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.
In an ongoing series exploring the effects of China’s Belt and Road Initiative on the cities involved, our next stop is Venice, the original end point of the medieval Silk Road, with ambitious plans for modern expansion as part of the New Silk Road.
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In March this year Italy became the first major Western power to endorse China’s Belt and Road Initiative. In doing so the country smoothed the way for some major transformations in its trade infrastructure, particularly in the historic port cities of Trieste, Genoa and, above all, Venice.
Echoes of Marco Polo’s travels along the medieval Silk Road are too tempting to ignore. Back then, in 1271 to be precise, the teenage Venetian sailed with his father and uncle to Acre, rode camels to the Persian port of Hormuz and continued on to the Shangdu summer palace of Yuan Chinese emperor Kublai Khan (the grandson of Genghis Khan), eventually spending several years as an advisor to the emperor. Upon his arrival back in Europe, the young merchant recounted his story to the romance writer Rustichello of Pisa, while both of them were imprisoned in Genoa (which was at war with Venice by the time Polo returned). The so-called Book of Marvels that emerged from this encounter became a bestseller and inadvertently reinvigorated European interest in trading with the Far East (Christopher Columbus was said to have carried a copy of the book on his voyage to what he thought was the eastern edge of China but actually turned out to be the Americas).
Expansion and Preservation
Venice has changed a lot since Polo’s time. After enjoying several more centuries as one of Europe’s preeminent maritime powers, it experienced a steady decline following the shift in European trade from the Near East to the New World, to which Venice had relatively less access compared to the Western European powers. By the early 20th Century, it became clear that the lagoon could no longer support trade on the scale suitable for maintaining competition with other Mediterranean ports. An extension was therefore built on the nearby mainland in Marghera which re-established the wider Venice region’s important position in Mediterranean maritime trade, while preserving historic Venice so that it could become one of world’s most popular tourist destinations.
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This same spirit of expansion and preservation has fuelled a new proposal to build an offshore port eight nautical miles off the mainland. The Venice Offshore-Onshore Port System (VOOPS), as it is called, is intended to provide Venice with a maritime port in deep waters outside the lagoon, thereby allowing the Port of Venice to handle the largest cargo ships that carry over 20,000 TEUs without causing disruption to the area around historic Venice. In the process, it will also link the Venice with the nearby ports of Chioggia, Porto Levante, Ravenna, as well as the inland ports of Mantua and Padua, the Greek port of Piraeus (also receiving the Belt and Road treatment), and markets across the central European mainland.
“Made in Italy”
The ultimate prize, however, is stronger links with Chinese and East Asian markets hungry for goods “Made in Italy”: Ferraris and Lamborghinis, Italian wine, food, fashion, art, interior design and all the many Italian products that remain synonymous with quality and luxury. Integration will also bring more Chinese tourists to Venice, a big destination for a population still inspired by the story of Marco Polo.
The problem is VOOPS was approved under the previous President of the Venice Port Authority Paolo Costa, who left the role in 2017. His replacement Pino Musolino has been considerably less enthusiastic about the plan, describing it as “pharaonic” in scope, totally out of proportion to the projected traffic passing through the upper Adriatic. While the project has not been outright rejected, its future is very much uncertain.
Populist Indecision
This indecision repeats itself on the national stage. Last year, elections delivered success for two populist parties, the Five Star Movement, who became the largest party, and the newly rebranded Lega (previously the northern Italian-focused Lega Nord), who led the largest coalition. After long negotiations, the two parties went into coalition together, with their two leaders, Luigi di Maio and Matteo Salvini each becoming deputy prime ministers under the premiership of compromise candidate and Independent politician Giuseppe Conte.
Whereas di Maio has been relatively positive about the Belt and Road Initiative, Salvini is much less enthusiastic, refusing to meet the Chinese President Xi Jinping when he visited earlier this year. Since the election, Salvini’s star has risen and the M5S popularity has plummeted, which means that it will likely be some time before Italy’s endorsement of the Belt and Road Initiative brings concrete results in Venice.
In an ongoing series exploring the effects of China’s Belt and Road Initiative on the cities involved, our next stop is the port of Rotterdam in The Netherlands, which must deal with increasing competition from land and sea as a result of China’s rise.
After a third of its buildings were destroyed during the 1940 Nazi blitzkrieg invasion of The Netherlands, the Port of Rotterdam rose phoenix-like from the rubble to become the world’s busiest port by 1962.
Benefitting from its position at the entry point of Western Europe, a region that was (and, of course, continues to be) home to several of the world’s wealthiest countries, Rotterdam held this position for a remarkable stretch of over four decades, until it was finally overtaken in 2004, first by Singapore and then by the Chinese Port of Shanghai. Since then, it has fallen out of the top ten largest ports in the world and now lies eleventh behind eight Chinese ports, as well as the ports of Dubai and Singapore.
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This probably says as much about recent changes in China as it does about the fortunes of Rotterdam and Europe more broadly: China, a country with a population twice that of the whole of Europe, has merely begun to close the gap.
Even so, the trend is suggestive of a general direction of travel that’s worth exploring.
A big port with little to gain
As previous articles in this series have shown, China’s Belt and Road Initiative has largely targeted cities which will can be easily integrated into China’s trade routes and can directly benefit from the investment and technical and logistical expertise that China offers. As a port which was already developed, and already supported by a prosperous national economy, Rotterdam has relatively less to gain from Chinese support.
That said, the railway-based “Belt” half of the Belt and Road Initiative is likely to have at least some indirect impact on Rotterdam’s role in transnational trade.
From centre to periphery
Rail’s main advantage is that it offers a middle ground: less expensive (though slower) than air freight and faster (though more expensive) than ship freight. Whereas the journey from China to Rotterdam takes a ship well over a month to complete, and on average around 55 days, the same trip can now be completed within two weeks by rail. This middle ground is also achieved with markedly less carbon emissions, something which will become increasingly important in the century to come.
The trouble this poses for Rotterdam is that it lies on the very periphery of China’s budding transcontinental rail network, something which is underlined by the fact that other European nations had already conducted rail trade with China for several years before the first freight train from China arrived in Rotterdam on July 23 2015.
What’s more, the frequency of trains to Rotterdam remains considerably lower than it is for other European cities east of Rotterdam. As an article in the Dutch newspaper AD explains, while the number of trains that travel between China and Europe is now 24 each week, many of these don’t go beyond Germany, mostly ending up in Duisburg in Germany and other cities in Central and Eastern Europe.
This suggests that, as the rail network continues to develop, Rotterdam could become a progressively less essential source of international trade for other countries in the European heartland.
Panic in the press
This is certainly the fear expressed in the Dutch press, which has become increasingly panicked about China’s infrastructural development in recent years, seeing it as a direct threat to the country’s economy, and a general threat to the West’s global pre-eminence.
Surveying the facts on the ground, however, it’s hard not to conclude that Rotterdam will actually probably be fine. It’s a relatively wealthy city in a very wealthy country, whose diverse and highly developed economy is more than capable of riding the wave of change brought about by China’s global infrastructural development, taking advantage of new and improved connections with the European heartland and beyond.
The decline of Western global pre-eminence is very real, but really only significant because of how long it took to happen. So long as policymakers and port management swallow their pride and make the best of the new situation, nothing will change for countries that once stood out because the rest of the world had been held back by centuries of Western imperialism.
