ArchiDocs: physical

Accessibility, Urbanization and Physical Activity

by Morten Myrup Jensen,

February 16th 2010

How much planning and design do citizens need to be encouraged to be physically active in the city?

The two extremes are on the one hand the group of disabled citizens who need designers to pay particular attention to accessibility in order for them to navigate the public spaces at all. They are at the mercy of planners who in fact have the choice to lock people up in their homes by planning badly with no regard for disabled people´s needs.

On the other hand we have the few dare devils that scale tall buildings as spiders on a wall, those that jump from skyscrapers with a parachute, train hoppers and the practitioners of parkour. They are bold, imaginative and practice their activities in spite of, and perhaps because of, the inaccessible city. They ignore rules and laws and city planners have little or no influence on their activity.

In between we have the large majority of people for whom the creative planning of the city spaces is vital for their will and urge to use it actively.

So, accessibility is a wide term. It covers access for the pedestrian and cyclist to often visited destinations as described in the Active Design Manual. The aim of this manual, on the topic of accessibility, is to give guidelines to planners on the issue of designing for active life styles.

It argues that securing safe, direct and convenient links between often used destinations like schools, workplaces, homes, shops and community facilities, people are more prone to go by foot or bicycle and leave the car behind.

As mentioned, another important aspect of accessibility is the obvious issue of making buildings and community facilities available to disabled citizens. This should be a prerequisite in any design but is often seen as an inconvenience to builders and designers. Accessibility for the disabled is neglected or perhaps added in the last phase of the design process adding to the frustration of builders.

Some conscientious design studios manage this aspect very well though, as documented in the Danish-Jewish Museum by Liebeskind, the new Ordrupgaard Museum by Hadid, and the Elephant House of the Copenhagen Zoo by Foster. (Ark). These projects should act as model examples for Danish contractors in the future.

Accessibility to spaces for physical activity is the major issue of the provided examples for this paper. They show that relatively small additions to the public space can make a world of difference.

A well planned playground in a Dutch town square, a wooden basin in the Copenhagen harbor or a safety net spanning a parking lot in down town Tokyo are simple constructions strategically placed to yield maximum gain.

The case of Tokyo is particularly interesting to me as I have a great desire to visit this urban jungle but haven´t yet had the chance. A quick search in the literature came up with a similar case of small scale / big reward kind of planning, namely the futsal ball courts occupying rooftops in Tokyo (focus).

This phenomenon made me think back to the time growing up in the workers quarters of Copenhagen when redevelopment of housing districts was in its first phase. The back yard transformed before our eyes from a useless place occupied by garages and divided by fences into one big playground for kids and hang out place for adults. The central object was this cage or enclosure for ball playing that turned out to become the favorite playing field for all the kid in the neighborhood. It was designed exactly like the futsal enclosures of Tokyo. So, it is no surprise to me that they turn out to be popular in Japan too.

In fact a simple idea to utilize the unused spaces on top of flat roofed buildings in dense urban areas, this example perfectly illustrates the points made by the Active Design Manual. As they are placed above street level, the danger of traffic is eliminated and makes them safe in this regard. I imagine though, that the air quality must be really bad even when raised above the city. But this remains to be documented. The accessibility is often high as the ball courts are placed close to public transportation routes. One even placed on top of a major route intersection, being the roof of a metro station hub. Providing that people have good access to the public transportation system from their homes, it seems that the major criteria of the Active Design Manual are met in this case.

In most urban areas transport routes divide quarters and cut off access from one side to the other. Typically, highways and railways are the causes of dead zones that would otherwise have been accessible to pedestrians or cyclists. This problem is particularly dominant in the case of Paris where a major highway encircles the entire city leaving the outer quarters totally cut off from accessing the city center by foot or bicycle. Many other cities and urban areas suffer from similar maladies which become apparent when urban sprawl intensifies.

Even thought I find the Active Design Manual rather doctrinal and its definitions and language tiresome to read from start to finish, I´m convinced it is invaluable as a checklist for planners of urban and suburban areas alike. Many inexpedient city plans could have been avoided if this manual had been referenced during the design process. This adds to my starting argument in the first paper, that the management and administration of knowledge is the key issue for designers and planners in the pursuit of building a better environment in the future.

(Ark) Danske Ark Byg, 09.2007, p 4

(fokus) Arkfokus, 4/2008, pp 4-9

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