Perhaps the most famous urban development of lockdown times in the first half of 2020 are the countless pop-up bike lanes in many European and in other countries. To avoid public transport, many people have taken to their bikes. Former car lanes or narrow bike lanes have been transformed into bike lanes that are at least two metres wide. But will these pop-up interventions be able to survive the crisis?
Pop-up bike lanes are part of a movement that is called tactical urbanism: short-term interventions for long-term change. The tactical goal of pop-up bike lanes is, in many cases, a long-term change in how traffic is planned. Similarly, parklets, “streateries” and other pop-up interventions want to change the urban design. They follow the idea of car-free cities or cities that at least prioritise pedestrians over cars. One example is the city of Milan in Italy: Can pop-up bike lanes create permanent change here?
[tttgallery id=”897″]
Milan’s Strade Aperte programme
While in many cities, it is still unclear how successful the pop-up bike lanes will be, Milan in Italy is on the way to implement some of the insights from lockdown into urban planning. Tactical urbanism is at play here since the pop-up bike lanes will become permanent in a network of up to 35 additional kilometres under the premises of the Strade Aperte programme.
The idea of Strade Aperte (“open streets”) emerged during the first month of lockdown. The idea was to encourage cycling across busy streets such as Corso Venezia and Corso Buenos Aires. But in addition to that, the city council announced a scheme to further reduce car use even after the lockdown. Apart from allowing for spatial distancing, the programme is supposed to decrease traffic congestion and improve air quality.
These are the elements of the Strade Aperte plan:
- Low-cost temporary cycle lanes
- New and broader pavements
- 30 km/h speed limits
- Pedestrian and cyclist priority streets
[tttgallery id=”898″]
Making pop-ups law
The city council of Milan asked Italy’s national government to make changes to the national traffic rules, which allowed for the quick creation of cycling paths. The current pop-up bike lanes in Milan are not part of the local traffic law yet, but they have been legalised. With the Strade Aperte programme, they will soon be a fixture in the streets.
While residents are still discussing the value of bike lanes, first problems are arising in Milan as summer holidays end and the city is filling up again. Many people still prefer their cars and it has been a struggle to enforce the correct use of bike lanes and smaller street lanes.
Milan’s city council is trying to make funds available for the purchase of electric bikes and scooters. At the same time, local train company Trenord made it illegal to take bikes on trains after some overcrowding incidents, which was a challenge especially for bike couriers. Thriving bike thefts and overworked maintenance shops soon showed that the enthusiasm for biking was hard to meet in terms of supply. Inspiration might be taken from France, where cities provided a subsidy of 50 euros for people to repair their old bikes in local workshops.
The public reception of Strade Aperte
For tactical urbanism to achieve its goal, public opinion must be on its side. While interventions of this kind can be top-down, for long-term changes one will be much better off having the support of the citizens. In Milan, the public seems divided. Some think that the Strade Aperte programme has been implemented too quickly without understanding the actual problems in some of the main streets. The pop-up lanes have, in some areas, become dangerous to cyclists and car drivers alike. Street vendours and restaurants complain of having less space and the strong car lobby warns of traffic congestion.
[tttgallery id=”899″ template=”content-slider”]
But there is also a big faction of citizens who are in favour of the project. The city council has taken first steps and invited citizens for public meetings. Architects and residents have also come together to suggest some redesigns of public space under the Strade Aperte project. The programme is already running, but there is still room for tweaks and improvements.
In April 2020, the city council asked citizens for their ideas which resulted in almost 3,000 submissions. Requests included 30 km/h speed limits, more pedestrian spaces, new bike sharing stations in Milan’s outskirts and more bike lanes. The resulting Strade Aperte programme is therefore a mix of bottom-up and top-down engagement.
Comprehensive long-term change for Milan’s streets
While the bike lanes in Milan are intended to be temporary and funding is limited, a future retention of this infrastructure with a higher investment or more safety for cyclists is what many activists and planners hope for. The pop-ups have not yet become permanent, but an important first step, which is changing the public idea of cycling, is underway in Milan and many other cities. Apart from funding and making bike lanes official, politics play an important role, too. Next year’s local elections might change or even cancel the Strade Aperte programme, since the centre-right parties tend to favour the car lobby.
The example of Milan shows that while tactical urbanism can be successful in what it sets out to do, it is not a cure for everything. Despite having a great network of public transport, Milan’s culture is still very much linked to car ownership. The city also grapples with a lack of social housing. People living in the suburbs might profit from Strade Aperte while they are in city centre (is it only focused on the centre), but for their commutes, pedestrianised and bicycle-friendly paths are not the main worry. At the same time, projects like Strade Aperte tend to support gentrification, pricing locals out even further.
This is why experts call for a broader approach, which might be falling on fertile grounds now more than before recent developments. A 15-minute city, where it only takes 15 minutes to reach the workplace and essential services by public transport or bike, is and popular approach among Milan’s planners and architects. In a small and dense city like Milan, it could work. Combined with incentives for cycling, maintenance projects, improved housing close to city centre and a shift in priority towards people over cars, this more comprehensive approach could lead to long-term changes.
In the end, the success of Strade Aperte will come down to support from residents and to political will. While Milan’s current city council focuses on improved urban infrastructure, bike lanes and inter-modal transportation, this might change in the future. However, there is hope – in Milan and elsewhere – that the new popularity of cycling and of pedestrianisation of streets has at least started a new trend. Tactical urbanism can therefore serve as an instrument that influences urban planning in a sustainable manner.
But let’s not forget: Changing the public’s mind and opening them up to new ideas takes long-term tactics, citizen engagement and visionary political leadership. Currently, we are only seeing the beginning of comprehensive urban change in cities like Milan via the short-term pop-ups. It will be up to Milan to grab this opportunity for change.
When we think of a metropolis, we think of bustling streets. By the time I write this article, however, the coronavirus is emptying these streets in Shanghai and Milan. This is creating the ultimate cultural shock.
Some time ago I wrote a column for topos called “From the Edges”. I was living in Mexico back then, and the idea was to comment on urban phenomena created not in the classic urban centres of global commerce and culture, but in the new metropolises growing rapidly in Latin America and East Asia. Now, as my colleague Anja asked me to come up with a new column, I decided to develop a new, edge-seeking perspective. I want to search for “edgy” phenomena taking place either in all our cities or in any one of them. Phenomena that take the urban sphere to its extreme, that challenge what it “means” to be a city.
The term “Edge City” is, of course, borrowed from Joel Garreau. Back in the early 1990s he found what was then a new urban reality – city-like structures that were not a part of traditional city centres, i.e. a concentration of entertainment and commerce without residential areas. Suburbia 2.0! Garreau’s “edge cities” were a phenomenon of the 20th century. It was entirely suitable then that one of those strange places was called “Century City”. Now, in the 21st century, urban reality has evolved. The city of today is less static, but permanently in danger of losing its own identity – for better or worse. For instance, the 20th century metropolis (or our idea of it) was one that always bustled with activity. But look at the reports from Shanghai or Milan these days: Shanghai has been a wasteland for weeks, and now Milan, this European vision of an urban realm defined by fashion and beauty, is following suit. The coronavirus is dancing on the catwalk of fear. Emptiness and the urban sphere – this is a relationship that brings up the question of what cities essentially are. Of course, Shanghai and Milan are not empty. The streets are empty, but the buildings are not. The outside is seen as a danger, however. The people next to me are a threat. Not because they might be criminals, but because they might be carrying a virus that some see as the beginning of the end of the sustainability of our globalised metropolitan lifestyles, at least for now.
The empty Shanghai streets are the flipside of another Chinese emptiness phenomenon that has recently been written about by the China experts Christian Sorace and William Hurst: “phantom urbanization”. With this term they are referring to urban structures China is currently building from scratch – without anybody actually (yet) living in them. City facades without people, without urban life, sometimes empty for years. Will the people eventually come? This is speculation. “China’s urbanization of land and creation of
infrastructure often far outpace the urbanization of its people,” write Sorace and Hurst (2016: 305). And, “Without the myth of future waves of rural migrants who will some day by some unspecified means be able to afford new urban housing, what remains is the proliferation of urban forms divorced from urban practice and uses. Ghost cities are the extreme pathological expression of this syndrome of phantom urbanization.” For the authors, the emptiness of these urban shells is not just a case of bad planning. Rather, they identify urbanisation as a metaphor for social and economic pro-gress. This progress needs strong symbols to be maintained, and building new cities is this symbol, even if the shell cities are not actually in use. There is, China seems to think, an aesthetic value in the framework of urban economic activity that has the capacity to produce this activity in the first place.
But then, there are writers – academics like Sorace and Hurst, as well as reporters who are as equally fascinated and appalled by the empty houses. They tell a story very different from the one envisioned by the Chinese decision-makers. And they tell a different story now, in corona-hit Shanghai, too. It is still an urban story, the story of the dangers of the urban sphere, and of the vulnerability of urbanisation as we understand it. This story has, in a way, always existed. It has always fascinated creatives, particularly film makers. Think of the TV show “The Walking Dead”. Think of the empty London Danny Boyle presented in 2002 in “28 Days later”. Or think of George Romero’s zombies taking over downtown Pittsburgh in “Land of the Dead” (2005). For Romero, the city is a place for zombies, and these are not mere “monsters”, but a representation of the excluded, the poor, the migrants. The rich (the living) have fled to the countryside. This reminds us of the drug-deserted Manhattan of the 1980s, from which suburbia – and the edge city – promised safe havens. We have overcome this, however. For us, good cities are now those that allow for encounters of all kinds. And good city management in the face of disasters like the coronavirus means finding new ways of maintaining urban life. From this perspective, the empty streets of Shanghai are the ultimate failure of catastrophe management, the definite corona-induced culture shock, and thereby the creators of a new, temporary “pathology of ghost cities”, in the sense of Sorace and Hurst. Let us hope that we find ways to refill the streets soon, and that corona in general creates learning processes to better prepare us for such counter-urban epidemics in the future.
This article can be found in topos 110.
The residential highrise Bosco Verticale in Milan, Italy, has won the International Highrise Award (IHP) 2014 for the world’s most innovative highrise. Choosing for the Bosco Verticale designed by Boeri Studio, the IHP 2014 awarded a project that blazes the trail for greened highrises and can be considered a prototype for the cities of tomorrow. The project was featured in Topos 83 on “Plants and Design”.
[tttgallery template=”content-slider”]
This year’s winner convinced the jury at several levels: The two greened residential highrises are based on simple rectangular footprints and differ in height, the one being 19, the other 27 stories high (80 and 112 meters respectively). Each of the 113 apartments in total is equipped with at least one balcony, which resembles a small garden or a small forest: several hundred trees, along with bushes and shrubs cover the facade. The plants ensure a natural climate in the apartments and provide outstanding residential conditions. The pioneering work necessary to green a highrise façade in Europe was undertaken by Boeri Studio along with agronomist landscape consultants Laura Gatti and Emanuela Borio.
“Bosco Verticale is a marvelous project! It’s an expression of the extensive human need for green. The “wooded highrises” are a striking example of a symbiosis of architecture and nature,” pronounced the jury of experts chaired by last IHP prize winner Christoph Ingenhoven. The project represents, they continued, definitely a role model for construction in densely populated zones in other European cities.
From over 800 highrises that were commissioned worldwide over the last two years, Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM) nominated 26 outstanding buildings from 17 different countries. An international jury of experts consisting of architects, structural engineers and real estate specialists selected the final five for the short-list. The prize is worth worth EUR 50,000,.
The four other sort-listed projects are:
“De Rotterdam” in Rotterdam, Netherlands (151.3 meters) by Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Rotterdam
“One Central Park” in Sydney, Australia (64.5 and 116 meters) by Ateliers Jean Nouvel, Paris
“Renaissance Barcelona Fira Hotel” in Barcelona, Spain (105 meters) by Ateliers Jean Nouvel, Paris
Sliced Porosity Block in Chengdu, China (123 meters) by Steven Holl Architects, New York
The 26 nominated projects are presented in the exhibition on “Best Highrises 2014-5 – International Highrise Award 2014” at Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM ) in Frankfurt until February 1, 2015
