Politecnico di Milano Architectural Engineering Urban Design Michele Casarin Mat: 764982

Lecco, January 10th 2011

Engineering, Urbanism and Struggle for Street Design (Michael Hebbert) The author starts explaining the existing conict between urban design and the highway requirements and how it can be resolved. There are two different paradigms, the hierarchical model that bases on design standards or trafc management, and the nonhierarchical, which developed experimentally on the appreciation of the contribution of the multi-purpose street to sustainable communities. The framework for the 20th century urbanism was dened by engineers and not architects, the highway system is based in a series of principles to reconcile safety with speed, calculating separations between visual stimulus on a drivers retina, muscle activity and vehicle response. This system was also based in the segregation of space, and classication by function, importance and volume maximizing the free ow, imitating the principles of cell and artery. This organization has managed the risk of a motorized society, because its based on purely safety measures, without taking into consideration any integration with the urban tissue. Depending on the specied speed and the predicted daily trafc, the standard species a cross section, the geometry of the curve, the braking distance, among others. To achieve efcient movement, its necessary to introduce the idea of a hierarchy of distributors, whereby important distributors feed down through distributors of lesser category to the minor roads which give access to the buildings. With this principles, engineers become urban planners, because highway design acts as the prime mover developing the site and shaping it according to the geometry of the hierarchical road plan, then every aspect of the city building follow its lead. Making no integration or urban planning since the beginning. In conventional urbanism a streets importance depends on the buildings in it, but in the hierarchical road design is the other way around, putting trafc capacity in an inverse relation to building capacity. Also the pedestrian are separated from speeding cars by eliminating the shared street. Then this idea transformed, making large scale highway constriction combined with megastructures in which pedestrians could walk above the moving trafc in articial oors, making urban designers to start playing important roles. The modern urban landscape is made of standard and non-standard roadspaces. Urban extensions are designed according to the hierarchy system, old building are exceptions until they are redeveloped and historic environments are anomalies. This designing methods are transforming the character of streets which were important civic, commercial and cultural places. All this segregation and separation is causing a discontinuity on the public realm, helped by the bad management of pavement pedestrian space, crowded by kiosks, junction boxes,ect. Now a days, the engineers are starting to use a non-orthodox highway design, refusing to serve major roads only for trafc and challenging the conventional assumption that safe driving requires a standardized and predictable environment. This kind of design involves: Social Inclusion Policies

Consists on reconnecting projects to the street network, making efforts to weave social housing back into the urban tissue. In some parts they eliminated existing infrastructure above the ground level or returning to two-way street. Regeneration of City Centers Conventional planning treats city centers as pedestrian areas, often becoming dead places. But now cities are more aware of the destruction of the public realm, and that they need to work on it to make it a safe an attracting space. Some solutions are putting expressways into tunnels, restoring two-way streets and reintroducing street parking and wide sidewalks. There is a coexistence of parked vehicles, pedestrians, cyclist and trafc. Neighborhood Design The best solution in new highway engineering is the trafc calmed zones. Making the design speed of 30 kilometers per hour to widen the drivers lateral vision and shorten the braking response distance, having little impact on journey times but huge benets in terms of accidents. With this criteria, engineers could abandon some requirements in the design, making an interaction in which the environment speaks through materials, trees, art and decoration, achieving speed reduction and attentive driving through an enhanced sense of place and locality. The Neo-Traditional Design Movement It is mainly a parallel tradition of non-orthodox highway design in North America. Its based on building-lined streets, back alleys and rear garages, combining architectural postmodernism and green activism, its called New Urbanism. They are designed with building frontage proportionate to street width, making building densities concentrate on intersection points, rejecting this way the principle of separation. They combine the purpose of rest and movement, exchange and circulation, with a systematic investigation of design precedents. The principle of the New Urbanism is to maintain access and multifunctionality at all street scales. The most important factor always in the relationship between engineering and urban design is safety. With the highway system, according to surveys, were more accidents, mainly because it is difcult to drive a modern car slowly on a well engineered road. The geometrical design and conguration increases the drivers sense of comfort and reduces their level of caution. All this made engineers change their contribution to urban design, making t roads to the space formed by buildings, instead of the predictable other way around. This allows a context sensitivity and a modern trafc calming thanks to the windscreen movie effect, that makes the driver aware of the context. The author made really clear the duality on the topic through the whole reading, making a long historical review. The old hierarchical paradigm its being replaced by other alternative approaches like the ones explained earlier, and in my opinion its going to continue this process, because this alternatives are allowing the revitalizing of the public realm, creating new spaces and integrating streets to the urban tissue, making them important public areas. The standard requirements could still be use but mainly in highways connecting long distances. After reading further articles on the subject, I must agree with the theory that proposes cities with the lowest car-dependable society, where the urban plan is made exploiting slow transportation (pedestrian and bicycles) and well organized public transportation. This way private cars are not needed, trafc, diseases, air and noise pollution would decrease, and public spaces will increase.