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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?"
Cheonggyecheon Park
Introduction
This has been briefly mentioned previously with during the literature review but it warrants burrowing further for more information.
First, a quick history, the Cheonggyecheon river has spent half of the 20th century buried beneath 16 lanes of stacked motorway built in the late 1960s, (Vidal, 2006) one of the most comprehensive obliterations of the natural environment ever perpetrated. The city wanted to renew the area as it was previously an informal refugee camp setup during the Korean War, the refugees became established and setup a shantytown that became a slum. The river spent this time running through an underground culvert choked in filth.
In 2003, the motorway was torn down and in 2005, the park, stretching over five miles long and containing 404 hectares of parkland (its width is questionable as the Guardian states 800 yards, which is over 700 metres wide? 800 feet is still just shy of 250 metres which seems exceedingly wide still) opened to the public.
Its impacts
Initially there was skepticism with regards to traffic congestion but history has shown that in similar projects across the world that this isn't the case, in San Francisco, the demolition of the Embarcadero Freeway in 1991 prompted traffic concerns over its closure, an earthquake in previous years had resulted in its closure without major traffic issues removing any objections to its removal. In Seoul, the same thing happened. As soon as the road was destroyed, the traffic disappeared, all 160,000 of them each day (Vidal, 2006) motorists changed their driving habits, either giving up using the car in that area (studies have found that bus usage has increased by 15% in and around Cheonggyecheon between 2003 and 2008, http://landscapeperformance.org) or simply finding another route. Its fairly well established that car use increases if there is more car capacity, on the flipside car use decreases with reduced capacity. This is known as the "Braess paradox".
There was was also fierce resistance from local traders in many cases who feared that the lack of cars would draw people away from the area, but their ills couldn't have been more ill founded as its been found that the new park attracts on average 64,000 people every day to the nearby area, at least 1,500 being tourists who help to contribute roughly £1.2 million to Seoul's economy, the number of businesses actually increased by 3.5% around the roads removal and the parks opening, double the business growth in downtown Seoul.
Permeability for pedestrians has dramatically improved as well with the creation of 22 new bridges crossing the river compared to with what was essentially an impenetrable barrier of concrete and traffic, it was as Carmona (2010) put it lost space.
(http://landscapeperformance.org)
fig 63 (top), Cheonggyecheon, before - showing the raised freeway and roads underneath,
fig 64 (bottom), and after - the new park and exposed Cheonggyecheon River. http://landscapeperformance.org/case-study-briefs/cheonggyecheon-stream-restoration
Moving onto environmental benefits, Professor Kee Yeon Hwang( an Urban planner at Hongik University) states that surface temperatures in summer along the restored river were on average 3.6 degrees Celsius lower than places 400 metres away due to the gigantic reduction of firstly, concrete and the urban heat-island effect but also the removal of 160,000 cars and the resulting pollution, the air now has 35% less particulates in the air as a result, halving the chance of respiratory diseases in the area.
The river also now functions as an air conditioner, cooling the capital during its long hot summers. Average wind speeds in June this year were 50% higher than the same period last year. Also, on the ecological side of things,
"many birds came back, plus fish, insects and plants. The variety of wildlife has vastly increased since we tore up the road".
To be specific, the river has resulted in an increase of biodiversity by 639% between 2003 and 2008, plant species increasing from 62 to 308, and insect species from 15 to 192.
Knock on Effects
The project has also resulted in a domino effect throughout far-eastern cities, in Seoul itself, there are plans to make the Han river (Cheonggyecheon is a tributary of it) which is currently not suited for pedestrians at all and surrounded by more motorways more pedestrianised. Shanghai and Tokyo have similar potential projects which they are considering (Vidal, 2006)
Gentrification
One of the main criticisms following the development is that of gentrification, with the development forcing thousands of people, many of whom lived informally under the roads and threatened the livelihoods of those living nearby. Too an extent this is warranted as the price of land has skyrocketed (unsurprisingly) by 30-50% for plots and units within 50 metres or so of the site.
Conclusions
What is undisputed though is that the designers, engineers and planners took a crumbling filth motorway and transformed an utterly car dominated area into one dominated by pedestrians and natural form by reopening the river.
Braess Paradox
By taking away space for traffic in an urban area you can actually increase the flow of traffic, and, by implication, by adding extra capacity to a road network you can reduce overall performance.
"adding extra capacity to a network when the moving entities selfishly choose their route, can in some cases reduce overall performance."
The closing of major roads for maintenence in Seoul and New York, it as predicted to cause massive jams but traffic flow ran more smoothly due to the removal of alternative routes and restriction of choice.
fig 65, photo of Cheonggyecheon park along its length, with old concrete stanions being used as a memorial, and illustrating the abundenc of greenery.
(http://creativeclusters.com/?p=1795)
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