CityScope Project is a powerful tool created by MIT’s MediaLab that uses augmented reality to quickly and simply model the effects of large-scale urban-planning decisions, allowing urban planning to be more accessible to everyone. The technology employs TIM, a tangible-interactive rapid prototyping environment for matrices of data. TIM uses an array of optically tagged LEGO bricks on the tabletop with overhead projectors that beam color-coded metrics onto each brick: a combination of computer vision and 3D projection mapping.

Overview from MIT’s MediaLab: “We develop simulation systems to predict and quantify the potential impact of disruptive interventions within new and existing cities. We place a special emphasis on augmented reality decision support systems (ARDSS) that facilitate non-expert stakeholder collaboration within complex urban environments. Such systems blend hardware, software, human interface design, cloud computation, and variants of so-called big data. “CityScope” is an open source platform for shared, interactive computation.”

This technology works at follows: every LEGO piece has a special chip that communicates with the overhead projectors, which beams metrics affected by each decision onto the new configuration. So, chips of each brick are assigned a user-determined variable such as “150-unit residential building,” “2-ha park” or “4-lane road”; and other variables such as walkability, access to jobs, housing or open space can easily be estimated in the following way: once assembled on the tabletop, the objects are able to represent an existing neighborhood, city or region, and users are able to pick up and insert, move or remove individual components while this changes to the city are visually revealed in real-time by changing color-codes projected onto the pieces. For example, if you placed a “150-unit residential building” piece onto a previously empty plot of land, the color of the street in front of the new building would change to indicate a quantifiable increase in traffic density. Thus, users from any background can configure the table collaboratively.

Perhaps, the most important value of this technology as a tool of management and governance is the ability to offer information about specific locations: building legislation, transportation systems, walkability, access to jobs, etc. The CityScope method is well suited to model the physical effects of zoning and building regulations, and it can be considered as a repository for hyper-local concerns, public meetings regarding zoning or building projects, allowing planners to easily communicate with their constituency in a more clear and accurate manner.

In conclusion, the beauty and perhaps the most important feature of CityScope rests in its ease of understanding and simplicity of use, being a great example of a technology that adapts to the actions of people instead of the other way around. In other words, allowing urban issues to be more accessible for everyone and providing a much higher level of transparency and accountability than we are used to today.

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La entrada Open Urban Planning: CityScope | An interactive LEGO City | MIT’s MediaLab se publicó primero en More Than Green.

An initiative taht has transformed several public spaces in Santiago de Chile. This tactical urbanism intervention is one of the many ways by which South American society reclaims the streets and transforms them into social platforms.

Pavement to Plaza is an activist initiative that has intervened in many public spaces in the world. The movement remarks the idea that a high percentage of the urban space is underutilised because of the fact that, amongst other reasons, the streets in many cities are excessively wide. They also highlight that in some urban areas the “streets and public rights-of-way make up 25% of the city’s land area; more space than all the public parks combined”. In this line, they employ several political and low-cost tools in order to transform roads into parks and streets into plazas. They have also negotiated with autorities in Santiago to implement parklets in the streets and carry out streets extention in many urban areas.

Along with this, their website provides the citizens with manuals to encourage social groups to develop this kind of interventions in an independent way. Amongst these manuals, citizens can learn how to build a parklet. They define themselves as a urban laboratory aimed to experiment with new ways of inhabiting the city.

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(photos via Okuplaza)

La entrada Pavement to Plaza | Chile se publicó primero en More Than Green.

“It has been recently called a referendum on the issue of Tempelhof park. The question will be whether the citizens prefer to keep this park in its current state or they agree with the urbanization of the area that the City Council is currently proposing. This plan consists in transforming the vast esplanade that, being previously an airport, nowadays is just a green area surrounded by two runways. The supporters of the ‘Tempelhof 100% field’ initiative claim that the 4.700 homes, the offices for 7.000 workers, the huge library and the sports facilities that the Mayor of the city -the Social Democrat Klaus Wowereit- is planning to build will ruin the spirit of the area and will end up being the death of a necessary lung for the city.”

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(vía EL PAÍS)

La entrada Tempelhof Airport will be submitted to referendum se publicó primero en More Than Green.

Title: THE HANGOVER OF THE WALL

School: UNIVERSITY OF ALICANTE

Tutor: ENRIQUE NIETO

Year: 2011

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PROLOGUE: BERLIN IS ANYTHING BUT BERLIN!                                                                  

Berlin is a mixture, contradiction, culture, cultures, it is green, grey, cold and hot, and always good fun. Sometimes it is inhumane, sometimes kind, beautiful and ugly at once, but always surprising. Berlin is the unfinished city, it is what it could be and not what it is. It is infested of future projects, full of empty spaces – magical spaces that hide history and radiate future. Chunks of time under the asphalt, on the facades, at the traffic lights … The day Berlin is finished, it will not be Berlin any longer. Berlin is the city that it still is not, it is an excited teenager preening for a date – that previous moment full of expectations impossible to fulfil.

And when at last Berlin will be finished, when a future mayor, whatever their sexual orientation, finishes its reconstruction, then Berlin will no longer be sexy, but will remain poor, sadly losing its identity and it will be transformed into a greyer city.

A GRAIN OF SAND CAN CREATE A MOUNTAIN (IMAGEN 1)

* Preliminary note: Intermediate use (Zwischennutzung) consists in providing temporary use of empty or abandoned sites in a transformative process, in order to inject activity into the area, but on many occasions to increase the value of the surroundings and to build or rent at higher prices – a kind of gentrification tool. Currently, the Council of Berlin stimulates this phenomenon through the rental management at very low cost for up to 5 years long to start-ups.

The unique essence of the city of Berlin, justified by its peculiar history, is full of emptiness, residual space and buildings without use. Let’s say, that these three entities promote uncertainty, intermediate use and confrontation between classes and are the driving force of the Berlin identity.

The current development of this city has boosted inharmonious coexistence. It has primarily been based on filling the vacuum created by the destruction during the war and the subsequent fall of the wall. On the one hand, promoting large urban developments with star architects to attract traditional tourism (for example at Potsdamer Platz) and, on the other hand, promoting free temporary and innovative use of empty spaces as a way of revitalization. Until now, the result has been positive and a remarkable dual-cultural movement has come up in an around Berlin: an alternative and creative one and an institutionalized and politically correct one. But this system eventually becomes unsustainable, the spaces are filled and prices rise and become inaccessible, and in a few years, the dual identity of the city will be lost.

The project I propose consists of the development of an urban system that keeps the level of uncertainty. Thus, we assume that the city should grow, and it is unrealistic to think that private land in the centre will remain empty any longer, yet we ensure that the entrepreneurial use of the plots generates a guarantee of permanent cyclical temporary use.

The chosen site is the adjacent land to the Spree River, between Jannovitzbrücke and Oberbaumbrücke., at the former east-west border. In this area, very close to the city centre, but still full of empty plots, where you can find a huge underground culture can be found.At present, a heated debate is raging over “Mediaspree”, a new wealthy urban development for the area that pretends to fill the emptiness with skycrapers and displace all this entire alternative neighbourhood.

BERLIN IS A SUBJUNCTIVE CITY 

To understand the project I would first like to explain a number of ideas I have come up with along time to articulate a certain theory: the temporary or intermediate use is unpredictable, but has a common element that makes it manageable on a larger scale.To generate intermediate use uncertainty spaces it must exist, creating a new concept – the Uncertainty Space (US): totally void, residual space or an unused building that could be occupied by intermediate or free spontaneous use.

There are 4 features of US in terms of creating running uncertainty along the year.

• A Free Open Space: it requires more inventive investment. Uncertainty occurs only on sunny days in summer.

• A Protected Space: an area covered against the rain. However, uncertainty does not occur during the winter days.

• A Sheltered Space: this is a partially enclosed space, the typical example is the abandoned house. In that place uncertainty can occur at any time of the year.

• A Comfortable Space: here, there is low uncertainty. If there is comfort, almost certainly, the use of the space has taken root and is no longer temporary. This type of space is only a theoretical one. This space would finally become a formal business space.

DESUBJUNCTIVIZATION OF THE CITY: THE NEW PROCESS

It is necessary to establish rules of development in the construction of buildings to make the coexistence between uncertainty spaces and market spaces possible – points of view which seem incompatible. To make it possible, it is necessary that uncertainty turns into something more concrete. The essence of uncertainty understood as wealth of the spontaneous program is even enhanced by the proposal, but it will take place in more concrete and stable areas. On the other hand, the market space must ensure that this takes place. Hence, we propose the “parasite mechanism”: the new areas of uncertainty will be fed by the market space to develop, the healthier is the host, the more beneficial for the parasite.

New “Space Release” Tax: The whole proposal is based on this system. It symbolically means that every square meter of new construction for the use of the permanent market (which destroys an area of uncertainty) should cede or assign another square meter of non-qualified, accessible residual space. These spaces ceded by each building are concentrated at strategic points, creating specific pockets of undeveloped space. In practice, the process takes place as follows:

In line with the above-mentioned, the promoter also invests in building some “Activity-Boiling Elements“. These elements are urban infrastructure providing void spaces with all the necessary tools to develop many new programs, but the space is still a void space – some kind of urban acupuncture that attracts people and activities.

It is possible to set up temporary businesses in the area; the potential money raised by this new intermediate use will be distributed between shareholders until they recover the money invested. From then on, the management of these areas will become independent.

Through this process, a change of great interest takes place: the uncertainty space has become a cyclical uncertainty space, because thanks to the above-mentioned, it has turned into a permanent and secure space, even though the program continues being random and changes in a cyclic way.

The insertion process: the implementation of the“Activity-Boiling Elements” system is presented as a process that grows by increasing capital construction. We propose a duration of 14 years divided into four stages. These stages could change depending on each time period required by the binomial “Expropriation of new empty pieces of land” / “Implementation of Activity-Boiling Elements” and the progress of the type of devices installed in the different areas. Along the first stages, we focus almost exclusively on the expropriation, and as the process continues, investments start focusing on the construction and improvement of the “Activity-Boiling Elements”

ACTIVITY-BOILING ELEMENTS 

They are devices that constitute the material part of the project. There are several types of these elements depending on their performances. To be precise, there are three types of elements, listed according to their complexity: mobile devices, generic activity boiling elements and specialized activity-boiling elements. These three types of devices are meant to provide the infrastructure necessary for the new programs of the void spaces. All of them have several factors in common:

1. they are located in strategic expropriated areas.

2. they generate more than the space program they use, i.e. they act as an acupuncture needle.

4. they are points of information, interconnected with one another, as a network, so that when accessing one, what is happening or planned in all the others will be known.

3. they have self-sufficient energy so that they do not depend on external factors which may influence them.

5. they work as a strategic set, facilitating each others tasks

6. they promote the generation of sporadic programs in their surroundings, but in no case create their own program. They are only a tool.

ACTIVITY-BOILING TYPES:

Mobile Devices: Its scale is the smallest one, these machines are able to move from one place to another according to the needs of the moment. They involve a small investment and they are a miniature reproduction of the senior device-system. Usually, there are some of them in all plots. Partially dependent on a senior boiling-element through which they are supplied. Everything that can be transported to promote an environment for new activities are also considered Mobile Devices. For example tarps, chairs, parasols, umbrellas, etc.

Types of mobile devices:

• Mobile heat-generator: generates heat by composting the pruning and falling leaves from the trees in the surroundings. (estimated yield: 1m3 compost could heat a space of 1.5 m3 for 4 weeks). The obtained fertilizer can also be sold.

• Mobile electric-generator: it generates electricity through a vertical 1Kw windmill (estimated monthly production: 144 kwh with average wind at 5m/s)

• Space Conditioner: generates a 8m2 liveable space by inflating a transparent plastic membrane which can be rented.

• Network broadcasting: it produces a free Internet wifi network off up to 300m distance. It has also a sound system of 500 W r.m.s. comparable to a “tuned car” as well as a powerful light source and has a computer to obtain information on what is happening in other areas of the Boiling-system.

Generic activity-boiler (generic a.b.): it is designed for the first steps of the implementation process or for small plots far away of the river. They represent a medium investment and are the simplest autonomous entity, not dependent for its operation other activity-boiling devices.

They provide fixed support to mobile devices and also catalyze new programs. They contain: an electric windmill with 7.7 kW (estimated monthly 833Kwh ), free use plug connectors, lighting/sound system, computer information point, stuff-library , wifi transmitter, toilets and a store for the mobile devices.

In some cases the area of the object-library becomes a dwelling for the caretaker who manages the whole system.

Energetic a.b.: They mean a high investment, generating hot air, hot water and electricity for space heating in winter and autumn (sporadically, spaces can also be cooled but this is very rare in Berlin). Through 10 underground shafts that collect the heat of groundwater (13oC all year), 6x15kw wind generators and a “photovoltaic balloon” that rises through the clouds, the energetic activity-boiler meet the electricity needs of the system. The other mobile-devices or activity-boilers can be connected to it to make use of the energy.

Space Conditioner a.b.: there are two different types; basically they work in the same way but just change their size. Artifacts moved by themselves but they must be always close to an energetic activity-boiler to get hot, so are not considered mobile devices. In them the appropriate conditions of temperature and light in winter are created by inflating large plastic bubbles. It takes hot air or water from the energetic activity-boiler and they can be added up to two each other forming an indoor space of over 1000m2.

THE SUBJECTIVE TASK OF EXPLAINING A PLACE 

The chosen area is the land adjacent to the Spree River, between Janovichbruu cke and Oberraumbruu cke, in the Mediaspree context. It was formerly an old industrial area that was destroyed during the Second World War. After the war, the Wall was built along this place generating a wide security area on the Soviet side and little sympathy on the other side to build there. Due to these circumstances the neighbourhood remained empty for decades and just after the fall of the Wall continued in the same way as there were more important issues to deal with such as Postdamer Platz or Prenzlauer Berg which are more centric places.

In 2002, the Mediaspree urban renewal plan was proposed in this area trying to attract multinational advertising and telecommunication companies through public subsidies in order to boost the image of a modern technological Berlin. These plans created a climate of confrontation with the Berlin citizens who along the years had been using these empty spaces to create a wide range of informal facilities and cultural activities.

The people of Berlin reject the privatization of land (especially the riverside), the filling of the empty space with skyscrapers, and the subsequent price increases of their rents. Associations were formed against this situation staging large public protests until, in 2007 a referendum resulted in an overwhelming majority against the new plans. Officially the project will go ahead, but in practice it is stuck between protests and demonstrations.

La entrada FDP| The hangover of the wall | Rafael García Sacristán se publicó primero en More Than Green.