Djemila Hadj-Hamou has more than 30 years of experience and is the newly appointed lead of our Landscape Architecture, Urban Planning and Urban Design team in Quebec. She obtained a bachelor’s degree in architecture and has a master’s degree in urban planning with a major in urban design from Université de Montréal (University of Montreal). She leads a variety of projects of different scales and also teaches a course in urban regeneration at the University of Montreal.

Tell us what inspired you to join the industry.

I’ve always been fascinated by the way architecture shapes a city, so I decided to study in this field and specialize in urban architecture. The balance between built environments and open spaces in a city isn’t a mere coincidence, but rather the result of a meticulous design process and thoughtful planning. Urban design links urban planning, architecture and landscape. Complex projects often require additional expertise, and I find building a multidisciplinary team to deliver a large project both challenging and very rewarding.

What is your favorite ArchTam project that you’ve worked on and why?

I’ve really enjoyed working on many projects throughout my career at ArchTam, especially those that require an innovative approach and push us to think outside the box. I particularly enjoyed a recent collaboration with our rail team on a high frequency rail (HFR) project since I love projects that bring together multidisciplinary teams. My role in the project was to evaluate the options for closing level crossings and ensure the urban and landscape integration of the proposed concepts.

Another favourite project is a traffic mitigation study for the City of Montreal. What made this project particularly interesting was that it combined three concepts: street density, greening and car traffic reduction. Our typo-morphological approach allowed us to identify potential solutions and layouts for the urban context. One of the proposed solutions included a typology of thresholds and adapted streets including school streets, play streets, square-park streets and garden streets. Inspired by Barcelona’s recently-developed superblocks, we were able to rethink the design and transform these areas into more liveable and healthy neighbourhoods for residents. This successful outcome was achieved through collaboration with our local transportation and mobility experts.

Tell us a story of how your work positively impacted the community.

As an urban planner and designer, I work to positively impact communities with outdoor spaces that combine sustainability and cultural relevance, and that artfully blend in with enhanced neighborhoods and improve the quality of life for residents. The innovative approach for the restoration of the pedestrian section of Prince-Arthur Street in Montreal’s Plateau Mont-Royal neighborhood is an example of a project that positively impacted the community, and was completed on time to mark the city’s 375^th anniversary in 2017. 

Prior to our work, the street had been a route where bicycle traffic could often pose risks to pedestrian safety. We transformed it into a green, pedestrian-friendly and safe promenade for families and children to stroll past restaurants and cafes. The middle of the promenade is enhanced with terraces, furniture and flowers, a similar concept to the popular La Rambla in Barcelona.

Our innovative, sustainable and environmentally friendly approach has guided the redesign of the street, giving pedestrians a feeling of safety to freely enjoy their strolls, while discouraging cyclists from using the pedestrian area. The street links the very lively Saint-Laurent Boulevard and the quiet Saint-Louis Square at the border between Plateau Mont-Royal and Montreal’s City Center. Distinctive furniture, multi-purpose flower box benches and its open space nature, make this area a local favourite venue for temporary outdoor events and seasonal activities.

Share a piece of career advice.

Get involved and be dedicated despite the obstacles that may arise along the way — it’s well worth it, as our industry has many exciting career possibilities. We are witnessing a number of paradigm shifts in many areas, so seize every opportunity that comes your way to collaborate with colleagues and cliennts, and develop innovative solutions and industry best practices that will improve communities and drive equity for years to come.

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The result is Richmond 300: A Guide for Growth, a plan five years in the making that recently earned the American Planning Association’s 2021 Daniel Burnham Award as the nation’s top comprehensive plan. The master plan envisions an equitable, sustainable and beautiful Richmond that delivers a high quality of life for all residents. It incorporates such goals as creating inclusive housing, developing an equitable transportation network, fostering a diverse economy and supporting a thriving environment.

Here are six takeaways from this City of Richmond/ArchTam collaboration that can help guide the development of master plans for other municipalities across the country looking to embrace a new sustainable future for all residents.

Break the mold. Typically, cities lead their master plan development, researching current conditions, developing their project scope and establishing targets before hiring a consultant to determine how to meet those goals. The planning director for the City of Richmond made the deliberate decision to move forward without these elements in place, underscoring the city’s desire for a more inclusive master plan that would consider the needs of underserved neighborhoods that historically had been shut out of these efforts.

This led to a master plan tailored to Richmond that accounted for needs voiced across all the city’s communities. While the city did not have the capacity to dedicate its personnel to the master plan full-time, ArchTam embedded itself within the city, temporarily relocating their offices for the project. This close relationship allowed for open, in-person discussions between ArchTam and city staff, cementing the team’s ability to serve as trusted advisors in a more meaningful, impactful way than would be possible with a traditional consultant.

Be open with the public. We were vocal about the process of creating an inclusive roadmap to guide the master plan’s development and sought input from the public from beginning to end. An example of this was how we formed the master plan’s steering committee. Typically, city officials appoint members for a steering committee before hiring a consultant, but Richmond wanted all voices to be heard. So, the mayor hosted a press conference where he asked citizens to apply for the plan’s committee and over 170 people expressed interest. The final committee consisted of 21 people varying widely in age, planning knowledge, and length of city residency. This diversity set the stage for an inclusive, transparent process and allowed us to create accessible, understandable content that resonated with our constituency and built community consensus.

Change the information flow. During the engagement process, we reversed the traditional top-down approach so that information flowed from the community up to the planners — a shift that allowed more people to contribute to the master plan.

We asked Richmond residents to send in their ‘Big Ideas.’ We received about 6,000 submissions, with over 900 vision statements that were then organized and brought to five working groups that were assigned to shape these submissions into draft maps, goals, objectives and recommendations. All Richmonders were invited to participate in these working groups with the expected commitment to attend all the meetings. Staff asked key technical experts from inside and outside City Hall to participate in the working groups as well, providing guidance and insight. Ranging between 30 and 50 unique members each, the groups worked with staff to fine tune the draft master plan during 15 meetings over five months. Once the working groups made their determinations, we brought the draft back for public review. The planning process began with Richmonders’ ideas and ended with their buy-in, giving all residents the opportunity to have a voice in the process and ownership of the adopted plan.

Shift gears when needed. We understood there would be times when a strategy or process didn’t work. To counter that, we built in time to reconsider and readjust, doing just that with our community engagement efforts.

We aimed to engage two percent of Richmond’s population — about 6,000 people. This target was intended to include people who are typically involved in planning conversations, such as residents who are active in civic associations, as well as residents from Black and Latino neighborhoods who have been less likely to be included in this process in the past.

When, after our first round of engagement, we lacked input from that second group, we readjusted our approach and hired seven residents from the communities we wanted to reach. These residents expanded input by using their community networks to discuss the plan and shared their feedback with the planning team, allowing us to build the inclusivity that was required in our approach.

Reach out for expertise. As a global firm, ArchTam has a depth of resources to draw on to address specific needs that arise during the master planning process. When developing ways to address heat islands — areas that experience increased heat within Richmond’s neighborhoods — we reached out to our colleagues who specialize in resiliency and sustainability. Based on their input, we worked with local researchers who mapped out the locations of these heat islands. The researchers found that these areas aligned with disinvested, minority neighborhoods. As a result, we devised strategies for increasing the presence of and access to greenspaces, providing greater equity for these communities.

Take action. The Richmond 300 master plan encompasses 17 goals, 70 objectives and more than 400 strategies, but unless these recommendations are acted upon, it’s only a document. Richmond is investing in bringing this plan to life. The city is rewriting zoning ordinances to deliver more parks, greenspaces and housing units throughout the city. Richmond is also using Richmond 300 to guide the redevelopment of over 100 acres of city-owned land scattered throughout the city into a blend of mixed-income housing, job-generating commercial uses and open space. And plans are in the works for a deck to be built over the interstate to reconnect a Black neighborhood that was cut off from the rest of the city decades ago. These are the first of many steps the city will take as it prioritizes equity, sustainability and inclusivity to build upon its motto – “One Richmond.”  

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As part of our continued focus on safety, we’re demonstrating our commitment to road safety by supporting the 6th Annual United Nations Global Road Safety Week. Simply put, low speed streets save lives. This year’s U.N. program focuses on keeping the streets and roadways safe where we live, work and play. There is considerable focus and urgency on this issue because everyone deserves the safety of low-speed, livable streets, which can have an effect on public health through the reduction of injury causing vehicle accidents and impact climate change by reducing vehicle emissions. This focus can also promote social and racial equality as a large portion of speed-related incidents occur in underserved communities.

Speeding is one of the top causes of roadway incidents around the globe, and as a globally focused organization, ArchTam has signed the “Streets for Life: For People and Planet” open letter that calls on policymakers to act for low speed streets worldwide, limiting speeds to 20 mph (30 km/h) where people walk, live and play.

As the world’s premier infrastructure consulting firm, ArchTam has helped conceptualize, develop, construct and operate transportation and roadway infrastructure projects around the world — from Honolulu to Hong Kong, and from Mumbai to Memphis to Melbourne. We have always placed a strong focus on roadway safety both in design and execution.

To achieve this, we have developed procedures and systems that include driver safety training for our more frequent business drivers, journey management planning, and design and quality checks. We’ve brought in foremost industry experts — the best and brightest from around the world to ensure that we continue to provide the high-quality expertise and delivery our clients expect from us, with an unwavering focus on safety. Road and driving safety is of particular importance to our company due to our exposure to the risk associated with it. Specifically, despite our project and geographical diversity, driving is one of the few risks that everyone is exposed to regardless of business.

You can learn more about the U.N.’s Global Road Safety Week by visiting the program’s website and you can view the open letter here.

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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.

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We’ve all heard the staggering statistics – over half the world’s population will live in urban areas by the middle of the century, the benefits of a global economy are distributed for the fortunate few, and climate change continues to exacerbate existing environmental concerns while creating new ones. The sheer magnitude of these physical, social and moral concerns and the unrelenting pressure that comes with having a small role to play in stemming the tide can overwhelm anyone, from policy makers to urbanists to the general public.

As the need for improved infrastructure increases, it can be tempting to default to new emerging technological solutions, like automated vehicles or artificial intelligence, as the wunderkind solution to all our problems. And who can blame us? As the intellectual and financial momentum of the technology sector pivot from the digital realm to the physical realm, we are seeing rapid improvements in technologies that only a decade ago seemed impossible. Hyperloop technology was a mere whitepaper in 2013, and in 2019 we have a fully automated, electric hyperloop pod zipping through a near vacuum tube at several hundred miles an hour. Instead of the internet acting as the laboratory for many startups, there is a more deliberate emphasis on the city and its people as the test bed for experimentation. This new unexpected inertia has led to rapid shifts in many previously fundamental assumptions about the form of cities and the arrangement of urban space, such as the increased value of curb space and the devaluation of structured parking garages.

With such rapid change upon us, how do we properly plan and design for the future? How do we help cities ensure they are choosing the right solution, at the right time, without exacerbating or reinforcing equity issues?

As overwhelming as these changes may appear, finding the path forward can often be as simple as ensuring that we are asking the right question about the right problem: Are we designing for technology itself, or are we designing for the people using the technology? Rapid change is not new in city building and there are clear examples in the past where we have erred and where we have succeeded in adapting to it. In designing cities around the automobile instead of people, we mistakenly measured success on vehicle throughput instead of our ability to connect people to jobs and housing. In our pursuit of economic growth, we tended to prioritize luxury development projects near transit oriented districts instead of treating them first and foremost as mechanism to solve affordable housing and mobility needs. And in our effort to maximize and protect property values, we segregated communities.

Deliberate human-centered design and planning can help counter our temptation to focus on technology instead of allowing it to adapt to us. In our work with planning hyperloop and high speed rail systems across Texas for six metropolitan planning organizations, we identified potential station locations not by highlighting available developable land or compatibility to technology deployment, but by which locations provided the most public benefit to the communities, such as locations where transit-oriented development could provide affordable housing to transit dependent populations. We then worked backwards to see how emerging technologies, like hyperloop and automated BRT, and corridor alignments could best work for those stations. This approach allowed us to always prioritize people in the decision-making process rather than technology modes or convenient rights-of-ways.

As we move into an era where technological change is defining many of our solutions to city building, despite our uncertainty about potential negative externalities, maintaining a clear perspective with a priority on human centered outcomes rather than technological can better help us navigate the future and build for tomorrow.

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