All engineers and urban designers should be made to walk on 35-40 degree days from my house to the local primary school with my children aged 5 and 6 and tell me what they think about streets without trees.

This little graphic  was given to Garden Beet from http://www.cobaeurope.com/ . The graphic is all about urban heat sinks and its a very easy problem to fix.

Its fairly obvious.

Concrete cities = hot cities .

Plant trees = cooler cities

But yet again in 2012 trees seem to be less important than traffic lights.

Quite frankly Garden Beet can not work out why its so difficult for trees to be installed in cities.

Some of the best urban design projects get built and shade giving trees somehow get left off the agenda.

The northern suburbs of Melbourne now has  a fab little urban design project running up Northcote’s very cool and hip High Street – but I can not believe it – there are these large concrete tram stops with NO TREES!!

Yep great job urban designers of state government – nice to see the pedestrian paths level with the tram entry/exists but guys where the F**K are the trees.

ITS NOT HARD – plant some bluddy trees or I am going to make you walk my children to school!!!

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Raw timber amongst asphalt and concrete is a soothing image.

Couple hard concrete and the black bitumen with fresh green herbs and a layer of pea straw we have an urban greenery that vibrates good times.

Nothing is more uplifting (for me) than watching shop owners vegetating their shop windows.

Here is a thought – instead of planning laws dictating signage, building form and land use why not have planning laws that reward shop owners for creating street niceness.

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I love this.

I have waited 10 months to show this image  and finally its the right month!

If you are living in the northern hemisphere and you have not ventured to Australia during Christmas you may have little idea how disconnected our European influenced Christmas decorations and traditions are from the hot Australian climate, its plants and landscape.

I have discussed this issue before in a blog post during Autumn 2010  . In a nut shell Australia becomes tacky and tinsley around November. We have fake snow, fake holly, fake snowmen in our shopping centers, streetscapes and in our homes.

With all this in mind I really loved the simple Christmas decoration shown in the image below. A little snapshot of an Australian Christmas.  It is a leafless branch in the middle of summer but nevertheless I loved the composition. And a lovely change from glittery snow capped ball balls.

Its mid January and Australia is now entering the next visual during this holiday period – its the abandoned Christmas tree – scorched to a crisp.

The postcard image above is a great little glimpse of an Aussie Christmas landscape found in most suburbs of the capital cities.

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The Europeans know how to tame the impact of cars on their villages.

Above are photos of different urban squares in Sicily. 

 The first image shows a piazza being used as a car park. The second and third image illustrate the use of these public spaces as a place for the pedestrian rather than the car.

Timber decking is frequently used as a design technique to redefine the role of public spaces in many Euorpean cities. The decking is demarcating a ‘people space’ rather than a ‘car space’.

Changing ground materials and creating a slight ground level change is a nifty urban design trick that tells people that a space has a different use to its surrounds. Add a few planter pots (or bollards) to the mix and drivers soon get the idea to stay well clear of this area.

This design concept has recently been applied to car parking bays within the streets of San Francisco. These spaces are referred to as Parklets in the USA by the City Planners.

For further details on these Parklets please refer to this article kindly provided by Jordan of Metropolitan Gardens.

http://sf.streetsblog.org/2010/03/18/newsom-christens-new-mojo-cafe-parklet-pledges-more-to-come/

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Wallpaper Nov 2010 tells me that San Francisco is building parklets….turning car parks into planters…great…i am all for urban greening but please tell me this is not new?

 I am 40. When I was 10 they turned a car parking space outside my grandmothers home into a parklet….probably called a planting area back in them olden days…jeppers that was 30 years ago..

..so either Wallpaper is asleep or San Francisco is truely gripped by the car…..really this is a bog standard urban design treatment in Australia…nothin wrong with that of course…but its rather odd to make it as something newsworthy? now i’d like to see Wallpaper herald some urban design solutions that really move beyond the ordinary …it claims to report on the contemporary….does it not?

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Deal foreshore (near Dover UK) must surely get an urban design makeover soonish as there are public liabilities all over the place. That roof on the rotunda looks like its about to fall.

Please do not assume I think Deal needs a makeover I just suspect it is due for one due to its state of repair. I always slightly fear makeovers as they tend to smooth and remove the best urban bits  - but Deal may be OK….

As I was walking along the pier I assumed that not one resident had lifted a  paint brush since the 60s. How wrong was I. At the end of the pier is a funky little cafe . The building does not scream for attention but it does not try to look like it was built last century either. Its contemporary and respects the unique character of Deal and the existing pier. Unbelievable. Am I in the UK? Yes, the coffee was bad.

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Dear Highway Agency

You are responsible for some of the most utterly bleak landscapes in the SE of England. For further reading on this subject please refer to my discussion with Noel Kingsbury and my previous article on English Landscapes of the SE.

After 5 years of living in the UK the above photos show the best form of roadscaping that I have ever seen in the UK.

Please embrace this artist. He is offering you a design approach.

Pete Dungey’s Pothole Gardens are an ‘ongoing series of public installations highlighting the problem of surface imperfections on Britain’s roads’.

Pete is drawing attention to the potholes in the roads and kindly navigating people away from the holes (and into each other?!) whilst cushioning the impact of potholes.

I believe he has inadvertently produced the most interesting bit of navigational road architecture (using soft materials) this country has ever seen.

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When viewed as a whole the suburban landscape creates a fabulous pattern – the never ending front lawn surrounded by a herbaceous boarder, the single storey triple fronted brick veneer (or bungalow for UK readers), garden accessories and so on. The pattern is created by the entire landscape. Its not just the house. Its the house in its garden setting within its wider streetscape.

Patterns are  inadvertently developed by the builder of the decade. Rubber stamping designs across the rural-urban fringe creates visual cohesion. And visual cohesion is good. Even better if that pattern is considered to be of historical value. Heritage buffs love an intact heritage pattern.

But why is the garden less important in these patterns. For some reason building patterns are not allowed to disrupt the streetscape but gardens can.

If I plopped an entire field of Eucalypts in the Howard Arkley picture below the streetscape is altered. The building becomes insignificant (from a streetscape perspective) – yet I could still not change the building.?

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What the F*k is this? Its a FAKE garage door.

Forget the fact that it is not being used as a garage – lets just pretend its a garage and everyone will be happy.

Mr and Mrs Blah Blah restored their wonderful garage but they can not actually use it.  Never mind a streetscape is never ruined by a car parked outside the house.

I think the theroists call this type of thing ‘facadism’.

Anyway, there is no streetscape design excitement in East Twickenham, London.

But quick over here . Oh thank god a teeny weeny bit of inner joy on my daily walk. A bit of anti-heritage street art by the local hooligans c. 2000.

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space along road

The fabulous use of bridge abutments in the UK and Europe always amazes me. In Australia these spaces are dead. Abutments in Australia are usually home to the hardiest of Australian plants and acres of weed mat and not much else. A very inhospitable landscape.  The top picture above is Richmond Bridge UK.  The second photo is the eastern freeway in Melbourne. While the two urban conditions are different it should at least give some idea as to how much Australian land is dedicated to the road beyond the actual asphalt surface.

In the urban areas of the UK rather than having acres of ‘dead’ space adjacent to the road corridor this area is functional.

In the cramped conditions of London I see bridge abutments used extremely well.  Traffic moves a lot slower in London and spaces in-between the roads are used to the maximum. Granted the road corridors in Australia  provide habitat but its not really quality habitat. And the habitat is only allowed cause the road engineers are obsessed with ensuring there are no obstacles for poeple to run into when they come flying off the road at 100km an hour.

I would like to see a group of aussie road engineers and UK road engineers compare notes. Really Australian and American road engineers have more influence over urban design than any UK architect or landscape architect could hope for.

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