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Urban Design Issues
Milton Keynes, Thomas Smith-Keary, 14045700
"How can retrofitted transport infrastructre create innovative & vibrant social spaces for people that impacts positevley on local identity?"
Innovation - greening the city
Introduction
This page offers insight on how to reimagine existing hard surfaces and excessive pavements into small neighbourhood greens and social spaces, an oasis of green within a sea of grey.
PLANT*SE
PLANT*SE (Permeable Landscape as Neighbourhood Treasure) is a nonprofit organisation started in 2004 by Jane Martin in San Francisco, between then and 2014, thousand square feet of concrete has been removed and replaced with flowers, grass, trees and accompanying scents, colours and sounds of wildlife (and wildlife itself of course). The first project was rectifying a previous public project that extended the sidewalk in an aim to create more space for pedestrians and reduce the impact of the car, the result was not hugely successful as it resulted in simply having excessively large grey pavements with little occupying the space.
These small projects demonstrate a variety of ways in which to insert greenery into a city using locally sourced planting many of which is drought resistant and requires no irrigation after planting, and lot of which is edible allowing greater interaction with the environment, reducing food miles and allowing more space to be used for urban agriculture.
The green pavements also allow greater distinction between public and private boundaries, typically planting on the road side is shared by the public, and those on the building side are owned by adjacent dwellings creating a living buffer between the two, and potentially giving a local resident or business greater ownership of the pavement as they can maintain there own small patch of it.
A further benefit is the reduction of flood risk due to the removal of so many hard surfaces and replacement with permeable surfaces. There have also been considerable social improvements, it reinforces pedestrian scale by reducing car dominance and reinforcing a sense of enclosure in what would other wise be a space far too open and exposed.
18th Street before
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18th Street After
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18th Street before
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Shotweel Street, before
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Shotweel Street, after
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Shotweel Street, before
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22nd Street before
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22nd Street after
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22nd Street before
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fig 49 (top left), Parklet in San Francisco, (http://anthologymag.com/blog3/2013/04/12/san-francisco-parklets/anthology-mag-blog-outandabout-parklet-4/)
fig 51 (bottom left), Parklet in San Francisco, (http://sf.streetsblog.org/2010/10/15/eyes-on-the-street-new-parklet-on-columbus-avenue/)
fig 50 (top right), Parklet in San Francisco, (http://archrecord.construction.com/news/2011/10/Parklet-Program.asp)
fig 52 (bottom right), Parklet in San Francisco, (http://archleague.org/2013/09/ogrydziak-prillinger-architects/Title.)
fig 53, 18th Street before. San Francisco,
fig 54, 18th Street after, San Francisco
http://www.plantsf.org/FeaturedProjects.html
fig 55, 22nd Street before, San Francisco
fig 56, 22nd Street after
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fig 56, Shotweel Street before, San Francisco
fig 57, Shotwell Street after, San Francisco.
(http://www.plantsf.org/FeaturedProjects.html)
links to PLANT*SE website & San Francisco Planning department Parklet Manual
Parklets
Jane Martins efforts actually resulted in a change of planning policy, allowing residents to acquire permits to make alterations themselves much easier and less costly. Over 500 of these permits have been issued in the past 7 years (2011) Following this the city implemented a "pavements to parks program" in 2010, creating small social spaces from reclaimed streets called Parklets, since its creation over 37 of these have been created. The parklets are designed to be affordable and temporary incase they need to be moved for maintenence works etc.
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