Superficial Beauty Conquering Urban Substance

Superficial Beauty Conquering Urban Substance

18/07/2017

barrysays

How do we define quality in urban design? It’s a difficult one to measure, due to the vast range of inputs influencing the urban realm, ranging from physical geography, through social science, and an appreciation for those disciplines involving cultural stewardship, urban economics, political economy, environmental impact and social theory. Whilst we do want to make attractive urban places, much of what is created in our cities frequently fails to consider urban design functions, and does not adequately meet the needs and expectations of the majority of users. Urban space decision making being carried out in China in particular, has for a long time been predominantly based the aesthetic and ephemeral over and above the efficient and effective.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Painting petty pictures…but does it work? (image: BWPI)

I now live next to a park. Not just any old park, but the latest 5km section of the Shenzhen Bay Park, now an 18km linear, public waterfront linking from central to western Shenzhen. This ambitious project provides essential and uninterrupted walkways, cycle tracks and recreation areas, overlooking the Bay area towards the undeveloped mountains of northern Hong Kong. It aims to service the ever-burgeoning Shenzhen population clamouring for recreation space.

The first section, the Hongshulin Coastal Ecological Park opened in December 2000, as a wetland and habitat reserve, and is considered China’s only inner-city coastal mangrove wetland. It’s connected to the Binhai Seaside Promenade which was upgraded into the Shenzhen Bay Coastal Recreation Zone in 2011 and extended south to the new development area of Houhai and the Shenzhen Bay Bridge.

Shenzhen Bay Coastal Recreation Zone aims to restore acres of mangrove coastline and marsh habitat, deepen the bay to reverse siltation, and design sensitive public access to these naturalised features. (image: BWPI)

Designed by the world renowned SWA group the impressive project aimed to restore acres of mangrove coastline and marsh habitat, deepen the bay to reverse siltation, and design sensitive public access to these naturalised features. Importantly the park was intended to extend from the street grid of the newly created residential communities to offer pedestrian connections with the restored coastline and recreation spaces.

THE REALITY

Huge crowds fill the amphitheatre at Shenzhen Bay Coastal Recreation Zone (image: BWPI)

Being so attractive, the park has been impressively popular. Too popular in fact since it just cannot cope with the visitor pressure on weekends and public holidays. This despite the fact that it has been effectively isolated behind 6 lanes of parallel coastal highway.

Only one neighbourhood path was however connected to the 13kms of park, as well as a couple of randomly located pedestrian bridges and tunnels. The integrated community connections, essential to a park have not really happened, and yet even without a metro stop the masses still arrived.

The park incorporated small car parks at intervals alongside the highway, encouraging the new middle class to visit by car. Chaos ensued, as never-ending arrivals unable to get into saturated car parks, abandoned their vehicles along the highway, sometimes in lines several kilometres long.

Small car parks at intervals encouraging visits by car. Chaos ensues on weekends with abandoned vehicles along the highway, sometimes reaching several kilometres long. （image: BWPI）

Image: BWPI

PRETTY DRAWINGS

Have a nice trip! Yes there are steps here. (image: BWPI)

Quality urban design has a strong spatial dimension and yet optimises relationships between people, activities, and networks. It considers buildings, places and spaces not as isolated elements, but as part of a bigger picture. Buildings are connected to their streets, the streets to their wider neighbourhood, the neighbourhoods to the city structure, and the city within its region. Urban design recognises that towns and cities are part of a constantly evolving relationship between people, land, culture and the wider environment.

The great Chinese development bonanza of the last 20 years has been conspicuous for its frequent lack of any urban design thinking. Stunning landmark buildings have been erected with little or no relationship to their surroundings, grids of wide and beautifully landscaped streets have been bulldozed across ancient neighbourhoods and acres of new park created behind barriers of roads, walls of moving steel.

Safe or not so safe? (image: BWPI)

This has resulted firstly out of an understanding that planning means creating and connecting grey infrastructure, roads, drains and sewers, and the most efficient form is a straight line between two points. To the planners, land has just been white space on a piece of paper. It has not been lives, history, culture, environments, communities, water, food, health or aesthetics. It is numbers, areas and a fresh start. Building roads is the first tool of the planner. They use them to burrow, tunnel, align, bridge, sever and destroy. Roads are the planners pick, their one-dimensional weapon of choice in opening up new development.

Image: BWPI

And new development can look very good on a drawing, even if it is of the wrong type in the wrong place. Investors may not be able to scan over a set of development proposals and easily identify the potential social conflicts, environmental impacts or economic inefficiencies any better than an inexperienced local mayor might, but they can appreciate a pretty picture when they see one, and Chinese designers have been fantastic at marketing new development based on pretty pictures. Colourful arrows, bold axes, wide plazas, flying kites and soaring birds proliferate in wonderfully produced renderings and videos. Shiny buildings in blue skies surrounded by endless woodland. No sign of flattened hillsides, relocated communities, lost floodplains or empty real estate.

Decision makers need to be, and should quite rightly expect to be, informed by highly qualified professionals. They have not been. They have appointed designers with limited experience but good referrals. They have looked to friends and connections and been guided by old university hands, experienced only in the ways of yore. They have looked at pictures presented of overseas wonders by young hands who have never visited them. The results have been imposed on a public that knows no better.

"Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight, or the open apple-blossom, the toiling work-horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law. Where function does not change, form does not change. The granite rocks, the ever-brooding hills, remain for ages; the lightning lives, comes into shape, and dies, in a twinkling.

It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law."

American Architect Louis Sullivan (1896)
(Attributed to ‘De architectura’ Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, Roman architect and engineer)

DOES FORM FOLLOW FUNCTION?

Warning strips required! The high-speed cycle track conflicts with the play area entry. (image: BWPI)

So let’s get back to quality urban design. Quality planning certainly helps make it easier and poor planning makes for an urban design nightmare. Quality urban design is people centric, the spaces only work if the activities within them work, regardless of how they look. Great urban design can be achieved in both shabby, busy, incongruous, old neighbourhoods as well as in sophisticated, modern, newly created towns and cities.

It responds to the existing condition and makes places easy to access, safe, vibrant, diverse and meaningful to people. The design or interventions to such places often need to be restrained, unnoticed, flexible and responsive to the complex interactivities being undertaken identifying areas with opportunity for positive change as well as those needing careful protection. They are often not something that can be drawn, but need programs and initiatives that encourage stakeholder motivation and economic transformation.

They need to respond to both an unknown future and a past history. The form that those interventions take are not aesthetic. They are not derived from making pretty pictures on the wall that flatter the eye and conceal the substance. There are many variables to the equations and always a lot of unknowns. As a colleague mentioned to me this week, “it’s not rocket science, it’s more difficult”.

Image: BWPI

REVIEW TIME

So my daughter asked me what I thought of “our” new park at the bottom of our garden. Everyone said how beautiful it was, but I wanted to somehow assess it for success in urban design terms. Does it really work or is it just another pretty picture? I decided to assess the promenade park based on a few relevant principles: -

Shared surfaces are great, but they need to be planned to be safe. (image: BWPI)

Neighbourhood Connectivity

In order to widen waterfront areas next to private residential areas and facilitate park continuity, the promenade park has been built out from the existing edge, much of it on pontoon over water. Local roads and access paths have been given connections with the new areas that are adjacent, however the park does not attempt to reach beyond the adjacent neighbourhood land and link across the parallel 4 lane distributor road to other neighbourhoods, green space or metro stops.

Congestion and conflict between pedestrians, bikes and cars at the nearby controlled junctions is heightened. The park “attracts” visitors to come from beyond the neighbourhood, but then doesn’t help them get there, just displaces problems to nearby areas, whist once again new car parking encourages journeys from afar and then leads to local congestion on streets.

Another blind corner. (image: BWPI)

Safety

Whoops, this is a bit of a frightener. It’s a new park, and there are some teething issues, but the layout seems to specifically encourage speeding with long, straight bike lanes between children’s play and residential exits. Residents are already unhappy that they can’t go out of their gate without walking straight into cyclists whilst children are at huge risk. There is no grade segregation between cyclists and park users, which makes for an attractive shared surface but gives no clarity to users whilst the colours of all surfaces are in grey tones, so its really hard to see steps. Nice curvy shapes would have looked great on the drawings but the blind corners are scary for cyclists and pedestrians. This is an accident waiting to happen.

Watch that step? (image: BWPI)

Panic measures. (image: BWPI)

Inclusiveness

For those with some visual impairment the park will prove a huge obstacle. Steps and level changes are hard to see even for those with 20/20 eyesight. There are no colour or tone changes, no warning strips, no identifiable difference between cycle tracks and pedestrian routes and lots of low overhanging structures to bump into.
To have no cars is great, but then banning bikes in a new park which has been built with bike lanes is beyond strange. Then we see the problem. The bike lanes mean the park isn’t safe, so the park management have had to put “bike patrollers” at entrances and focal points to keep bikes out during weekends and public holidays. The black uniformed “wardens” also make sure bikes don’t stray off the tracks at other times, so you can’t actually stop and take in the view from the promenade or cycle to the play areas with your kids without leaving your bike somewhere else. There are also no designated bike parking areas, despite the plethora of sharebikes dominating the streets of the city.

The park is a lovely, pretty place for all ages with ramps and barrier free access. But it’s been designed to encourage express biking through the middle and in doing so created its own problems. The need for a heavy-handed management solution is a design disaster.

Generic design disregards the special character of the fishing harbour. (image: BWPI)

Sense of Place

Shenzhen is a new city, yet the park is over 18kms long and the new section integrates some of the oldest communities and port activities in the area. These include the old harbour with its fishing industry, the former oil and gas depot and the first 5 star hotel in China. These distinctive neighbourhoods have a clear and meaningful past, influencing the collective memory of the local communities. Yet the park gives no reference to these distinctive areas. It has the same design solutions across the full length. 5kms of sameness, however nice it might look, there is no sense of passing through distinctive areas, no touchpoints to history no sense of place. The new has obliterated and turned its back on the old.

Image: BWPI

A PRETTY PICTURE

Close the gate！Cyclists speed by at a busy residential entrance. Kids can't go out. (image: BWPI)

It surely can’t be possible, but it’s almost as if “our new park” were just designed as a picture of pretty patterns on a sheet of white paper, by people who never even visited. It turns out it’s not our park after all. We were not invited to hold discussion sessions to suggest what might work best for our community. We are not allowed to use it for cycling to our kid’s activities on the weekend nor can we use it to connect safely to the metro. We dare not tread outside the gate for fear of being knocked down, banging our head or tripping up. Moreover, we can’t celebrate the history and distinctive character of the place we live. It’s been rolled up and replaced by a piece of everywhereness, of international blandness of meaningless form dictating its very function.

Barry Wilson is a Landscape Architect, urbanist and university lecturer. His practice, Barry Wilson Project Initiatives, has been tackling urbanisation issues in Hong Kong and China for over 20 years. (www.initiatives.com.hk).

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