the 2018/19 financial year. “Demand is currently high in South and Central America, but there are also some interesting projects in France and Italy, for example in Rome and Milan,” explains Thomas Pichler, managing director of the Austrian company. “We see cable cars primarily as feeder lines to larger public transport systems. In Mexico City, we are currently building a cable car line that will serve as an extended arm to one of the city’s largest transportation hubs,” says Pichler. Such solutions are being discussed in Germany as well. In Trier, a fast public transport connection is currently being sought between the city centre and the university on the other side of the Moselle. Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and Munich are also thinking about solving their traffic problems with inner-city cable cars: An urban cable car boom in times of climate change.
The Second Bicycle Architecture Biennale launched in Amsterdam this June, featuring an array of cutting-edge bicycle infrastructural projects from around the world. But how useful are they for citizens not blessed with a bike friendly city?
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Last June saw the opening of the Second Bicycle Biennale in Amsterdam, a showcase of various innovative bicycle infrastructural projects from Europe and around the world. Initiated by the BYCS foundation, and curated by NEXT Architecture, this edition was introduced at Amsterdam’s WeMakeThe.City festival, before going on tour across Europe, making stops at several major exhibitions and events, including Velo-City in Ireland, Arena Oslo, as well as events in Rome and Gent.
The biennale featured fifteen projects in total, selected for their success in extending beyond functional design solutions and tackling wider urban problems. While this allows for quite a wide berth, several themes emerge from the entries. To start with, many of the projects are defined by their relationship to pre-existing car and rail infrastructure. For instance, one involves the creative repurposing of an old highway in Auckland and another involves renovation of an old railway in Queens, New York, while a project in Barcelona has successfully overcome the impediment created by a particularly tricky section of the city’s motorway network.
Seeking synergy
In a similar vein, several projects have clearly been selected for their success in binding together previously disparate parts of the city. This goes for the Auckland and Queens projects, as well as a striking bridge in the small Dutch town of Purmerend, and another bridge in Cologne, Germany which has helped to turn its surrounding area into a new city centre.
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Meanwhile, there’s a very obvious focus on projects that seek to synergise with the key nodes of a city’s wider infrastructure, including a skyway that maps onto a bus rapid transit line in the Chinese city of Xiamen, a bike path that follows Berlin’s elevated U1 metro line, as well as projects in Copenhagen, Utrecht and The Hague which all adeptly insert themselves into the rapid passenger flows of these cities’ respective central train stations.
Sensitive, Stealthy, Smooth
If there were a golden thread observable from all these themes, it probably comes from the seeming assumption that the desired bicycle-centred city of the future is best achieved by way of solutions that are sensitive, stealthy and smoothly plugged into the pre-existing urban fabric. This is definitely an uncontroversial and sensible approach, and by no means the wrong one, but it would be great if a future edition also focused on some more bottom-up interventions. Coming as they do from Amsterdam, it cannot have escaped the founders of the Biennale that their own city’s incredibly bike-friendly atmosphere comes thanks to decades of grassroots activism from previous generations, rather than being delivered through top-down urban planning.
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More grassroots, wider geography
Covering some more grassroots projects ought to also address another issue with the Biennale, that most of its successful entries are located in North and Western Europe, with four projects from The Netherlands, three from Germany, two from Belgium and one from Denmark.
Given these places are at the forefront of the move to a more bicycle-oriented urban environment, this narrow geography is to be expected. But the many cities where conditions aren’t suited to cutting edge infrastructure surely could do with some more practicable inspiration from other places that are similarly hamstrung.
To be fair to the Biennale, it’s beyond their stated scope to intervene in the various complex political situations that prevent bicycle infrastructure from being realised. But avoiding this aspect will necessarily limit its capacity for meaningful change.
Until September 8, 2019, the exhibition „Access for All“ in the Architekturmuseum München (Architecture Museum in Munich) will focus on the social infrastructures of the city of São Paulo and present buildings and open spaces that create integrative spaces for an urban society.
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On the façade of Munich Architekturmuseum, bright red, large capital letters advertise the title of its recent exhibition: “Access for All”. Three words that aren’t always easy to realise. São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city, however, certainly meets this goal with success. The city of over 20 million inhabitants manages to achieve this despite facing complex challenges, ranging from environmental pollution and water supply to traffic overload, social inequality and informal settlements.
Is it possible for a densely populated city with abundant resources and just as many problems to serve as a role-model for openly accessible spaces that allow for multipurpose use free of conflicts? And how? Since in São Paulo, public and private parties have been investing for many years in architectonical infrastructures that compensate spatial narrowness and at the same time aim to improve people’s quality of life through relaxation, culture and sports.
From the Marquise to the swimming pool on the roof
The exhibition focuses on open spaces, large multifunctional buildings and the Avenida Paulista – all of them integrative spaces for urban society. Oscar Niemeyer’s Marquise in Ibirapuera Park is an example of open spaces: a roof, which simultaneously serves as a pathway, under which nothing has to happen, but anything can. It’s actively used by inline skaters, skateboarders, BMX riders, walkers and fruit vendors. The “SESC 24 de Maio” by the architect Paolo Mendes da Rocha is a multifunctional building par excellence: it offers various recreational activities across 14 floors, including a theatre in the lower level, a restaurant, a library and a rooftop swimming pool. A ramp provides street access to the building and extends across all floors. Most of the spaces are open to everyone.
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Avenida Paulista: a place of encounter, of conflict, of demonstration and of tolerance
Spatially and structurally, the exhibition is divided into three areas, which the visitor explores from front to back. The first section includes the projects with photographs, illustrations and plans, presented on black steel frames with grids and on white tabletops. It comes across as spontaneous, provisional and entertaining while subtly striking a chord of casual urbanity. This impression is enhanced in the second area of the exhibition room, which focusses on the Avenida Paulista and showcases a model of the street and adjacent buildings in the centre of the room. This nearly three-kilometre boulevard is located beneath all the skyscrapers and is closed to traffic every Sunday. It’s a place of encounter, of conflict, of demonstration and of tolerance. In the model, the Avenida and the other freely accessible spaces along the street are coloured in bright red. This visualises that it’s exactly these spaces, running like a red vein between banks, hotels and corporate headquarters, that give the city its vitality.
A miniature Marquise à la Niemeyer, on which people can sit, transforms the third and last area of the exhibition into a space of reflection and encounter. Just like in the open spaces of São Paulo, visitors can decide how they want to use it– whether they would like to read specialist publications, watch interviews on the projects, play chess or observe other visitors.
Inspiration for any modern big city
The exhibition “Access For All“ manages to showcase something that isn’t directly present and makes it perceptible on different levels: the great value of open spaces for urban society between prestigious buildings, between narrowness, stress and conflicts. While the focus is on São Paulo, the exhibition offers inspiration for any modern big city. Urban life takes place in the openly accessible spaces where there is no obligation to consume. It’s in these very spaces that a community practises democracy.
