InstituteforUrbanDesign

SustainableCities:

Mexico City/Istanbul/

New Orleans/St.Paul/Johannesburg/Atlanta/Tokyo

Fellows Proceedings 10.17.2006

10.18.2006

InstituteforUrbanDesign

SustainableCities:

Mexico City/Istanbul/

New Orleans/St.Paul/Johannesburg/Atlanta/Tokyo

Fellows Proceedings 10.17.2006

10.18.2006

Sustainable Cities: Urban Design

Fellows Proceedings

October 17, 2006

The Century AssociationNew York

October 18, 2006

United NationsUN-HabitatNew York

Institute for Urban Design

3 Contents2 Conference Program

Sustainable Cities:Urban Design

Institute for Urban Designin cooperation with:United Nations Human Settlements Program

(UN-Habitat) Toyo UniversityBSHFRockefeller Foundation

October 17, 2006

The Century Association7 West 43rd StreetNew York, NY

Welcome

Ann FerebeeFounding DirectorInstitute for Urban DesignGuide for Tomorrow’s Cites

Aliye CelikManaging DirectorInstitute for Urban DesignAchieving Sustainability

Lance Jay BrownACSADistinguished ProfessorSchool of Architecture CUNYThemes and Issues

Panelists

Mario SchjetnanGrupo de Desino UrbanoMexico CityDemocratic Open Space

Dr. Suha OzkanCompetition AdvisorIstanbul Metropolitan PlanningCompetitions to GuideDevelopment of Two New CityCenters in Istanbul

Respondents

Robert OuelletteThe National PostToronto

Charles McKinneyChief of DesignCity of New YorkParks & Recreation

October 18, 2006

United NationsDag Hammarskjold AuditoriumNew York, NY

Overview

Dr. Axumite Gebre-EgziabherDirectorUN-HabitatNew York OfficeWelcome

Ann FerebeeFounding DirectorInstitute for Urban DesignProgram Goals

Panel 1

ModeratorMichael SorkinDirectorUrban Design ProgramCUNY

Panelists

Darren WalkerVice PresidentFoundation InitiativesRockefeller FoundationNine Plans Will ProvideFoundation for Rebuilding in New Orleans

Mayor Chris ColemanSt. Paul, MNUrban Design Center as Vehicle for PolicyImplementation

Respondents

Lisa ChamberlainThe New York Times

Steve RugareUrban Design Center of Northern OhioKent State UniversityCleveland, Ohio

Panel 2

Chair HE. Mr. Christopher F.Hackett Permanent Representative of Barbados to the United Nations

Panelists

Dr. Axumite Gebre-EgziabherDirectorUN-HabitatNew York OfficeUrban Design and Human Settlements

Mario SchjetnanMexico City(Repeat of speech from previous day)

Dr. Suha OzkanChairmanWorld ArchitectureCommunityThe Aga Khan Awards:Tradition vs Innovation

Diane DiaconPresidentBuilding and Social Housing FoundationLeicestershire, U.K.Foundation Award ProgramEncourages Better HousingFor The Poor

Panel 3

ChairHE. Ms. Judith BahemukaAmbassador from Kenya to Canada

ModeratorLance Jay BrownACSADistinguished ProfessorSchool of Architecture CUNY

Professor Tonomori MatsuoPresidentToyo UniversityTokyo, JapanWater Conservation ThroughReuse in Tokyo

Dr. Junichiro OkataUrban PlanningTokyo University Tokyo, JapanCommunity BasedImprovement of InformalUrban Space

Conclusion

Professor Michael SorkinDirectorUrban Design ProgramCUNYFormulary for a Sustainable Urbanism

Sustainable Cities: Urban Design

Welcome

Guide for Tomorrow’s Cities 4Ann FerebeeAchieving Sustainability 4Aliye CelikThemes and Issues 5Lance Jay Brown

October 17, 2006

Democratic Open Space 7Mario SchjetnanCompetitions to Guide Development of 12Two New City Centers in IstanbulDr. Suha OzkanExchange 21Response 21

October 18, 2006

Overview

Welcome 23Dr. Axumite Gebre-EgziabherProgram Goals 23Ann Ferebee

Panel 1

Nine Plans Will Provide Foundation for 24Rebuilding in New OrleansDarren WalkerUrban Design Center as Vehicle for Policy 28ImplementationMayor Chris ColemanExchange 31Response 32

Panel 2

Urban Design and Human Settlements 34Dr. Axumite Gebre-EgziabherThe Aga Khan Awards: Tradition vs Innovation 36Dr. Suha OzkanFoundation Award Program Encourages 38Better Housing For The PoorDiane DiaconResponse 41

Panel 3

Water Conservation Through Reuse in Tokyo 43Tonomori MatsuoCommunity Based Improvement of 44Informal Urban SpaceDr. Junichiro Okata

Conclusion

Formulary for a Sustainable Urbanism 47Michael Sorkin

Speaker Biographies/Sponsors 54

To learn more about the Institute for Urban Design,future programs and publications, please see:www.instituteforurbandesign.org

To mail proposals for future publication, please send to:Ann FerebeeDirectorInstitute for Urban Design47 Barrow StreetNew York, NY 10014Phone: 212-741-2041Fax: 212-633-0125E-mail: annferebee@aol.com

3 Contents2 Conference Program

Sustainable Cities:Urban Design

Institute for Urban Designin cooperation with:United Nations Human Settlements Program

(UN-Habitat) Toyo UniversityBSHFRockefeller Foundation

October 17, 2006

The Century Association7 West 43rd StreetNew York, NY

Welcome

Ann FerebeeFounding DirectorInstitute for Urban DesignGuide for Tomorrow’s Cites

Aliye CelikManaging DirectorInstitute for Urban DesignAchieving Sustainability

Lance Jay BrownACSADistinguished ProfessorSchool of Architecture CUNYThemes and Issues

Panelists

Mario SchjetnanGrupo de Desino UrbanoMexico CityDemocratic Open Space

Dr. Suha OzkanCompetition AdvisorIstanbul Metropolitan PlanningCompetitions to GuideDevelopment of Two New CityCenters in Istanbul

Respondents

Robert OuelletteThe National PostToronto

Charles McKinneyChief of DesignCity of New YorkParks & Recreation

October 18, 2006

United NationsDag Hammarskjold AuditoriumNew York, NY

Overview

Dr. Axumite Gebre-EgziabherDirectorUN-HabitatNew York OfficeWelcome

Ann FerebeeFounding DirectorInstitute for Urban DesignProgram Goals

Panel 1

ModeratorMichael SorkinDirectorUrban Design ProgramCUNY

Panelists

Darren WalkerVice PresidentFoundation InitiativesRockefeller FoundationNine Plans Will ProvideFoundation for Rebuilding in New Orleans

Mayor Chris ColemanSt. Paul, MNUrban Design Center as Vehicle for PolicyImplementation

Respondents

Lisa ChamberlainThe New York Times

Steve RugareUrban Design Center of Northern OhioKent State UniversityCleveland, Ohio

Panel 2

Chair HE. Mr. Christopher F.Hackett Permanent Representative of Barbados to the United Nations

Panelists

Dr. Axumite Gebre-EgziabherDirectorUN-HabitatNew York OfficeUrban Design and Human Settlements

Mario SchjetnanMexico City(Repeat of speech from previous day)

Dr. Suha OzkanChairmanWorld ArchitectureCommunityThe Aga Khan Awards:Tradition vs Innovation

Diane DiaconPresidentBuilding and Social Housing FoundationLeicestershire, U.K.Foundation Award ProgramEncourages Better HousingFor The Poor

Panel 3

ChairHE. Ms. Judith BahemukaAmbassador from Kenya to Canada

ModeratorLance Jay BrownACSADistinguished ProfessorSchool of Architecture CUNY

Professor Tonomori MatsuoPresidentToyo UniversityTokyo, JapanWater Conservation ThroughReuse in Tokyo

Dr. Junichiro OkataUrban PlanningTokyo University Tokyo, JapanCommunity BasedImprovement of InformalUrban Space

Conclusion

Professor Michael SorkinDirectorUrban Design ProgramCUNYFormulary for a Sustainable Urbanism

Sustainable Cities: Urban Design

Welcome

Guide for Tomorrow’s Cities 4Ann FerebeeAchieving Sustainability 4Aliye CelikThemes and Issues 5Lance Jay Brown

October 17, 2006

Democratic Open Space 7Mario SchjetnanCompetitions to Guide Development of 12Two New City Centers in IstanbulDr. Suha OzkanExchange 21Response 21

October 18, 2006

Overview

Welcome 23Dr. Axumite Gebre-EgziabherProgram Goals 23Ann Ferebee

Panel 1

Nine Plans Will Provide Foundation for 24Rebuilding in New OrleansDarren WalkerUrban Design Center as Vehicle for Policy 28ImplementationMayor Chris ColemanExchange 31Response 32

Panel 2

Urban Design and Human Settlements 34Dr. Axumite Gebre-EgziabherThe Aga Khan Awards: Tradition vs Innovation 36Dr. Suha OzkanFoundation Award Program Encourages 38Better Housing For The PoorDiane DiaconResponse 41

Panel 3

Water Conservation Through Reuse in Tokyo 43Tonomori MatsuoCommunity Based Improvement of 44Informal Urban SpaceDr. Junichiro Okata

Conclusion

Formulary for a Sustainable Urbanism 47Michael Sorkin

Speaker Biographies/ Sponsors 54

To learn more about the Institute for Urban Design,future programs and publications, please see:www.instituteforurbandesign.org

To mail proposals for future publication, please send to:Ann FerebeeDirectorInstitute for Urban Design47 Barrow StreetNew York, NY 10014Phone: 212-741-2041Fax: 212-633-0125E-mail: annferebee@aol.com

5 Institute for Urban Design4 Welcome

Guide for Tomorrow’s Cities?

Ann FerebeeFounding DirectorInstitute for Urban Design

Sustainable Cities: Urban Design was the Institute’slargest and most challenging program. Representativesfrom six foreign cities addressed more than 200 registrantsat the Dag Hammarskjold Auditorium of the United Nationsin New York.

To hear within a single hour that Lagos was thefastest growing city in the world while also absorbing thatNew Orleans had lost, in Hurricane Katrina, 60 percent ofits population was, indeed, a shock.

To learn, at the same time, that designers are prepar-ing plans for the nine parishes of New Orleans, whilePakistan’s Orangee project has provided toilets for 100,000,was exhilarating.

In less than 24 hours, registrants for the two-day program learned about:

• Tokyo’s water saving policy.• Mexico City’s rehabilitated parks, the lungs for a

population of 19 million.• Istanbul’s competition process to provide plans—

by Zaha Hadid, Kisho Kurokawa and Ken Yeang—for conversion of two industrial areas into new community centers.

• Eutopia, a green utopia outlined by Michael Sorkin to provide a guide, which urban designers can consider, in mapping tomorrow’s cities.

Achieving Sustainability

Aliye P. CelikManaging DirectorInstitute for Urban Design

The rapid growth of the world population is one of the most striking demographic trends today. Most of thisincrease in population will have to be settled in urban areasbecause of pressures on rural areas. In developing countriesin particular, 59 million new dwellers are added to theurban populations annually. Currently, Africa has the low-est urbanization level; but has the fastest urban populationgrowth. Asia’s prospects are especially daunting given theanticipated rapid population increases in India and China.Thus, rapid urbanization will be the dominant feature inhuman settlements in the coming decades.These develop-ments will call for the better planning of urban growth anddevelopment, design and the better management of exist-ing urban centers to cope with the demands of increasingnumber of urban citizens, to protect them from natural and man made hazards, to deal with the challenges ofpoverty equity and equality. The challenges of developedcountries are different from the challenges of developingcountries but there are lessons to be learnt from the expe-rience of each country in order to achieve a sustainablebuilt environment.

In 1976 United Nations decided to organize HabitatConference, which was held in Vancouver to find solutionsto the rapid urbanization the world was facing. In 1996,Habitat II Conference was organized in Istanbul to dealwith the increasing poverty in the urban areas. The IstanbulDeclaration adopted at the Habitat II said that a solution canbe found only by the cooperation of different stake holders.

In 2000, The United Nations adopted the MillenniumDeclaration and Millennium Development Goals where 191Member states of the United Nation made a commitmentto improve the living conditions of the 2.5 billion poor inthe world. Goal 7 of the Millennium Development Goalscommits Member States of the United Nations to ensureenvironmental sustainability by integrating the principlesof sustainable development into country policies and pro-grams, to reduce by half by 2015 the proportion of peoplewithout sustainable access to safe drinking water and basicsanitation and, as well as to achieve by 2020 significantimprovement in the lives of 100 million slum-dwellers.

The development and design of new buildings, openspaces, parks, cities, and urban growth call for environ-mental planning and management capacities, as well asthe capacity to take note of social and political changesthat can undermine traditional social networks and resultin increased inequity and exclusion.

Cities, especially new cities, can support larger popu-lations while limiting their adverse impacts on the naturalenvironment and therefore hold promise for sustainablehuman settlement. It is important to ensure that resourcesare used effectively, paying particular attention to the fol-lowing factors:

• Ensuring that urban design is guided by suitable planning that redirect internal and external migra-tion so that they support sustainable development

• Promoting energy efficiency, that incorporates emissions standards, pollution-controls and monitor related problems by urban design

• Promoting the greater use of renewable materials and the incorporation of new techniques in tradi-tional building methods, thus supporting the local economy and ensuring affordability through design

• Increasing reliance on water recycling designs to reduce network losses and cut costs

• Ensuring effective, efficient, and affordable mobility in the city

• Improving sustainability of urban design through local authorities

• Promoting public private alliance in sustainable urban design

• Providing affordable housing and good living conditions to the poor of the cities

The real challenge in sustainable urban design is tocombine local capacity building and urban policy reformsin order to efficiently plan and manage the urban growthprocess and to turn urban risks into urban opportunities.Including sustainable buildings and urban design in thesustainability dialogue is one emerging tool for consideringnew urban developments in a coherent and integratedmanner.

We hope that sustainability of urban design stays inthe agenda of the United Nations as well as governments,local authorities, private sector, and around the world inthe years and decades to come.

Themes and Issues

Lance Jay BrownACSA Distinguished Professor School of Architecture CUNYInstitute for Urban DesignModeratorOctober 17 and 18 panels

The world is at a crossroads. At a November meetingof architecture school administrators in Denver, the mes-sage came back that “unless we stop using coal, anywherein the energy chain, it’s curtains for the world as we know it.

Buildings are the worst energy consumers (construc-tion plus HVAC systems), far worse than SUVs. How fast the icecaps melt and the seas rise depends on when we hit the level of no return. Students must be educated withthe zero carbon objective writ large. Dense cities like NewYork, thriving on public mass transport, may be as green as currently possible. But other cities are repositories of theworld’s poorest and populations. How do architects, land-scape architects, and urban designers help reconcile thesediscrepancies? The potential for the “planet of slums”and the ever widening gap between rich and poor, loomedlarge at the start of a multi-sponsored Urban Design andSustainability symposium at the United Nations onOctober 18.

We now meet at a time when more is known aboutthe effects of how we live on the earth than at any othertime in history. The rate of the development and accelerateddelivery of new information is staggering.

However, the miraculous recovery of St. Paul and the desperate needs of New Orleans, in the end give morehope than despair. There was nothing Pollyanna-ish aboutthe work offered by the speakers on October 18. All pulledtogether, loosely networked, to explain current issues.Depletion of pure water resources and deforestation weredescribed in terms of Tokyo. Gender challenges were high-lighted in terms of Lagos and other African cities.

There was an undercurrent of “when worlds collide”.How to resolve the growing divide between rich and poor,the discrepancies in resource consumption, the lack ofuniversal health care and education all were addressed.

Even before the symposium ran out of time, one presentation offered a new term to describe those thatwould fail to respond to the obvious calls to action…the“depleters.” While the future is more uncertain than ever.Perhaps the most important aspect of this meeting was thatdesigners and policy makers co-mingled as representativesfrom Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas found commonground for exploring these critical issues of mutual concern.

5 Institute for Urban Design4 Welcome

Guide for Tomorrow’s Cities?

Ann FerebeeFounding DirectorInstitute for Urban Design

Sustainable Cities: Urban Design was the Institute’slargest and most challenging program. Representativesfrom six foreign cities addressed more than 200 registrantsat the Dag Hammarskjold Auditorium of the United Nationsin New York.

To hear within a single hour that Lagos was thefastest growing city in the world while also absorbing thatNew Orleans had lost, in Hurricane Katrina, 60 percent ofits population was, indeed, a shock.

To learn, at the same time, that designers are prepar-ing plans for the nine parishes of New Orleans, whilePakistan’s Orangee project has provided toilets for 100,000,was exhilarating.

In less than 24 hours, registrants for the two-day program learned about:

• Tokyo’s water saving policy.• Mexico City’s rehabilitated parks, the lungs for a

population of 19 million.• Istanbul’s competition process to provide plans—

by Zaha Hadid, Kisho Kurokawa and Ken Yeang—for conversion of two industrial areas into new community centers.

• Eutopia, a green utopia outlined by Michael Sorkin to provide a guide, which urban designers can consider, in mapping tomorrow’s cities.

Achieving Sustainability

Aliye P. CelikManaging DirectorInstitute for Urban Design

The rapid growth of the world population is one of the most striking demographic trends today. Most of thisincrease in population will have to be settled in urban areasbecause of pressures on rural areas. In developing countriesin particular, 59 million new dwellers are added to theurban populations annually. Currently, Africa has the low-est urbanization level; but has the fastest urban populationgrowth. Asia’s prospects are especially daunting given theanticipated rapid population increases in India and China.Thus, rapid urbanization will be the dominant feature inhuman settlements in the coming decades.These develop-ments will call for the better planning of urban growth anddevelopment, design and the better management of exist-ing urban centers to cope with the demands of increasingnumber of urban citizens, to protect them from natural and man made hazards, to deal with the challenges ofpoverty equity and equality. The challenges of developedcountries are different from the challenges of developingcountries but there are lessons to be learnt from the expe-rience of each country in order to achieve a sustainablebuilt environment.

In 1976 United Nations decided to organize HabitatConference, which was held in Vancouver to find solutionsto the rapid urbanization the world was facing. In 1996,Habitat II Conference was organized in Istanbul to dealwith the increasing poverty in the urban areas. The IstanbulDeclaration adopted at the Habitat II said that a solution canbe found only by the cooperation of different stake holders.

In 2000, The United Nations adopted the MillenniumDeclaration and Millennium Development Goals where 191Member states of the United Nation made a commitmentto improve the living conditions of the 2.5 billion poor inthe world. Goal 7 of the Millennium Development Goalscommits Member States of the United Nations to ensureenvironmental sustainability by integrating the principlesof sustainable development into country policies and pro-grams, to reduce by half by 2015 the proportion of peoplewithout sustainable access to safe drinking water and basicsanitation and, as well as to achieve by 2020 significantimprovement in the lives of 100 million slum-dwellers.

The development and design of new buildings, openspaces, parks, cities, and urban growth call for environ-mental planning and management capacities, as well asthe capacity to take note of social and political changesthat can undermine traditional social networks and resultin increased inequity and exclusion.

Cities, especially new cities, can support larger popu-lations while limiting their adverse impacts on the naturalenvironment and therefore hold promise for sustainablehuman settlement. It is important to ensure that resourcesare used effectively, paying particular attention to the fol-lowing factors:

• Ensuring that urban design is guided by suitable planning that redirect internal and external migra-tion so that they support sustainable development

• Promoting energy efficiency, that incorporates emissions standards, pollution-controls and monitor related problems by urban design

• Promoting the greater use of renewable materials and the incorporation of new techniques in tradi-tional building methods, thus supporting the local economy and ensuring affordability through design

• Increasing reliance on water recycling designs to reduce network losses and cut costs

• Ensuring effective, efficient, and affordable mobility in the city

• Improving sustainability of urban design through local authorities

• Promoting public private alliance in sustainable urban design

• Providing affordable housing and good living conditions to the poor of the cities

The real challenge in sustainable urban design is tocombine local capacity building and urban policy reformsin order to efficiently plan and manage the urban growthprocess and to turn urban risks into urban opportunities.Including sustainable buildings and urban design in thesustainability dialogue is one emerging tool for consideringnew urban developments in a coherent and integratedmanner.

We hope that sustainability of urban design stays inthe agenda of the United Nations as well as governments,local authorities, private sector, and around the world inthe years and decades to come.

Themes and Issues

Lance Jay BrownACSA Distinguished Professor School of Architecture CUNYInstitute for Urban DesignModeratorOctober 17 and 18 panels

The world is at a crossroads. At a November meetingof architecture school administrators in Denver, the mes-sage came back that “unless we stop using coal, anywherein the energy chain, it’s curtains for the world as we know it.

Buildings are the worst energy consumers (construc-tion plus HVAC systems), far worse than SUVs. How fast the icecaps melt and the seas rise depends on when we hit the level of no return. Students must be educated withthe zero carbon objective writ large. Dense cities like NewYork, thriving on public mass transport, may be as green as currently possible. But other cities are repositories of theworld’s poorest and populations. How do architects, land-scape architects, and urban designers help reconcile thesediscrepancies? The potential for the “planet of slums”and the ever widening gap between rich and poor, loomedlarge at the start of a multi-sponsored Urban Design andSustainability symposium at the United Nations onOctober 18.

We now meet at a time when more is known aboutthe effects of how we live on the earth than at any othertime in history. The rate of the development and accelerateddelivery of new information is staggering.

However, the miraculous recovery of St. Paul and the desperate needs of New Orleans, in the end give morehope than despair. There was nothing Pollyanna-ish aboutthe work offered by the speakers on October 18. All pulledtogether, loosely networked, to explain current issues.Depletion of pure water resources and deforestation weredescribed in terms of Tokyo. Gender challenges were high-lighted in terms of Lagos and other African cities.

There was an undercurrent of “when worlds collide”.How to resolve the growing divide between rich and poor,the discrepancies in resource consumption, the lack ofuniversal health care and education all were addressed.

Even before the symposium ran out of time, one presentation offered a new term to describe those thatwould fail to respond to the obvious calls to action…the“depleters.” While the future is more uncertain than ever.Perhaps the most important aspect of this meeting was thatdesigners and policy makers co-mingled as representativesfrom Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas found commonground for exploring these critical issues of mutual concern.

7 Institute for Urban Design6 Sustainable Cities

I’m going to show tonight three metropolitan parks inMexico City that we have been participating in over thelast twelve or fifteen years. The issues are related to openspace. We conceive open space as a system of structuringequality of public space, an important question of democ-racy in Mexico.

The second issue that we have been working on forthe last thirty years is water: water capture, water recycling,water infiltration, water management, storm water and therestoration of historical water landscapes. Mexico City is a city of two cultures. As Octavio Paz, the Mexican philoso-pher and poet used to say, in every corner of Mexico CityCortes and Montezuma clash. So in continuously unearthingthe city’s remnants, we live with culture. Finally, this chaoticcity has grown from half a million to 22 million today. Theissue of governance, of planning, of work, of providingaccessibility to open space is what we are dealing with.

When the Spaniards came in the early 16 th century toMexico City, they found a city which was in the middle of asystem of lakes. It took four hundred years to work againstthose lakes, and finally they almost dried out. In the 20th

century there are only two remaining lakes. So it’s a casestudy of a city against its own water. Up to the 20th century,Mexico City still had channels and connections to watersystems. With the explosion of population, the water hascompletely dried out. Most of the new growing areas haveno parks. Most of the cultural and recreation centers arein Mexico City.

Xochimilco Park

This park is called Xochimilco, the last remnant ofthe lacustrine, or lake-oriented culture, of Mexico City. It’san area which was developed by the pre-Hispanic peoplein the 8th century, turning it into agricultural land. In 1989,it was declared a world heritage site by UNESCO, and anintegral plan of recovering and re-establishing the area waslaunched by the city. We were selected to design a majormetropolitan park. The whole program for the restorationof the Chinampa, or agricultural island system, was 3,000 hectares, and we designed this specific park of 300hectares. The park was planned to save the historical areaby containing urbanization.

The project is about recycling water from the southpart of the city and thereby recovering these cultural andagricultural landscapes, a magnificent invention from thepre-Hispanic cultures. The islands produced up to threeharvests a year, and therefore the Aztecs were able to con-quer the central part of Mexico, or Mesoamerica. The parkwas accomplished in five years. It has been maintainedfrom 1994 to the present. Many jobs were recreated here in sports and an agricultural tourism program.

The park also helped recover incoming birds fromNorth America. A new sports park was also created for the city. Finally, a 14-hectare plant and flower market wasdesigned in the center.

In addition, a ring road that goes around Mexico Citywas built and interconnected in this last stage. It could not

Mario Schjetnan

Grupo de Desino UrbanoMexico CityDemocratic Open Space

The islands inXochimilco Parkwere used forfarming. Aztecengineers erectedthe canals.

Three Parks Provide Lungs for Mexico City

Istanbul FollowsCompetition Plans By Architects forRedeveloping TwoIndustrial Areas

The Century AssociationNew York

10.17.2006

7 Institute for Urban Design6 Sustainable Cities

I’m going to show tonight three metropolitan parks inMexico City that we have been participating in over thelast twelve or fifteen years. The issues are related to openspace. We conceive open space as a system of structuringequality of public space, an important question of democ-racy in Mexico.

The second issue that we have been working on forthe last thirty years is water: water capture, water recycling,water infiltration, water management, storm water and therestoration of historical water landscapes. Mexico City is a city of two cultures. As Octavio Paz, the Mexican philoso-pher and poet used to say, in every corner of Mexico CityCortes and Montezuma clash. So in continuously unearthingthe city’s remnants, we live with culture. Finally, this chaoticcity has grown from half a million to 22 million today. Theissue of governance, of planning, of work, of providingaccessibility to open space is what we are dealing with.

When the Spaniards came in the early 16 th century toMexico City, they found a city which was in the middle of asystem of lakes. It took four hundred years to work againstthose lakes, and finally they almost dried out. In the 20th

century there are only two remaining lakes. So it’s a casestudy of a city against its own water. Up to the 20th century,Mexico City still had channels and connections to watersystems. With the explosion of population, the water hascompletely dried out. Most of the new growing areas haveno parks. Most of the cultural and recreation centers arein Mexico City.

Xochimilco Park

This park is called Xochimilco, the last remnant ofthe lacustrine, or lake-oriented culture, of Mexico City. It’san area which was developed by the pre-Hispanic peoplein the 8th century, turning it into agricultural land. In 1989,it was declared a world heritage site by UNESCO, and anintegral plan of recovering and re-establishing the area waslaunched by the city. We were selected to design a majormetropolitan park. The whole program for the restorationof the Chinampa, or agricultural island system, was 3,000 hectares, and we designed this specific park of 300hectares. The park was planned to save the historical areaby containing urbanization.

The project is about recycling water from the southpart of the city and thereby recovering these cultural andagricultural landscapes, a magnificent invention from thepre-Hispanic cultures. The islands produced up to threeharvests a year, and therefore the Aztecs were able to con-quer the central part of Mexico, or Mesoamerica. The parkwas accomplished in five years. It has been maintainedfrom 1994 to the present. Many jobs were recreated here in sports and an agricultural tourism program.

The park also helped recover incoming birds fromNorth America. A new sports park was also created for the city. Finally, a 14-hectare plant and flower market wasdesigned in the center.

In addition, a ring road that goes around Mexico Citywas built and interconnected in this last stage. It could not

Mario Schjetnan

Grupo de Desino UrbanoMexico CityDemocratic Open Space

The islands inXochimilco Parkwere used forfarming. Aztecengineers erectedthe canals.

Three Parks Provide Lungs for Mexico City

Istanbul FollowsCompetition Plans By Architects forRedeveloping TwoIndustrial Areas

The Century AssociationNew York

10.17.2006

9 Institute for Urban Design8 Mario Schjetnan

Boats inXochimilco Parkhave been usedfor fishing for centuries.

Aqueductscarry waterinto a newlake.

The lakes and canals collecting them to oneanother werefirst prepared by the Aztecs, but had becomefilled with silt by the mid-20th Century. Thecanals wererestored, aflower market and reception

center preparedby LandscapeArchitect Mario Schjetnan.For this workHarvard awardedhim their Green Prize inUrban Design.

9 Institute for Urban Design8 Mario Schjetnan

Boats inXochimilco Parkhave been usedfor fishing for centuries.

Aqueductscarry waterinto a newlake.

The lakes and canals collecting them to oneanother werefirst prepared by the Aztecs, but had becomefilled with silt by the mid-20th Century. Thecanals wererestored, aflower market and reception

center preparedby LandscapeArchitect Mario Schjetnan.For this workHarvard awardedhim their Green Prize inUrban Design.

11 Institute for Urban Design10 Mario Schjetnan

Left:Mexican President Foxapproved the proposal to convert the Pemex site toinclude newlakes, an aquatic museumand moderate-income housing.

Below:The Pemex site,one of thelargest brown-fields in MexicoCity, will becleaned under the supervisionof some 50 soil engineersfrom ANAM, The AutonomousUniversity ofMexico City.

be built before due to flooding. The park establishes con-nections on a regional basis. We did a thorough history interms of paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries. On theright hand side of the Mexico City freeway you have theseaqueducts which inject water into a new lake. Eventuallythis water is pushed into the agricultural areas.

There is also a nature park called Parque EcologicoXochimilco. On the lefthand side, you can see the recyclingwaters now being injected through the water treatmentplants into the lake system. It’s a park that was designedthrough conventions with Canada and the United States in order to have these flying bird paths from North Americaand re-establish a wetlands to protect the birds. Morethan twenty species of birds have been visiting. We workclosely with the National University of Mexico to re-estab-lish different types of wetlands.

Plant and Flower Market

The community, which wanted to go back to agricul-ture, said let’s build a market to sell plants and flowers,which is what Xochimilco means in the pre-Hispanic lan-guage. It means ‘place to grow flowers’. Plant and FlowerMarkets boost the economy.

The park goes through a pergola through a system of plazas. Then you can enter an embarcadero at the endof the park. An arboretum contains the plants and flowers,the trees and water plants common to the landscape. Somecanals were dug out and planted with some fifty thousandtrees. The project created jobs, tourism, agriculture, recre-ation, and then connected the city through its ring road.

Chapultepec Park

At the present moment, we are working inChapultepec Park. It dates from 1460. It was created by a landscape architect for King Montezuma. ChapultepecPark is like Central Park, the Mall in Washington, and alsoa battlefield, because this is where the last battle with the United States was fought in 1847. It’s the central openspace in Mexico City.

Chapultepec receives some seventeen million peoplea year. With three metro stations, it connects to the metro-politan area. You can come for five pennies from anywherein the metropolitan area to this park. It is a recreationalcenter, has a major zoo, and three national museums.

The rehabilitation of Chapultapec is led by theCitizens Council, a board of donors and the government of Mexico City. It is a trilogy that has been able to gather $12 million in donations. So we have been able to matchone peso from each donation to one peso given by the government.

Central Park in New York is 340 hectares. Chapultepechas 300 hectares of forest and another 300 hectares of parkitself, plus the museums and the President’s house. Fifty-five percent of the people in Chapultepec Park come by metro.

After some 150 presentations with citizens, in 2003 a master plan was devised. The plan for the park (shown

below) established fifteen zones and a structure of pedes-trian movement systems. The project required rehabilita-tion of the water system, including lakes and the canals.The park that was designed in 1907 is the same today.Of course, it was also changed by Maximilian, the emperorwho invaded Mexico in 1860. A fountain connects the majormuseums and a botanical garden.

Pemex Proposal

We are presently working on the Pemex refinery site.It’s a brownfield where water is important. It was closed in 1995. This plan for the park (below) will require waterrecycling, water cleaning, and capturing water from the rain.

Bridge fromChapultapec Parkleads pedestriansover highwayand into centerof Mexico City.

11 Institute for Urban Design10 Mario Schjetnan

Left:Mexican President Foxapproved the proposal to convert the Pemex site toinclude newlakes, an aquatic museumand moderate-income housing.

Below:The Pemex site,one of thelargest brown-fields in MexicoCity, will becleaned under the supervisionof some 50 soil engineersfrom ANAM, The AutonomousUniversity ofMexico City.

be built before due to flooding. The park establishes con-nections on a regional basis. We did a thorough history interms of paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries. On theright hand side of the Mexico City freeway you have theseaqueducts which inject water into a new lake. Eventuallythis water is pushed into the agricultural areas.

There is also a nature park called Parque EcologicoXochimilco. On the lefthand side, you can see the recyclingwaters now being injected through the water treatmentplants into the lake system. It’s a park that was designedthrough conventions with Canada and the United States in order to have these flying bird paths from North Americaand re-establish a wetlands to protect the birds. Morethan twenty species of birds have been visiting. We workclosely with the National University of Mexico to re-estab-lish different types of wetlands.

Plant and Flower Market

The community, which wanted to go back to agricul-ture, said let’s build a market to sell plants and flowers,which is what Xochimilco means in the pre-Hispanic lan-guage. It means ‘place to grow flowers’. Plant and FlowerMarkets boost the economy.

The park goes through a pergola through a system of plazas. Then you can enter an embarcadero at the endof the park. An arboretum contains the plants and flowers,the trees and water plants common to the landscape. Somecanals were dug out and planted with some fifty thousandtrees. The project created jobs, tourism, agriculture, recre-ation, and then connected the city through its ring road.

Chapultepec Park

At the present moment, we are working inChapultepec Park. It dates from 1460. It was created by a landscape architect for King Montezuma. ChapultepecPark is like Central Park, the Mall in Washington, and alsoa battlefield, because this is where the last battle with the United States was fought in 1847. It’s the central openspace in Mexico City.

Chapultepec receives some seventeen million peoplea year. With three metro stations, it connects to the metro-politan area. You can come for five pennies from anywherein the metropolitan area to this park. It is a recreationalcenter, has a major zoo, and three national museums.

The rehabilitation of Chapultapec is led by theCitizens Council, a board of donors and the government of Mexico City. It is a trilogy that has been able to gather $12 million in donations. So we have been able to matchone peso from each donation to one peso given by the government.

Central Park in New York is 340 hectares. Chapultepechas 300 hectares of forest and another 300 hectares of parkitself, plus the museums and the President’s house. Fifty-five percent of the people in Chapultepec Park come by metro.

After some 150 presentations with citizens, in 2003 a master plan was devised. The plan for the park (shown

below) established fifteen zones and a structure of pedes-trian movement systems. The project required rehabilita-tion of the water system, including lakes and the canals.The park that was designed in 1907 is the same today.Of course, it was also changed by Maximilian, the emperorwho invaded Mexico in 1860. A fountain connects the majormuseums and a botanical garden.

Pemex Proposal

We are presently working on the Pemex refinery site.It’s a brownfield where water is important. It was closed in 1995. This plan for the park (below) will require waterrecycling, water cleaning, and capturing water from the rain.

Bridge fromChapultapec Parkleads pedestriansover highwayand into centerof Mexico City.

13 Institute for Urban Design12 Suha Ozkan

Although Istanbul now has a mayor who is an architect,the city didn’t have a planning office for twenty years beforethat. It was planned by Napoleonic rules of self-interest.When Istanbul hosted the International Congress ofArchitects last year, the mayor got excited about what he saw. He invited me to help to conduct competitions fortwo neighborhoods.

Istanbul connects two continents. The inhabitants of the city do intercontinental travel every day. They crossthe Bosphorus. The city center overlooks the water whichconnects Asia and Europe. In the last 15 years the popula-tion doubled to 14 million. So I, with the help of theMetropolitan Planning Office and the mayor, created com-petitions for two new centers of development. One area,called Kartal, is fifteen kilometers away from Istanbul,but it’s still in the metropolitan district, just opposite thePrincess Islands. It was occupied by industries which havebecome obsolete.

People own the land here in large patches. They havecapital in their pocket, but there was no guidance for themto invest. The design competitions provide a set of plans to guide development. This was the mission.

The Kartal Competition

We invited three architects for the Kartal competi-tion: Zaha Hadid, Massimiliano Fuksas and KushioKurokawa. The eastern airport of Istanbul is adjacent tothe project area. The empty area Hadid chose to trans-form. She connected and meshed the east and the west ofthe site with three patterns, to be reformed and regained.In other words, she respected whatever existed there asproperty lines. She created different land-uses.

Massimiliano Fuksas from Milan, created a competi-tion entry for the same area a north-south progression ofthe land use, with increasing densities and changing land-use patterns. Massimiliano’s project requires, in order toget those green in the west, a heavy land-swap or expro-priation. He also proposed heavy urban structures aroundthe crater in the north and more cultural uses in the south.A Marine Museum is central to his proposal. At the north-ern area around the lake, he wants to have major urbanfunctions. We like this plan because it can generate fundsfor the public sector. It would inject a substantial amountof life in the city. The new metro line will serve it.

Kushio Kurokawa proposed one major superstructure.It is a snake-like form.There is an artificial river in between,and there are more high-rise buildings on the eastern side.This powerful proposal was selected by a jury that includedMichael Sorkin, here with us tonight.The main handicap of this proposal was that it would monopolize ownershipof land so that it could be developed. If it were done infragments, it would take ages.

Dr. Suha Ozkan

Competition AdvisorIstanbul Metropolitan PlanningCompetitions to Guide Development of Two New City Centers in Instanbul

Kartal:

Kartal is anindustrial siteon the edgeof Istanbul.IstanbulMetropolitanPlanningincludes anurban designand competitions group thatremains incharge of plansby competition

winnersZaha Hadid,MassimilianoFuksas, andKisho Kurokawa.The aim is totransform anindustrial area into a 555hectare centralbusinessdistrict withoffices, homes,shopping, anda marina.

13 Institute for Urban Design12 Suha Ozkan

Although Istanbul now has a mayor who is an architect,the city didn’t have a planning office for twenty years beforethat. It was planned by Napoleonic rules of self-interest.When Istanbul hosted the International Congress ofArchitects last year, the mayor got excited about what he saw. He invited me to help to conduct competitions fortwo neighborhoods.

Istanbul connects two continents. The inhabitants of the city do intercontinental travel every day. They crossthe Bosphorus. The city center overlooks the water whichconnects Asia and Europe. In the last 15 years the popula-tion doubled to 14 million. So I, with the help of theMetropolitan Planning Office and the mayor, created com-petitions for two new centers of development. One area,called Kartal, is fifteen kilometers away from Istanbul,but it’s still in the metropolitan district, just opposite thePrincess Islands. It was occupied by industries which havebecome obsolete.

People own the land here in large patches. They havecapital in their pocket, but there was no guidance for themto invest. The design competitions provide a set of plans to guide development. This was the mission.

The Kartal Competition

We invited three architects for the Kartal competi-tion: Zaha Hadid, Massimiliano Fuksas and KushioKurokawa. The eastern airport of Istanbul is adjacent tothe project area. The empty area Hadid chose to trans-form. She connected and meshed the east and the west ofthe site with three patterns, to be reformed and regained.In other words, she respected whatever existed there asproperty lines. She created different land-uses.

Massimiliano Fuksas from Milan, created a competi-tion entry for the same area a north-south progression ofthe land use, with increasing densities and changing land-use patterns. Massimiliano’s project requires, in order toget those green in the west, a heavy land-swap or expro-priation. He also proposed heavy urban structures aroundthe crater in the north and more cultural uses in the south.A Marine Museum is central to his proposal. At the north-ern area around the lake, he wants to have major urbanfunctions. We like this plan because it can generate fundsfor the public sector. It would inject a substantial amountof life in the city. The new metro line will serve it.

Kushio Kurokawa proposed one major superstructure.It is a snake-like form.There is an artificial river in between,and there are more high-rise buildings on the eastern side.This powerful proposal was selected by a jury that includedMichael Sorkin, here with us tonight.The main handicap of this proposal was that it would monopolize ownershipof land so that it could be developed. If it were done infragments, it would take ages.

Dr. Suha Ozkan

Competition AdvisorIstanbul Metropolitan PlanningCompetitions to Guide Development of Two New City Centers in Instanbul

Kartal:

Kartal is anindustrial siteon the edgeof Istanbul.IstanbulMetropolitanPlanningincludes anurban designand competitions group thatremains incharge of plansby competition

winnersZaha Hadid,MassimilianoFuksas, andKisho Kurokawa.The aim is totransform anindustrial area into a 555hectare centralbusinessdistrict withoffices, homes,shopping, anda marina.

15 Institute for Urban Design14 Suha Ozkan

FuksasArchitects planfor Kartal:

Kartal, formerindustrial area of Istanbul,was selected ascompetition sitein order to createa new businesscenter for thecity with hotels,shopping and amarina. TheMassimilanoFuksas proposalincludes high rise officesin the North,a marina inthe South and,in the middle,a residentialarea. Now anassociation oflandowners hasbeen incorporated.In Decemberthe city begandiscussion withland owners andother communityrepresentatives.Early in 2007discussion withZaha Hadid willresume.

KurokawaArchitect andAssociates plan for Kartal:

Above:Kartal area siteplan by KishoKurokawa isorganized arounda north-southaxis running tothe coast. Theaxis is also aneco-corridor forwhich a park isproposed. To theeast a commercialcenter is proposedand to the west a pedestrianaxis. A marinaand parks linethe coast.

Left:The sunken quarrylake above connects to thetransportationcenter belowwhich is the proposed marina.

15 Institute for Urban Design14 Suha Ozkan

FuksasArchitects planfor Kartal:

Kartal, formerindustrial area of Istanbul,was selected ascompetition sitein order to createa new businesscenter for thecity with hotels,shopping and amarina. TheMassimilanoFuksas proposalincludes high rise officesin the North,a marina inthe South and,in the middle,a residentialarea. Now anassociation oflandowners hasbeen incorporated.In Decemberthe city begandiscussion withland owners andother communityrepresentatives.Early in 2007discussion withZaha Hadid willresume.

KurokawaArchitect andAssociates plan for Kartal:

Above:Kartal area siteplan by KishoKurokawa isorganized arounda north-southaxis running tothe coast. Theaxis is also aneco-corridor forwhich a park isproposed. To theeast a commercialcenter is proposedand to the west a pedestrianaxis. A marinaand parks linethe coast.

Left:The sunken quarrylake above connects to thetransportationcenter belowwhich is the proposed marina.

17 Institute for Urban Design16 Suha Ozkan

“Urban Geometrycan actually dictate activityon the street”says Hadid, andthis perceptionis reflected in the proposalfor Kartal inIstanbul.Americans canvisit Hadid’sContemporaryArts Center,Cincinnati and in 2012 visit herAquatic Centerfor 2012 Olympics in London.

Zaha HadidArchitects plan for Kartal:

“At the GrandBuildings schemefor TrafalgarSquare in London,I used theconcept of carving as a wayof introducingmultiple eventsat the groundplane,” ZahaHadid has said.Her scheme fora new city center in Kartal suggests the sameearth-carvingapproach. Theplan, preparedby Hadid withPatrickSchumacher,for the Greater IstanbulMunicipality isbeing closelyfollowed by MayorKadik Topbas, anarchitect.

17 Institute for Urban Design16 Suha Ozkan

“Urban Geometrycan actually dictate activityon the street”says Hadid, andthis perceptionis reflected in the proposalfor Kartal inIstanbul.Americans canvisit Hadid’sContemporaryArts Center,Cincinnati and in 2012 visit herAquatic Centerfor 2012 Olympics in London.

Zaha HadidArchitects plan for Kartal:

“At the GrandBuildings schemefor TrafalgarSquare in London,I used theconcept of carving as a wayof introducingmultiple eventsat the groundplane,” ZahaHadid has said.Her scheme fora new city center in Kartal suggests the sameearth-carvingapproach. Theplan, preparedby Hadid withPatrickSchumacher,for the Greater IstanbulMunicipality isbeing closelyfollowed by MayorKadik Topbas, anarchitect.

19 Institute for Urban Design18 Suha Ozkan

The Kucukcekmece Competition

The site for the second competition, in westernIstanbul, is a fragile piece of land. It connects the sweetwater lake, no longer sweet, but polluted — with the Sea of Marmara. And for this competition site, we indicated itcould be urbanized because land is owned by the public. Weinvited to enter the competition Ken Yeang from Malaysia,Kengo Kuma from Japan and Winy Maas from Holland.

Ken Yeang proposed an eco-structure. It’s a looseurban structure, embellished with green. He put museumsand theaters, and an 8-story hotel on the shore. Factoriesand industrial buildings he protected. He provided someoverflow of the green from over the highways, so that eco-logical continuity would be maintained by flora and fauna.He also connected the lake and the sea. These connectionswould provide the cleaning of the lake from pollution.

Kenga Kuma has proposed a marina at the place thatthe engineers said it should be built. But he brought to it asa reminder of Venice by providing housing with canals forsea transport. Investors love this idea because they couldsell houses for millions of dollars.

The proposal was a couple of sizes too large for theTurkish imagination. We liked it, but more as a utopia thanthe reality. This is Kuma’s proposed Venice of Istanbul,even with the Rialto Bridge.

Lagoon City was the proposal of Winy Maas. We had a hard time digesting the lagoon, the area that we wantedto protect as a landscape. He proposed the marina. So thewhole idea was to first dig it up, make it a marina, thenbuild into that. So that took us by surprise. However, sincethe area was being so intensively built the investors likedand lobbied for this project.

These competitions were a first for Turkey. The plans of the architects were open to the public. We had anauditorium of people where the audience could respond.The evaluation was done only by the jury. We turned the competition into a symposium. We let people voice theirideas to the jury.

Kucukcekmece:

Opposite:The Kucukcekmecewaterfront competition siteof 181 hectaresis being plannedto integratearchitecture into a huge-scale ecosystem.

Llewelyn DavisYeang plan forKucukcekmece:

Left:Ken Yeung,Llewelyn DavisYeang competitionplan envisionsan eco-park,aquarium andmarina.

19 Institute for Urban Design18 Suha Ozkan

The Kucukcekmece Competition

The site for the second competition, in westernIstanbul, is a fragile piece of land. It connects the sweetwater lake, no longer sweet, but polluted — with the Sea of Marmara. And for this competition site, we indicated itcould be urbanized because land is owned by the public. Weinvited to enter the competition Ken Yeang from Malaysia,Kengo Kuma from Japan and Winy Maas from Holland.

Ken Yeang proposed an eco-structure. It’s a looseurban structure, embellished with green. He put museumsand theaters, and an 8-story hotel on the shore. Factoriesand industrial buildings he protected. He provided someoverflow of the green from over the highways, so that eco-logical continuity would be maintained by flora and fauna.He also connected the lake and the sea. These connectionswould provide the cleaning of the lake from pollution.

Kenga Kuma has proposed a marina at the place thatthe engineers said it should be built. But he brought to it asa reminder of Venice by providing housing with canals forsea transport. Investors love this idea because they couldsell houses for millions of dollars.

The proposal was a couple of sizes too large for theTurkish imagination. We liked it, but more as a utopia thanthe reality. This is Kuma’s proposed Venice of Istanbul,even with the Rialto Bridge.

Lagoon City was the proposal of Winy Maas. We had a hard time digesting the lagoon, the area that we wantedto protect as a landscape. He proposed the marina. So thewhole idea was to first dig it up, make it a marina, thenbuild into that. So that took us by surprise. However, sincethe area was being so intensively built the investors likedand lobbied for this project.

These competitions were a first for Turkey. The plans of the architects were open to the public. We had anauditorium of people where the audience could respond.The evaluation was done only by the jury. We turned the competition into a symposium. We let people voice theirideas to the jury.

Kucukcekmece:

Opposite:The Kucukcekmecewaterfront competition siteof 181 hectaresis being plannedto integratearchitecture into a huge-scale ecosystem.

Llewelyn DavisYeang plan forKucukcekmece:

Left:Ken Yeung,Llewelyn DavisYeang competitionplan envisionsan eco-park,aquarium andmarina.

21 Institute for Urban Design20 Suha Ozkan

Kengo Kuma and Associatesplan forKucukcekmece:

Kengo Kuma, said to have been influencedby Bruno Taut,called Istanbul a bridge betweenthe east andwest. His plan

calls forseven canalstogether withraised greenareas to enhancepedestriancirculation.

MVRDV plan forKucukcekmece:

Winy Maas ofMVRDV proposestwo new canalsbetween theMarmara Sea andKucukcekmeceLake. A marina,convention center and hotelare envisioned.

Response

Robert OuelletteThe National PostToronto

Three projects tonight are indicative of a positive trend in opposition to the overwhelmingnegative environmental news. Every day we hear that the seas are rising, the ozone is beingdepleted. When I look at projects like these,the fact that they’re being implemented by such capable designers makes me realize that if there is something that’s going to save us, it is the process of design. We have the tools thatallow us to understand complex situations inways we could never do before. Mario’s collisionof Cortes and Montezuma was a nice metaphor.It’s also a good metaphor for understanding the complexity of the environment and how wecan solve those issues with design. Today whatwe see is designers taking complex technicalsolutions and recreating nature in ways thatnature never conceived of. Dr. Ozkan mentionedhow you finance complex programs like these.Without understanding those, the macro-economic systems, these design solutions can’ttake place.

Charles McKinneyChief of DesignCity of New YorkParks & Recreation

As Chief of Design for New York City ParksDepartment, I believe that landscape architecture is the most important career path of this century, that the future of the worlddepends on landscape architecture. It dependson the creative reverence for the in-between.The men who have spoken to us tonight havedemonstrated that they're not professionalsinterested in what things look like, they areinterested in creating a world worth living in.

Right now the person who’s doing the most for New York City’s urban environment is ourmayor. If it wasn’t for the mayor, there would be no interest in design at the level of the city.New York City is spending $300 million a yearnow on open space. We are spending $300 million knitting our urban fabric back together.

Exchange

Lance Jay BrownMexico City, which is in the middle of a landmass, has a water issue. Everything we’re goingto talk about tonight, will be about how we dealwith land and water interfaces. With that, doesMario have a question for Suha, or does Suhahave a question for Mario?

Suha OzkanI want to know about the financial aspects ofMario’s parks. The larger project I had is 550hectares, the other one is 180 hectares of land.

Mario SchjetnanThe Xochimilco Park is a major rehabilitation of 3,000 hectares, and the park itself was 300.The project was financed for $500 million. Itwas financed by selling precious land in the ’90s,and through a World Bank loan. So overall, half a billion dollars was small for Mexico City.

Suha OzkanI left my real job after twenty-five years with the Aga Khan Awards to induce some positivechanges in Istanbul. We are talking about 550 hectares of land, which is now occupied 40 percent by industries. We are thinking of it,because it is a land speculation in construction.

In the end, we thought that we should make it an association, which gives free access toevery individual to become a member. It was themost democratic way of doing it. The associationbecomes the client. Whereas in the landscapeproject, we expect the public to generate thefunds, and do it with limited developments forcertain pinpointed areas where there’s preciousland and some kind of profit, like the 5-star or as Ken calls it, 8-star hotels to be built. Thatwould be the way to do it.

Mario SchjetnanThe Pemex project is the former Pemex refinery of Mexico City. Now we have convinced Pemex to remediate the site. They have set aside $15 million in the first stage to remediate it.The government has promised to do the parkitself, which costs some $10 million. Then otherinvestors will come. A major aquarium will beprivately and publicly financed. It’s a projectthat’s going to go on for the next six or ten years.

21 Institute for Urban Design20 Suha Ozkan

Kengo Kuma and Associatesplan forKucukcekmece:

Kengo Kuma, said to have been influencedby Bruno Taut,called Istanbul a bridge betweenthe east andwest. His plan

calls forseven canalstogether withraised greenareas to enhancepedestriancirculation.

MVRDV plan forKucukcekmece:

Winy Maas ofMVRDV proposestwo new canalsbetween theMarmara Sea andKucukcekmeceLake. A marina,convention center and hotelare envisioned.

Response

Robert OuelletteThe National PostToronto

Three projects tonight are indicative of a positive trend in opposition to the overwhelmingnegative environmental news. Every day we hear that the seas are rising, the ozone is beingdepleted. When I look at projects like these,the fact that they’re being implemented by such capable designers makes me realize that if there is something that’s going to save us, it is the process of design. We have the tools thatallow us to understand complex situations inways we could never do before. Mario’s collisionof Cortes and Montezuma was a nice metaphor.It’s also a good metaphor for understanding the complexity of the environment and how wecan solve those issues with design. Today whatwe see is designers taking complex technicalsolutions and recreating nature in ways thatnature never conceived of. Dr. Ozkan mentionedhow you finance complex programs like these.Without understanding those, the macro-economic systems, these design solutions can’ttake place.

Charles McKinneyChief of DesignCity of New YorkParks & Recreation

As Chief of Design for New York City ParksDepartment, I believe that landscape architecture is the most important career path of this century, that the future of the worlddepends on landscape architecture. It dependson the creative reverence for the in-between.The men who have spoken to us tonight havedemonstrated that they're not professionalsinterested in what things look like, they areinterested in creating a world worth living in.

Right now the person who’s doing the most for New York City’s urban environment is ourmayor. If it wasn’t for the mayor, there would be no interest in design at the level of the city.New York City is spending $300 million a yearnow on open space. We are spending $300 million knitting our urban fabric back together.

Exchange

Lance Jay BrownMexico City, which is in the middle of a landmass, has a water issue. Everything we’re goingto talk about tonight, will be about how we dealwith land and water interfaces. With that, doesMario have a question for Suha, or does Suhahave a question for Mario?

Suha OzkanI want to know about the financial aspects ofMario’s parks. The larger project I had is 550hectares, the other one is 180 hectares of land.

Mario SchjetnanThe Xochimilco Park is a major rehabilitation of 3,000 hectares, and the park itself was 300.The project was financed for $500 million. Itwas financed by selling precious land in the ’90s,and through a World Bank loan. So overall, half a billion dollars was small for Mexico City.

Suha OzkanI left my real job after twenty-five years with the Aga Khan Awards to induce some positivechanges in Istanbul. We are talking about 550 hectares of land, which is now occupied 40 percent by industries. We are thinking of it,because it is a land speculation in construction.

In the end, we thought that we should make it an association, which gives free access toevery individual to become a member. It was themost democratic way of doing it. The associationbecomes the client. Whereas in the landscapeproject, we expect the public to generate thefunds, and do it with limited developments forcertain pinpointed areas where there’s preciousland and some kind of profit, like the 5-star or as Ken calls it, 8-star hotels to be built. Thatwould be the way to do it.

Mario SchjetnanThe Pemex project is the former Pemex refinery of Mexico City. Now we have convinced Pemex to remediate the site. They have set aside $15 million in the first stage to remediate it.The government has promised to do the parkitself, which costs some $10 million. Then otherinvestors will come. A major aquarium will beprivately and publicly financed. It’s a projectthat’s going to go on for the next six or ten years.

23 Overview22 Sustainable Cities

Welcome

Dr. Axumite Gebre-EgziabherDirectorUN-HabitatNew York Office

Excellencies, distinguished guests, United Nationscolleagues, ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the executivedirector of UN-Habitat, Mrs. Anna Tibajuka, it’s an honorand pleasure for me to welcome you here at the United Nations headquarters. I would like to take this opportunityto express my appreciation to the representatives of per-manent missions to the United Nations, and to AmbassadorJudith Bahemuka from Kenya to Canada. We are delightedto have her here.

We have also special guests from Japan, the UnitedKingdom, and Mexico. I welcome you all. My sincere gratitude also goes to the organizers, the Institute forUrban Design, Toyo University, Building & Social HousingFoundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

I would like to congratulate the Institute and, particu-larly Ann Ferebee, founding director, Lance Brown, togetherwith my friend Aliye Celik, who have been instrumental inputting this event together with us. I welcome you to theUnited Nations Human Settlements program, UN-Habitat,the city agency of the United Nations.

The year 2007 marks a turning point in history. One outof every two people will be living in a city. Whereas Europe,North America and Latin America experienced intenseurbanization and rapid growth through the mid-20th century,the trend has now shifted to Asia and Africa. Annual urbangrowth rates are highest in Sub-Saharan Africa, averagingabout 4.58 percent, while the developed world’s cities are growing at a slower pace, averaging about 0.7 percentper year.

Cities are centers of economic growth and culturalcreativity. People move for a better life. However, one out of three city dwellers, a total of one billion people, are livingin slums and half of them are women. In many countries,immigrants constitute a growing group of urban residentsthat are victims of exclusion. They are often denied access to housing and urban services, and have no voicein decision-making.

Urban design and urban planning are essential inaddressing some of these challenges. Much of the thinkingabout sustainable development and planning is in flux. It is important to seize this opportunity to develop a clearervision for the future. In UN-Habitat, we believe that holdingthis conference is an important step. I hope that we will beable to explore the nature of challenges and what we cando about them. Implications of migration at the urban levelmust be assessed. While UN-Habitat, within its mandate,assists local authorities to adopt more inclusive governanceand management, there is an urgent need for a coordinatedapproach across all spheres of government to overcomeinconsistencies in policies and practices. If we want tobuild inclusive cities, we have to pay much more attention.

We hope that the presentation today will enable us todevelop the right policy options, to implement more effective strategies and to learn from each other and to be able to celebrate the true sense of our humanity, ourcultural diversity.

Program Goals

Ann FerebeeFounding DirectorInstitute for Urban Design

Thank you, madam. This meeting is a culmination ofmy work at the Institute. I’ve been director for twenty-fiveyears, but I never thought I would be here at the UnitedNations. I wish my mother were here. Thanks to our spon-sors from overseas and our sponsors here in New York.

A British author from the late 1950s, C.P. Snow, thenovelist and scientist, gave us the term “the two cultures”.In the post-war London situation it seemed to him that historians, poets and novelists sat on one side of the cityand the mathematicians and scientists sat on the other.The two cultures never interacted, said C.P. Snow. Today’s event is unique in providing an opportunity for those from the world of policy and diplomacy to teach those of us in the world of landscape architecture, planning and urbandesign about the policy issues. We really have existed in two separate worlds. Today is our opportunity to exchange with one another.

Last night Mario Schjetnan reminded us of the enormous predicted population growth in Mexico City,Tokyo, and New York. Nairobi and other cities in Africa will be growing even more rapidly. But New Orleans whichhas, since Katrina, lost 60 percent of its population, isshrinking. Cities along the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal,like Youngstown, have also lost 50 percent or more of theirpopulation. Darren Walker will report on New Orleans.

Panel 1

New Orleans Rebuilds While St.Paul Expands;Both Along theMississippi

United NationsUN-HabitatNew York

10.18.2006

23 Overview22 Sustainable Cities

Welcome

Dr. Axumite Gebre-EgziabherDirectorUN-HabitatNew York Office

Excellencies, distinguished guests, United Nationscolleagues, ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the executivedirector of UN-Habitat, Mrs. Anna Tibajuka, it’s an honorand pleasure for me to welcome you here at the United Nations headquarters. I would like to take this opportunityto express my appreciation to the representatives of per-manent missions to the United Nations, and to AmbassadorJudith Bahemuka from Kenya to Canada. We are delightedto have her here.

We have also special guests from Japan, the UnitedKingdom, and Mexico. I welcome you all. My sincere gratitude also goes to the organizers, the Institute forUrban Design, Toyo University, Building & Social HousingFoundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

I would like to congratulate the Institute and, particu-larly Ann Ferebee, founding director, Lance Brown, togetherwith my friend Aliye Celik, who have been instrumental inputting this event together with us. I welcome you to theUnited Nations Human Settlements program, UN-Habitat,the city agency of the United Nations.

The year 2007 marks a turning point in history. One outof every two people will be living in a city. Whereas Europe,North America and Latin America experienced intenseurbanization and rapid growth through the mid-20th century,the trend has now shifted to Asia and Africa. Annual urbangrowth rates are highest in Sub-Saharan Africa, averagingabout 4.58 percent, while the developed world’s cities are growing at a slower pace, averaging about 0.7 percentper year.

Cities are centers of economic growth and culturalcreativity. People move for a better life. However, one out of three city dwellers, a total of one billion people, are livingin slums and half of them are women. In many countries,immigrants constitute a growing group of urban residentsthat are victims of exclusion. They are often denied access to housing and urban services, and have no voicein decision-making.

Urban design and urban planning are essential inaddressing some of these challenges. Much of the thinkingabout sustainable development and planning is in flux. It is important to seize this opportunity to develop a clearervision for the future. In UN-Habitat, we believe that holdingthis conference is an important step. I hope that we will beable to explore the nature of challenges and what we cando about them. Implications of migration at the urban levelmust be assessed. While UN-Habitat, within its mandate,assists local authorities to adopt more inclusive governanceand management, there is an urgent need for a coordinatedapproach across all spheres of government to overcomeinconsistencies in policies and practices. If we want tobuild inclusive cities, we have to pay much more attention.

We hope that the presentation today will enable us todevelop the right policy options, to implement more effective strategies and to learn from each other and to be able to celebrate the true sense of our humanity, ourcultural diversity.

Program Goals

Ann FerebeeFounding DirectorInstitute for Urban Design

Thank you, madam. This meeting is a culmination ofmy work at the Institute. I’ve been director for twenty-fiveyears, but I never thought I would be here at the UnitedNations. I wish my mother were here. Thanks to our spon-sors from overseas and our sponsors here in New York.

A British author from the late 1950s, C.P. Snow, thenovelist and scientist, gave us the term “the two cultures”.In the post-war London situation it seemed to him that historians, poets and novelists sat on one side of the cityand the mathematicians and scientists sat on the other.The two cultures never interacted, said C.P. Snow. Today’s event is unique in providing an opportunity for those from the world of policy and diplomacy to teach those of us in the world of landscape architecture, planning and urbandesign about the policy issues. We really have existed in two separate worlds. Today is our opportunity to exchange with one another.

Last night Mario Schjetnan reminded us of the enormous predicted population growth in Mexico City,Tokyo, and New York. Nairobi and other cities in Africa will be growing even more rapidly. But New Orleans whichhas, since Katrina, lost 60 percent of its population, isshrinking. Cities along the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal,like Youngstown, have also lost 50 percent or more of theirpopulation. Darren Walker will report on New Orleans.

Panel 1

New Orleans Rebuilds While St.Paul Expands;Both Along theMississippi

United NationsUN-HabitatNew York

10.18.2006

25 Institute for Urban Design24 Darren Walker

I am honored to be here today representing the RockefellerFoundation. I was born in Louisiana, and although I grew upa Texan, I always had a great affinity for Louisiana and, ofcourse, New Orleans. When the horrible tragedy of Katrinaand its aftermath hit, I immediately resonated to what I saw because, as an American, as an African-American,as someone who believes in our values as a country, I wasdeeply disturbed. For the Rockefeller Foundation, the ques-tion of New Orleans was straightforward in terms of a deci-sion to support efforts to rebuild. We have worked on urbanpoverty in the United States for more than forty years, andon reducing the poverty that we have found in New Orleans,although New Orleans represents a rather acute circum-stance. The elements that were present in New Orleansbefore Katrina are present in many cities in this country.

Race, Class, Democracy

We also were moved after Katrina because what’shappening in that region is a narrative about this country.It is about the intersection of race, class, democracy, thebuilt environment and social justice. It’s quite complex.For many people when they look at a city like New Orleanstoday, they’re overwhelmed by the complexity of the chal-lenge. We believe that, as a philanthropic organization, weshould embrace that complexity, recognize that there arerisks associated with investing in New Orleans, and work tomitigate and anticipate those risks. But at the end of theday, we must be committed.

What happened in New Orleans revealed so muchabout our nation, and it revealed it to the world. Peoplewere shocked and appalled by what they saw. My col-leagues in our office in Nairobi, many of whom had nevervisited America, were unsettled by what they saw because they’d always heard us lecture them about the atrocitiesof poverty and governance in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet inour own backyard was revealed an extraordinary level ofdeprivation and marginalization of people.

So, New Orleans is not just about America taking care of Americans for the sake of America. During this dif-ficult time internationally, it is also about America demon-strating to the world that we can solve our problems athome no matter how intractable they may appear.

I want to talk about New Orleans and what we’re trying to do to help. In fact, this isn’t a story about theRockefeller Foundation. It’s a story about incredibleresilience on the part of so many people who are deter-mined to rebuild their city. I want to talk about the contextfor planning, the planning process and some of the emerg-ing designs. They illuminate a way forward for the city.

The challenging context for planning in New Orleanshas to be acknowledged. Architects and planners are quitefocused on the environment. But New Orleans is a complexecology. It’s complex because there are real issues of gov-ernance. The role of government, at the federal, state andlocal level, has come into question as a result of Katrina.The local political condition can be confounding. There islittle tradition of constructive collaboration across lines

of governance, race and class. It is not easy to reconcilethe different constituents and stakeholders in the city.Differences have developed along race and class lines.

In order to move forward in New Orleans we mustconfront the impact of two centuries of marginalization ofAfrican-Americans, who live in the region. When one looksat the way in which the city has emerged over time, yousee the manifestation of those decades of racial marginal-ization, and marginalization based upon class.

Population Loss

Of course, talking about New Orleans’ future bringsinto question how many people will ultimately return toNew Orleans.Beginning in the 1960s, New Orleans, like mostU.S. cities, experienced what we call “white flight”, middleclass flight, out of the city. New Orleans, like Detroit at onetime, had a population of more than 800,000 people. Now it finds itself, at least by the census count in August, at160,000 people. It is certain that there will be more peoplereturning to New Orleans, but it’s not likely that in the nearterm New Orleans is going to return to its pre-Katrinapopulation of 400,000 residents.

The matter of returning residents is difficult for people to talk about. It’s difficult because it’s integrallyrelated to the issues of race and class. When you talk to African-American citizens, particularly poor African-American citizens, there is not much belief that there isgoing to be a place for them in the new New Orleans. Whenone looks at vulnerable neighborhoods, like the LowerNinth Ward that was populated by African-Americans, fair-minded people have argued that it and similarly situatedneighborhoods shouldn’t be rebuilt. Others vehementlydisagree. This is all a part of the local discourse, and itmakes it hard to have a planning process when the funda-mental question of “Is your neighborhood going to berebuilt?” is on the table.

Finally, we have to also discuss the challenge ofcapacity. I can speak for our Foundation when I say NewOrleans was a difficult place for a number of years to work.We ultimately made the decision that we would not investin New Orleans — this was more than a decade ago —because it was a difficult environment and the capacity-building that we attempted to invest in simply wasn’t tak-ing hold. Given limited resources and given the fact thatthere are other cities where those investments were takinghold,we made a determination to not invest in New Orleans.

We also have to take responsibility for the realitytoday, not necessarily saying that we should have continuedto invest, but recognizing that capacity and infrastructurematter. In a city like New Orleans, at this point in time, thereisn’t the absorptive capacity to execute on the unified planwhen it is complete. That’s something that we are thinkingabout, because we have to be positioned, once this plan is completed, to advance it, execute it, monitor it, andensure its success.

Planning Process

The planning process is called the Unified NewOrleans Plan (UNOP). Before I get into the plan, it’s impor-tant to understand why a foundation is paying for whatappears to be something that the government should fund.This is a fundamental question that is at the heart of NewOrleans and at the heart of much of the debate going on in this country about the role of government. The planningprocess for New Orleans is part of a state-wide planningprocess that, as a part of the federal legislation, has beenmandated to be completed in order for the city to receiveinfrastructure funding and other investments from the fed-eral government. A plan is required.The state was mandatedby the federal government to create a state-wide plan forall of the distressed parishes. The governor put in place afunding program for those plans in the other parishes.

When the governor and mayor discussed OrleansParish, the mayor demurred and said that he would rathertake the lead in the funding and planning for his parish.So it is important to understand that there are structuralissues at play, there are political issues at play, and thereare personal issues at play. When the mayor demurred, thegovernor went forward with the planning process for theother distressed parishes. In fact, every parish in the stateof Louisiana that was deemed distressed by the federalgovernment, does have a plan now. Orleans does not. Themayor was under the mistaken belief that FEMA wouldunderwrite the planning process. FEMA ultimately declined.Because the city was bankrupt, it had no capacity, as mostcities do, to access the municipal finance markets. And the federal government had already given instructions to the state to generate a plan. So, in fairness, the federalgovernment actually thought the state and city wouldcome together.

We were approached at the eleventh hour, becausethe mayor realized that he had no money to plan, and thecity was insolvent. They’d laid off 90 percent of the staff

Panel 1Darren Walker

Vice PresidentFoundation InitiativesRockefeller FoundationNine Plans Will Provide Foundation for Rebuilding in New Orleans

Darren Walkeremphasizesthe challengeof racialseparation as illustratedby New Orleansplanning meetings forthe Lower 9thWard (left)and the French Quarter(below).

25 Institute for Urban Design24 Darren Walker

I am honored to be here today representing the RockefellerFoundation. I was born in Louisiana, and although I grew upa Texan, I always had a great affinity for Louisiana and, ofcourse, New Orleans. When the horrible tragedy of Katrinaand its aftermath hit, I immediately resonated to what I saw because, as an American, as an African-American,as someone who believes in our values as a country, I wasdeeply disturbed. For the Rockefeller Foundation, the ques-tion of New Orleans was straightforward in terms of a deci-sion to support efforts to rebuild. We have worked on urbanpoverty in the United States for more than forty years, andon reducing the poverty that we have found in New Orleans,although New Orleans represents a rather acute circum-stance. The elements that were present in New Orleansbefore Katrina are present in many cities in this country.

Race, Class, Democracy

We also were moved after Katrina because what’shappening in that region is a narrative about this country.It is about the intersection of race, class, democracy, thebuilt environment and social justice. It’s quite complex.For many people when they look at a city like New Orleanstoday, they’re overwhelmed by the complexity of the chal-lenge. We believe that, as a philanthropic organization, weshould embrace that complexity, recognize that there arerisks associated with investing in New Orleans, and work tomitigate and anticipate those risks. But at the end of theday, we must be committed.

What happened in New Orleans revealed so muchabout our nation, and it revealed it to the world. Peoplewere shocked and appalled by what they saw. My col-leagues in our office in Nairobi, many of whom had nevervisited America, were unsettled by what they saw because they’d always heard us lecture them about the atrocitiesof poverty and governance in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet inour own backyard was revealed an extraordinary level ofdeprivation and marginalization of people.

So, New Orleans is not just about America taking care of Americans for the sake of America. During this dif-ficult time internationally, it is also about America demon-strating to the world that we can solve our problems athome no matter how intractable they may appear.

I want to talk about New Orleans and what we’re trying to do to help. In fact, this isn’t a story about theRockefeller Foundation. It’s a story about incredibleresilience on the part of so many people who are deter-mined to rebuild their city. I want to talk about the contextfor planning, the planning process and some of the emerg-ing designs. They illuminate a way forward for the city.

The challenging context for planning in New Orleanshas to be acknowledged. Architects and planners are quitefocused on the environment. But New Orleans is a complexecology. It’s complex because there are real issues of gov-ernance. The role of government, at the federal, state andlocal level, has come into question as a result of Katrina.The local political condition can be confounding. There islittle tradition of constructive collaboration across lines

of governance, race and class. It is not easy to reconcilethe different constituents and stakeholders in the city.Differences have developed along race and class lines.

In order to move forward in New Orleans we mustconfront the impact of two centuries of marginalization ofAfrican-Americans, who live in the region. When one looksat the way in which the city has emerged over time, yousee the manifestation of those decades of racial marginal-ization, and marginalization based upon class.

Population Loss

Of course, talking about New Orleans’ future bringsinto question how many people will ultimately return toNew Orleans.Beginning in the 1960s, New Orleans, like mostU.S. cities, experienced what we call “white flight”, middleclass flight, out of the city. New Orleans, like Detroit at onetime, had a population of more than 800,000 people. Now it finds itself, at least by the census count in August, at160,000 people. It is certain that there will be more peoplereturning to New Orleans, but it’s not likely that in the nearterm New Orleans is going to return to its pre-Katrinapopulation of 400,000 residents.

The matter of returning residents is difficult for people to talk about. It’s difficult because it’s integrallyrelated to the issues of race and class. When you talk to African-American citizens, particularly poor African-American citizens, there is not much belief that there isgoing to be a place for them in the new New Orleans. Whenone looks at vulnerable neighborhoods, like the LowerNinth Ward that was populated by African-Americans, fair-minded people have argued that it and similarly situatedneighborhoods shouldn’t be rebuilt. Others vehementlydisagree. This is all a part of the local discourse, and itmakes it hard to have a planning process when the funda-mental question of “Is your neighborhood going to berebuilt?” is on the table.

Finally, we have to also discuss the challenge ofcapacity. I can speak for our Foundation when I say NewOrleans was a difficult place for a number of years to work.We ultimately made the decision that we would not investin New Orleans — this was more than a decade ago —because it was a difficult environment and the capacity-building that we attempted to invest in simply wasn’t tak-ing hold. Given limited resources and given the fact thatthere are other cities where those investments were takinghold,we made a determination to not invest in New Orleans.

We also have to take responsibility for the realitytoday, not necessarily saying that we should have continuedto invest, but recognizing that capacity and infrastructurematter. In a city like New Orleans, at this point in time, thereisn’t the absorptive capacity to execute on the unified planwhen it is complete. That’s something that we are thinkingabout, because we have to be positioned, once this plan is completed, to advance it, execute it, monitor it, andensure its success.

Planning Process

The planning process is called the Unified NewOrleans Plan (UNOP). Before I get into the plan, it’s impor-tant to understand why a foundation is paying for whatappears to be something that the government should fund.This is a fundamental question that is at the heart of NewOrleans and at the heart of much of the debate going on in this country about the role of government. The planningprocess for New Orleans is part of a state-wide planningprocess that, as a part of the federal legislation, has beenmandated to be completed in order for the city to receiveinfrastructure funding and other investments from the fed-eral government. A plan is required.The state was mandatedby the federal government to create a state-wide plan forall of the distressed parishes. The governor put in place afunding program for those plans in the other parishes.

When the governor and mayor discussed OrleansParish, the mayor demurred and said that he would rathertake the lead in the funding and planning for his parish.So it is important to understand that there are structuralissues at play, there are political issues at play, and thereare personal issues at play. When the mayor demurred, thegovernor went forward with the planning process for theother distressed parishes. In fact, every parish in the stateof Louisiana that was deemed distressed by the federalgovernment, does have a plan now. Orleans does not. Themayor was under the mistaken belief that FEMA wouldunderwrite the planning process. FEMA ultimately declined.Because the city was bankrupt, it had no capacity, as mostcities do, to access the municipal finance markets. And the federal government had already given instructions to the state to generate a plan. So, in fairness, the federalgovernment actually thought the state and city wouldcome together.

We were approached at the eleventh hour, becausethe mayor realized that he had no money to plan, and thecity was insolvent. They’d laid off 90 percent of the staff

Panel 1Darren Walker

Vice PresidentFoundation InitiativesRockefeller FoundationNine Plans Will Provide Foundation for Rebuilding in New Orleans

Darren Walkeremphasizesthe challengeof racialseparation as illustratedby New Orleansplanning meetings forthe Lower 9thWard (left)and the French Quarter(below).

27 Institute for Urban Design26 Darren Walker

Center:The photo showsthe streetfrom sameneighborhoodtoday.

Left:Katrina Cottageis designedto be addedonto. DesignerMarianne Cusatois currentlypreparing newvariations onthe originalmodel.

Top:Andres Duanyhas provideda classic new urbanistmaster plan forthe Gentillydistrict.

Above:Ray Gindroz,Urban DesignAssociates,Pittsburg, hasprovided a planfor a stilldevastatedneighborhood.

of city government. The planning agency was down to twostaff members. I asked the same question. Why are youcalling the Foundation to pay for something that ought tobe paid for by city government? It became clear that therewas a bottleneck, and that the city itself had paid for someplanning to go on in some of the neighborhoods. So theMayor and City Council actually did attempt, with the lim-ited resources they had, but it was disparate, not compre-hensive and ultimately insufficient.

We wanted to galvanize the local planning effort,because over time many people, including many of you inthis room and at universities across the country, descendedupon New Orleans to offer help. So there were many dis-parate planning activities underway, many of which werehigh-quality and creative.

Unified New Orleans Plan

UNOP, as it is currently called, has as its goal to bringtogether neighborhood planning efforts, as well as a city-wide plan, which will be presented to the City Council andthe Louisiana Recovery Authority (LRA), as required by law.When that plan is approved, the LRA will begin to disperseinfrastructure dollars. The important thing here to under-stand is that there has to be a coordinated master plan.We felt that rather than giving the money to government,the best way to do that would be to create a partnershipamong government, private architects and planners andlocal philanthropy to move the process forward as quicklyas possible.

Planning Charettes

In our original conversations with the city and withlocal leaders, we came up with goals that were based ondevelopment principles that will help ensure that we don’trepeat past mistakes. The first is to have a process that isequitable and inclusive. Far too often policy decisions aremade in ways that exclude low-income people. One of theways in which we have encouraged this is to ensure thatlocal community representatives are part of the UNOPmanagement; they are a part of the oversight, and they areparticipating at the neighborhood level where the planningcharettes are occurring and where they’re interacting andmaking it clear what their priorities are. UNOP is also hold-ing charettes in diaspora cities of Houston, Dallas, Atlantaand Baton Rouge.

HOPE VI

Mixed-income development, in some circles in thiscountry, is a contested area of housing policy. In the 1990s,the federal government initiated a program called HOPE VI,which was meant to remove distressed public housing frominner cities across America. Probably the most potentexample is in Chicago, where about two-thirds of publichousing is being torn down.The theory underlying this wasbased on the work of a group of housing advocates and

lawyers in Chicago who successfully brought a class actionlawsuit on behalf of a Ms. Gautreaux and other residents in the 1980s against the City of Chicago Public HousingAuthority. As a part of the settlement, Ms. Gautreaux and anumber of other plaintiffs were relocated into economicallymixed, primarily white neighborhoods around Chicago.There was a longitudinal study of the impact of that moveon this cohort of public housing residents. The study indi-cated that the impacts of relocation were positive. Arounda host of issues, from access to jobs to security and safety,people felt less at risk and more secure.

In the 1990s, then Secretary of HUD, Henry Cisneros,and President Clinton became intrigued by this idea, andHouse Speaker Newt Gingrich also liked the program.They put in place a multi-billion dollar program that isreshaping much of housing for the poor in U.S. cities. Theproblem is that this is not a one-for-one replacement pro-gram where if you have a hundred units in a development,a hundred units are going to be rebuilt for poor people.This requires that poor people be dispersed into a regionalhousing marketplace, and there are some problems asso-ciated with this strategy.

HOPE VI is also about investing equitably in ameni-ties. We all know in many urban areas, particularly wherepoor people live, there is insufficient space and not well-maintained public amenities. One has to walk or drive agreater distance to get basic services. We want to makesure that when the infrastructure plan for New Orleans isdone, that this issue is addressed. It also has to leveragethe opportunity for creating jobs. The irony of what’s goingon in Louisiana is that many people thought that Louisianawas going to be broke by the end of this year. In fact, theLouisiana State Treasury has a surplus because of a federaltransfer of funds and its impact on spurring economicdevelopment and tax receipts. This transfer has had anamazing impact on the local economy. The reality is thereare capacity challenges in the construction industry and in the housing industry to actually utilize this moneyeffectively.

Building Local Capacity

Finally, we have to build local capacity, both of people and of institutions, to sustain this effort once it’scompleted. The program was quite fragmented. UNOP hasbrought together the local neighborhood and the citywideplanners. We have a terrific group of national architects,planners and designers engaged. There are thirteen plan-ning districts all working feverishly with design profes-sionals to develop a plan to be reviewed ultimately by theLouisiana Recovery Authority.That will be in February ’07.

My colleague,Margot Brandenburg,found the pictures(page 25) that are both a visual of the planning processand a visual of the challenge. When you look on the top inthe district planning meeting of the Lower Ninth Ward, yousee all African-Americans, and when you look at the dis-trict planning meeting in the French Quarter, you see allwhites. This is a challenge. As the city plans for the future,

are we going to have black people planning for the blackneighborhoods and white people planning for the whiteneighborhoods?

There are some interesting emerging plans as thearchitects and planners have been fantastic in their creativity and engagement with local people. This Gentillyneighborhood was an historically African-American,middle-class neighborhood that was built after the Second WorldWar, and it’s mostly beautiful bungalows and very nice mid-century modern houses. What came out of the charettethat Andres Duany did with the residents of Gentilly wasthe idea of this town center for the neighborhood, with apublic space in the middle, then mixed-use developmentaround the periphery of the public space. It’s inventive andreflects the work of community people saying to a talentedarchitect and planning team, this is our vision for our community.

Ray Gindroz of Urban Design Associates is doing ter-rific work in reconceptualizing public housing. It’s impor-tant to understand that as a part of the rebuilding of NewOrleans, the federal government has made the decision totear down five of the seven large public housing projects inthe city. This is a controversial move. It begs the questionthat I raised before — where are the poor people going togo? Projects such as Lafitte are mixed-income, and therewill be a cap on the number of poor residents who can livethere. That cap exceeds the number of poor people who arecurrently living in these projects. So, we have to ask hardquestions to ensure that poor residents, who live in theseformerly highly-concentrated neighborhoods, will have theopportunity to live in another part of town.

This rendering envisions the transformation in Lafitte.You can see at the top what it looks like now and the vision.The proposal is one of my favorites. The Katrina cottage, awonderful design by Marianne Cusato, is a small structurethat initially was thought of as temporary, but it actuallywas designed to be added on to and be habitable, utilitarianand culturally consistent with New Orleans vernacular.

As we consider the next few months of planning, it’sgoing to be incumbent upon us to monitor the progress, toask ourselves: Is this process inclusive? Are we replicatingpatterns of the past that will ensure more segregatedhousing and neighborhoods? Will there be sustainability of the public and private investments? Finally, we have toevaluate this. We want to learn from this process whetheror not the kinds of interventions that are being imple-mented are effective, whether or not they are sustainable,and whether or not they ultimately have a positive impacton people’s lives. We’re prepared to say we don’t know the answer to that. But we do believe that we have to try new approaches, we have to experiment in different ways,because doing what’s been done in the past will yield whatwe had in New Orleans before Katrina, and that’s notacceptable.

27 Institute for Urban Design26 Darren Walker

Center:The photo showsthe streetfrom sameneighborhoodtoday.

Left:Katrina Cottageis designedto be addedonto. DesignerMarianne Cusatois currentlypreparing newvariations onthe originalmodel.

Top:Andres Duanyhas provideda classic new urbanistmaster plan forthe Gentillydistrict.

Above:Ray Gindroz,Urban DesignAssociates,Pittsburg, hasprovided a planfor a stilldevastatedneighborhood.

of city government. The planning agency was down to twostaff members. I asked the same question. Why are youcalling the Foundation to pay for something that ought tobe paid for by city government? It became clear that therewas a bottleneck, and that the city itself had paid for someplanning to go on in some of the neighborhoods. So theMayor and City Council actually did attempt, with the lim-ited resources they had, but it was disparate, not compre-hensive and ultimately insufficient.

We wanted to galvanize the local planning effort,because over time many people, including many of you inthis room and at universities across the country, descendedupon New Orleans to offer help. So there were many dis-parate planning activities underway, many of which werehigh-quality and creative.

Unified New Orleans Plan

UNOP, as it is currently called, has as its goal to bringtogether neighborhood planning efforts, as well as a city-wide plan, which will be presented to the City Council andthe Louisiana Recovery Authority (LRA), as required by law.When that plan is approved, the LRA will begin to disperseinfrastructure dollars. The important thing here to under-stand is that there has to be a coordinated master plan.We felt that rather than giving the money to government,the best way to do that would be to create a partnershipamong government, private architects and planners andlocal philanthropy to move the process forward as quicklyas possible.

Planning Charettes

In our original conversations with the city and withlocal leaders, we came up with goals that were based ondevelopment principles that will help ensure that we don’trepeat past mistakes. The first is to have a process that isequitable and inclusive. Far too often policy decisions aremade in ways that exclude low-income people. One of theways in which we have encouraged this is to ensure thatlocal community representatives are part of the UNOPmanagement; they are a part of the oversight, and they areparticipating at the neighborhood level where the planningcharettes are occurring and where they’re interacting andmaking it clear what their priorities are. UNOP is also hold-ing charettes in diaspora cities of Houston, Dallas, Atlantaand Baton Rouge.

HOPE VI

Mixed-income development, in some circles in thiscountry, is a contested area of housing policy. In the 1990s,the federal government initiated a program called HOPE VI,which was meant to remove distressed public housing frominner cities across America. Probably the most potentexample is in Chicago, where about two-thirds of publichousing is being torn down.The theory underlying this wasbased on the work of a group of housing advocates and

lawyers in Chicago who successfully brought a class actionlawsuit on behalf of a Ms. Gautreaux and other residents in the 1980s against the City of Chicago Public HousingAuthority. As a part of the settlement, Ms. Gautreaux and anumber of other plaintiffs were relocated into economicallymixed, primarily white neighborhoods around Chicago.There was a longitudinal study of the impact of that moveon this cohort of public housing residents. The study indi-cated that the impacts of relocation were positive. Arounda host of issues, from access to jobs to security and safety,people felt less at risk and more secure.

In the 1990s, then Secretary of HUD, Henry Cisneros,and President Clinton became intrigued by this idea, andHouse Speaker Newt Gingrich also liked the program.They put in place a multi-billion dollar program that isreshaping much of housing for the poor in U.S. cities. Theproblem is that this is not a one-for-one replacement pro-gram where if you have a hundred units in a development,a hundred units are going to be rebuilt for poor people.This requires that poor people be dispersed into a regionalhousing marketplace, and there are some problems asso-ciated with this strategy.

HOPE VI is also about investing equitably in ameni-ties. We all know in many urban areas, particularly wherepoor people live, there is insufficient space and not well-maintained public amenities. One has to walk or drive agreater distance to get basic services. We want to makesure that when the infrastructure plan for New Orleans isdone, that this issue is addressed. It also has to leveragethe opportunity for creating jobs. The irony of what’s goingon in Louisiana is that many people thought that Louisianawas going to be broke by the end of this year. In fact, theLouisiana State Treasury has a surplus because of a federaltransfer of funds and its impact on spurring economicdevelopment and tax receipts. This transfer has had anamazing impact on the local economy. The reality is thereare capacity challenges in the construction industry and in the housing industry to actually utilize this moneyeffectively.

Building Local Capacity

Finally, we have to build local capacity, both of people and of institutions, to sustain this effort once it’scompleted. The program was quite fragmented. UNOP hasbrought together the local neighborhood and the citywideplanners. We have a terrific group of national architects,planners and designers engaged. There are thirteen plan-ning districts all working feverishly with design profes-sionals to develop a plan to be reviewed ultimately by theLouisiana Recovery Authority.That will be in February ’07.

My colleague,Margot Brandenburg,found the pictures(page 25) that are both a visual of the planning processand a visual of the challenge. When you look on the top inthe district planning meeting of the Lower Ninth Ward, yousee all African-Americans, and when you look at the dis-trict planning meeting in the French Quarter, you see allwhites. This is a challenge. As the city plans for the future,

are we going to have black people planning for the blackneighborhoods and white people planning for the whiteneighborhoods?

There are some interesting emerging plans as thearchitects and planners have been fantastic in their creativity and engagement with local people. This Gentillyneighborhood was an historically African-American,middle-class neighborhood that was built after the Second WorldWar, and it’s mostly beautiful bungalows and very nice mid-century modern houses. What came out of the charettethat Andres Duany did with the residents of Gentilly wasthe idea of this town center for the neighborhood, with apublic space in the middle, then mixed-use developmentaround the periphery of the public space. It’s inventive andreflects the work of community people saying to a talentedarchitect and planning team, this is our vision for our community.

Ray Gindroz of Urban Design Associates is doing ter-rific work in reconceptualizing public housing. It’s impor-tant to understand that as a part of the rebuilding of NewOrleans, the federal government has made the decision totear down five of the seven large public housing projects inthe city. This is a controversial move. It begs the questionthat I raised before — where are the poor people going togo? Projects such as Lafitte are mixed-income, and therewill be a cap on the number of poor residents who can livethere. That cap exceeds the number of poor people who arecurrently living in these projects. So, we have to ask hardquestions to ensure that poor residents, who live in theseformerly highly-concentrated neighborhoods, will have theopportunity to live in another part of town.

This rendering envisions the transformation in Lafitte.You can see at the top what it looks like now and the vision.The proposal is one of my favorites. The Katrina cottage, awonderful design by Marianne Cusato, is a small structurethat initially was thought of as temporary, but it actuallywas designed to be added on to and be habitable, utilitarianand culturally consistent with New Orleans vernacular.

As we consider the next few months of planning, it’sgoing to be incumbent upon us to monitor the progress, toask ourselves: Is this process inclusive? Are we replicatingpatterns of the past that will ensure more segregatedhousing and neighborhoods? Will there be sustainability of the public and private investments? Finally, we have toevaluate this. We want to learn from this process whetheror not the kinds of interventions that are being imple-mented are effective, whether or not they are sustainable,and whether or not they ultimately have a positive impacton people’s lives. We’re prepared to say we don’t know the answer to that. But we do believe that we have to try new approaches, we have to experiment in different ways,because doing what’s been done in the past will yield whatwe had in New Orleans before Katrina, and that’s notacceptable.

29 Institute for Urban Design28 Chris Coleman

I am pleased to join this distinguished group of speakersfrom around the world to discuss a global issue: how to create healthy, sustainable environments to enable people to thrive. Saint Paul, Minnesota is often considered“flyover” country by people from the East or West coast.But elsewhere in the world, we are recognized for beingsituated on the headwaters of one of the greatest rivers inthe world, the Mississippi River. In fact, as the capital cityof the headwaters state, we in Saint Paul believe we havean obligation to lead the national discourse about city-building on rivers.

The Mississippi River

Like most of the world’s great cities, Saint Paul wasborn of its relationship to the water. The Mississippi Riverwas the source of sustenance for native people, the pathway for European explorers, and the trade route and transportation corridor for 19th and 20th century settlement.However, the river was at its nadir in the 1960s when its banks were lined with railroad tracks, highways andmanufacturing. The river itself was fouled with industrialdischarge, sewage and street run-off.

After decades of fits and starts surrounding effortsto reclaim the Mississippi River, a big breakthroughoccurred in the early 1990s with the establishment of theSaint Paul on the Mississippi Development Framework andthe Design Center.

Lead with a Vision

Nothing is more important in city-building than tohave a community-embraced vision that becomes thebackdrop against which all decisions are made. Saint Paulhad the benefit of drawing on the expertise of four greaturban planners. First, in 1992, native son Ben Thompsonwas called on to help create a river vision. After much studyand analysis, Thompson came back to the city with a single image. His rendering, in which he coined the phase,Great River Park, illustrates a city where its urban environ-ment meets the river’s edge and the natural environmentreaches into the core of the city. Many of his report’s recip-ients expected him to recommend a festival marketplace,like Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. Instead, in his oral report, hesaid simply this: “Saint Paul is a river city… it just hasn’tbehaved as one for many years.”

Thompson’s seminal work was followed by Bill Morrishand Catherine Brown, a husband and wife team who ledthe University of Minnesota’s urban landscape design pro-gram. They added depth to Great River Park concept andthe notion of Saint Paul being “of the Mississippi River.”

Ken Greenberg, a Toronto-based urban planner,built off these studies and led Saint Paul through a two-year planning exercise resulting in the Saint Paul on theMississippi Development Framework. The Frameworkfocused on the downtown segment of the river and wasintentionally focused on the idea of connecting downtowninvestments and river revitalization efforts. This award-

winning plan was completed in 1997, with the community-wide support and the endorsement of the City Council and Mayor. The moral of the story is that a city must startwith a vision, it must be embraced by the community andbe flexible to respond to changing market conditions.

Ten Principles of City Building

The fatal flaw in many city plans is that they areoverly prescriptive, relying on a series of steps that areunrealistic over time. The Saint Paul on the MississippiDevelopment Framework is guided by a set of principles,none of which are unique. The uniqueness is that the entireFramework is founded on these principles. They are itsenduring feature.

St. Paul Design Center

The most important thing we did in Saint Paul toensure the ongoing realization of the vision was to estab-lish the Saint Paul on the Mississippi Design Center. TheDesign Center is a joint program of the not-for-profit Saint Paul Riverfront Corporation and the City of St. Paul.It is led by an architect/urban planner and staffed by citydesign, planning and economic development staff.The staffcome from city agencies, including Parks, Public Works,Planning and Economic Development; they work part-timein the Design Center. The Design Center’s role is to providedesign guidance on new projects, lead community planningefforts for future projects, create tools and technologies toaid public policy decision making, and ensure the commu-nity has an opportunity to stay engaged with the city’sdevelopment agenda.

A Vital City Center

The Design Center has been instrumental in shapingthe development of the downtown core, encouraginginvestment along key growth corridors and advancingenvironmental stewardship practices. With respect to the

downtown, the Design Center leads the precinct planningprocess, champions investment in the public realm, andensures that new developments have a connection to theMississippi River.

Commercial corridors, typically along the historicstreet-car lines, have been the focus of recent develop-ment pressure as inner city investment has become moreattractive. A new light rail transit system, connecting down-town Saint Paul to downtown Minneapolis, has especiallyincreased the pressure in one such corridor. The DesignCenter assists neighborhood organizations in applyingprinciples of density and economic viability to neighbor-hood planning.

Environmental stewardship has become an essentialingredient in sustainable city development. The DesignCenter has been a champion of clean energy systems,brownfield redevelopment, use of green building standardsand restoration of natural habitat.

West Side Flats

In the 1960s, after several years of being flooded out,the West Side Flats neighborhood was relocated to higherground. Families who had been there for generations weredisplaced; some under order by the Sheriff. Shortly there-after a flood wall was built and industrial uses moved in.Twenty five years later the industries left, leaving a vacantriverfront. However, the painful memories of neighborhoodrelocation remained. This manifested itself as communityresistance to nearly any proposed reuse of this land.

The Design Center was called on to facilitate a com-munity process to better understand the goals and desiresof the community. The resulting product was the West SideFlats Master Plan, which described a redevelopment visionembraced by the community. This plan was then used toattract a corporation looking for a new location for its satel-lite office headquarters.Rather than resist this developmentproposal, the neighborhood became its chief champion.The West Side Flats Master Plan has become the sourcedocument against which to review other project proposals.

Panel 1Mayor Chris Coleman

St.PaulMinnesotaUrban Design Center as Vehicle for Policy Implementation

St. Paul river-front at siteof former FordFactory, is beingredeveloped asa residentialcommunity.

Light rail system will be used toincrease mixed use density along new transit corridors.

29 Institute for Urban Design28 Chris Coleman

I am pleased to join this distinguished group of speakersfrom around the world to discuss a global issue: how to create healthy, sustainable environments to enable people to thrive. Saint Paul, Minnesota is often considered“flyover” country by people from the East or West coast.But elsewhere in the world, we are recognized for beingsituated on the headwaters of one of the greatest rivers inthe world, the Mississippi River. In fact, as the capital cityof the headwaters state, we in Saint Paul believe we havean obligation to lead the national discourse about city-building on rivers.

The Mississippi River

Like most of the world’s great cities, Saint Paul wasborn of its relationship to the water. The Mississippi Riverwas the source of sustenance for native people, the pathway for European explorers, and the trade route and transportation corridor for 19th and 20th century settlement.However, the river was at its nadir in the 1960s when its banks were lined with railroad tracks, highways andmanufacturing. The river itself was fouled with industrialdischarge, sewage and street run-off.

After decades of fits and starts surrounding effortsto reclaim the Mississippi River, a big breakthroughoccurred in the early 1990s with the establishment of theSaint Paul on the Mississippi Development Framework andthe Design Center.

Lead with a Vision

Nothing is more important in city-building than tohave a community-embraced vision that becomes thebackdrop against which all decisions are made. Saint Paulhad the benefit of drawing on the expertise of four greaturban planners. First, in 1992, native son Ben Thompsonwas called on to help create a river vision. After much studyand analysis, Thompson came back to the city with a single image. His rendering, in which he coined the phase,Great River Park, illustrates a city where its urban environ-ment meets the river’s edge and the natural environmentreaches into the core of the city. Many of his report’s recip-ients expected him to recommend a festival marketplace,like Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. Instead, in his oral report, hesaid simply this: “Saint Paul is a river city… it just hasn’tbehaved as one for many years.”

Thompson’s seminal work was followed by Bill Morrishand Catherine Brown, a husband and wife team who ledthe University of Minnesota’s urban landscape design pro-gram. They added depth to Great River Park concept andthe notion of Saint Paul being “of the Mississippi River.”

Ken Greenberg, a Toronto-based urban planner,built off these studies and led Saint Paul through a two-year planning exercise resulting in the Saint Paul on theMississippi Development Framework. The Frameworkfocused on the downtown segment of the river and wasintentionally focused on the idea of connecting downtowninvestments and river revitalization efforts. This award-

winning plan was completed in 1997, with the community-wide support and the endorsement of the City Council and Mayor. The moral of the story is that a city must startwith a vision, it must be embraced by the community andbe flexible to respond to changing market conditions.

Ten Principles of City Building

The fatal flaw in many city plans is that they areoverly prescriptive, relying on a series of steps that areunrealistic over time. The Saint Paul on the MississippiDevelopment Framework is guided by a set of principles,none of which are unique. The uniqueness is that the entireFramework is founded on these principles. They are itsenduring feature.

St. Paul Design Center

The most important thing we did in Saint Paul toensure the ongoing realization of the vision was to estab-lish the Saint Paul on the Mississippi Design Center. TheDesign Center is a joint program of the not-for-profit Saint Paul Riverfront Corporation and the City of St. Paul.It is led by an architect/urban planner and staffed by citydesign, planning and economic development staff.The staffcome from city agencies, including Parks, Public Works,Planning and Economic Development; they work part-timein the Design Center. The Design Center’s role is to providedesign guidance on new projects, lead community planningefforts for future projects, create tools and technologies toaid public policy decision making, and ensure the commu-nity has an opportunity to stay engaged with the city’sdevelopment agenda.

A Vital City Center

The Design Center has been instrumental in shapingthe development of the downtown core, encouraginginvestment along key growth corridors and advancingenvironmental stewardship practices. With respect to the

downtown, the Design Center leads the precinct planningprocess, champions investment in the public realm, andensures that new developments have a connection to theMississippi River.

Commercial corridors, typically along the historicstreet-car lines, have been the focus of recent develop-ment pressure as inner city investment has become moreattractive. A new light rail transit system, connecting down-town Saint Paul to downtown Minneapolis, has especiallyincreased the pressure in one such corridor. The DesignCenter assists neighborhood organizations in applyingprinciples of density and economic viability to neighbor-hood planning.

Environmental stewardship has become an essentialingredient in sustainable city development. The DesignCenter has been a champion of clean energy systems,brownfield redevelopment, use of green building standardsand restoration of natural habitat.

West Side Flats

In the 1960s, after several years of being flooded out,the West Side Flats neighborhood was relocated to higherground. Families who had been there for generations weredisplaced; some under order by the Sheriff. Shortly there-after a flood wall was built and industrial uses moved in.Twenty five years later the industries left, leaving a vacantriverfront. However, the painful memories of neighborhoodrelocation remained. This manifested itself as communityresistance to nearly any proposed reuse of this land.

The Design Center was called on to facilitate a com-munity process to better understand the goals and desiresof the community. The resulting product was the West SideFlats Master Plan, which described a redevelopment visionembraced by the community. This plan was then used toattract a corporation looking for a new location for its satel-lite office headquarters.Rather than resist this developmentproposal, the neighborhood became its chief champion.The West Side Flats Master Plan has become the sourcedocument against which to review other project proposals.

Panel 1Mayor Chris Coleman

St.PaulMinnesotaUrban Design Center as Vehicle for Policy Implementation

St. Paul river-front at siteof former FordFactory, is beingredeveloped asa residentialcommunity.

Light rail system will be used toincrease mixed use density along new transit corridors.

31 Institute for Urban Design30 Chris Coleman

The NationalGreat RiverPark will helpconnect St.Paul’s 26 milewaterfront alongthe Mississippi.The goal is toattract some$2 billion ininvestmentsover 10 years.

Holman Field Floodwall Enhancement

Not far from the West Side Flats and near the downtown is a city airport. It is a reliever airport to theMinneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and is usedlargely by the National Guard and for air service for corpo-rate clients. This airport was built in the flood plain some75 years ago. Again, due to periodic flooding, the airport wasoccasionally out of service. To increase its reliability, theMetropolitan Airports Commission proposed the construc-tion of a floodwall. This proposal was welcomed by thebusiness community and opposed by neighborhood groups.The necessary variance was voted down by the City Council.

The Design Center was called in to lead a designprocess involving city staff and airport staff. The challengewas to design a floodwall that would be less offensive andintrusive than originally approved while meeting the basiccost parameters of the Airports Commission. Ultimately a new design was advanced and met approval of the CityCouncil and the Mayor.

Highland Park Ford Plant

Recently, Ford Motor Company announced that itwould be closing a long-standing production plant alongthe river in the Highland Park neighborhood. This willvacate 140 acres of prime real estate while eliminating2000 jobs. The Design Center will assist the city and FordMotor Company in its decision-making process about theultimate disposition of their land.

Upcoming Assignments

Saint Paul has an agenda for revitalizing the city,using the Mississippi River as an engine. The river willinspire a new generation of thinking, where the naturalenvironment will be embraced as a resource. Through theDesign Center, we have a team that ensures the communityvision is realized and responds to changing market condi-tions. The Saint Paul on the Mississippi DevelopmentFramework has become a living, breathing document ratherthan a plan that collects dust on the shelf of the city’splanning department.

Exchange

Lisa ChamberlainThe New York Times

What I try to do is shoehorn design and architecture into what is otherwise the realestate section of the paper. I want to make a comparison between the World Trade Center site and New Orleans. They’re not comparable.Sixteen acres that’s surrounded by wealth ismuch different from however many New Orleansacres that are not surrounded by wealth. At theWorld Trade Center site, a lack of planningresults in disaster.

What’s happened at the World Trade Centersite is that a formal plan was finally approvedjust a couple of weeks ago. Meanwhile, the foundation is being laid for the Freedom Tower,and 7 World Trade Center is open and looking for tenants. Larry Silverstein, who signed a lease for the Twin Towers six or so weeks before 9/11,is moving forward with plans with three differentarchitects whose plans were recently unveiled.

I was glad to hear that the federal governmenthas said New Orleans has to have a plan beforethe dollars are going to flow. That’s good news.

The question is: Who is making the decisionsat the end of the day in New Orleans? Usually it’s the person bringing the money in who’s making the decisions, and that’s what the World Trade Center site is all about. Since you’rebringing the money in, I’m hoping you can tell us when the plans are laid, who says that this isactually going to stick? This is the blueprint, youcannot do this here, but you can do that there?Who says that?

Darren WalkerYou have identified a core challenge in a democracy. When you have New Orleans or you have Lower Manhattan, what you essentiallyhave is contested space. You have contestedspace because different people view what oughtto be done differently. In a democracy, that’sproblematic because you don’t have someonewho comes in and says, actually, this is not thenumber one priority, and this is where the housingis going. You don’t have Robert Moses. So we,on the one hand, celebrate the participatoryprocess. We celebrate engagement, civic participation, but it also requires patience towork things through.

That’s very difficult. In terms of New Orleans,the plan itself will have to be presented to thestate, which has the ultimate authority. The State of Louisiana will determine, and alreadyhas, what will be done in other parishes.

In terms of the development plan for New Orleans, it is truly bubbling up from theneighborhoods. But there will be tension andconflict around resolving what are the priorityareas for re-building. What are the priority infrastructure investments? Who gets to stay in

the neighborhoods they currently live in, and who has to be relocated? Recommendations will be made, but ultimately the state has theauthority to give thumbs up or thumbs down.

Lisa ChamberlainSo that’s primarily because the money is flowing through the state?

Darren WalkerIt’s primarily because, under federal legislation,the federal government says to the state, you arethe governmental unit with authority to spendthis money based upon guidelines in the federallegislation which are quite broad. Mississippi is interpreting things differently from Louisiana,because the Mississippi governor has a differentpoint of view about priorities than does theLouisiana governor. Under our federal system,that is acceptable.

31 Institute for Urban Design30 Chris Coleman

The NationalGreat RiverPark will helpconnect St.Paul’s 26 milewaterfront alongthe Mississippi.The goal is toattract some$2 billion ininvestmentsover 10 years.

Holman Field Floodwall Enhancement

Not far from the West Side Flats and near the downtown is a city airport. It is a reliever airport to theMinneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and is usedlargely by the National Guard and for air service for corpo-rate clients. This airport was built in the flood plain some75 years ago. Again, due to periodic flooding, the airport wasoccasionally out of service. To increase its reliability, theMetropolitan Airports Commission proposed the construc-tion of a floodwall. This proposal was welcomed by thebusiness community and opposed by neighborhood groups.The necessary variance was voted down by the City Council.

The Design Center was called in to lead a designprocess involving city staff and airport staff. The challengewas to design a floodwall that would be less offensive andintrusive than originally approved while meeting the basiccost parameters of the Airports Commission. Ultimately a new design was advanced and met approval of the CityCouncil and the Mayor.

Highland Park Ford Plant

Recently, Ford Motor Company announced that itwould be closing a long-standing production plant alongthe river in the Highland Park neighborhood. This willvacate 140 acres of prime real estate while eliminating2000 jobs. The Design Center will assist the city and FordMotor Company in its decision-making process about theultimate disposition of their land.

Upcoming Assignments

Saint Paul has an agenda for revitalizing the city,using the Mississippi River as an engine. The river willinspire a new generation of thinking, where the naturalenvironment will be embraced as a resource. Through theDesign Center, we have a team that ensures the communityvision is realized and responds to changing market condi-tions. The Saint Paul on the Mississippi DevelopmentFramework has become a living, breathing document ratherthan a plan that collects dust on the shelf of the city’splanning department.

Exchange

Lisa ChamberlainThe New York Times

What I try to do is shoehorn design and architecture into what is otherwise the realestate section of the paper. I want to make a comparison between the World Trade Center site and New Orleans. They’re not comparable.Sixteen acres that’s surrounded by wealth ismuch different from however many New Orleansacres that are not surrounded by wealth. At theWorld Trade Center site, a lack of planningresults in disaster.

What’s happened at the World Trade Centersite is that a formal plan was finally approvedjust a couple of weeks ago. Meanwhile, the foundation is being laid for the Freedom Tower,and 7 World Trade Center is open and looking for tenants. Larry Silverstein, who signed a lease for the Twin Towers six or so weeks before 9/11,is moving forward with plans with three differentarchitects whose plans were recently unveiled.

I was glad to hear that the federal governmenthas said New Orleans has to have a plan beforethe dollars are going to flow. That’s good news.

The question is: Who is making the decisionsat the end of the day in New Orleans? Usually it’s the person bringing the money in who’s making the decisions, and that’s what the World Trade Center site is all about. Since you’rebringing the money in, I’m hoping you can tell us when the plans are laid, who says that this isactually going to stick? This is the blueprint, youcannot do this here, but you can do that there?Who says that?

Darren WalkerYou have identified a core challenge in a democracy. When you have New Orleans or you have Lower Manhattan, what you essentiallyhave is contested space. You have contestedspace because different people view what oughtto be done differently. In a democracy, that’sproblematic because you don’t have someonewho comes in and says, actually, this is not thenumber one priority, and this is where the housingis going. You don’t have Robert Moses. So we,on the one hand, celebrate the participatoryprocess. We celebrate engagement, civic participation, but it also requires patience towork things through.

That’s very difficult. In terms of New Orleans,the plan itself will have to be presented to thestate, which has the ultimate authority. The State of Louisiana will determine, and alreadyhas, what will be done in other parishes.

In terms of the development plan for New Orleans, it is truly bubbling up from theneighborhoods. But there will be tension andconflict around resolving what are the priorityareas for re-building. What are the priority infrastructure investments? Who gets to stay in

the neighborhoods they currently live in, and who has to be relocated? Recommendations will be made, but ultimately the state has theauthority to give thumbs up or thumbs down.

Lisa ChamberlainSo that’s primarily because the money is flowing through the state?

Darren WalkerIt’s primarily because, under federal legislation,the federal government says to the state, you arethe governmental unit with authority to spendthis money based upon guidelines in the federallegislation which are quite broad. Mississippi is interpreting things differently from Louisiana,because the Mississippi governor has a differentpoint of view about priorities than does theLouisiana governor. Under our federal system,that is acceptable.

33 Sustainable Cities32 Institute for Urban Design

Response to Darren Walker

Steve RugareCommunity Design CenterKent State University

Darren Walker’s discussion of New Orleans rightly focuses on the complexity of race andclass issues as they affect the planning process,and almost all of what he said is relevant to thelarge number of American cities with chronicpopulation loss and concentrated poverty.This should be no surprise, since New Orleanswas one of these “shrinking cities” even beforethe flooding.

Walker’s description of the New Orleansprocess certainly resonates with our experienceworking in Cleveland and Youngstown. Given very real day-to-day struggles and a history of political dysfunction, it’s difficult to go to a disadvantaged community with the messagethat the pie as a whole is shrinking, even thoughwe suspect acknowledging that reality mightlead to a better design and planning outcome.What we’ve found is that, even when people areready to acknowledge that their city is shrinking,they tend to think that their neighborhood is the place that can buck the trend and grow.I suspect this will be a problem in New Orleans as well. When all the individual neighborhoodplans are collated, it will turn out that theyanticipate far more development than the city as a whole can support.

This leads me to a final observation. Some of the neighborhood plans developed for NewOrleans by the protagonists of new urbanism(DPZ, UDA etc.) show a kind of routine densification that, I fear, may be more the resultof design prejudice than of community process.Our admittedly limited experience suggests that solutions for areas with high vacancy ratesneed to be far less dependent on continuity of fabric and more dependent on programming andstewardship of “banked” land. This approach,which might be related to “landscape urbanism,”was something we got from the people on theground in places like Youngstown. Time will tellwhether the charrette process in New Orleansreally offered residents more than a one-size-fits-all urban design solution.

Response to Mayor Chris Coleman

Jane ThompsonThompson Design GroupCambridge, MA

Mayor Coleman is right, and very kind, to mention Ben’s significant contribution in initiating the whole city’s interest in restoringthe city’s Mississippi waterfront and HarrietIsland. We did the waterfront plan concept as a vision drawing made by Ben based on his memories as a child—the greening of St. Paul.We made a presentation to the usual supportivefriends/activists who backed it, and it resulted in the St. Paul Riverfront Corporation. And theydid it, with implementation by Greenberg andothers over time.

Ken GreenbergGreenberg Consultants Inc.TorontoCanada

In terms of the Design Center I would suggest the following: The Saint Paul on the MississippiDesign Center has become a unique institutionfor successful formulation and implementationof city-scale design concepts by providing a broadly respected forum and ‘space’ for interaction—simultaneously in and out of government, responsive to many communitiesand able to operate across the broad array ofdisciplines involved in city-building.

Panel 2

Immigration toAfrican CitiesOutpaces Provision ofAffordable Housing

United NationsUN-HabitatNew York

10.18.2006

33 Sustainable Cities32 Institute for Urban Design

Response to Darren Walker

Steve RugareCommunity Design CenterKent State University

Darren Walker’s discussion of New Orleans rightly focuses on the complexity of race andclass issues as they affect the planning process,and almost all of what he said is relevant to thelarge number of American cities with chronicpopulation loss and concentrated poverty.This should be no surprise, since New Orleanswas one of these “shrinking cities” even beforethe flooding.

Walker’s description of the New Orleansprocess certainly resonates with our experienceworking in Cleveland and Youngstown. Given very real day-to-day struggles and a history of political dysfunction, it’s difficult to go to a disadvantaged community with the messagethat the pie as a whole is shrinking, even thoughwe suspect acknowledging that reality mightlead to a better design and planning outcome.What we’ve found is that, even when people areready to acknowledge that their city is shrinking,they tend to think that their neighborhood is the place that can buck the trend and grow.I suspect this will be a problem in New Orleans as well. When all the individual neighborhoodplans are collated, it will turn out that theyanticipate far more development than the city as a whole can support.

This leads me to a final observation. Some of the neighborhood plans developed for NewOrleans by the protagonists of new urbanism(DPZ, UDA etc.) show a kind of routine densification that, I fear, may be more the resultof design prejudice than of community process.Our admittedly limited experience suggests that solutions for areas with high vacancy ratesneed to be far less dependent on continuity of fabric and more dependent on programming andstewardship of “banked” land. This approach,which might be related to “landscape urbanism,”was something we got from the people on theground in places like Youngstown. Time will tellwhether the charrette process in New Orleansreally offered residents more than a one-size-fits-all urban design solution.

Response to Mayor Chris Coleman

Jane ThompsonThompson Design GroupCambridge, MA

Mayor Coleman is right, and very kind, to mention Ben’s significant contribution in initiating the whole city’s interest in restoringthe city’s Mississippi waterfront and HarrietIsland. We did the waterfront plan concept as a vision drawing made by Ben based on his memories as a child—the greening of St. Paul.We made a presentation to the usual supportivefriends/activists who backed it, and it resulted in the St. Paul Riverfront Corporation. And theydid it, with implementation by Greenberg andothers over time.

Ken GreenbergGreenberg Consultants Inc.TorontoCanada

In terms of the Design Center I would suggest the following: The Saint Paul on the MississippiDesign Center has become a unique institutionfor successful formulation and implementationof city-scale design concepts by providing a broadly respected forum and ‘space’ for interaction—simultaneously in and out of government, responsive to many communitiesand able to operate across the broad array ofdisciplines involved in city-building.

Panel 2

Immigration toAfrican CitiesOutpaces Provision ofAffordable Housing

United NationsUN-HabitatNew York

10.18.2006

35 Institute for Urban Design34 Axumite Gebre-Egziabher

Panel 2Dr. Axumite Gebre-Egziabher

DirectorUN-HabitatNew York OfficeUrban Design and Human Settlements

This is a follow-up from my remarks in the morning, and I now emphasize the challenge of urban design. As of 2007,the majority of people in the world will live in urban areas.Most of the increase is going to be in the developing world.

12 Asian Mega-Cities

People move from rural to urban areas, from urbanareas to the capital cities. Then they go internationalwhere they are called international migrants by the timethey reach New York or Johannesburg. There is also south-south migration. A high birth rate adds to expanding citypopulations. Improvements, nevertheless, have takenplace in health facilities. Most of the expansion will occurin some 12 mega-cities in Asia. What do they impose in thedeveloping world? Here we are overstretching the capacityof the local authorities, of the planners who manage thecities. But the demographic transformation is unstoppable.So planners need to work together with policy makers.

One Million in Slums

The migration creates a trend towards the urbaniza-tion of poverty. Currently one million people live in slums.In Sub-Saharan Africa almost 72 percent of the urban pop-ulation live in slums. In the developed world, 6 percent livein slum-like conditions. How do we define slums? We callit a slum if it has no access to improved water or improvedsanitation, or no living area, or durability of the housing.We see also the feminization of poverty. Half of people liv-ing in the slums are women. What do we do for the future?There are related problems: crime, and violence.

We have seen what has happened with HurricaneKatrina. It’s the poor who are most affected by natural disasters. We need to take into account social equity andhuman rights. We have to look at the economic prospects.If there are no jobs, then there is poverty. In Nairobi, thehome of UN-Habitat, 75 percent of the population lives on 5 percent of the land. We have to deal with that reality.

Habitat has the Millennium Development Goals.We are the focal point for slum improvements. If we look at the development goals, we see each one of them has an implication at the local level, where we as planners and urban designers bring everything together. Because implementation is at the local level, education has to belocalized. In terms of intensity of exclusion, are plannersconsidering where the majority live?

At UN-Habitat, we now have a global campaign onurban good governance. Also, we are looking at creditmechanisms. We are talking about slum upgrading and, inthe long term, to come up with sustainable urban develop-ment planning. We start from scratch and we try to repli-cate. We do have best practices. We do have a sustainablecities program. But at the end of the day, we are looking athow to bring community-based infrastructure and servic-es, including water and sanitation, to the communities.We include the citizens of the city in participatory planning. The people provide solutions.

We are looking at density, housing, sanitation andgarbage. There is also a program on water and sanitation,for example, around Lake Victoria. We have projects now in Cambodia, Bangladesh and Somalia. We the peopleneed to help themselves, because if we do not look at thesocial, economic and environmental issues within a city,then there is no sustainability.

Above:UN-Habitat workin Cambodia.

Left, top:Fresh drinking wateris still carried by women to their families in manyBangladesh cities.

Left, bottom:An outdoor shower is a welcomed luxuryfor those housed inmany African cities.

35 Institute for Urban Design34 Axumite Gebre-Egziabher

Panel 2Dr. Axumite Gebre-Egziabher

DirectorUN-HabitatNew York OfficeUrban Design and Human Settlements

This is a follow-up from my remarks in the morning, and I now emphasize the challenge of urban design. As of 2007,the majority of people in the world will live in urban areas.Most of the increase is going to be in the developing world.

12 Asian Mega-Cities

People move from rural to urban areas, from urbanareas to the capital cities. Then they go internationalwhere they are called international migrants by the timethey reach New York or Johannesburg. There is also south-south migration. A high birth rate adds to expanding citypopulations. Improvements, nevertheless, have takenplace in health facilities. Most of the expansion will occurin some 12 mega-cities in Asia. What do they impose in thedeveloping world? Here we are overstretching the capacityof the local authorities, of the planners who manage thecities. But the demographic transformation is unstoppable.So planners need to work together with policy makers.

One Million in Slums

The migration creates a trend towards the urbaniza-tion of poverty. Currently one million people live in slums.In Sub-Saharan Africa almost 72 percent of the urban pop-ulation live in slums. In the developed world, 6 percent livein slum-like conditions. How do we define slums? We callit a slum if it has no access to improved water or improvedsanitation, or no living area, or durability of the housing.We see also the feminization of poverty. Half of people liv-ing in the slums are women. What do we do for the future?There are related problems: crime, and violence.

We have seen what has happened with HurricaneKatrina. It’s the poor who are most affected by natural disasters. We need to take into account social equity andhuman rights. We have to look at the economic prospects.If there are no jobs, then there is poverty. In Nairobi, thehome of UN-Habitat, 75 percent of the population lives on 5 percent of the land. We have to deal with that reality.

Habitat has the Millennium Development Goals.We are the focal point for slum improvements. If we look at the development goals, we see each one of them has an implication at the local level, where we as planners and urban designers bring everything together. Because implementation is at the local level, education has to belocalized. In terms of intensity of exclusion, are plannersconsidering where the majority live?

At UN-Habitat, we now have a global campaign onurban good governance. Also, we are looking at creditmechanisms. We are talking about slum upgrading and, inthe long term, to come up with sustainable urban develop-ment planning. We start from scratch and we try to repli-cate. We do have best practices. We do have a sustainablecities program. But at the end of the day, we are looking athow to bring community-based infrastructure and servic-es, including water and sanitation, to the communities.We include the citizens of the city in participatory planning. The people provide solutions.

We are looking at density, housing, sanitation andgarbage. There is also a program on water and sanitation,for example, around Lake Victoria. We have projects now in Cambodia, Bangladesh and Somalia. We the peopleneed to help themselves, because if we do not look at thesocial, economic and environmental issues within a city,then there is no sustainability.

Above:UN-Habitat workin Cambodia.

Left, top:Fresh drinking wateris still carried by women to their families in manyBangladesh cities.

Left, bottom:An outdoor shower is a welcomed luxuryfor those housed inmany African cities.

37 Institute for Urban Design36 Suha Ozkan

I shall be talking about the Aga Khan Award forArchitecture, where I spent twenty-five years as the exec-utive of this award. Among values for selection are culturalidentity, climate, public participation and co-existence ofcultures, races, faiths. Recycling of resources, protectionof the environment, regeneration of nature, poverty alleviation and more equitable distribution of financialresources are values reflected in winning projects.

100 Projects in 30 Years

Around these values we have selected, over the last thirty years, one hundred projects. I shall give you an anthology of projects that highlight sustainability.

Landscapes are where most of the damage to theenvironment has been done. The first project is from oneof the most prosperous countries, Saudi Arabia. They werebuilding a new diplomatic quarter. The client said that inorder to stop the dust and the sand, you don’t do lawns.Youuse boulders. As they were pushing water into the sand tomake it green, he said that’s not sustainable. German con-sultants persuaded the client that plants don’t die. Theycan be regenerated. They saved tons of desert sand fromdifferent places to the finest grain. They put the finestgrain into incubators. In the course of a year, they regener-ated two hundred unknown species. These species werethe species which resisted desertification over centuries,as the desert was flowing in. They have proliferated theseplants and used them as landscaping. For the intensivesupport of landscaping, they used recycled water.

Frei Otto

Architects began to recognize this new concept oflandscaping. A palace housing the diplomatic club waswhere architects encapsulated an oasis. The rest of thedesert was left as it had been before. Tents by Frei Otto,a German architect, provided gathering places.

Midwest Technical University is the second project.A vast land, it was given to establish the first Americanuniversity in Turkey. The government at that time allocatedthe land, which was larger than the settlement area ofAnkara. The president of the university planted thirty-three million trees as guards to protect the land.

Hasan Fathy

Sustainability is a technology that comes from with-in. Hasan Fathy said, “You don’t build on a site; you build of the site.” From Arctic regions to the deserts, there werealways materials for people to build habitats, whetherigloos, mud or bricks.

Recycling of the resources of the building were bytwo Norwegian architects.They were second-year students.They volunteered to the Christian missionaries to build ahospital for lepers in India. Material was recuperated bydemolishing buildings.They built a hospital for a populationwhich was outcast by society.

Panel 2Dr. Suha Ozkan

ChairmanWorld ArchitectureCommunityThe Aga Khan Awards:Tradition vs Innovation

Another project came from Mauritania in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Kaedi Hospital was formed from thevalues of the culture itself. In societies in the south, thepatients don’t die from the disease that they have, they diefrom the excessive care of visitors. This particular hospitalallowed only doctors and patients. Visitors camp and staythere as long as they want, but the hospital is a sterilespace only for caregivers and patients.

Fabrizio Carola

This was also done with the technology of castinghalf-baked bricks with pressurized equipment. The archi-tect, Fabrizio Carola, also used his architectural masteryto generate the novel expressions of architecture underthese limited conditions. It was a real hospital, not a clinic.

This UNESCO project is for an agricultural trainingcenter in Senegal, where the desert sand is made intobricks and, in turn, into architecture. This is a school whichwas designed by the only educated person in the village,the son of the chief who then became an architect.Everything that happened in his life was due to his educa-tion. His simple school has three bands: one protects thebuilding from the flood; the other protects the buildingfrom rain, and the elevated roof provides insulation. Theroof also acts as a sound barrier against rainfall. In themiddle, there are classrooms and in the garden kids learnhow to grow plants. The simple plan allows three class-rooms, and the common space in between can be used forrecesses. It has double-shell seating system which allowsthe building to be cooled by natural forces.

Sand

Nader Khalili said that sand is the most availablematerial. He said that if we can put the sand into tubes of either jute or plastic (photos right), then we can roll itaround and build. These were seismic-proof shelters. Theywere built by students in California and tested as the pro-totypes in Siberia, Africa, and Iran. They’re covered withplaster from inside and outside. It’s labor intensive but the material cost is nil.

Balkrishna Doshi, an associate of Le Corbusier andLouis Kahn, gave his heart to the poor. Doshy said if we cangive whatever is needed in the most deprived conditions,then people can do their shelters as they like. The jury saidthat the world-class architect lending his signature to thepoorest of the poor was on its own applaudable. Doshy’sproject is a multi-cultural, multi-faith community. Thisneighborhood will become a major part of the city.

Muhammad Yunus

Three days ago the leader of this project, MuhammadYunus won the Nobel Peace Prize. It was in 1987 when I heard that someone, by providing micro-credit, built70,000 rural houses which were cyclone-proof. I went tosee it with my own eyes. It was true. The maximum credit

given was $300, just to get them to have six columns andtop sheeting material against rain. The rest of the materialwas local. Muhammad Yunus, with the micro-creditprocess, accomplished this. We gave him the award in1989, and he said if you ask for credit, if you ask for collat-eral, that’s not credit. How can you give credit to people forbeing human beings? He established a mechanism whereten people write for each other. They get the credit andthey pay collectively.

In Hyderabad, Pakistan, the land is owned by thepublic.The government agency calls it Incremental Housing.All they want is for the people to make their commitmentto urban life. They come with their belongings, their family.They camp here for two weeks.They see if they’re genuinelycommitted to urban life or not. Then they are given a plotof land and the facilities to do weaving or tailoring or carpentry. Then they improve their shacks into houses.

The Aga KhanAward, previouslyadministered bySuha Ozkan, some-times highlightsMuslim vernaculararchitecture. Thesand houses wereactually designedby Nader Khalilifrom Cal-EarthInstitute.

37 Institute for Urban Design36 Suha Ozkan

I shall be talking about the Aga Khan Award forArchitecture, where I spent twenty-five years as the exec-utive of this award. Among values for selection are culturalidentity, climate, public participation and co-existence ofcultures, races, faiths. Recycling of resources, protectionof the environment, regeneration of nature, poverty alleviation and more equitable distribution of financialresources are values reflected in winning projects.

100 Projects in 30 Years

Around these values we have selected, over the last thirty years, one hundred projects. I shall give you an anthology of projects that highlight sustainability.

Landscapes are where most of the damage to theenvironment has been done. The first project is from oneof the most prosperous countries, Saudi Arabia. They werebuilding a new diplomatic quarter. The client said that inorder to stop the dust and the sand, you don’t do lawns.Youuse boulders. As they were pushing water into the sand tomake it green, he said that’s not sustainable. German con-sultants persuaded the client that plants don’t die. Theycan be regenerated. They saved tons of desert sand fromdifferent places to the finest grain. They put the finestgrain into incubators. In the course of a year, they regener-ated two hundred unknown species. These species werethe species which resisted desertification over centuries,as the desert was flowing in. They have proliferated theseplants and used them as landscaping. For the intensivesupport of landscaping, they used recycled water.

Frei Otto

Architects began to recognize this new concept oflandscaping. A palace housing the diplomatic club waswhere architects encapsulated an oasis. The rest of thedesert was left as it had been before. Tents by Frei Otto,a German architect, provided gathering places.

Midwest Technical University is the second project.A vast land, it was given to establish the first Americanuniversity in Turkey. The government at that time allocatedthe land, which was larger than the settlement area ofAnkara. The president of the university planted thirty-three million trees as guards to protect the land.

Hasan Fathy

Sustainability is a technology that comes from with-in. Hasan Fathy said, “You don’t build on a site; you build of the site.” From Arctic regions to the deserts, there werealways materials for people to build habitats, whetherigloos, mud or bricks.

Recycling of the resources of the building were bytwo Norwegian architects.They were second-year students.They volunteered to the Christian missionaries to build ahospital for lepers in India. Material was recuperated bydemolishing buildings.They built a hospital for a populationwhich was outcast by society.

Panel 2Dr. Suha Ozkan

ChairmanWorld ArchitectureCommunityThe Aga Khan Awards:Tradition vs Innovation

Another project came from Mauritania in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Kaedi Hospital was formed from thevalues of the culture itself. In societies in the south, thepatients don’t die from the disease that they have, they diefrom the excessive care of visitors. This particular hospitalallowed only doctors and patients. Visitors camp and staythere as long as they want, but the hospital is a sterilespace only for caregivers and patients.

Fabrizio Carola

This was also done with the technology of castinghalf-baked bricks with pressurized equipment. The archi-tect, Fabrizio Carola, also used his architectural masteryto generate the novel expressions of architecture underthese limited conditions. It was a real hospital, not a clinic.

This UNESCO project is for an agricultural trainingcenter in Senegal, where the desert sand is made intobricks and, in turn, into architecture. This is a school whichwas designed by the only educated person in the village,the son of the chief who then became an architect.Everything that happened in his life was due to his educa-tion. His simple school has three bands: one protects thebuilding from the flood; the other protects the buildingfrom rain, and the elevated roof provides insulation. Theroof also acts as a sound barrier against rainfall. In themiddle, there are classrooms and in the garden kids learnhow to grow plants. The simple plan allows three class-rooms, and the common space in between can be used forrecesses. It has double-shell seating system which allowsthe building to be cooled by natural forces.

Sand

Nader Khalili said that sand is the most availablematerial. He said that if we can put the sand into tubes of either jute or plastic (photos right), then we can roll itaround and build. These were seismic-proof shelters. Theywere built by students in California and tested as the pro-totypes in Siberia, Africa, and Iran. They’re covered withplaster from inside and outside. It’s labor intensive but the material cost is nil.

Balkrishna Doshi, an associate of Le Corbusier andLouis Kahn, gave his heart to the poor. Doshy said if we cangive whatever is needed in the most deprived conditions,then people can do their shelters as they like. The jury saidthat the world-class architect lending his signature to thepoorest of the poor was on its own applaudable. Doshy’sproject is a multi-cultural, multi-faith community. Thisneighborhood will become a major part of the city.

Muhammad Yunus

Three days ago the leader of this project, MuhammadYunus won the Nobel Peace Prize. It was in 1987 when I heard that someone, by providing micro-credit, built70,000 rural houses which were cyclone-proof. I went tosee it with my own eyes. It was true. The maximum credit

given was $300, just to get them to have six columns andtop sheeting material against rain. The rest of the materialwas local. Muhammad Yunus, with the micro-creditprocess, accomplished this. We gave him the award in1989, and he said if you ask for credit, if you ask for collat-eral, that’s not credit. How can you give credit to people forbeing human beings? He established a mechanism whereten people write for each other. They get the credit andthey pay collectively.

In Hyderabad, Pakistan, the land is owned by thepublic.The government agency calls it Incremental Housing.All they want is for the people to make their commitmentto urban life. They come with their belongings, their family.They camp here for two weeks.They see if they’re genuinelycommitted to urban life or not. Then they are given a plotof land and the facilities to do weaving or tailoring or carpentry. Then they improve their shacks into houses.

The Aga KhanAward, previouslyadministered bySuha Ozkan, some-times highlightsMuslim vernaculararchitecture. Thesand houses wereactually designedby Nader Khalilifrom Cal-EarthInstitute.

39 Institute for Urban Design38 Diane Diacon

I’ve been asked to talk about sustainable urban projectsthe B.S.H.F. has identified through our World HabitatAward competition. Four projects around the world illus-trate different contexts and settings. Those projects are in South Africa, Sweden, the United States and Pakistan.The three key elements of urban sustainability include management of existing areas, limiting environmental foot-prints, and reducing poverty. It is about making the urbanenvironment more livable for the poor because theyhaven’t got the money to make choices.

Johannesburg: Crime and Grime

The World Habitat Awards are now in their 21st year,and they continue to identify housing projects that areinnovative, sustainable and capable of being transferred.The first project is the Johannesburg Housing Company,established in 1995 at the start of the post-Apartheid gov-ernment. Prior to this, in all the cities of South Africa, therehas been spiraling decline in the city center, as people andbusiness fled to the suburbs. Empty buildings in the citycenter were taken over by slum landlords. They becamecenters of extortion, crime, and widespread urban derelic-tion. “Crime and grime” they call it.

The company purchases and renovates abandonedbuildings and builds new developments on brownfield sites.Today they provide over 3,000 apartments. That’s home for 9,000 people of very low income. They have a goodmanagement and maintenance record. Their buildings areclean, well managed, and above all safe.

Panel 2Diane Diacon

PresidentBuilding and SocialHousing FoundationLeicestershireU.K.Foundation Award Program Encourages Better Housing For The Poor

In some instances, they’ve now got twenty or twenty-five urban blocks redeveloped. Some of those are locatedin very similar areas. In those areas, they’re able to worktogether with other property owners to help transform the whole urban area, not just their individual blocks. Thehouses here are from Hillborough where there has been a50 percent increase in the price of property in the last twoyears. Business is coming back. It’s possible to walk downthe street.

They’re also concerned to minimize the environ-mental footprint of the properties. All the refurbishedproperties have strong energy conservation measures.Theproperty, built on brownfield sites, is built to high environ-mental standards, and in some cases have solar panels.With homes close to the city center, low-income workersno longer have to make long journeys in from the town-ships outside of the city. That’s saving time, transportationcosts, and reducing pollution. Just because you’re poor,you don’t have to live in poor-quality housing.

The organization also challenges poverty andinequality, giving children a chance to catch up andimprove their education. That’s important in addressingthe Apartheid geography in South Africa. Setting up soccerleagues for young people, competitions between the different apartment blocks. Small children play football or soccer. They run around like bees, here, there and every-where. But the older youngsters are learning a wide rangeof skills. It’s about team playing, it’s about strategy, tactics,coordinating. What’s happening now, particularly in thiscity, is that life has been brought back into it. People areliving here. Businesses are returning. Tax income is goingup. The city is beginning to reinvest. The crime and grimeare being addressed.The Johannesburg Housing Company’sonly regret is that it didn’t buy more property when it wasdirt cheap.

Gothenberg

The second project is different. We’re in Sweden now, a large estate on the edge of Gothenberg, altogether2700 properties, large-scale, built in the 1970s using aconcrete-panel construction system. Within a few years, itwas suffering urban decay, high levels of crime, alienation,poor maintenance, high unemployment. The dwellingswere expensive to heat because of their constructionmethod, and it became used as a sink estate, providinghome for immigrants, as the local people no longer wantedto live there.The housing company had wanted to demolishit. But they worked with an architect who was convincedthat refurbishment of those properties would be moresustainable.

They started with improving the physical environment,the buildings, and transportation links to the city center,in-filling of void spaces on the ground floor for large blocksto provide community greenhouses. Not only communitygreenhouses — these became like community centers.

Because it’s in Sweden, a cold climate, and a strongethos around environmental improvement, an important

element was minimizing the environmental footprint. Highlevels of insulation were included and heat recirculationsystems. There’s been a 40 percent reduction in energy anda 60 percent reduction in water usage during the last fiveyears since the refurbishment was completed. It includescomposting and waste recycling. The tenants understandexactly what’s happening.

Equally important was bringing about social sustain-ability. A third of the properties have been empty, and theother two-thirds no one wanted to live in. Now they’ve gota waiting list. Existing residents were involved throughoutthe process in the redesign of the estate and the redesignof their apartments. There’s now a 50/50 balance of localpeople and immigrant people, with good relations.

Atlanta

This third project is in a low-income area three milesfrom downtown Atlanta. This was a greenfield site of about18 hectares. It had planning permission for 62 dwellings,but a progressive developer and architect came together topioneer a much more sustainable urban form of develop-ment, rather than have the low-density urban sprawl typi-cal of Atlanta. Instead of using the whole amount of landfor housing, they allocated under half of it for housing, andthe remainder was kept for community agriculture, greenopen space and woodland. They were building to a muchhigher density. The project met six of the seven of AtlantaRegional Commission’s Smart Growth criteria: green spacepreservation, compact design, walkability, range of housingopportunities, growth in existing communities, and trans-portation choices. It was a mixed income scheme, and it’spart of a much larger urban renewal program involvingunprecedented cooperation between the government,private enterprise, and neighborhood associations. TheCommunity Agriculture group runs a vegetable-growingprogram. There are links with the neighborhood, and theseare treasured. This project shows how you can do thingsdifferently on a greenfield site, in the American context.

Inner city areasin Johannesburgare revitalizedwith newbuildings onbrownfield sites.Some 3,000affordable homesfor 9,000 low-income residentsutilize energyconservationmeasures andrenewable energy systems.

The UK’s Building and Social HousingFoundation issued a citation forEast LakeCommons, a low-income site

three miles outside Atlanta,Georgia in partbecause more than half of thesite is devotedto communityagriculture.

39 Institute for Urban Design38 Diane Diacon

I’ve been asked to talk about sustainable urban projectsthe B.S.H.F. has identified through our World HabitatAward competition. Four projects around the world illus-trate different contexts and settings. Those projects are in South Africa, Sweden, the United States and Pakistan.The three key elements of urban sustainability include management of existing areas, limiting environmental foot-prints, and reducing poverty. It is about making the urbanenvironment more livable for the poor because theyhaven’t got the money to make choices.

Johannesburg: Crime and Grime

The World Habitat Awards are now in their 21st year,and they continue to identify housing projects that areinnovative, sustainable and capable of being transferred.The first project is the Johannesburg Housing Company,established in 1995 at the start of the post-Apartheid gov-ernment. Prior to this, in all the cities of South Africa, therehas been spiraling decline in the city center, as people andbusiness fled to the suburbs. Empty buildings in the citycenter were taken over by slum landlords. They becamecenters of extortion, crime, and widespread urban derelic-tion. “Crime and grime” they call it.

The company purchases and renovates abandonedbuildings and builds new developments on brownfield sites.Today they provide over 3,000 apartments. That’s home for 9,000 people of very low income. They have a goodmanagement and maintenance record. Their buildings areclean, well managed, and above all safe.

Panel 2Diane Diacon

PresidentBuilding and SocialHousing FoundationLeicestershireU.K.Foundation Award Program Encourages Better Housing For The Poor

In some instances, they’ve now got twenty or twenty-five urban blocks redeveloped. Some of those are locatedin very similar areas. In those areas, they’re able to worktogether with other property owners to help transform the whole urban area, not just their individual blocks. Thehouses here are from Hillborough where there has been a50 percent increase in the price of property in the last twoyears. Business is coming back. It’s possible to walk downthe street.

They’re also concerned to minimize the environ-mental footprint of the properties. All the refurbishedproperties have strong energy conservation measures.Theproperty, built on brownfield sites, is built to high environ-mental standards, and in some cases have solar panels.With homes close to the city center, low-income workersno longer have to make long journeys in from the town-ships outside of the city. That’s saving time, transportationcosts, and reducing pollution. Just because you’re poor,you don’t have to live in poor-quality housing.

The organization also challenges poverty andinequality, giving children a chance to catch up andimprove their education. That’s important in addressingthe Apartheid geography in South Africa. Setting up soccerleagues for young people, competitions between the different apartment blocks. Small children play football or soccer. They run around like bees, here, there and every-where. But the older youngsters are learning a wide rangeof skills. It’s about team playing, it’s about strategy, tactics,coordinating. What’s happening now, particularly in thiscity, is that life has been brought back into it. People areliving here. Businesses are returning. Tax income is goingup. The city is beginning to reinvest. The crime and grimeare being addressed.The Johannesburg Housing Company’sonly regret is that it didn’t buy more property when it wasdirt cheap.

Gothenberg

The second project is different. We’re in Sweden now, a large estate on the edge of Gothenberg, altogether2700 properties, large-scale, built in the 1970s using aconcrete-panel construction system. Within a few years, itwas suffering urban decay, high levels of crime, alienation,poor maintenance, high unemployment. The dwellingswere expensive to heat because of their constructionmethod, and it became used as a sink estate, providinghome for immigrants, as the local people no longer wantedto live there.The housing company had wanted to demolishit. But they worked with an architect who was convincedthat refurbishment of those properties would be moresustainable.

They started with improving the physical environment,the buildings, and transportation links to the city center,in-filling of void spaces on the ground floor for large blocksto provide community greenhouses. Not only communitygreenhouses — these became like community centers.

Because it’s in Sweden, a cold climate, and a strongethos around environmental improvement, an important

element was minimizing the environmental footprint. Highlevels of insulation were included and heat recirculationsystems. There’s been a 40 percent reduction in energy anda 60 percent reduction in water usage during the last fiveyears since the refurbishment was completed. It includescomposting and waste recycling. The tenants understandexactly what’s happening.

Equally important was bringing about social sustain-ability. A third of the properties have been empty, and theother two-thirds no one wanted to live in. Now they’ve gota waiting list. Existing residents were involved throughoutthe process in the redesign of the estate and the redesignof their apartments. There’s now a 50/50 balance of localpeople and immigrant people, with good relations.

Atlanta

This third project is in a low-income area three milesfrom downtown Atlanta. This was a greenfield site of about18 hectares. It had planning permission for 62 dwellings,but a progressive developer and architect came together topioneer a much more sustainable urban form of develop-ment, rather than have the low-density urban sprawl typi-cal of Atlanta. Instead of using the whole amount of landfor housing, they allocated under half of it for housing, andthe remainder was kept for community agriculture, greenopen space and woodland. They were building to a muchhigher density. The project met six of the seven of AtlantaRegional Commission’s Smart Growth criteria: green spacepreservation, compact design, walkability, range of housingopportunities, growth in existing communities, and trans-portation choices. It was a mixed income scheme, and it’spart of a much larger urban renewal program involvingunprecedented cooperation between the government,private enterprise, and neighborhood associations. TheCommunity Agriculture group runs a vegetable-growingprogram. There are links with the neighborhood, and theseare treasured. This project shows how you can do thingsdifferently on a greenfield site, in the American context.

Inner city areasin Johannesburgare revitalizedwith newbuildings onbrownfield sites.Some 3,000affordable homesfor 9,000 low-income residentsutilize energyconservationmeasures andrenewable energy systems.

The UK’s Building and Social HousingFoundation issued a citation forEast LakeCommons, a low-income site

three miles outside Atlanta,Georgia in partbecause more than half of thesite is devotedto communityagriculture.

41 Institute for Urban Design40 Diane Diacon

Pakistan’s Home to One Million

My last project, from Pakistan, is a large informalsettlement — home to over a million people. It’s been there for thirty years but had no physical infrastructure.This project is an example of how a local community was mobilized to improve the urban environment. No one else was going to do it for them, or pay for it for them. These aretypical problems of informal settlements that have grownup on the edge of cities in countries in the global south.One in three people in the world live in places like this.Sanitation is lacking, roads hardly exist, poor water supply,no solid waste collection at all.

Orangi Pilot Project

What the Orangi Pilot Project did was talk to thecommunities. It found out what they wanted. What theyfound it wanted was good sanitation. It provided training in how to lay piped water and sewage systems. Although it provided the training, the work and the cost was metby the local communities themselves. Altogether five hun-dred kilometers of underground sanitation have been laid.Over 100,000 homes have an indoor toilet, and people areproud of these toilets. It makes a very real difference tothe way they live. It’s a cleaner and healthier environment.People are now investing in their homes.

They’re planting trees. They’re installing electriclights. They’re clearing away the solid waste, all on theirown initiative and at their own expenses. So the reputationof the area has improved. Having an indoor toilet nowappears on marriage lists, and that’s a real indicator thatwhat you’re doing has gone into the culture of society andexpectations are raised. There’s a future for this place now,and for the people living in it.

Barefoot Architects

Giving people an opportunity to earn an income is crucial to addressing inequalities. Training is given in building methods and design so that local people have theskills to address some of their problems. Young men aretrained as “barefoot architects”. They can provide low-costadvice to people wanting to improve their homes. Trainingis given in how to build better and more efficient blocks,so the houses don’t crack and degenerate. The lesson hereis that the residents are a resource in any process of urbanregeneration. It can only be sustainable if it puts people at the center of that process. It’s important for urbandesigners to recognize the value of that resource and todraw upon it.

East Lake CommonsConservationCommunity,located 3 milesfrom downtownAtlanta, is anew developmentfor mixed tenureand income groups.It utilizescompact design,community agricultureand greenspaceto reduce itsecologicalfootprint.

Response

Andrew WhalleyGrimshaw Architects, NY

I lead the Grimshaw practice here in New York as well as write for Architecture on sustainability.In a few generations we are going from a ruralplanet to a deeply urbanized planet where themajority in another generation will be living in cities. At the moment that’s a great problem,because they’re unsustainable, using vastamounts of the world’s resources. Yet it shouldbe an opportunity for a solution. If these citiesare only occupying two percent of the planet’ssurface, it should be a great design opportunity.The challenge is how do you create a life-enriching urban fabric, yet dense and efficient?Forty percent of the population are in China and India, so these services have to be tackledquite early on. Yet in a way it’s an easier solutionbecause it’s set against a background of rampant economic and technological advance.Perhaps designing a new type of city in China,outside Shanghai, is an easier task than doing itin Africa, a much tougher economic climate.

41 Institute for Urban Design40 Diane Diacon

Pakistan’s Home to One Million

My last project, from Pakistan, is a large informalsettlement — home to over a million people. It’s been there for thirty years but had no physical infrastructure.This project is an example of how a local community was mobilized to improve the urban environment. No one else was going to do it for them, or pay for it for them. These aretypical problems of informal settlements that have grownup on the edge of cities in countries in the global south.One in three people in the world live in places like this.Sanitation is lacking, roads hardly exist, poor water supply,no solid waste collection at all.

Orangi Pilot Project

What the Orangi Pilot Project did was talk to thecommunities. It found out what they wanted. What theyfound it wanted was good sanitation. It provided training in how to lay piped water and sewage systems. Although it provided the training, the work and the cost was metby the local communities themselves. Altogether five hun-dred kilometers of underground sanitation have been laid.Over 100,000 homes have an indoor toilet, and people areproud of these toilets. It makes a very real difference tothe way they live. It’s a cleaner and healthier environment.People are now investing in their homes.

They’re planting trees. They’re installing electriclights. They’re clearing away the solid waste, all on theirown initiative and at their own expenses. So the reputationof the area has improved. Having an indoor toilet nowappears on marriage lists, and that’s a real indicator thatwhat you’re doing has gone into the culture of society andexpectations are raised. There’s a future for this place now,and for the people living in it.

Barefoot Architects

Giving people an opportunity to earn an income is crucial to addressing inequalities. Training is given in building methods and design so that local people have theskills to address some of their problems. Young men aretrained as “barefoot architects”. They can provide low-costadvice to people wanting to improve their homes. Trainingis given in how to build better and more efficient blocks,so the houses don’t crack and degenerate. The lesson hereis that the residents are a resource in any process of urbanregeneration. It can only be sustainable if it puts people at the center of that process. It’s important for urbandesigners to recognize the value of that resource and todraw upon it.

East Lake CommonsConservationCommunity,located 3 milesfrom downtownAtlanta, is anew developmentfor mixed tenureand income groups.It utilizescompact design,community agricultureand greenspaceto reduce itsecologicalfootprint.

Response

Andrew WhalleyGrimshaw Architects, NY

I lead the Grimshaw practice here in New York as well as write for Architecture on sustainability.In a few generations we are going from a ruralplanet to a deeply urbanized planet where themajority in another generation will be living in cities. At the moment that’s a great problem,because they’re unsustainable, using vastamounts of the world’s resources. Yet it shouldbe an opportunity for a solution. If these citiesare only occupying two percent of the planet’ssurface, it should be a great design opportunity.The challenge is how do you create a life-enriching urban fabric, yet dense and efficient?Forty percent of the population are in China and India, so these services have to be tackledquite early on. Yet in a way it’s an easier solutionbecause it’s set against a background of rampant economic and technological advance.Perhaps designing a new type of city in China,outside Shanghai, is an easier task than doing itin Africa, a much tougher economic climate.

43 Institute for Urban Design42 Sustainable Cities

Panel 3Tonomori Matsuo

PresidentToyo UniversityTokyoWater ConservationThrough Reuse in Tokyo

The definition of sustainable development was first givenin the report of the World Commission on Environment andDevelopment (WCED) of United Nations in 1987. The reportsaid that sustainable development is development thatmeets the needs of the present without compromising theability of future generations to meet their own needs.

The concept of sustainable development is charac-terized by time-dependent characteristics and time-dependent changes in population and economic growth.Deterioration of living and global environments come to beessential factors to be considered. Japanese experiencesin GDP growth, energy consumption, CO2 emission for 50years and in wastewater reuse systems for preservation of river basins in the Tokyo Metropolitan area provide lessons for other cities.

After the world oil crises in 1973, the Japanese econ-omy experienced GDP growth without any increase in pri-mary energy consumption and CO2 emission. This showedthat the energy efficiency of Japanese society in total waswell improved very rapidly by the advancement of energyefficiency in industries and in people’s life style. In spite of these experiences, Japanese energy consumption andCO2 emission are now increasing again.

Tokyo Metropolitan government introduced treatedwastewater reuse systems in 1964 to compensate theindustrial water supply from underground water, and to stop over pumping of underground water. The treatedwastewater reused for toilets in high rise office and governmental buildings has progressed to reduce theunnecessary development of large dams in the mountainarea and to preserve natural ecosystems. Now many purposes of treated wastewater reuse systems have beenintroduced in the Tokyo Metropolitan area.

The Shiodomedistrict in Tokyouses reclaimedwater in allof its toilets.

Panel 3

Tokyo Leads inWater Conservationand NeighborhoodDesign

United NationsUN-HabitatNew York

10.18.2006

43 Institute for Urban Design42 Sustainable Cities

Panel 3Tonomori Matsuo

PresidentToyo UniversityTokyoWater ConservationThrough Reuse in Tokyo

The definition of sustainable development was first givenin the report of the World Commission on Environment andDevelopment (WCED) of United Nations in 1987. The reportsaid that sustainable development is development thatmeets the needs of the present without compromising theability of future generations to meet their own needs.

The concept of sustainable development is charac-terized by time-dependent characteristics and time-dependent changes in population and economic growth.Deterioration of living and global environments come to beessential factors to be considered. Japanese experiencesin GDP growth, energy consumption, CO2 emission for 50years and in wastewater reuse systems for preservation of river basins in the Tokyo Metropolitan area provide lessons for other cities.

After the world oil crises in 1973, the Japanese econ-omy experienced GDP growth without any increase in pri-mary energy consumption and CO2 emission. This showedthat the energy efficiency of Japanese society in total waswell improved very rapidly by the advancement of energyefficiency in industries and in people’s life style. In spite of these experiences, Japanese energy consumption andCO2 emission are now increasing again.

Tokyo Metropolitan government introduced treatedwastewater reuse systems in 1964 to compensate theindustrial water supply from underground water, and to stop over pumping of underground water. The treatedwastewater reused for toilets in high rise office and governmental buildings has progressed to reduce theunnecessary development of large dams in the mountainarea and to preserve natural ecosystems. Now many purposes of treated wastewater reuse systems have beenintroduced in the Tokyo Metropolitan area.

The Shiodomedistrict in Tokyouses reclaimedwater in allof its toilets.

Panel 3

Tokyo Leads inWater Conservationand NeighborhoodDesign

United NationsUN-HabitatNew York

10.18.2006

45 Institute for Urban Design44 Junichiro Okata

Panel 3Dr. Junichiro Okata

Urban PlanningTokyo UniversityTokyo Community BasedImprovement of Informal Urban Space

In Tokyo, around a half of the inner urban area is informallydeveloped vulnerable urban space. As so-called ‘scrap and build redevelopment’ could not be introduced for various reasons, local municipalities and local residents started an incremental environmental improvement pro-gram that was fiscally supported by national and prefec-ture governments.

The local community association established a‘Machi-Zukuri’ (community based urban improvement)plan. The local government controls development in thearea by a consultation procedure. It supports cooperativerebuilding of small apartment houses, renovation of existing housing, and improved public spaces includingwidening of narrow streets and creation of pocket parks.The effectiveness of this approach depends on the locationand the basic characteristics of each district. In a residen-tial infrastructure changed the image of the district,attracted new young residents, and stimulated an arealocated at the western part of Tokyo called Taishido district.

The improvement of public space changed the imageof the district, attracted new young residents, and stimu-lated a development market for apartment houses. Thus a gentrification process moved on. On the other hand,in a residential— industrial mixed-use area, such as the Kyo-Jima district, the improvement of public space andthe development of public housing did not attract new residents nor private investment for rebuilding. In thesedistricts, another approach is necessary that promotessocial activities and local culture, demonstrates thatanother urban life style is emerging, and thus promote thevitality of the community and attracts new residents andinvestments. Not only the urban design of public space but also the design of social activities is important for theimprovement of vulnerable urban areas.

Below:Wooden houses,narrow roads and insufficientopen space makeTokyo vulnerableto fire spread.

A typical urbanrenewal programbased on theland readjustmentsystem: Studiedfor the recon-struction of anarea devastatedby an earthquake.

Left:The rebirth of pedestrian and stream sidewalks.

45 Institute for Urban Design44 Junichiro Okata

Panel 3Dr. Junichiro Okata

Urban PlanningTokyo UniversityTokyo Community BasedImprovement of Informal Urban Space

In Tokyo, around a half of the inner urban area is informallydeveloped vulnerable urban space. As so-called ‘scrap and build redevelopment’ could not be introduced for various reasons, local municipalities and local residents started an incremental environmental improvement pro-gram that was fiscally supported by national and prefec-ture governments.

The local community association established a‘Machi-Zukuri’ (community based urban improvement)plan. The local government controls development in thearea by a consultation procedure. It supports cooperativerebuilding of small apartment houses, renovation of existing housing, and improved public spaces includingwidening of narrow streets and creation of pocket parks.The effectiveness of this approach depends on the locationand the basic characteristics of each district. In a residen-tial infrastructure changed the image of the district,attracted new young residents, and stimulated an arealocated at the western part of Tokyo called Taishido district.

The improvement of public space changed the imageof the district, attracted new young residents, and stimu-lated a development market for apartment houses. Thus a gentrification process moved on. On the other hand,in a residential— industrial mixed-use area, such as the Kyo-Jima district, the improvement of public space andthe development of public housing did not attract new residents nor private investment for rebuilding. In thesedistricts, another approach is necessary that promotessocial activities and local culture, demonstrates thatanother urban life style is emerging, and thus promote thevitality of the community and attracts new residents andinvestments. Not only the urban design of public space but also the design of social activities is important for theimprovement of vulnerable urban areas.

Below:Wooden houses,narrow roads and insufficientopen space makeTokyo vulnerableto fire spread.

A typical urbanrenewal programbased on theland readjustmentsystem: Studiedfor the recon-struction of anarea devastatedby an earthquake.

Left:The rebirth of pedestrian and stream sidewalks.

47 Institute for Urban Design46 Sustainable Cities

The vitality of the city is crucial to the success of democ-racy itself: the city remains a pre-eminent medium ofcommunity, interaction, difference and accountancy.

Although it seems counter-intuitive, New York Statehas been ranked second in the U.S. (after balmy Hawaii) in its efficient use of energy. This situation is due to a single circumstance: the high rates of public transportationuse in New York City, greater by far than anyplace else inthe country. That such a single factor should — in a placeof demanding climate and profligate consumption — be so influential is hugely suggestive. Urban sustainabilityrequires acting at appropriate scales.

This doesn’t come easily. Voluntarism is endemic,the result of national policies that are unconcerned withthe fate of the planet. The stupidity and selfishness of theU.S. regime is a special embarrassment: we lead the worldboth in producing greenhouse gasses and in refusing to do anything about them. This bizarre state of denial is notsimply the result of triumphant neo-liberal political econ-omy or the more direct corruptions of Bush family cozinesswith the petroleum industry but speaks to larger culturaldivides in America. These can, at least in part, be traced tothe origins of the environmental movement as an elementof the counter-cultural coalescence of the sixties, itselfstrongly figured historically by both a spiritualized idea ofthe natural that favored an attitude of sublime withdrawaland by the sense of boundlessness inculcated by the appar-ent infinity of the frontier. The national psyche remainsunequipped to deal with the idea of scarcity and ourimperial affect is a direct result.

Drastic Measures

The small is beautiful position that logically charac-terizes so much of the discourse of environment has, as a result, meant that the movement for green architectureand urbanism has, true to its origins, been largely preoccu-pied with the power of individuals, with thinking modestly.The literature — and to a lesser degree, the environment —abounds with examples of buildings that seek to conserveenergy and to achieve higher levels of environmental auton-omy, with indispensable models of modesty. The paradox isthat although we must all cultivate such styles of behavior,the problems are absolutely massive. It has, for example,been estimated that an immediate 70 percent reduction in greenhouse emissions would simply stabilize the globalwarming process at present elevated levels. Drastic meas-ures are required and we must act locally and globally.

Ecological Footprint: Los Angeles/Peru

One of the most succinct measures of the place ofcities in the global environment and of their self-relianceis the so-called “ecological footprint.” This is no more thana convention for calculating the area of a city (or a buildingor a person) in terms of the totality of the resources it con-sumes, but — in its representational directness — it hasthe power to dramatically change normative conceptual-

Michael Sorkin

DirectorUrban Design ProgramCUNYFormulary for a Sustainable Urbanism

Conclusion

Green Urbanism

United NationsUN-HabitatNew York

10.18.2006

47 Institute for Urban Design46 Sustainable Cities

The vitality of the city is crucial to the success of democ-racy itself: the city remains a pre-eminent medium ofcommunity, interaction, difference and accountancy.

Although it seems counter-intuitive, New York Statehas been ranked second in the U.S. (after balmy Hawaii) in its efficient use of energy. This situation is due to a single circumstance: the high rates of public transportationuse in New York City, greater by far than anyplace else inthe country. That such a single factor should — in a placeof demanding climate and profligate consumption — be so influential is hugely suggestive. Urban sustainabilityrequires acting at appropriate scales.

This doesn’t come easily. Voluntarism is endemic,the result of national policies that are unconcerned withthe fate of the planet. The stupidity and selfishness of theU.S. regime is a special embarrassment: we lead the worldboth in producing greenhouse gasses and in refusing to do anything about them. This bizarre state of denial is notsimply the result of triumphant neo-liberal political econ-omy or the more direct corruptions of Bush family cozinesswith the petroleum industry but speaks to larger culturaldivides in America. These can, at least in part, be traced tothe origins of the environmental movement as an elementof the counter-cultural coalescence of the sixties, itselfstrongly figured historically by both a spiritualized idea ofthe natural that favored an attitude of sublime withdrawaland by the sense of boundlessness inculcated by the appar-ent infinity of the frontier. The national psyche remainsunequipped to deal with the idea of scarcity and ourimperial affect is a direct result.

Drastic Measures

The small is beautiful position that logically charac-terizes so much of the discourse of environment has, as a result, meant that the movement for green architectureand urbanism has, true to its origins, been largely preoccu-pied with the power of individuals, with thinking modestly.The literature — and to a lesser degree, the environment —abounds with examples of buildings that seek to conserveenergy and to achieve higher levels of environmental auton-omy, with indispensable models of modesty. The paradox isthat although we must all cultivate such styles of behavior,the problems are absolutely massive. It has, for example,been estimated that an immediate 70 percent reduction in greenhouse emissions would simply stabilize the globalwarming process at present elevated levels. Drastic meas-ures are required and we must act locally and globally.

Ecological Footprint: Los Angeles /Peru

One of the most succinct measures of the place ofcities in the global environment and of their self-relianceis the so-called “ecological footprint.” This is no more thana convention for calculating the area of a city (or a buildingor a person) in terms of the totality of the resources it con-sumes, but — in its representational directness — it hasthe power to dramatically change normative conceptual-

Michael Sorkin

DirectorUrban Design ProgramCUNYFormulary for a Sustainable Urbanism

Conclusion

Green Urbanism

United NationsUN-HabitatNew York

10.18.2006

49 Institute for Urban Design48 Michael Sorkin

izations of the urban. Unlike a political boundary or even astandard metropolitan statistical area, an ecological foot-print does not simply measure the extent of contiguousconurbation or administrative control. Rather, it seeks toquantify just how much of the earth a city requires to sus-tain itself. This includes inventories of such resources asfood, oxygen, water, CO2 uptake, energy and raw materials.A variety of more or less credible algorithms are availableto convert these quantities into areas and the results canbe mind-bending. By one set of calculations, the ecologi-cal footprint of Los Angeles is equivalent to the total areaof Peru!

This has a number of deep implications for urbanism.First, footprinting suggests that we must think of cities ina way that exceeds their immediate territories. Footprintingvividly reveals how cities function globally, given the longdistances their resources are obliged to travel and the distant victims of urban effluent. To cite one tiny example,moving a kiwi from New Zealand to London produces fivetimes the weight of the kiwi in greenhouse gasses, anexchange that might give one pause at breakfast time. Thecalories consumed in transporting a head of lettuce fromCalifornia to New York are about thirty-six times thoseavailable nutritionally eating the head.

Clearly, if all cities shared the habits of consumptiontypical of Los Angeles (or New York or Tokyo), the surfaceof the planet today would be insufficient to supply themall with the means of life. According to a 1997 calculationby Matthias Wackernagl, the United States as a whole hasa capacity of around 18 million square miles but a totalfootprint of close to 50 million.This is the very definition ofthe unsustainable: if the entire world consumed at the USrate, two additional planets would be required to supportit. This seems unlikely in the short term.

Half at $1 A Day

The disproportion is rendered even more grotesqueby the fact that huge numbers of the world’s population (ofwhich half — three billion — now live in cities) do not haveeven the minimum necessities of life. Close to one and ahalf billion people live on less than one dollar a day. Morethan a billion people lack safe drinking water and threebillion do not have access to adequate sanitation. Lifeexpectancy rates — and the other components of humandevelopment —vary appallingly between the rich and thepoor. Capitalism — now the planetary economic system —argues that only the neo-liberal engine of “free” trade andfiscal bondage to the global banking regime — will— in itsrising tide — lift all boats. In practice, this has abundantlybeen proved not to be the case as agri-business has wipedout “inefficient” local farming and onerous debt servicehas crippled the ability of governments to provide basicservices. NAFTA, vaunted by its advocates as Mexico’s roadout of poverty has — by swamping the market with cheapAmerican corporate corn—crushed the historic small-scalevillage corn-growing economy. As a result, thousands havebeen forced off the land and into the cities — which,

unable to cope, grow more miserable by the day. Millionsmore flee across the border to assume shadowy roles asAmerica’s new lumpen proletariat. Indeed, economic andcultural globalization — with its skein of distorted interde-pendencies — has helped thwart the possibility for localautonomy and, by extension, self-sufficiency.

Mathematics of Equity

What this suggests is that only a radical reduction in either population or rates of consumption can save us.Of course, such a retrenchment can happen — as it gener-ally does — on the backs of the poor, made even more miserable to protect the appetites of the privileged. Thiscrisis confronts us directly with the mathematics of equity.Every baby that dies of malnutrition or dirty water in thedeveloping world is, in fact, the victim of our own failuresof generosity and justice, of a human eco-system we havedesigned to rob billions of their lives and chances. And, thefocus of so much of the environmental and aid communi-ties on strategies for the lowest cost technologies, whileurgent on an emergency basis, can also be a bandage for asystem that thrives on inequity. As with the old modernistgrail of the minimum dwelling, thinking about the least wecan do for the “other” is also a way of protecting our rightto the maximum. What is needed, rather, is for us to learnto do with less. The presumption that those of us who areso rapidly robbing the planet of its future have no sacrificesto make, that the transfer of technology and knowledge of how to live should proceed from us to “them” is back-wards. Although we may prefer not to frame it this way,the planet is suffering a crisis of overdevelopment.

The kind of strategic thinking that focuses on equityrather than on making the imbalance a little more tolera-ble can resonate in a wide variety of ways. For instance, ifthe world were to go vegetarian, footprints would be dra-matically reduced. Beef — the nutritional gold standard —is the most inefficient imaginable protein delivery systemfrom a planetary perspective. First world piggishness isreaching new levels of grotesquery in the US which, as manyof you know, is plagued by an obesity epidemic in a popu-lation increasingly force-fed by corporate nutrition-deliv-ery systems. This is just one symptom of a larger complexof behaviors in which our will to consume is the driverbehind what is approaching cultural suicide, something we are all too eager to encourage others to join.

Our cultural profligacy is also reflected in our stylesof mobility. We Americans are wedded to our motorcarswhich generate a tremendous range of problems,reflected in the recent hysteria over rising gasoline prices.The American automobile industry has become virtuallypsychotic, pursuing an agenda that is not just completelyinimical to planetary health but which defies the mostbasic logic of competition. As our cars, like our people —and our houses — grow ever fatter— with lower and lowermileage—the automakers find themselves in an ever moreparlous state, slashing wages and benefits, laying off tensof thousand of workers, and teetering on the brink of

bankruptcy. For their part, corporate officials demonizeworkers for the modest expectation that they will be provided with pensions and healthcare but are seeminglyunable to reflect on the stupid and lethal product theyproduce. This lethality is not simply legible in a movementsystem that kills hundreds of thousands of people a yeararound the world in accidents but which is also a rootcause of that obesity and diabetes epidemic, now clearlyidentified by the US Centers for Disease Control with thesedentary lifestyles that result from the urbanism ofsprawl. But that is another story.

Rise of Mega Cities

The economic model that most closely describes the mechanism of urban self-sufficiency is that of importsubstitution or import replacement as Jane Jacobs calls it. In her classic The Economy of Cities, Jacobs argues thatthis process has been the historic driver of rapid urban

growth and differentiation, from the earliest days of citiesand that cities, in essence, invented the countryside astheir footprints spread rather than the other way around.Although generally used to describe a strictly economicdynamic, the idea also contains a teleological component.It begs the question of why cities grow and, implicitly, con-tains a notion about the limits of growth. If there is a singlephenomenon today that marks the contemporary stage ofurbanism, it is the rise of the so-called mega-cities, citieswith populations in excess of ten million. Although citiesof a million have been know for millennia, the predominanceof these places is of much more recent origin. At presentthere are well over 500 such cities of a million or more,among them, about thirty cities of ten million or more, atleast twenty-three of which are in the developing world.

The difficulty with such places lies in both theirunsustainability in environmental terms and their politicaland social apraxia. Like systems and organisms of manyother types, cities too can reach a scale at which they are

ArverneRockaways,New York City,Michael SorkinStudio.

49 Institute for Urban Design48 Michael Sorkin

izations of the urban. Unlike a political boundary or even astandard metropolitan statistical area, an ecological foot-print does not simply measure the extent of contiguousconurbation or administrative control. Rather, it seeks toquantify just how much of the earth a city requires to sus-tain itself. This includes inventories of such resources asfood, oxygen, water, CO2 uptake, energy and raw materials.A variety of more or less credible algorithms are availableto convert these quantities into areas and the results canbe mind-bending. By one set of calculations, the ecologi-cal footprint of Los Angeles is equivalent to the total areaof Peru!

This has a number of deep implications for urbanism.First, footprinting suggests that we must think of cities ina way that exceeds their immediate territories. Footprintingvividly reveals how cities function globally, given the longdistances their resources are obliged to travel and the distant victims of urban effluent. To cite one tiny example,moving a kiwi from New Zealand to London produces fivetimes the weight of the kiwi in greenhouse gasses, anexchange that might give one pause at breakfast time. Thecalories consumed in transporting a head of lettuce fromCalifornia to New York are about thirty-six times thoseavailable nutritionally eating the head.

Clearly, if all cities shared the habits of consumptiontypical of Los Angeles (or New York or Tokyo), the surfaceof the planet today would be insufficient to supply themall with the means of life. According to a 1997 calculationby Matthias Wackernagl, the United States as a whole hasa capacity of around 18 million square miles but a totalfootprint of close to 50 million.This is the very definition ofthe unsustainable: if the entire world consumed at the USrate, two additional planets would be required to supportit. This seems unlikely in the short term.

Half at $1 A Day

The disproportion is rendered even more grotesqueby the fact that huge numbers of the world’s population (ofwhich half — three billion — now live in cities) do not haveeven the minimum necessities of life. Close to one and ahalf billion people live on less than one dollar a day. Morethan a billion people lack safe drinking water and threebillion do not have access to adequate sanitation. Lifeexpectancy rates — and the other components of humandevelopment —vary appallingly between the rich and thepoor. Capitalism — now the planetary economic system —argues that only the neo-liberal engine of “free” trade andfiscal bondage to the global banking regime — will— in itsrising tide — lift all boats. In practice, this has abundantlybeen proved not to be the case as agri-business has wipedout “inefficient” local farming and onerous debt servicehas crippled the ability of governments to provide basicservices. NAFTA, vaunted by its advocates as Mexico’s roadout of poverty has — by swamping the market with cheapAmerican corporate corn—crushed the historic small-scalevillage corn-growing economy. As a result, thousands havebeen forced off the land and into the cities — which,

unable to cope, grow more miserable by the day. Millionsmore flee across the border to assume shadowy roles asAmerica’s new lumpen proletariat. Indeed, economic andcultural globalization — with its skein of distorted interde-pendencies — has helped thwart the possibility for localautonomy and, by extension, self-sufficiency.

Mathematics of Equity

What this suggests is that only a radical reduction in either population or rates of consumption can save us.Of course, such a retrenchment can happen — as it gener-ally does — on the backs of the poor, made even more miserable to protect the appetites of the privileged. Thiscrisis confronts us directly with the mathematics of equity.Every baby that dies of malnutrition or dirty water in thedeveloping world is, in fact, the victim of our own failuresof generosity and justice, of a human eco-system we havedesigned to rob billions of their lives and chances. And, thefocus of so much of the environmental and aid communi-ties on strategies for the lowest cost technologies, whileurgent on an emergency basis, can also be a bandage for asystem that thrives on inequity. As with the old modernistgrail of the minimum dwelling, thinking about the least wecan do for the “other” is also a way of protecting our rightto the maximum. What is needed, rather, is for us to learnto do with less. The presumption that those of us who areso rapidly robbing the planet of its future have no sacrificesto make, that the transfer of technology and knowledge of how to live should proceed from us to “them” is back-wards. Although we may prefer not to frame it this way,the planet is suffering a crisis of overdevelopment.

The kind of strategic thinking that focuses on equityrather than on making the imbalance a little more tolera-ble can resonate in a wide variety of ways. For instance, ifthe world were to go vegetarian, footprints would be dra-matically reduced. Beef — the nutritional gold standard —is the most inefficient imaginable protein delivery systemfrom a planetary perspective. First world piggishness isreaching new levels of grotesquery in the US which, as manyof you know, is plagued by an obesity epidemic in a popu-lation increasingly force-fed by corporate nutrition-deliv-ery systems. This is just one symptom of a larger complexof behaviors in which our will to consume is the driverbehind what is approaching cultural suicide, something we are all too eager to encourage others to join.

Our cultural profligacy is also reflected in our stylesof mobility. We Americans are wedded to our motorcarswhich generate a tremendous range of problems,reflected in the recent hysteria over rising gasoline prices.The American automobile industry has become virtuallypsychotic, pursuing an agenda that is not just completelyinimical to planetary health but which defies the mostbasic logic of competition. As our cars, like our people —and our houses — grow ever fatter— with lower and lowermileage—the automakers find themselves in an ever moreparlous state, slashing wages and benefits, laying off tensof thousand of workers, and teetering on the brink of

bankruptcy. For their part, corporate officials demonizeworkers for the modest expectation that they will be provided with pensions and healthcare but are seeminglyunable to reflect on the stupid and lethal product theyproduce. This lethality is not simply legible in a movementsystem that kills hundreds of thousands of people a yeararound the world in accidents but which is also a rootcause of that obesity and diabetes epidemic, now clearlyidentified by the US Centers for Disease Control with thesedentary lifestyles that result from the urbanism ofsprawl. But that is another story.

Rise of Mega Cities

The economic model that most closely describes the mechanism of urban self-sufficiency is that of importsubstitution or import replacement as Jane Jacobs calls it. In her classic The Economy of Cities, Jacobs argues thatthis process has been the historic driver of rapid urban

growth and differentiation, from the earliest days of citiesand that cities, in essence, invented the countryside astheir footprints spread rather than the other way around.Although generally used to describe a strictly economicdynamic, the idea also contains a teleological component.It begs the question of why cities grow and, implicitly, con-tains a notion about the limits of growth. If there is a singlephenomenon today that marks the contemporary stage ofurbanism, it is the rise of the so-called mega-cities, citieswith populations in excess of ten million. Although citiesof a million have been know for millennia, the predominanceof these places is of much more recent origin. At presentthere are well over 500 such cities of a million or more,among them, about thirty cities of ten million or more, atleast twenty-three of which are in the developing world.

The difficulty with such places lies in both theirunsustainability in environmental terms and their politicaland social apraxia. Like systems and organisms of manyother types, cities too can reach a scale at which they are

ArverneRockaways,New York City,Michael SorkinStudio.

51 Institute for Urban Design50 Michael Sorkin

simply unable to perform coordinated movements. Beyonda certain size, cities become both inaccessible and beyondmanagement. Services are undeliverable and politics —which must be rooted in the local to be truly democratic —cease to be a meaningful element in everyday life.Moreover, since these cities are increasingly the productof the in-migration of the poor, they become factories ofdespair, forcing their inhabitants into ever more desperatemargins in which any hope of individual autonomy becomesan impossible dream. And yet, as Jane Jacobs and so manyothers have so eloquently pointed out, large cities are — intheir multiplication of useful margins — the indispensablesettings for freedom and choice.

New Cities Needed

This balance between political autonomy and envi-ronmental self-sufficiency has a clear component of scale.Thinking about the future of the city, it is evident that the

only reasonable formula is to create new cities and lots of them. Of course, this process is taking place all the time,but the degree to which urban creation proceeds withoutanything that might properly be called environmentalplanning is astonishing. The vast majority of our cities are simply accidents, the undisciplined growth of existingtowns or— most characteristically — the global spread of the interstitial ooze commonly called the “edge city” orsimply sprawl. Again, America leads the way: our economydirects the major portion of our urban investment and development not to traditional urban areas but to the endless periphery of the multi-national globopolis.Unfortunately, this unbridled growth has also acquired alarge cadre of enthusiasts, ranging from laissez-faire creepsto mindless architectural exponents of bigness, eager tobe caught up in hyper-growth.

As I’ve already suggested, one of the cultural resist-ances that must be overcome by a sustainable urbanism isour own inclination to think in terms of technical solutionsto environmental problems. This is not to slight the impor-tance of technology — one need only think about the revo-lution that might ensue from the invention of truly cheapphoto-voltaics or desalination — rather to point out thepotential conflict between the idea of technology as themedium for overcoming difference and the predication of the sustainable in the idea of locality. Products of west-ern-style cultural universalism, our leading building andenvironmental technologies have long sought to offer ahomogeneity of possibilities in the construction of build-ings and cities. Air-conditioning secures a constant indoortemperature everywhere. Fertilizers and genetic engineer-ing bring local diets into conformity with multi-nationalnutritional norms. Automobile ownership assures territorialsmoothness. Electronic technology throws body-basedstyles of adjacency into radical doubt.

The corrective is to think of technology not as anautonomous force that seeks solutions measured only byinternal standards of “efficiency” and uniformity but as aninstrumentality that can found and secure the benefits ofthe local— mid-wife to difference. This means that partic-ularity must be valued for itself, that the paradigm of uni-formity must be resisted at all levels, from the technical tothe cultural. The fight for diversity is not simply sentimen-tal, nostalgia for vanishing habits of life that technologyhas rendered obsolete. Rather, as we know from geneticsand social biology, diversity is crucial to renewal andhealth. This is also true in the political and social registers.Freedom is the byproduct of authentic choices and a uni-form — Starbucks on every corner— environment is theenemy of both our rights and our opportunities.

Dialectic of Difference

Devising urban practices and morphologies to pro-duce this dialectic of difference is the task of green urban-ism. To state such principles is to beg their inflection —the argument for a consistent agenda is very differentfrom arguing for a uniform collection of forms. Indeed, as

global culture increasingly assaults the authenticity of difference, our task as architects and urbanists is to find — through research, invention, and leaps of theimagination — the new structures of difference that willproduce and support an ever-unfolding array of localforms, habits, and meanings. This said, what might be theelements of a sustainable urbanism that have widespreadapplication, practices that are both protective and stimu-lating? If the goal is to promote urbanism that is just,beautiful, and sustainable, allow me to suggest a half-dozen crucial qualities:

1 The Green City Will Be Delimited The debate over compact cities has been especially

fervid in Europe, less so in the United States. Nevertheless,one of the primary agendas for urban growth is the reten-tion of the difference between what is urban and what isnot, a proposition about both character and edges. Whilewe may prefer to think of nature as an artifact, an artificialconstruction, a remnant of 18th century rationalist ideology,we all know that, as a practical matter, the continued exis-tence of the “natural” environment is crucial for both ourpsychical self-construction and for our physical survival.The only cure for sprawl is to call a halt to it, to build cities in which boundaries are clear and which are able to continuously inventory the means of their own survival,differentiation, hospitality, and assets. This will produce adouble cycle of growth. The first phase — that of enlarge-ment — will limn the expanded territorial requirements ofthe city. The second — characteristic of “historic” cities —will be an on-going differentiation in place.

2 The Green City Will Be Body-BasedSustainable urbanism is the recognition that cities

are habitats. This implies a radical re-description of what it means to measure urban success and what exactly itmeans to live in the city. The city, treated as an ecology orcollection of ecologies, must conduce both the mental andphysical health of its inhabitants and structure itself —in the first instance — to the capacities and needs of thehuman body. The wave of tele- and cyborg technologies —well reflected in our chosen contemporary forms of paranoia — tend toward a disembodied subjectivity, thebio-political winnowing of citizenship. Freedom of move-ment — the basis of freedom of assembly — is the rootexpression of democracy in space and the sustainable citywill privilege a particular means — human locomotion.

Mobility — If walking is the alpha means of urban cir-culation, then the basic construct of urban organization —the neighborhood — will be both sized and differenced toaccommodate people on foot.This suggests that neighbor-hoods be highly mixed in use, supporting the range of dailynecessities — employment, education, commerce, convivi-ality — that are crucial to full and active life. The walkingcity also ramifies in its architecture. If the test of regularaccessibility by foot is applied to urban building, it will tendto generate an architecture that is low — five or six storieshigh. Unless walking is restored, architecture is dead.

Propinquity—Throughout the world the green agendahas displaced or merged with the red as the focus of political activity. This is not simply a distraction from whatmight seem more pressing principles but a reformulationof the terms of the struggle for a world arriving at the “end of history,” a re-articulation of the terms of politicalargument for a globalizing culture.

Global Commons

To the degree that the ownership of the environ-ment — and America and its ideological allies are pressingfor the rapid devolution of the global commons into pri-vate hands — marks the world distribution of wealth, itsstewardship becomes the marker of what once was calledclass struggle. However, equally crucial to the character ofthe green city — which I understand as conceptually fullyinterchangeable with the idea of the just city — is the way in which it fulfills the primal role of democratic space,

Company Town, Hen Heup, Laos,Michael SorkinStudio.

Penang Peaks,Michael SorkinStudio.

51 Institute for Urban Design50 Michael Sorkin

simply unable to perform coordinated movements. Beyonda certain size, cities become both inaccessible and beyondmanagement. Services are undeliverable and politics —which must be rooted in the local to be truly democratic —cease to be a meaningful element in everyday life.Moreover, since these cities are increasingly the productof the in-migration of the poor, they become factories ofdespair, forcing their inhabitants into ever more desperatemargins in which any hope of individual autonomy becomesan impossible dream. And yet, as Jane Jacobs and so manyothers have so eloquently pointed out, large cities are — intheir multiplication of useful margins — the indispensablesettings for freedom and choice.

New Cities Needed

This balance between political autonomy and envi-ronmental self-sufficiency has a clear component of scale.Thinking about the future of the city, it is evident that the

only reasonable formula is to create new cities and lots of them. Of course, this process is taking place all the time,but the degree to which urban creation proceeds withoutanything that might properly be called environmentalplanning is astonishing. The vast majority of our cities are simply accidents, the undisciplined growth of existingtowns or— most characteristically — the global spread of the interstitial ooze commonly called the “edge city” orsimply sprawl. Again, America leads the way: our economydirects the major portion of our urban investment and development not to traditional urban areas but to the endless periphery of the multi-national globopolis.Unfortunately, this unbridled growth has also acquired alarge cadre of enthusiasts, ranging from laissez-faire creepsto mindless architectural exponents of bigness, eager tobe caught up in hyper-growth.

As I’ve already suggested, one of the cultural resist-ances that must be overcome by a sustainable urbanism isour own inclination to think in terms of technical solutionsto environmental problems. This is not to slight the impor-tance of technology — one need only think about the revo-lution that might ensue from the invention of truly cheapphoto-voltaics or desalination — rather to point out thepotential conflict between the idea of technology as themedium for overcoming difference and the predication of the sustainable in the idea of locality. Products of west-ern-style cultural universalism, our leading building andenvironmental technologies have long sought to offer ahomogeneity of possibilities in the construction of build-ings and cities. Air-conditioning secures a constant indoortemperature everywhere. Fertilizers and genetic engineer-ing bring local diets into conformity with multi-nationalnutritional norms. Automobile ownership assures territorialsmoothness. Electronic technology throws body-basedstyles of adjacency into radical doubt.

The corrective is to think of technology not as anautonomous force that seeks solutions measured only byinternal standards of “efficiency” and uniformity but as aninstrumentality that can found and secure the benefits ofthe local— mid-wife to difference. This means that partic-ularity must be valued for itself, that the paradigm of uni-formity must be resisted at all levels, from the technical tothe cultural. The fight for diversity is not simply sentimen-tal, nostalgia for vanishing habits of life that technologyhas rendered obsolete. Rather, as we know from geneticsand social biology, diversity is crucial to renewal andhealth. This is also true in the political and social registers.Freedom is the byproduct of authentic choices and a uni-form — Starbucks on every corner— environment is theenemy of both our rights and our opportunities.

Dialectic of Difference

Devising urban practices and morphologies to pro-duce this dialectic of difference is the task of green urban-ism. To state such principles is to beg their inflection —the argument for a consistent agenda is very differentfrom arguing for a uniform collection of forms. Indeed, as

global culture increasingly assaults the authenticity of difference, our task as architects and urbanists is to find — through research, invention, and leaps of theimagination — the new structures of difference that willproduce and support an ever-unfolding array of localforms, habits, and meanings. This said, what might be theelements of a sustainable urbanism that have widespreadapplication, practices that are both protective and stimu-lating? If the goal is to promote urbanism that is just,beautiful, and sustainable, allow me to suggest a half-dozen crucial qualities:

1 The Green City Will Be Delimited The debate over compact cities has been especially

fervid in Europe, less so in the United States. Nevertheless,one of the primary agendas for urban growth is the reten-tion of the difference between what is urban and what isnot, a proposition about both character and edges. Whilewe may prefer to think of nature as an artifact, an artificialconstruction, a remnant of 18th century rationalist ideology,we all know that, as a practical matter, the continued exis-tence of the “natural” environment is crucial for both ourpsychical self-construction and for our physical survival.The only cure for sprawl is to call a halt to it, to build cities in which boundaries are clear and which are able to continuously inventory the means of their own survival,differentiation, hospitality, and assets. This will produce adouble cycle of growth. The first phase — that of enlarge-ment — will limn the expanded territorial requirements ofthe city. The second — characteristic of “historic” cities —will be an on-going differentiation in place.

2 The Green City Will Be Body-BasedSustainable urbanism is the recognition that cities

are habitats. This implies a radical re-description of what it means to measure urban success and what exactly itmeans to live in the city. The city, treated as an ecology orcollection of ecologies, must conduce both the mental andphysical health of its inhabitants and structure itself —in the first instance — to the capacities and needs of thehuman body. The wave of tele- and cyborg technologies —well reflected in our chosen contemporary forms of paranoia — tend toward a disembodied subjectivity, thebio-political winnowing of citizenship. Freedom of move-ment — the basis of freedom of assembly — is the rootexpression of democracy in space and the sustainable citywill privilege a particular means — human locomotion.

Mobility — If walking is the alpha means of urban cir-culation, then the basic construct of urban organization —the neighborhood — will be both sized and differenced toaccommodate people on foot.This suggests that neighbor-hoods be highly mixed in use, supporting the range of dailynecessities — employment, education, commerce, convivi-ality — that are crucial to full and active life. The walkingcity also ramifies in its architecture. If the test of regularaccessibility by foot is applied to urban building, it will tendto generate an architecture that is low — five or six storieshigh. Unless walking is restored, architecture is dead.

Propinquity—Throughout the world the green agendahas displaced or merged with the red as the focus of political activity. This is not simply a distraction from whatmight seem more pressing principles but a reformulationof the terms of the struggle for a world arriving at the “end of history,” a re-articulation of the terms of politicalargument for a globalizing culture.

Global Commons

To the degree that the ownership of the environ-ment — and America and its ideological allies are pressingfor the rapid devolution of the global commons into pri-vate hands — marks the world distribution of wealth, itsstewardship becomes the marker of what once was calledclass struggle. However, equally crucial to the character ofthe green city — which I understand as conceptually fullyinterchangeable with the idea of the just city — is the way in which it fulfills the primal role of democratic space,

Company Town, Hen Heup, Laos,Michael SorkinStudio.

Penang Peaks,Michael SorkinStudio.

Garden City, Broadacre City

5 The Green City Will Be Green I mean this literally. It isn’t an accident that moder-

nity’s “classic” proposals for new forms for the city —whether the Garden City, the Radiant City, Broadacre City, or simply the suburbs — have all been predicated on a rebalancing of built space and green space. This makessense: all of these propositions were responding to thenineteenth century predecessors of the dysfunctionalurbanism of today.

It seems self-evident that the only answer to theproblem of a planet urbanizing at the rate of a million people a week is the creation of many new cities, citiesthat are radically sustainable.

If one can make a blanketing statement about theformal character of these cities, it is that they will literallyteem with green. This proposition might seem both tooobvious and too simple. But an abundance of greenery incities will mark their efficiency and progress in the future.

“E” for Utopia

6 Eutopian Although the idea of utopia is one that has fallen

into disrepute, demonized as the source of a deadly rationalism that has ethnic cleansing and the concentrationcamp as its highest achievements, it remains vital that wearchitects be able to project our dreams and our researchinto the space of the imaginary. Utopia has always been a vital form of propaganda for the idea of the best and I believe that we give up our commitment to healing theplanet at our— and everyone’s — peril. I’ve added that “e” to utopia to change its meaning from no place to a better place and to suggest that the construction of such places must be collective and their forms shifting andmysterious. The idea of a better earth means, at root, amore democratic one. This means that a Eutopian urban-ism is inescapably political. Whether this takes the formof squandered resources, labor exploitation, downstreampollution, or the symbolic consolidation of undeservedpower, our urbanism must define itself in constant opposition to the forms and practices of inequality andexploitation.

53 Institute for Urban Design52 Michael Sorkin

Eutopia iscaptured inEmerald Cityof Oz poster.Image courtesyRandy Souders.

providing the setting for both the deliberate and the acci-dental meeting of bodies. The facilitation of this interactionis perhaps our most critical task.

Sun, Space, Greenery

Respiration — Le Corbusier’s famed formulation of a trinity of architectural desires — sun, space, and green-ery — is a good enough mantra for the tectonics of body-based architecture. Although this seems basic, its implica-tions are ever more deeply ignored. Faith will not assurebreathable air, cross-ventilation, comfortable insulation,the reduction of the urban heat island, or room for the necessary pleasures of physical culture. Green urbanism,at its roots, is a strategy for survival. In the immortal andindisputable motto of the Hanseatic League, Stadt Luftmacht frei — city air makes you free.

3 The Green City Will Be Self-SufficientThe idea of the self-sufficient city is by no means

meant to deny the fundamental value of cooperation.Indeed, such cooperation is the precondition of self-sufficiency. Nor should the idea of self-sufficiency suggest the elimination of specialization and exchange, whethereconomic, social, cultural, or biological. Rather, the goal of self-sufficiency is to provide a primary measure of a city’s responsiveness to the biosphere and an inventory ofglobal economic and environmental justice. A city strivingto support itself will—via this predicate of economy —find — as suggested above — a more meaningful anddefensible place in a world community increasingly characterized by weak states and powerful corporations.

4 The Green City Will Be LocalGiven the rapid evisceration of locality by the

onslaught of multinational culture, new strategies mustemerge for authenticating the individuality of place andfor fighting the spread of the generic city. A green and self-sufficient city will be closely attuned to the particulars ofits bio-climate, culture, and resource base. There are threepotential sources for such differentiations of form. First,the weight of culture and history — the fabric of memoryand of consent — must be served.

Second, appropriate technologies of sustainability —however simple — will be foundational in the dispositionof the elements of the city and in their particular configu-rations. The repertoire of shading, insulating, the manage-ment of wind, the use of indigenous materials, the carefulconsideration of life-cycle from “cradle to cradle”, thereduction of embodied energy in construction, the use ofrenewable means of producing energy, all will contributeto the formulation of an architecture of particularity andsuitability within the larger context of local wishes andmemories. Finally, the true signature of cultural locality lies in both functional and expressive singularity. Suchsingularities — whether those of Venice or Fez, Madrid or New York, Istanbul or Bangkok — are not automaticor “natural.”

Garden City, Broadacre City

5 The Green City Will Be Green I mean this literally. It isn’t an accident that moder-

nity’s “classic” proposals for new forms for the city —whether the Garden City, the Radiant City, Broadacre City, or simply the suburbs — have all been predicated on a rebalancing of built space and green space. This makessense: all of these propositions were responding to thenineteenth century predecessors of the dysfunctionalurbanism of today.

It seems self-evident that the only answer to theproblem of a planet urbanizing at the rate of a million people a week is the creation of many new cities, citiesthat are radically sustainable.

If one can make a blanketing statement about theformal character of these cities, it is that they will literallyteem with green. This proposition might seem both tooobvious and too simple. But an abundance of greenery incities will mark their efficiency and progress in the future.

“E” for Utopia

6 Eutopian Although the idea of utopia is one that has fallen

into disrepute, demonized as the source of a deadly rationalism that has ethnic cleansing and the concentrationcamp as its highest achievements, it remains vital that wearchitects be able to project our dreams and our researchinto the space of the imaginary. Utopia has always been a vital form of propaganda for the idea of the best and I believe that we give up our commitment to healing theplanet at our— and everyone’s — peril. I’ve added that “e” to utopia to change its meaning from no place to a better place and to suggest that the construction of such places must be collective and their forms shifting andmysterious. The idea of a better earth means, at root, amore democratic one. This means that a Eutopian urban-ism is inescapably political. Whether this takes the formof squandered resources, labor exploitation, downstreampollution, or the symbolic consolidation of undeservedpower, our urbanism must define itself in constant opposition to the forms and practices of inequality andexploitation.

53 Institute for Urban Design52 Michael Sorkin

Eutopia iscaptured inEmerald Cityof Oz poster.Image courtesyRandy Souders.

providing the setting for both the deliberate and the acci-dental meeting of bodies. The facilitation of this interactionis perhaps our most critical task.

Sun, Space, Greenery

Respiration — Le Corbusier’s famed formulation of a trinity of architectural desires — sun, space, and green-ery — is a good enough mantra for the tectonics of body-based architecture. Although this seems basic, its implica-tions are ever more deeply ignored. Faith will not assurebreathable air, cross-ventilation, comfortable insulation,the reduction of the urban heat island, or room for the necessary pleasures of physical culture. Green urbanism,at its roots, is a strategy for survival. In the immortal andindisputable motto of the Hanseatic League, Stadt Luftmacht frei — city air makes you free.

3 The Green City Will Be Self-SufficientThe idea of the self-sufficient city is by no means

meant to deny the fundamental value of cooperation.Indeed, such cooperation is the precondition of self-sufficiency. Nor should the idea of self-sufficiency suggest the elimination of specialization and exchange, whethereconomic, social, cultural, or biological. Rather, the goal of self-sufficiency is to provide a primary measure of a city’s responsiveness to the biosphere and an inventory ofglobal economic and environmental justice. A city strivingto support itself will—via this predicate of economy —find — as suggested above — a more meaningful anddefensible place in a world community increasingly characterized by weak states and powerful corporations.

4 The Green City Will Be LocalGiven the rapid evisceration of locality by the

onslaught of multinational culture, new strategies mustemerge for authenticating the individuality of place andfor fighting the spread of the generic city. A green and self-sufficient city will be closely attuned to the particulars ofits bio-climate, culture, and resource base. There are threepotential sources for such differentiations of form. First,the weight of culture and history — the fabric of memoryand of consent — must be served.

Second, appropriate technologies of sustainability —however simple — will be foundational in the dispositionof the elements of the city and in their particular configu-rations. The repertoire of shading, insulating, the manage-ment of wind, the use of indigenous materials, the carefulconsideration of life-cycle from “cradle to cradle”, thereduction of embodied energy in construction, the use ofrenewable means of producing energy, all will contributeto the formulation of an architecture of particularity andsuitability within the larger context of local wishes andmemories. Finally, the true signature of cultural locality lies in both functional and expressive singularity. Suchsingularities — whether those of Venice or Fez, Madrid or New York, Istanbul or Bangkok — are not automaticor “natural.”

55 Institute for Urban Design54 Speakers/Sponsors

SustainableCities

Speakers/Sponsors

Speakers

Judith BahemukaJudith Bahemuka was the PermanentRepresentative of Kenya to the UnitedNations before moving to Canada. Shewas the Chairman of the Social andHuman Sciences National Committeeat the United Nations Educational,Scientific and Cultural Organization(UNESCO) National Commission.Since 1998, Ms. Bahemuka served asDirector of the University of Nairobi’sInternational Learning Centre, whichshe established. Between 1994 and1998, she was professor and Chairmanof the University’s Department ofSociology. A trained sociologist, whosespecialization is rural development,Ms. Bahemuka is the author of a number of books.

Lance Jay BrownLance Jay Brown served two terms aselected Chair, School of Architecture,Urban Design and LandscapeArchitecture at the City College of New York/CUNY where he is nowCoordinator for Design. Principal ofLance Jay Brown, Architecture + UrbanDesign, Brown served as AssistantDirector, Design Arts Program, andNational Endowment for the Arts andserved as Director, Design Excellencein Non-traditional Architecture, the2003 ACSA Distinguished Professorshipfor Life; 2003 Fellowship, AmericanInstitute of Architects and was elected two terms as Board Memberfor Educational Affairs, AIA New YorkChapter. He is Program Advisor to theInstitute for Urban Design.

Aliye P. CelikAliye P. Celik, Ph.D, is a Senior Advisor at the Global Alliance forInformation and Development at DESAand developed the October 17 and 18program for the Institute for UrbanDesign. As the Chief of ECOSOC andInterorganizational CooperationBranch/DESA, Celik strengthened the United Nations through innovative participatory mechanisms. She joined the United Nations Programmefor Human Settlements in 1981 andserved the organization first in Nairobithen as the head of the New Yorkoffice up to 2000. Dr. Celik has degrees in architecture from MiddleEast Technical University, PrincetonUniversity, and Instanbul TechnicalUniversity.

Chris ColemanChris Coleman was elected by the people of Saint Paul and became the45th Mayor of the City of Saint Paulupon taking office in January 2006.Mayor Colman’s roots in Saint Paul run deep. He is a lifelong Saint Paulresident, born in 1961 as one of sixkids in a classic Saint Paul, IrishAmerican Democratic family. Growingup, Mayor Coleman attended St.Luke’s, graduated from Cretin in 1979,attended undergrad at the Universityof Minnesota and graduated from theU of M law school in 1987. In his freetime, Mayor Coleman enjoys camping,hiking, coaching his kids’ sports,running along trails in Saint Paul’sparks, listening to music and playingthe bagpipes. His passions are hiskids, Connie and public services.

Diane Diacon Diane Diacon is Director of the Buildingand Social Housing Foundation, anindependent research organizationthat promotes sustainable development and innovation in housingthrough collaborative research andknowledge transfer both in the UK and internationally. She has publishedwidely in the field of innovative housing solutions and lectures on sustainable housing issues in a range of academic institutions. She is a Non-Executive Director of both aregional and national housing providerand represents the United Kingdom on the European Liaison Committeefor Social Housing.

Ann FerebeeAnn Ferebee is Founding Director of the Institute for Urban Design.Launched in 1979 with support fromthe National Endowment for the Arts,the Institute held its first program at the University of Pennsylvania and later programs with Harvard,University of Toronto and PompidouCenter, Paris. Ann is a design journalistwhose History of Modern Designwas recognized as among best 100 illustrated texts of 1970. Ann is working on a 2nd edition to her bookon modern design and will launch an Institute Archives Project in 2007.Her son, John, is a student at StonyBrook University.

Axumite Gebre-EgziabherAxumite Gebre-Egziabher is presentlythe Director of UN-HABITAT New YorkOffice. Born in Axum, Ethiopia, sheholds a Doctrate (PhD) in DevelopmentPlanning, from the DPU, University ofLondon, U.K. Prior to her present post,she worked as Coordinator of theSpecial Session of the United NationsGeneral Assembly for the review andappraisal of the implementation of theHabitat Agenda (Istanbul + 5), fromMay 1999–June 2002.

Christopher F. HackettChristopher F. Hackett is thePermanent Representative ofBarbados. He has been Chief of theCaribbean Division, Regional Bureaufor Latin America and the Caribbean,of the United Nations DevelopmentProgramme (UNDP). Mr. Hackett holdsa PhD in public administration fromNew York University, a Master of Artsin international relations from CarltonUniversity, among other degrees.

Tonomori MatsuoProfessor Tonomori Matsuo graduatedfrom Department of Civil Engineering,University of Tokyo in 1963. He waselected President of Toyo University inSeptember 2003. The research group,headed by him, at the Graduate Schoolof Regional Development Studies, wasselected as an Open Research Centerby Ministry on Education of JapaneseGovernment in 2001. Dr. Matsuo’smajor research fields are biologicalwastewater treatment, metabolic and energy systems in urban areas.He recently started a new researchfield called “Environmentics” for sustainable development of globalsocieties through the 21st century.

Junichiro OkataProfessor Okata joined the University of Tokyo in 1996 as an associate professor for urban planning at theDepartment of Urban Engineering,School of Engineering. He has taught at the Department of UrbanEngineering as a professor for urbanplanning since 1999 and has been the Secretary General at the Center for Sustainable Urban Regeneration(cSUR) since 2003. His experiencescover planning and housing policy in Japan, Korea, China, Great Britain,Germany, United States, Canada andColombia. He has chaired committeeson municipal planning in Yokohama,Kamakura and Atsugi. Currently, he is the director of cSUR research team on Sustainability of Mega-Cities.

Suha OzkanDr. Ozkan has done research on thetheory and history of architecture,design, vernacular form and emergencyhousing. At Middle East TechnicalUniversity, Istanbul he taught architectural design and design theoryfor fifteen years, became AssociateDean of the Faculty of Architecture in 1978, and was appointed Vice-President of the University in 1979.He has lectured in North America,Europe, Central-, South-, and South-East Asia, including at the Schools of Architecture at the Universities ofParis, Lausanne, York and Trondheim.With the Aga Khan Award forArchitecture in Geneva, Dr. Ozkanserved as Deputy Secretary Generalfrom 1983 to 1990, and was made theSecretary General in 1991. On behalf ofthe Aga Khan Trust for Culture, he hasorganized international architecturalcompetitions. He has received theGolden Award for global contributionin architecture by the Indian monthly,Architecture and Design. His mostrecent project is called WorldArchitecture Community.

Mario SchjetnanMario Schjetnan obtained a degree in Architecture from the NationalUniversity of Mexico (UNAM) in 1968and proceeded to obtain a MasterDegree in Landscape Architecture with emphasis in urban design at the University of California, Berkeley in 1970. In 1984 he was selected for a Loeb Fellowship at the GraduateSchool of Design, Harvard University.In 1977, he started his own firm, Grupode Diseño Urbano/GDU, together withJosé Luis Pérez. The Green Prize inUrban Design from Harvard Universityfor Parque Ecológico Xochimilco in1996; the Latin American Grand Prixfrom the Biennial in Architecture inBuenos Aires, Argentina for theMuseum of the Northern Cultures of Mexico in Paquimé, Chihuahua in 1995. The President´s Award ofExcellence from the American Societyof Landscape Architecture for ParqueTezozomoc in 1989. He will lecture atthe University of Virginia in 2007.

Michael SorkinThe Michael Sorkin Studio is a NewYork-based architectural practicewhose recent projects include planning and design for a sustainable5,000-unit community in Penang,Malaysia, master planning forHamburg, Leipzig, and Schwerin,Germany, planning for a Palestiniancapital in East Jerusalem, campusplanning at the University of Chicagoand CCNY. Michael Sorkin is theDirector of the Graduate Urban Design Program at the City College ofNew York. From 1993 to 2000 he wasProfessor of Urbanism and Director of the Institute of Urbanism at theAcademy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

Darren WalkerDarren Walker is Vice President,Foundation Initiatives at theRockefeller Foundation. He earned hisbachelor’s degree from the Universityof Texas at Austin and his law degreefrom the University of Texas School ofLaw. Previously, he was chief operatingofficer of the Abyssinian DevelopmentCorporation in Harlem. He has alsoheld several finance positions in thefor-profit world, including associatefor capital markets at the Union Bankof Switzerland in New York. Mr. Walkerspent a year as a full-time volunteer at the Children’s Storefront School inHarlem, a private school that offerseducation tuition-free for local children. He donates financially to theHetrick Martin Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on the needs of gay and lesbian youth in New York.

Sponsors

Institute for Urban DesignSince 1979, the Institute for UrbanDesign has provided Fall and Springprograms to debate existing problemsin urban design and to include urbandesign professionals to share ideas for new solutions. We study the experiments urban design professionalare making in various cities and use them to formulate possible applications in other cities. JournalistsTalk About Cities, an 8-year-old program was reflected in the October2006 conference to which journalistsfrom Toronto and New Yorkcontributed. Fellows are elected by the Board of the Institute in recognitionof their contribution to the design of cities. Publications include Urban Design Update (bimonthly),Urban Design Case Study (Quarterly),Membership Directory (yearly), andProceedings for each symposium.An Archive of publications since 1979,will begin to be posted on the websitein January 2007.

UN-HabitatUN-Habitat’s June program drew more than 10,000 attendees andshowcased Vancouver as perhaps thebest designed city in North America.Following that the organization convened meetings in Florence on energy, in Oslo on private publicpartnerships for a green revolution in Africa and in Geneva on tourism inAfrica. A focus for 2007 will be waterfor African cities.

Rockefeller FoundationThe Rockefeller Foundation wasestablished in 1913 by John D.Rockefeller, Sr. to promote the “well-being” of humanity by addressing the root causes of serious problems.With assets of more than $3 billion,it is one of the nation’s largest privatefoundations. The Foundation worksinternationally to expand opportunitiesfor poor and vulnerable people and to help ensure that the benefits of glabalization are shared more widely.Two recently launched RockefellerFoundation initiatives include theAlliance for a Green Revolution inAfrica (with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) and lead fundingand other support for the Unified NewOrleans Plan for rebuilding in the wakeof Hurricane Katrina.

Toyo UniversityThe aims of the Faculty of RegionalDevelopment and the Graduate Schoolof Regional Development are to teachsustainable development and financein order to develop villages and townsin Japan and abroad. It is the aim ofthe Faculty of Regional DevelopmentStudies to enable students to be ableto solve the piling-up problems of theworld, contribute to the sustainablecreation of regional societies and bearthe tasks of the 21st century.

BSHFThe Building and Social HousingFoundation (BSHF) is an independentresearch organization that promotessustainable development in housingthrough collaborative research andknowledge transfer. Established in1976, BSHF works both in the UK andinternationally to identify innovativehousing solutions and to foster theexchange of information and goodpractice.

AcknowledgementsThanks to The Rockefeller Foundationfor supporting production and printing of The Proceedings. TheProceedings was edited by AnnFerebee and designed by MartinPerrin, Perrin Studio. The staff included Joyce Batterton, Associatefor Text and Roberta Korcz, PictureAssociate.

55 Institute for Urban Design54 Speakers/Sponsors

SustainableCities

Speakers/Sponsors

Speakers

Judith BahemukaJudith Bahemuka was the PermanentRepresentative of Kenya to the UnitedNations before moving to Canada. Shewas the Chairman of the Social andHuman Sciences National Committeeat the United Nations Educational,Scientific and Cultural Organization(UNESCO) National Commission.Since 1998, Ms. Bahemuka served asDirector of the University of Nairobi’sInternational Learning Centre, whichshe established. Between 1994 and1998, she was professor and Chairmanof the University’s Department ofSociology. A trained sociologist, whosespecialization is rural development,Ms. Bahemuka is the author of a number of books.

Lance Jay BrownLance Jay Brown served two terms aselected Chair, School of Architecture,Urban Design and LandscapeArchitecture at the City College of New York/CUNY where he is nowCoordinator for Design. Principal ofLance Jay Brown, Architecture + UrbanDesign, Brown served as AssistantDirector, Design Arts Program, andNational Endowment for the Arts andserved as Director, Design Excellencein Non-traditional Architecture, the2003 ACSA Distinguished Professorshipfor Life; 2003 Fellowship, AmericanInstitute of Architects and was elected two terms as Board Memberfor Educational Affairs, AIA New YorkChapter. He is Program Advisor to theInstitute for Urban Design.

Aliye P. CelikAliye P. Celik, Ph.D, is a Senior Advisor at the Global Alliance forInformation and Development at DESAand developed the October 17 and 18program for the Institute for UrbanDesign. As the Chief of ECOSOC andInterorganizational CooperationBranch/DESA, Celik strengthened the United Nations through innovative participatory mechanisms. She joined the United Nations Programmefor Human Settlements in 1981 andserved the organization first in Nairobithen as the head of the New Yorkoffice up to 2000. Dr. Celik has degrees in architecture from MiddleEast Technical University, PrincetonUniversity, and Instanbul TechnicalUniversity.

Chris ColemanChris Coleman was elected by the people of Saint Paul and became the45th Mayor of the City of Saint Paulupon taking office in January 2006.Mayor Colman’s roots in Saint Paul run deep. He is a lifelong Saint Paulresident, born in 1961 as one of sixkids in a classic Saint Paul, IrishAmerican Democratic family. Growingup, Mayor Coleman attended St.Luke’s, graduated from Cretin in 1979,attended undergrad at the Universityof Minnesota and graduated from theU of M law school in 1987. In his freetime, Mayor Coleman enjoys camping,hiking, coaching his kids’ sports,running along trails in Saint Paul’sparks, listening to music and playingthe bagpipes. His passions are hiskids, Connie and public services.

Diane Diacon Diane Diacon is Director of the Buildingand Social Housing Foundation, anindependent research organizationthat promotes sustainable development and innovation in housingthrough collaborative research andknowledge transfer both in the UK and internationally. She has publishedwidely in the field of innovative housing solutions and lectures on sustainable housing issues in a range of academic institutions. She is a Non-Executive Director of both aregional and national housing providerand represents the United Kingdom on the European Liaison Committeefor Social Housing.

Ann FerebeeAnn Ferebee is Founding Director of the Institute for Urban Design.Launched in 1979 with support fromthe National Endowment for the Arts,the Institute held its first program at the University of Pennsylvania and later programs with Harvard,University of Toronto and PompidouCenter, Paris. Ann is a design journalistwhose History of Modern Designwas recognized as among best 100 illustrated texts of 1970. Ann is working on a 2nd edition to her bookon modern design and will launch an Institute Archives Project in 2007.Her son, John, is a student at StonyBrook University.

Axumite Gebre-EgziabherAxumite Gebre-Egziabher is presentlythe Director of UN-HABITAT New YorkOffice. Born in Axum, Ethiopia, sheholds a Doctrate (PhD) in DevelopmentPlanning, from the DPU, University ofLondon, U.K. Prior to her present post,she worked as Coordinator of theSpecial Session of the United NationsGeneral Assembly for the review andappraisal of the implementation of theHabitat Agenda (Istanbul + 5), fromMay 1999–June 2002.

Christopher F. HackettChristopher F. Hackett is thePermanent Representative ofBarbados. He has been Chief of theCaribbean Division, Regional Bureaufor Latin America and the Caribbean,of the United Nations DevelopmentProgramme (UNDP). Mr. Hackett holdsa PhD in public administration fromNew York University, a Master of Artsin international relations from CarltonUniversity, among other degrees.

Tonomori MatsuoProfessor Tonomori Matsuo graduatedfrom Department of Civil Engineering,University of Tokyo in 1963. He waselected President of Toyo University inSeptember 2003. The research group,headed by him, at the Graduate Schoolof Regional Development Studies, wasselected as an Open Research Centerby Ministry on Education of JapaneseGovernment in 2001. Dr. Matsuo’smajor research fields are biologicalwastewater treatment, metabolic and energy systems in urban areas.He recently started a new researchfield called “Environmentics” for sustainable development of globalsocieties through the 21st century.

Junichiro OkataProfessor Okata joined the University of Tokyo in 1996 as an associate professor for urban planning at theDepartment of Urban Engineering,School of Engineering. He has taught at the Department of UrbanEngineering as a professor for urbanplanning since 1999 and has been the Secretary General at the Center for Sustainable Urban Regeneration(cSUR) since 2003. His experiencescover planning and housing policy in Japan, Korea, China, Great Britain,Germany, United States, Canada andColombia. He has chaired committeeson municipal planning in Yokohama,Kamakura and Atsugi. Currently, he is the director of cSUR research team on Sustainability of Mega-Cities.

Suha OzkanDr. Ozkan has done research on thetheory and history of architecture,design, vernacular form and emergencyhousing. At Middle East TechnicalUniversity, Istanbul he taught architectural design and design theoryfor fifteen years, became AssociateDean of the Faculty of Architecture in 1978, and was appointed Vice-President of the University in 1979.He has lectured in North America,Europe, Central-, South-, and South-East Asia, including at the Schools of Architecture at the Universities ofParis, Lausanne, York and Trondheim.With the Aga Khan Award forArchitecture in Geneva, Dr. Ozkanserved as Deputy Secretary Generalfrom 1983 to 1990, and was made theSecretary General in 1991. On behalf ofthe Aga Khan Trust for Culture, he hasorganized international architecturalcompetitions. He has received theGolden Award for global contributionin architecture by the Indian monthly,Architecture and Design. His mostrecent project is called WorldArchitecture Community.

Mario SchjetnanMario Schjetnan obtained a degree in Architecture from the NationalUniversity of Mexico (UNAM) in 1968and proceeded to obtain a MasterDegree in Landscape Architecture with emphasis in urban design at the University of California, Berkeley in 1970. In 1984 he was selected for a Loeb Fellowship at the GraduateSchool of Design, Harvard University.In 1977, he started his own firm, Grupode Diseño Urbano/GDU, together withJosé Luis Pérez. The Green Prize inUrban Design from Harvard Universityfor Parque Ecológico Xochimilco in1996; the Latin American Grand Prixfrom the Biennial in Architecture inBuenos Aires, Argentina for theMuseum of the Northern Cultures of Mexico in Paquimé, Chihuahua in 1995. The President´s Award ofExcellence from the American Societyof Landscape Architecture for ParqueTezozomoc in 1989. He will lecture atthe University of Virginia in 2007.

Michael SorkinThe Michael Sorkin Studio is a NewYork-based architectural practicewhose recent projects include planning and design for a sustainable5,000-unit community in Penang,Malaysia, master planning forHamburg, Leipzig, and Schwerin,Germany, planning for a Palestiniancapital in East Jerusalem, campusplanning at the University of Chicagoand CCNY. Michael Sorkin is theDirector of the Graduate Urban Design Program at the City College ofNew York. From 1993 to 2000 he wasProfessor of Urbanism and Director of the Institute of Urbanism at theAcademy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

Darren WalkerDarren Walker is Vice President,Foundation Initiatives at theRockefeller Foundation. He earned hisbachelor’s degree from the Universityof Texas at Austin and his law degreefrom the University of Texas School ofLaw. Previously, he was chief operatingofficer of the Abyssinian DevelopmentCorporation in Harlem. He has alsoheld several finance positions in thefor-profit world, including associatefor capital markets at the Union Bankof Switzerland in New York. Mr. Walkerspent a year as a full-time volunteer at the Children’s Storefront School inHarlem, a private school that offerseducation tuition-free for local children. He donates financially to theHetrick Martin Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on the needs of gay and lesbian youth in New York.

Sponsors

Institute for Urban DesignSince 1979, the Institute for UrbanDesign has provided Fall and Springprograms to debate existing problemsin urban design and to include urbandesign professionals to share ideas for new solutions. We study the experiments urban design professionalare making in various cities and use them to formulate possible applications in other cities. JournalistsTalk About Cities, an 8-year-old program was reflected in the October2006 conference to which journalistsfrom Toronto and New Yorkcontributed. Fellows are elected by the Board of the Institute in recognitionof their contribution to the design of cities. Publications include Urban Design Update (bimonthly),Urban Design Case Study (Quarterly),Membership Directory (yearly), andProceedings for each symposium.An Archive of publications since 1979,will begin to be posted on the websitein January 2007.

UN-HabitatUN-Habitat’s June program drew more than 10,000 attendees andshowcased Vancouver as perhaps thebest designed city in North America.Following that the organization convened meetings in Florence on energy, in Oslo on private publicpartnerships for a green revolution in Africa and in Geneva on tourism inAfrica. A focus for 2007 will be waterfor African cities.

Rockefeller FoundationThe Rockefeller Foundation wasestablished in 1913 by John D.Rockefeller, Sr. to promote the “well-being” of humanity by addressing the root causes of serious problems.With assets of more than $3 billion,it is one of the nation’s largest privatefoundations. The Foundation worksinternationally to expand opportunitiesfor poor and vulnerable people and to help ensure that the benefits of glabalization are shared more widely.Two recently launched RockefellerFoundation initiatives include theAlliance for a Green Revolution inAfrica (with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) and lead fundingand other support for the Unified NewOrleans Plan for rebuilding in the wakeof Hurricane Katrina.

Toyo UniversityThe aims of the Faculty of RegionalDevelopment and the Graduate Schoolof Regional Development are to teachsustainable development and financein order to develop villages and townsin Japan and abroad. It is the aim ofthe Faculty of Regional DevelopmentStudies to enable students to be ableto solve the piling-up problems of theworld, contribute to the sustainablecreation of regional societies and bearthe tasks of the 21st century.

BSHFThe Building and Social HousingFoundation (BSHF) is an independentresearch organization that promotessustainable development in housingthrough collaborative research andknowledge transfer. Established in1976, BSHF works both in the UK andinternationally to identify innovativehousing solutions and to foster theexchange of information and goodpractice.

AcknowledgementsThanks to The Rockefeller Foundationfor supporting production and printing of The Proceedings. TheProceedings was edited by AnnFerebee and designed by MartinPerrin, Perrin Studio. The staff included Joyce Batterton, Associatefor Text and Roberta Korcz, PictureAssociate.

56 Institute for Urban Design

Design: Perrin Studio

56 Institute for Urban Design

Design: Perrin Studio

Sustainable Cities: Urban Design

Fellows Proceedings

October 17, 2006

The Century AssociationNew York

October 18, 2006

United NationsUN-HabitatNew York

Institute for Urban Design