ArchiDocs: Innovation

Innovation, Urbanization and Physical Activity

by Morten Myrup Jensen,

February 22nd 2010

The industrial revolution liberated us from hard physical labour. Machines were exchanged for our bodies and then we got an obesity epidemic on our hands. Lack of physical exercise is one important cause of our life style maladies. We know this, and we want to exercise more to live better and longer.

In the industrial age physical exercise was mainly associated with labour. Then there was sports, which in all forms and sizes was competitive or performance oriented, largely motivated by obligation. Only the wealthy had access to activities like horseback riding, hunting or sailing which might not be categorized as sports per se.

Today most of us are wealthy in the sense that we can choose to improve our health and wellbeing with physical life style activities. The majority of us are motivated by inclination and care less about performance and more about that the activities are both pleasurable, sociable and identity forming.

But we are basically comfortable animals and we want easily accessible opportunities to exercise our lazy bodies. That’s why we need to design and plan our cities in a way to encourage people to leave their homes and cars to engage their bodies in movement.

I feel fortunate to live in Copenhagen which has bicycle traffic high on the priority list. One of the great additions to the city from a bicycle point of view is the planning and construction of green bicycle routes. They are basically residual areas from abandoned railway tracks that have been joined and transformed into greenspaces, creating a web of routes across the city¹⁾. They serve as expressways for cyclists that can travel unhindered by car traffic and stop lights. There is no doubt that the planning of the routes is in accordance with The Active Design Manual and greatly encourages people to use their bicycles. One third of daily commuters within the city go by bike!

Young Danish architects are sometimes aware of this unique quality of our capital. One such example literally brings the qualities on international display. The Danish 2010 Shanghai World Fair pavilion is equipped with 1.500 cph city bikes and a harbour bath with clean swimmable water from the cph harbour canal ²⁾. In my view, an effective way to promote both Copenhagen and healthy city design to the world.

A series of residential projects by the Copenhagen based studio BIG have considerations on people being able to be physically active in or around the buildings. I will mention a few and comment on them.

Inspired by New York and Tokyo projects, the High Square is using the roof top of a large department store in cph to create outdoor leisure activities including a ball court ³⁾. In my opinion the weather conditions in Denmark doesn´t really favor projects of this kind. Generally, I think more attention need to be paid to include shelter from the elements in projects that rely only on physical activity outdoors.

The KløverKarréen project proposes a huge residential block surrounding an existing grass covered area with numerous ball fields. The roof is designed as a publicly accessible terrace undulating from ground level to 15 stories. Thus potentially giving unprecedented views of the city in a 3 km stroll around the block ⁴⁾. A spectacular idea that is sure to attract people to take a long and awarded walk.

Same concept is used in the figure 8 house in a newly developed part of Copenhagen called Ørestad. In this residential block the roof touches ground level and rise to trace the figure 8 before returning to ground level ⁵⁾. In this way runners can race endlessly if they feel like it. This project is nearly completed.

Worth mentioning is also the Mountain Dwellings project which has the opposite effect by bringing the car garage as close to the front door as possible. Arguably, by doing so you free space by saving parking lots, but in my view the project encourages and favors car transportation to adverse effect. To make up for this, it seems, the studio shows in a movie how accessible the building is to tracours (parkour practitioners) if not for ordinary people ⁶⁾.

The Third Urban Space denotes the collection of activities and offerings to a local community coming from the planning and addition of an arena. Isolated, sports are an economically bad deal to be investing in. The positive return for a town investing in a new arena comes from the “secondary effects” i.e. new jobs and taxes arising from synergy with other cultural and popular economies comprising the Third Urban Space. In this way an arena can be a catalyst for development.

In my fourth year of school I designed an Olympic size swimming stadium for the Ørestad Nord quarters of Copenhagen. I elaborated on the dreams of bringing the Olympic Games to Copenhagen and did plan work on the location, building and design of the project. I decided on a two stage building design which would transform the space occupied by half of the spectator seats after the Games into community related facilities like children’s pools, spa, fitness center, restaurant, conference facilities etc. Thus gaining the economic benefit of the Games and also of the Third Urban Space growing in the greater part of the Stadiums lifespan.

A segment of people do not join sports clubs, favour non-traditional forms of exercise and want to engage in their activities regardless of opening hours. In my experience, formation of club-less networks often involve activities like diving, surfing, hiking, skiing, running, ice- and roller-skating etc. and can be observed on the internet in communities like facebook and dating sites.

I was involved in one part of the Louisiana Exhibition, Green Architecture for the Future ⁷⁾which used a technology of piezoelectric inducers. These tiny devices can be built into floors or pavements to produce electrical current from the movement caused by people walking on top of it. With refinement, the potential is obvious to make people save energy by not using their cars and at the same time producing energy by moving their bodies ⁸⁾.

¹⁾ Abandoned Copenhagen railway tracks transformed into green bicycle routes.

http://www.cphx.dk/index.php?id=27551#/23983/

Not in English, but play the short movie to the right on the page

Detailed map:

http://www.kk.dk/Borger/ByOgTrafik/cyklernesby/~/media/08702E26BA1542B798207A48C1CA51F4.ashx

²⁾ Danish 2010 Shanghai world fair pavilion with 1500 cph city bikes, harbour bath et. al.

BIG:XPO

http://www.big.dk/projects/xpo/xpo.html

³⁾ Recreational space on top of department store

BIG:HIGH SQUARE

http://www.big.dk/projects/mag/mag.html

⁴⁾ 3 km of publicly accessible roof terrace