As the coronavirus pandemic challenges our traditional concepts of space, Underground Cities is a timely invitation to look at how this largely untapped resource can open up vast amounts of space both below and above ground for people to use and enjoy in innovative ways.

The book is structured around five key themes:

• A New Frontier considers visionary blank-slate planning geared toward legacy-building and livability.
• People-Centered Spaces shares research and examples on making the Earth’s subsurface viable and appealing for human habitation.
• Moving People, Transporting Goods examines new infrastructure systems that have the potential to redefine mobility and, in turn, cities.
• New Techniques of Representation looks at the digital innovations that are expanding the boundaries of what we can successfully plan, design and deliver.
• Looking Forward provides case studies of three densely-populated cities — Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo — and explores how they are integrating the subsurface in new and unique ways.

Underground Cities features contributions from ArchTam experts on topics ranging from architecture to geotechnical engineering and social science.

• “With advances in technology and the invention of new materials and tools, what is feasible enters a new dimension. It is time to redefine the underground.” Sean Chiao, President, Asia Pacific
• “Cities are vital living organisms that need to adapt to survive. To be able to respond to today’s rapidly changing conditions, they must start putting people – and all their manifest needs – at the heart of their underground infrastructure.” Will Symons, Asia Pacific Resilience and Sustainability Practice Leader
• “The vitality of natural light can now be captured, in part at least, by artificial lighting systems that change color to replicate the visible cycles and qualities found in the natural environment.” Lee Barker-Field, Director, Specialist Lighting, Europe, Middle East & Africa
• “ArchTam, in collaboration with the Civil Engineering and Development Department of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region has explored ways of integrating the latest Virtual Reality and photogrammetry technologies with more widely used techniques such as Building Information Modeling and 3D spatial data.” Thomson Lai, Greater China Digital Transformation & Innovation Team Leader
• “Far from being in the realm of science fiction, these ideas are based on the sensible science of civil engineering. We have barely scratched the surface (so to speak) of the world beneath our feet.” John Endicott, Asia Pacific Geotechnical, ArchTam Fellow

Learn more about Underground Cities here.

The book is now available for purchase on the Lund Humphries U.K. site and for pre-order on their U.S. site.

The post Exploring the potential for human civilizations underground appeared first on Blog.

Brilliant exudes character and confidence. Brilliant works across boundaries in support of a greater vision. Brilliant finds the common ground between private and public to close funding gaps. Brilliant performs technically while achieving broader social and economic benefits. Brilliant overcomes obstacles to get essential projects delivered.

Cities can explore eight steps to capitalize on their strengths, address their weaknesses, and achieve brilliance:

Start at the end

Secure a legacy with strategic planning

What will your city be like in 50 years? Understanding where your city is headed—and how you want to shape its future—should guide how projects and infrastructure are prioritized today. Smart long-term planning anticipates social, economic and environmental changes and builds the strategic direction to secure a positive legacy, for cities and leaders.

Draw a crowd

Energize the center through compact urban design

People come to cities to be near other people. Cities need places where people can come together, places that resonate, inspire and excite; a waterfront promenade or central park, a distinctive district or event center, a signature tower or downtown area. A well-planned project can turn the tide and change a city’s fortune. Cities that work to boost business and celebrate life are positioned to compete and succeed.

Renovations at LAX will help Angelinos and world travelers ‘get there together.’

Get there together

Upgrade transportation to move people and business faster

A city’s economy moves at the pace of its transportation network. Efficient transportation speeds the flow of people, ideas and commerce. Airports and seaports are global gateways. Roads and rail establish regional connections. Bike and walking routes make mobility healthy, inexpensive, and fun. In a great city, access is built into the fabric.

Change the flow

Get more from innovative energy and water infrastructure

We depend upon civil infrastructure to meet our daily needs, but the investments we make for these essential functions can yield wider value when we take new approaches. Stormwater managed naturally can improve the urban landscape, increase property values and protect our waterways. Recycled wastewater can green our parks and neighborhoods. Solid waste treated organically can reduce landfill and produce energy for homes.

The restoration of Echo Park Lake is helping LA ‘change the flow.’

Make green pay

Take environmental action that provides an economic boost Investments in the environment can yield financial and social dividends. As cities take measures to mitigate and adapt to climate change, remediate contamination, and protect and restore natural environments, they are finding a wealth of benefits, from energy savings and cleaner air to rising real estate values and healthier people. It creates a better climate for business and community.

Ignore borders

Collaborate across agencies and boundaries for bigger results

Challenges do not follow the boundaries of departments and municipalities. Neither should solutions. To compete at a global level, cities need to advance in step with their supporting regions. This means collaborating across disciplines and jurisdictions, and cooperating and planning at the regional level, to see the bigger picture, connect better ideas and find smarter solutions.

Act now

Identify and address physical and cyber vulnerability

Buildings and bridges are joining the internet of things. This increases the need for cyber security, along with security against physical attacks, violent weather, earthquakes, and decay over time. Proactive solutions begin with a comprehensive vulnerability assessment. Anticipating the most likely points of attack or failure lets a city know where to invest to prevent or mitigate disaster before it strikes.

A public-private partnership for the Gov. George Deukmejian Courthouse helped Long Beach ‘finish ahead.’

Finish ahead

Get projects funded, built and operating sooner

Public budgets are stretched. Roads, bridges, water systems, hospitals, schools and courthouses need maintenance or new structures, but there are new ways around old obstacles. Partnering the public and private sectors and linking the phases of a project’s life cycle can speed construction, reduce cost, increase performance and manage risk. It’s time to take advantage of the alternatives.

Stephen Engblom (Stephen.engblom@archtam.com) is an urban planner and designer, and global director of ArchTam Cities.

The post Eight steps to a brilliant city appeared first on Blog.

The sound quality of urban environments is an important consideration for people’s health and well being. The World Health Organisation notes that one in five Europeans is regularly exposed to noise levels at night that could significantly damage their health. My work in acoustic design looks at how we can advance tools and technology to assist in better managing noise pollution within cities.

ArchTam’s acoustic practice recently partnered with the University of York’s Audio Lab, where I will be working over the next two years with Dr Damian Murphy and his team on a research initiative, funded through a Royal Society Industry Fellowship, which centres on advancing auralisation capabilities.

Auralisation is the audio equivalent of visualisation. We use it to create digital models where we can place any sound within a virtual environment to create the sense of hearing the sound as if it had been placed and recorded in the given environment.

Concert halls are optimised to create better spaces to hear performances. Auralisation also informs the interior design of office environments to enhance their acoustic quality. Our research, however, will look at adapting auralisation capabilities so that they go beyond an architectural (indoor) application to an environmental (outdoor) one.

We will look at new and more accurate ways to predict sound propagation outside, like wave-based methods, which better simulate the possible noise levels of new infrastructure so that their acoustic impact can be identified and addressed before they get built.

Perhaps most importantly, auralisation techniques will help us create tools to better demonstrate how noise level exposure relates to the subjective and qualitative nature of a sound environment, which is difficult to express amongst even experienced consultants.

Imagine what it will be like to have the ability to model the sound of a proposed road or rail link from virtually any point within its surroundings. We could plot its acoustical impact from the middle of a local resident’s garden – showing the difference between night time and day time conditions and between peak and non-peak usage times – and listen to the impact and the effectiveness of numerous mitigation strategies.

Having better tools to more accurately predict a soundfield benefits everyone because it provides a better understanding of a project’s potential social impact and makes the subjective quality of the soundfield easier to discuss. For example, it can inform the design of the infrastructure so that a road includes more effective sound barriers. It can also add transparency and foster more collaborative solutions in the project’s planning and public consultation process.

We want to see the next generation of auralisation improving the sound quality not just of buildings, but of the entire city to improve everyone’s quality of life.

Dr. Alex Southern (alex.southern@archtam.com) is a Royal Society Industry Fellow and senior consultant, Environment, ArchTam

The post Acoustic design for more livable cities appeared first on Blog.

The birthplace of Taiwan, Tainan has long been the island’s historic heart, bringing together together aboriginal Taiwanese, Chinese, Dutch and Japanese cultural influences, rich in the spiritual traditions of Chinese folk religion, Confucianism and Buddhism. Established as a trading port in the early 1600s with Chinese and Dutch colonial settlement and later an important centre in the Japanese era, Tainan today bears many of the marks of these centuries of influence. It is a centre of spirituality and scholarship with an urban core that is home to more than 50 temples, including the oldest continuously existing Confucian Temple in the world, making the city virtually unique in the Chinese-speaking world in terms of built heritage and religious architecture. Tainan is the seat of the elite National Cheng Kung University with a beautiful urban campus of colonial colonnades and striking playing fields under the protective shade of ancient banyan trees. Its handsome colonial-era city hall is now home to the Taiwanese National Museum of Literature. There is a rich food culture here and a tradition of artisanal agriculture that are intimately tied to the land in and around the city.

This is a place ready for people to come home to, but it is a relatively low-profile place despite being blessed with so many treasures; and as with many cities around the world, it is facing challenges of how to stay relevant and resilient. How can Tainan leverage Taiwan’s re-orientation towards a knowledge economy? How can it attract and retain the talent needed to start new businesses and create new industries? As a low-lying seaside city in a sub-tropical climate, how will Tainan adapt to climate change impacts and do its part to mitigate global warming? How can Tainan capitalise on the rich cultural texture that makes it so special, yet is largely unknown to the outside world, and do so without harming what makes it so beautiful in the first place? Tainan faces a critical window of time to get right the answers to these challenges, but we are seeing firsthand a myriad of opportunities for this hidden gem to shine. We believe a bright future is Tainan’s for the taking. We’ll be posting some more updates on the progress here on this blog and the results of our final study here.

Daniel Elsea (daniel.elsea@archtam.com) is creative director for ArchTam’s Buildings + Places group, is the co-author of the forthcoming book “Jigsaw City: ArchTam and the Asian New Town Now,” and is currently a post-graduate in sustainable urban development at the University of Oxford.

The post Coming home to Tainan appeared first on Blog.

The world’s cities are already home to the majority of the global population, with this forecast to grow by a further 3 billion people by 2050. The infrastructure needed to support this growth is often underfunded or falls short of what it could deliver to urban communities.

Cities have long planned and developed strategies to provide infrastructure investment, but as successive governments have discovered, there is never enough room in public budgets for all necessary projects.

Del Mar Station, Pasadena.

Many treasury departments have introduced processes to better manage public spending and project budgets as they are being conceived, developed and readied for construction. While more effective use of taxpayers’ money is commendable, the focus on budgets has often made it harder for governments to justify infrastructure investment which will enhance local livability, particularly where a project has little or no immediate or obvious economic return.

In Melbourne, with a population of over 4 million, a heritage of building resilient infrastructure over the decades has delivered world-class livability. Important thoroughfares, drainage works and railway projects of the past have delivered iconic boulevards, significant parks and city landmarks which have not only fulfilled their functional brief but also contributed to Melbourne’s amenity and reputation. However, times have changed and the scrutiny to which projects are subjected has tended to hobble the investigation, let alone the execution, of new roads, rails or drains that could also improve amenity over time.

When the focus of a project is narrow and does not consider broader long-term amenity considerations, the outcomes can be suboptimal and, in the long run, expensive.

Octavia Boulevard, San Francisco.

There are many global examples of infrastructure being built only to be completely torn down at great expense when broader negative health, economic and social impacts have done their damage.  This could be avoided with more inclusive and integrated thinking.

The solution is for project proponents to reconfigure the way in which they conceive and design projects. Specifically, designers need to consider community amenity and aesthetics as core parts of a project’s design and functionality. This is likely to require a precinct approach to project planning, rather than considering infrastructure in isolation. In Melbourne the recent spate of railway level crossing removals carried out by the Victorian Government have considered amenity as a central part of their design, resulting in rail lines being sunk with development opportunity created above, rather than previous approaches such as road overpasses, which have undermined community connectedness.

There is great promise in these times of austerity for those of us who dream of greener and more enjoyable cities in which to live and work. Rather than looking at livability as an expensive ‘add-on’ it should be seen as potentially adding value to infrastructure project and avoiding costs in the future.

Zac Cvitkovic is a principal urban designer in ArchTam’s Melbourne office.

The post Livable infrastructure appeared first on Blog.

The questions of how we can find a sustainable balance between society and nature and how we design and manage our cities are of course very closely linked. As we at ArchTam thought about Earth Day for 2014, we decided that to achieve the most productive results, the former question could use some re-framing in the way that it often manifests in the popular dialogue.

We have seen the limits of the argument asserting that we need to act forcefully to protect nature. As one who personally feels a strong sense of connection to this argument, it was difficult to admit that this position lacks universal appeal and to accept the necessity of seeking a broader coalition to achieve the same ends. But the fact is that human society typically only mobilizes to effect change in its own economic, social and cultural interests. And we don’t need to see anything wrong with this. Because the other fact is that advancing those interests within the parameters of our planet will inherently involve finding a better balance with nature. It’s first a question of how we frame the objective, who our audience is, and what we are offering as the proposed benefits of action. It’s second a matter of understanding what progress looks like and the extent to which we can currently see it.

So on this Earth Day, despite our recognition of the magnitude of environmental challenges, we found reason for optimism, and despite our species’ propensity to accidentally destroy while we create, we found reason to celebrate human ingenuity. See what we mean in this presentation of Ideas and Innovations toward a Better Future.

Jake Herson (jacob.herson@archtam.com) is managing editor of the Connected Cities blog.

The post What should Earth Day mean? appeared first on Blog.

It has been about a year now since a new public space called Firm Foundation opened in Banjarmasin – a delta city on the Indonesian island of Kalimantan. Like all of the housing nearby, Firm Foundation is built on stilts over river water. It was a welcome addition to the neighborhood, which, like many other dense riverfront areas of the city, lacks any public space.

Just this past month, our team had a chance to check in on the new space as well as the residents who collaborated on its design. The 100-square-meter space provides a gateway to the area from the water and is intended to bring neighborhood activities to the river. The design takes cues from Indonesian architecture – which uses subtle shifts in floor levels to differentiate space – as well as the small platforms and landings residents construct themselves to access river water. Given the lack of public realm in the area, Firm Foundation is full of children at nearly all hours when school is not in session.

Firm Foundation place-making concept.

Firm Foundation site plan.

We were excited to see that the new public space has also catalyzed investment in the area. Shortly after Firm Foundation opened, the family next door decided to convert half of their house into what is now a thriving food stall. The income from the new enterprise supports the family of five. The idea for the project began with ArchTam’s Urban SOS student design competition. The winning entry in 2011 came from a group of students volunteering with Yayasan Kota Kita (“Our City Foundation”), an Indonesia-based urban development organization. After the team won the competition, ArchTam offered to help sponsor Yayasan Kota Kita to implement their concept.

Firm Foundation waterfront public space. Photo by Bima Pramata.

Now honored with the SEED Excellence in Public Interest Design Award and a Social Impact Design Special Recognition from AIA San Francisco, the project has also resulted in a Social Design Field Guide, which tells the story of how residents participated in the creation of the new space.

The project has become a model for local government in Banjarmasin, showing that even modest investments in the public realm, constructed with the methods and materials residents utilize to build their own neighborhoods, can help to address pervasive and entrenched issues related to livelihoods and water.

On this return visit, the team’s agenda had a new focus. During our past work with the community, we learned that waste management is a top issue for residents. In this area with no road access for trucks, waste typically goes into the river or is burned. While throwing waste in the river is the easiest and most convenient response to the situation, it is destructive for both residents and the environment. It will be a major undertaking to change this behavior and introduce new services, and so the team sought to lay the groundwork by shifting perceptions about waste and the community.

In a series of activities with residents, the team put forward a basic message, which should sound familiar to any designer with an interest in sustainability: “Waste is an asset.” The principle aim was to connect residents to a local “recycling bank.” Through this program, residents earn income in an account in exchange for collecting materials such as plastic bags and cups, cardboard, and bottles. The team organized a training for a group of women from the neighborhood, who then signed up for the bank and made their first deposits.

Recycling bank educational activity. Photo by Daniel Feldman.

Recycling bank deposits book. Photo by Daniel Feldman.

In a separate activity, we worked alongside the area’s children to build two new football goals from salvaged wood, bamboo, and tin as well as plastic bags. While the group found all of the materials lying on the ground and in the water, a local blacksmith lent his shop and tools for the task. Again, the objective was to start to change how residents perceive the waste around them, which has become the status quo of their surroundings.

Children working on football goals constructed of recycled materials. Photos by Daniel Feldman.

Our partners in the local government have an interest in developing a comprehensive strategy for improving this riverfront neighborhood. The challenge of doing so concerns how to introduce services and infrastructure to make living over the water both healthy and dignified. With the support of ArchTam and Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center, our team has been working to show how residents might themselves lead this important effort to transform urban systems.

Michael Haggerty is an urban planner and currently a student in the Master in Architecture program at Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

The post Firm Foundation appeared first on Blog.

With a surprisingly comedic style, the Dane told us that he graduated from architecture school in 1960, “the worst time for architecture.” This was the era in which the modernists “cancelled city life.” Corbusier declared that buildings must be standalone objects surrounded by green lawns. One can sympathize with the focus on green open space, but this eliminated the density that true urbanism requires, resulting in aesthetically clean but bleak, post-apocalyptic landscapes. Robert Moses meanwhile turned New York into an interstate highway for suburban commuters. The film chronicles how this paradigm is being lifted with the pedestrianization of downtown Manhattan under the Bloomberg administration.

The story is largely that of how the car shaped the city, which is to say ruined it for people. While the global environment and western city life suffered tragically from this misstep, the problem now is that megacities of the developing world aspire to the same lifestyle. The wrongness of western car-driving people telling the 1,000 Bangladeshis who move to Dhaka every day that they cannot have a car should not be lost on anyone. But for the planners of such cities, it is less about being told what not to do and more about making a decision for the sake of their own quality of life. They have seen the success of the west, and now they have also seen its folly.

Recognizing that we “measure what we care about,” Gehl spent much of his career compiling data on the urban element that had not been measured—people, what they do and what they want. He started in Italy, where he felt people had a natural love of shared public space. Whether this could be achieved in the culturally cooler European north, he wasn’t sure. But he helped transform Copenhagen into what claims and is widely believed to be the most livable city in the world. The key to this was kicking out cars. More residents bike to work than drive today. And other cities are following suit, seeking the advice of Gehl’s “urban habitat consultants.” Some, like Moscow, benefit from the efficiency of autocracy. Others, like Christchurch, seized on the bittersweet opportunity that follows devastating natural disaster.

The panel discussion moved to the question of London, which Gehl criticized for what he believes the city’s slowness in adopting his recommendations, given a decade ago. This opinion was balanced by a London city transport planner, who highlighted incremental successes. A likeminded private developer gave a good answer to the question of why developers should buy into these types of schemes. They not only make sense for quality of life, but they make economic sense. As I see it, where there are no people, there is no money. And there are no people where there are cars.

We all had a good laugh at Norman Foster’s expense. His vision for an elevated cycle way atop London’s rail network certainly impressed me when I first saw it. But amid Gehl’s comedic flow, it flopped. He pointed out that the objective with cycling is not to get from point A to point B as efficiently as possible. It is to participate in the life of the city, “look at the girls, go into the shops,” things one cannot do from atop a rail line. Gehl and other panelists also pointed out that space for bicycles must be taken from cars—not pedestrians.

I often think there is a problem with the profession of architecture itself, because it deals with singularities rather than systems. Gehl has transcended this, and he is not the only one, but he might be the most famous living one. Working from a background in urban design or landscape architecture is no guarantee of getting it right, but I tend to think it helps. The developer on the panel said it is harder to create a public realm than a building. What I understood from that comment is that unlike a building, a public realm has more diverse users and dynamic uses. Beyond the complexities of working with a client and city authorities, it requires working with the people. How well we can do that seems to hold the key to the future. For as the film noted, the people, across generations and geographies, tend to want the same things, which emerge clearly when anyone asks them. They want livable, sustainable cities.

Jake Herson (jacob.herson@archtam.com) is managing editor of the Connected Cities blog.

The post An evening with Jan Gehl appeared first on Blog.

No matter what city you live in, there is a good chance that there is a buried creek right below your feet. Many people do not know that there was once a creek flowing near their home or business. As our cities developed, many of our natural creeks were placed in underground pipes and culverts for reasons that seemed sound in their day—create more developable land, make way for roadways, or even to bury a creek that was considered a health hazard due to poor environmental regulation and water quality. When I purchased my first home, a search over historic maps revealed that a small creek may have flowed near or even under my house. Today many communities are looking at the benefits of uncovering and restoring these forgotten waterways.

Aging infrastructure, flooding, and the desire for more livable cities is motivating communities to explore creek daylighting, which offers a unique opportunity to restore a historic waterway while also revitalizing the surrounding communities. Creek daylighting allows for the removal of undersized or failing pipes and their replacement with a surface channel that provides better flood protection along with additional environmental, social, and economic benefits.

Renderings by Hogan Edelberg and Blake Sanborn.

What this means to the average person is greater natural space in their neighborhood, better flood protection for their homes and businesses, and additional recreational opportunities through walking and biking trails.

Renderings by Hogan Edelberg and Blake Sanborn.

Over my career, I have worked on a number of creek daylighting projects and know that communities undertake these them for a variety of reasons. A recent project located along Lick Run in Cincinnati is designed to reduce over 600 million gallons of combined sewer overflow per year. Re-engineering this historic waterway is estimated to save the city over $200 million dollars by replacing the previously-planned underground storage tunnel. The creek project was determined to be less expensive and provide valuable community revitalization opportunities.

It’s engineering in reverse—instead of building large pipes to carry our creeks, we are building creeks to eliminate the need for large pipes.

I’m currently working on a creek daylighting project in San Francisco along the historic Yosemite Creek. As part of their 20-year, multi-billion dollar Sewer System Improvement Program, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is planning to uncover and restore a half-mile of Yosemite Creek. This project will demonstrate that creek daylighting is not only a cost-effective tool to reduce combined sewer discharges to the San Francisco Bay, but can also provide valuable community amenities such as habitat creation, recreation, and education.

Renderings by Hogan Edelberg and Blake Sanborn.

San Francisco’s high-density urban landscape coupled with sky-high property values creates a unique set of challenges for engineers and designers. With a creek collecting stormwater from 110 acres of a local park, the team is relying on streetscape right-of-ways, city-owned parks, and innovative design responses. It will be exciting to see this project unfold in its complex context, and we hope it can serve as a model, along the Cincinnati project, for other cities across the country.

Renderings by Hogan Edelberg and Blake Sanborn.

Kerry Rubin (kerry.rubin@archtam.com) is an ecological engineer in ArchTam’s Design + Planning practice.

The post Once and future creeks appeared first on Blog.

Alastair Leighton, an associate director of ArchTam’s Design + Planning practice in Fortitude Valley, Australia, points out that “We break urban complexity down into manageable component parts, with transport networks managed by transport specialists as just one example, but we sometimes forget to reintegrate these layers and assess the effects of changes upon the urban environment as a whole, and upon ourselves as end users.”

Some of the effects of this are deeply psychological and difficult to assess. Others are not. For instance, obesity is now the killer of 65% of American men. Among other factors, urban environments have a domineering influence on behaviors that will either promote physical and mental health or erode it.

While much of our cities is structural and electronic, we must remember that the city-dwellers are the most significant layer of the city – the layer that shapes the city, either deliberately or by accident, the layer that is in turn shaped by the city, and the reason that the city exists in the first place. While mechanical systems are truly complex, organic systems are additionally fluid and respond to qualitative factors. Alastair thinks we can achieve much by looking at the city organically, and shaping environments and behaviors for the health of people.

Read his article in the Guardian here, and view an infographic he created. Contact him at alastair.leighton@archtam.com.

Jake Herson (jacob.herson@archtam.com) is managing editor of the Connected Cities blog.

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