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.
Studio – the Architecture and Urbanism Magazine – calls for participation in issue #19 on the topic “Frequency”. Proposals can be submitted until August 30, 2020.
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Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit of time. The time frame is the duration of cycles in a recurring event, where the time frame is the reciprocal of the frequency.
In recent months we observed the power of low and high frequencies in the city, which was manifested in an economy clash, clean environments, riots, and public health hazards, creating the necessity for architects, urban designer, and theorists, to rethink the established concept of the city, public space and user interactio.
STUDIO #19 FREQUENCY aims to understand how the city reacts to extreme situa-tions and how architecture can interpret and act on its observations, data, and future necessities. What is the long term consequence of low and high FREQUENCY? How to predict and interpret the FREQUENCY in our cities? What are the values and qualities of the architectural FREQUENCY? How is FREQUENCY changing the way we live, design, and look at the city?
Submission Guidelines
Contributions may be submitted in different forms – essays, photographic projects, illustrations, data visualizations, case studies and projects, interviews, comic strips and even novels – exploring the issue in any field of design: architecture, urbanism, art, photography, graphic design, film… etc.
Proposals can be submitted as an abstract (200 words) until 30 August 2020. The abstract must be written in English and must not exceed 2MB in size (incl. picture if available).
For further procedure and process click here.
Little-known outside of economics text books, just-in-time production has had countless affects on the modern urban landscape.
Just-In-Time (JIT) supply chains have left an indelible mark on the modern city. Developed by car manufacturer Toyota in the 1960s and 1970s, JIT’s essential aim is to cut costs by reducing the amount of goods and materials a firm holds in stock and increasing the speed with which these goods and materials are transported, housed, processed and consumed.
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Even from its origins, JIT was a distinctly spatial phenomenon. Japan suffers from a lack of land and natural resources. As a result, the country has long been forced to adopt a “lean” approach to manufacturing, involving smaller factories holding fewer goods and an efficient transport infrastructure to keep up a steady supply of new materials. Building on this pre-existing situation, managers at Toyota, also recognised the need to minimise waste by imposing greater discipline on the production line, ensuring smooth handling of materials and fewer mistakes.
The rise of the container
Just-in-time’s development went hand-in-hand with another innovation in global trade: containerisation. Now almost completely ubiquitous as a method of goods transport, containers were first widely adopted in the 1970s and, with the increasing standardisation of container units, it became possible to carry much larger quantities of goods on ever larger container ships, thus making it easier for a company to orient their supply chains to the just-in-time approach, since they could be more confident of a steady supply of goods.
Together JIT and containerisation brought about the decline of the inner-city warehouse as a building for storing goods. This set in train a rapid emptying of warehouse districts in major cities across the world, with the warehouses either being flattened and the land redeveloped – as happened in the development of a financial district in Canary Wharf from the 1980s and in the waterside redevelopment around Baltimore’s Inner Harbour in the 2000s – or converted – as happened in Manhattan’s Meat Packing district and in the London Borough of Hackney. Either way, property developers are indebted to JIT for the space it created in the inner city.
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Farewell to the seedy docks
The shift away from inner city docks also made way for the emergence of new ports in smaller towns and on the edge of cities. In the UK for instance, as the London and Edinburgh docks declined, ports like Felixstowe and Grimsby emerged in their place to become, respectively, the largest container and cargo ports in the country. Unlike the former historic ports, these towns remain relatively unknown beyond their immediate regions, they also lack the reputation for seediness that the London and Edinburgh docks once enjoyed. This is partly because it used to be much easier to rob a boat’s cargo and because there were more dockers who were more embedded in the city. Smuggling still occurs in these new ports, but it happens in a much more clinical fashion (as illustrated in the brilliant second season of The Wire).
Along with inner city seediness, JIT also helped bring about the death of main street, since the approach mainly benefits big companies that can manage large supply chains. Massive supermarket chains such as Walmart can source cheap goods from all over the world at prices that the small-town store and the medium-sized factory simply cannot compete with. This particular shift has delivered some big benefits to ordinary people, most notably that consumer products have become much cheaper than they used to be, enabling more people to afford both the necessities and luxuries of life. However, the jobs needed to have the money to buy these products have declined thanks to containerisation and JIT encouraging companies to take the work process to other parts of the world, a move which has had disastrous results for the middle class in major developed economies.
A Landscape in JIT’s image
One last thing (although there’s much more to talk about), JIT’s demand for an ever faster and smoother flow of goods has led to a huge reconfiguring of the landscape. Land reclamation and river dredging around major ports, expansion of high-speed rail and motorway networks, and a massive proliferation of so-called fulfilment centres on the urban periphery, are just a few of the major ways that this reconfiguration has impacted the physical geography of countries across the world.
Thanks to JIT, the global economy is now deeply connected. While it may seem impressive in its scope, this connectivity is very precarious. Most cities now have only enough food and medical supplies to last them a few days and are faced with the constant threat of ever-present bottlenecks and chokepoints. Looked at this way, just-in-time has probably gone too far and penetrated too deeply into every aspect of our lives. But can it even be stopped?
Jan Gehl was recently named “the last living worldwide renowned guru in urbanism.” His fully-booked lecture at the Amsterdam Public Library on March 15 was part of public series jointly organized by the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture and the Amsterdam Centre for Architecture (ARCAM). His light and matter-of-factly approach, together with the audience’s outbursts of laughter, made for an engaging and entertaining experience. While a scathing critique of modernism no longer raises eyebrows in the architectural world, it is still surprising to hear sacred monsters like Le Corbusier being criticized within the walls of an architectural institution.
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“Maybe if I twisted it in a more funny way than the other guy, then I would be more famous, more starchitect than him!”
I first discovered Jan Gehl when I was an architecture student. Exhausted by the endless focus on form proposed by the great architects of our time, I hung onto the figure of Gehl to remind myself that I had not chosen the wrong profession. Together with psychologist Ingrid Mundt, who is also his wife, Gehl developed an approach that integrates architecture, urban planning, sociology, and psychology, emphasizing both research and practice. His approach always resonated with my (wishful) understanding of what architecture should be. This is why watching him holding a water pitcher above his head while mocking architects’ usual obsession with form—“maybe if I twisted it in a more funny way than the other guy, then I would be more famous, more starchitect than him!”—felt priceless to me.
“When in doubt, leave some meters out”
At times, Jan Gehl’s revelations seem to have more to do with popular wisdom than with architecture or urban design theory. This includes his idea that we should build everything at a smaller scale than we think is needed because smaller spaces generate more intense interaction, whereas big empty spaces give people the impression they are missing out on something. “When in doubt, leave some meters out,” he suggests, and then proceeds to explain how the best location for a party of 50 is not a house but a kitchen.
“It’s like Henry Ford is still alive!”
His critical stance towards the technocratic approach of modernists, the inability to work at a human scale, and the inappropriateness of cities designed for cars in today’s society—“It’s like Henry Ford is still alive!”—should not surprise us anymore. The 82-year old architect and urban designer has been lecturing and writing about this since at least 1971, when his first book Life Between Buildings was published in Danish. And yet, after almost half a century, Gehl’s humorous words still sound refreshing. Maybe because we are surrounded by “birdshit architects,” as he affectionately calls them, dropping towers wherever they feel like, and turning places like Dubai into “collections of perfume bottles.”
But Jan Gehl is not an architectural theorist in his ivory tower. Throughout the history of his firm, he was involved with projects in cities all around the globe. The case studies he presented during his lecture, from his hometown Copenhagen to Melbourne, Sidney, Moscow, and New York, illustrate his approach to the city based on decades of observations on how people behave in public spaces. He gathered data about people’s behavior and engaged in an iterative process where research and urban planning support one another.
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Attacks on great Modernist masters and a broader criticism of the star system architecture
And if interdisciplinarity is key to understanding how cities affect their inhabitants, I would have liked to hear more from Gehl about the influence of psychologist Ingrid Mundt on her husband’s work. His attacks on great Modernist masters resonate with a broader criticism of the star system architecture has become. Media and academic institutions continue to sustain the myth of the isolated genius instead of reflecting a much more realistic image of architecture and urban design as products of interdisciplinary collaboration. Even if the work of Jan Gehl reveals an innovative and interdisciplinary mindset, the way he is portrayed by the media corroborates the image of a lone guru.
Nevertheless, Gehl’s lessons are of great importance at a time when architects are just beginning to understand that building is not a cookie-cutter solution to every problem. By showing that an intervention on the built environment does not necessarily involve construction to have far-reaching effects on people’s lives, he demonstrates that it is time to stop “bending to Brasilia,” and start better understanding how we can create livable cities for people in the 21st Century.
West of Munich, at the interface of city and countryside, the new urban district of Freiham Nord will be developed. Not a continuation of peripheral areas with detached houses but an extension of the densely built-up city.The appeal of the experimental, often inherent at the interface of city and country, may well be lost. A park is to create a transition to the landscape. It is currently being designed in a two-stage competition.
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A new interface of city and cultural landscape in Munich
Munich, western periphery, Aubing suburban railway station – the view from the train reveals backyards and rear sides. Everyday things, nothing showy like those that run along wide arterial roads. Repetitive images: detached houses, commercial areas, allotments, housing estates. At the station a large board advertising urban living greets arrival passengers. It shows white houses with flat roofs, terraces and French windows. “We want to create urban living like you have in the city but green like in the countryside”, says Elisabeth Merk, head of Munich’s department of urban planning. The urban still seems a promise here. The road from the station runs between a cemetery and residential high-rises, lined with buffer planting and ruderal species. Suddenly there is a field boundary and the view opens up to the west. Motorway traffic drones behind a noise barrier on the horizon. Somewhere in the gap two construction cranes turn: they are building the schools first. Unlike Madrid for example, where large access roads complete with all utilities were constructed on the urban periphery during the property bubble and have since been waiting for the development of housing and residents to arrive in vain (see Topos 94), Munich has been growing continuously: around 213,000 inhabitants are anticipated between 2011 and 2030 with an estimated need for 150,000 dwelling units. (…)
Find the whole article in our current 98th Topos edition
Globally, agglomerations are attractive to the population in rural areas and are therefore constantly growing. Also in Europe, there has been an increase in migratory movements from the countryside to the city, so city planning is facing new challenges. On 16th of May, the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences is organizing a conference about the subject. Under the title “Europe’s Agglomerations – Challenges to Planning and Building”, experts and participants exchange views on the trend.
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Opportunities and limitations of urban development
The aim of the conference is to identify the opportunities and limitations of urban development. For this purpose, current research results and solutions are to be discussed and evaluated. To deal with the complex subject matter, the congress deals with building-related, legal and economic aspects as well as social and cultural developments. The broad topic area is divided into two forums, in which the participants can inform themselves and exchange information through speeches and discussions. While Forum I deals with business, law and infrastructure, Forum II concerns with gentrification, dependency on the car and the digitalisation of planning data. Afterwards, the challenges of growth in terms of their ecological and social aspects are discussed in a joint forum.
Participation and Recognition
Participation fee: 90 € | Student price: 30 €
More information can be found here.
