IN-PERSON: Livable Cities – New York

Abstract

What makes a city livable? Depending on which index you look at, city livability may include design quality and sustainability. But aren’t these 2 aspects incompatible? Because if design quality comes with public spaces with a specific identity, and sustainability comes with flexibility, then these seem difficult to match? Architect Bjarke Ingels stated that for a building to remain relevant, it should have a specific character with qualities aside from the pure programmatic. Thereby it will inspire the care of its users and will survive, even if its initial function is no longer needed. This quote also can be linked with the comparison between the nest and the cave of Sou Fujimoto. Among him, a nest can be described as a hospitably arranged ‘functional place’. By contrast, a cave is there regardless of people. A nest is built in order to be inhabited, but a cave is a more provocative characteristic place full of opportunities for a person to discover. These two ideas made us rethink the process to design a part of a city in a sustainable way. In a first phase, we analysed ‘public places with character’, and documented also the possible functions with the use of different ‘personae’. Personae are here used as fictional social roles of users of public spaces. What are the specifics of public places that are highly appreciated in a city? In a second phase, we started to design. We didn’t immediately try to conceive a sustainable city area, but we changed the project into the design of a public area with ‘character’, with a specific identity. Only later in the design process, we tested the programmatic flexibility of the design and adjusted the project for more sustainability. For this testing, we reused the different personae to test several scenarios. In this phase, much of the designed places seemed to be already much more flexible than initially expected, or they seemed to be easily adapted to be so.