Green Security

Natural Barbed Wire (c) SINNOVEG

The problem with most security fences and barriers is that they are, to put it simply… UGLY. Barbed wire fences and concrete blast walls are not often referred to as attractive, but when it comes down to a matters of security and safety from suicide bombers, the aesthetics are rarely considered an issue.

But what if there was an alternative? What if you could have a wall of green that would repel those would be intruders and still look nice to anyone not trying to get through?

Enter ”natural defensive weaved hedges.’ French businessman Jean-Marie Zimmermann travelled to Baghdad with a modest proposal. Replacing the multitude of blast walls and barbed wire fences with green walls made with tightly woven thorny plants. Zimmermann suggests;

“Why not make the Green Zone green? This is the kind of place where we can provide protection. We can remake Baghdad as a city focused on nature, ecology and the environment, with a new concept of security,” S

Its a simple principle really; plant a row of thorny trees and bushes 80 centimetres apart and weave the branches together. As the plants grow they form a dense and razor-sharp hedge that within three years can reach a height of six metres.  Protectionist Roses anyone? For those that don’t think that the plants alone will be enough Zimmmermann says its no problem to place traditional barbed wire, tire spikes, sensors, and other metal barriers within the hedge. Extra protection that is harder to see with the green camouflage over top.

Natural Barrier At Installation with Razor Wire (c) SINNOVEG

Natural barrier after (c) SINNOVEG

While the barrier won’t stop a tank, it will stop a truck, and the same holds true for most security barriers.

Hakim Abdel Zahra, the spokesman for the municipality, said the city was studying the concept of plant barriers ‘which was brought to us by a French investor’. ‘The idea of establishing security barriers made of plants has many benefits, both from the psychological side and for the beauty and attractiveness of the city.’

‘When you have five or six rows of thorny trees it will take at least an hour to cross, and that is more than enough time to capture the guy,’ he says.

‘Nothing is insurmountable, not even a concrete wall, but you slow down the infiltration. That’s the principle.’ Mr Zimmermann dreams big, and as he expounds on the product he starts to look beyond Baghdad and its government buildings to Iraq’s long and porous borders with its sometimes antagonistic neighbours.

‘A vegetation barrier on certain parts of the border would be perfectly compatible with sensors,’ he says, and unlike the minefields that criss-cross the Middle East it would not leave future generations with missing limbs.

And if infiltrators try to burn their way in? ‘It would take more than a blowtorch,’ he laughs. ‘These are living plants.’ S

I for one would like to see more of these green security walls. There are plenty of what would otherwise be nice city views that are ruined by the presence of a barbed wire topped chain link fence. If you would like to find out more you can also consult the SINNOVEG website.

Liverpool Street Station Dance Party

A number of performers and citizens get together for a surprise dance party at the Liverpool Street Station. The event was set up by T-Mobile.

Seen In The City: Port De Barcelona

Beşiktaş Fish Market at AMNP

AMNP brings us a great post about the city of Beşiktaş’s new fish market.

The Beşiktaş Fish Market is located on a triangular site. It is an iconic venue where many locals and visitors buy fresh fish daily. The construction of the old fish market was in very poor shape and needed to be replaced.

The design solution was to maintain its iconic neighborhood presence, while also reaffirming its welcoming feeling. GAD designed a triangular shaped concrete shell covering the entire site with large openings at street level. The concrete shell provides a column-free interior space, optimizing the project’s programmatic needs. The new design injects a contemporary and pragmatic solution, at once preserving the fish market’s history.

Beşiktaş Fish Market at AMNP.

A Whirlpool on Land; A look at Copenhagen’s New Aquarium

The plans for the New Copenhagen Aquarium by Danish architects 3XN represent a departure from the usual in building design. The whole structure is shaped on the idea of a Whirlpool. The core of the building is a round room evokes the eye of the whirlpool, and serves as the gateway to the rest of the building. From the eye visitors choose the type of water environment they would like to explore, either river, lake or ocean.

“The building is based around a central ‘round room’ around which different sequences of rooms ‘whirl’, each with its own unique journey into the murky depths. What is most striking is the care taken over the design’s integration into its surroundings and context: a giant glass ceiling refracts shimmering patches of light onto the walls, giving the impression of being underwater. The feeling is heightened by the fact that to look up is to acknowledge that one is effectively at the bottom of a deep whirlpool.”

The form of the whirlpool is most evident from above, and its a veiw that wont be wasted since the building site located quite near to the airport, and along a flight path. Travellers flying into and out of Copenhagen will be able to enjoy the design of the building from the confort of their seat… (the comfort level of course depends on the class of your seat)

via Blue Planet: Copenhagen’s Amazing New Aquarium | Environmental Graffiti

The New Library of Alexandria

The city of Alexandria in Egypt has long held a place in history as a center of learning, the Great Library of Alexandria was created around 295 B.C. when Demetrius of Phalerun convinced the Egyptian Pharaoh Ptolemy to build a library that would house all the books in the world and become a center of culture and learning.

According to history Ptolemy developed such a passion for his library that any ship that came into harbor saw all of its books seized. The Pharaoh was good enough to make copies of the books but those were what were returned to the ship while the originals stayed in the library. The library was said to have amassed more then 700,000 scrolls before its eventual destruction by fire.

The New Library of Alexandria was created by Egypt, and the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization with the goal of making it once again a focal point for research, and the advancement of knowledge and the open exchange of ideas. A number of countries contributed to its building, including the fallen government of Suddam Hussein, whose check for 21 million cleared the bank just days before the start of the Gulf War.

“In a world worried about the clash of civilizations, about war, about hatred and about killing, I think it’s significant that out of Egypt comes this new library, a place of understanding, learning, tolerance and brotherhood,”

Ismail Serageldin, the library’s director and a former World Bank vice president. s

The current incarnation of the library has about 250,000 books which is less then most college libraries contain in their collections. The library currently has space for about 5 million volumes, while the largest library in the world, the Library of Congress has nearly 20 million. While the book collection is not even close to being the largest in the world, the library is notable for being the one and only mirror site (backup) for the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive (IA) is a nonprofit organization that maintains a on-line library and archive of web and multimedia resources. One should also not that this is the only library in the world whose collection is mirrored, (at least publicly.)

The Library was designed by the Norwegian firm Snohetta in the shape of a disc tilted towards the Mediterranean to suggest the image of the Egyptian sun illuminating the world. The walls are built of grey Aswan granite and are carved with characters from one hundred and twenty different human scripts.

The exterior of the Library has a large reflecting pool and a public plaza which link the building to the sea and the city. The pools assist in cooling the building’s environs and naturally collect dust to improve air quality on the site.

A better way to wait

I came across an entry on a guerrilla art installation London where Industrial Designer Bruno Taylor installed a Swing Set in a public bus shelter. Taylor believes that its time we reclaimed our streets and remembered our childhood. The Bus Stop Swing Set gives commuters the opportunity to get a little enjoyment out of the daily commute. Usually waiting at the bus stop is a dreary and relatively boring part of the morning commute that is hard to enjoy.

“71% of adults used to play on the streets when they were young. 21% of children do so now. Are we designing children and play out of the public realm?

This project is a study into different ways of bringing play back into public space. It focuses on ways of incorporating incidental play in the public realm by not so much as having separate play equipment that dictates the users but by using existing furniture and architectural elements that indicate playful behaviour for all.

It asks us to question the current framework for public space and whether it is sufficient while also giving permission for young people to play in public.

Play as you go…” Bruno Taylor.

Taylor has recently finished a Masters in Industrial Design and his thesis exhibition is currently going on at Central Saint Martin and has a number of suggestions about how we can get some enjoyment out of our public spaces. Not only does he have the swing there is also a bouncing bench. He also asks what happened to us. When we were children the majority of us played out on our streets and in public spaces (sometimes spooky private spaces too,)  However these days most children are confined to their yards and homes. Taylor would like to bring play back into public spaces a first step is getting adults to remember how much fun it is. I would love to see a couple of these here in Montreal. Waiting for the Metro would be so much more fun if I could have a swing while waiting for it to pull into the station.

There are however likely to be some health and safty issues with installing the swing in particular next to high traffic areas, most bus stops are a little too close to the road for the arc of a good swing. However that isn’t to say that widened pedestrain sidewalks couldn’t take a few of these, and the bouncy bench, well that could go anywhere.

The Litmus Garden

The site before

The site after

One of the most exciting things we have been seeing lately is the use of engineered marshlands to clean up and reclaim water systems that have been polluted by our poor stewardship of the environment. Back in April of 2001 a group of Volunteers lead by T. Allan Comp Ph.D created a series of cascading pools planted with a variety of species of plants to filter a watershed which had become severely toxic with mining waste. Vintondale, Pennsylvania is a small coal patch town in Cambria County, It was created in the early 20th century by the Vinton Coal Company to support its underground mining operation and surface works. The watershed is a neglected ecosystem and Acid mine Drainage is a large water quality problem. Much of the area had resembled a gash in the earth itself. The good doctor and his multidisciplinary team worked with the community to create the wetlands project that fit the town’s aspirations for the site and still preformed the function of cleaning the water system.

On the City of Kent website he talks about the project and how it came about.

When I first started talking about this idea that eventually became AMD&ART and won a national EPA Phoenix award among others, I’d show slides of the standard Acid Mine Drainage (AMD) treatment system, basically a series of rectangular ponds, and suggest we might be able to do more. Then I’d show Buster Simpson’s River Roll-Aids, Mel Chin’s Revival Fields and the Richards/Oppenheimer/Hargraves Bixby Park – but it was the images I had from Herbert Bayer’s Mill Creek Canyon Earthworks that finally got through to the audience. Here was a real problem with a real and art-full solution – it worked to solve the environmental problem and it worked to address something in the human soul as well. I showed Earthworks empty and I showed it full of people and, finally, my audiences started to understand how we might start with rectangular ponds to solve an environmental problem and grow that idea into a 35-acre park that treated AMD, created new wetlands and a new active recreation area while also addressing a need for deeper historical understanding and a more humane connection between past, present and even future. s

He goes on to express how these treatment systems can become living and working gardens that not only clean toxic waterways, but also offer places that engage the mind and honor the past. The projects also have the ability to turn community members from passive inhabitants into advocates for their community. The site has an excellent write up about how the project came about and how it works that I am not going to get into here but these engineered wetlands, like the Sustainable Storm Water Managment System mentioned earlier here on Urban Neighbourhood, offer the opportunity for us to create working environmental systems for our cities that offer enjoyable green space for us to use at the same time. Could you imagine wanting to go for a stroll through the water treatment plant?

The Waterfront Trail

A Floating Bridge on Hamilton's portion of the trail

The Waterfront Trail was inaugurated this past year after the community organization in charge of the trail. The Waterfront Regeneration Trust was finally able to strike a deal after twelve years of hard work. The creation of the trail was no small undertaking with seventy different municipalities and other groups involved. The goal of the trust is to make sure that everyone has access to the waterfront and that the waterfront is worth getting to.

The trail is designed to take into account the history of the area. Most of the shores of Lake Ontario and the portion of the Saint Lawrence River that the trail fronts on was settled by Loyalists fleeing the United States who wanted to remain loyal to the British crown. They exerted a profound influence on the social, political and business life of Ontario for more then two centuries and played a major role in the development of Canada. The trail bears witness to this history by passing a number of historical reminders; Loyalist College, Loyalist Parkway, Loyalist Township and even the Loyalist Motel.

The goal of the trail is for it to link waterfronts from Niagara-on-the-Lake to Brockville and, then eventually, to connect it with Upper New York State’s Seaway Trail. It currently includes 31 communities, 182 parks and natural areas, 152 arts and cultural heritage attractions, 37 major annual waterfront festivals, and 170 marinas and yacht clubs.

Map of the Entire Trail

The trail is designed to be a multi-use recreation trail for use by people from all walks of life. The trail is also used by 24% of its patrons to commute to and from work. Currently the trail is about 30% off road dedicated path and 70% on residential streets or the paved shoulders of major roads. Most sections of the trail are paved but some are still gravel or packed limestone.

In the future the trust seeks to complete the few portions of the trail that are as of yet secured and expand the trail through a further 52 projects along the waterfront.

For more information on the trail check out their website.

Plus Petrina, the promotions and events manager for the trust has added some great suplementary information about the trust down below in the comments section so give it a click and check out what she has to say!

Public Squares, public parking, and the Soul of a City

Dancers in Young Dundas Square

There was an article in the Toronto Sun this past Sunday about the best way to save the soul of a city in trouble because citizens are worried the city “has begun to go down the dark road of social mistrust.” There are a number of factors that contribute to this including the government’s insistence that Canadians need a government willing and prepared to fight violent crime, even though crime rates have been in decline for years. (Stats Canada puts the crime rate at a 30 year low) Consider the public’s obsession with crime dramas–how many different ‘CSI’ and ‘Law and Order’ variants are out there?

Another often overlooked factor is how the very structure of the city can have a real impact on the way citizens relate to each other. Blank walls, improper lighting, and giant parking lots can have a big impact on how safe a city feels. Matthew Blackett puts forth the suggestion that any number of the city-owned Toronto Parking Authority’s 150 surface parking lots could be converted to public squares. Most downtown public parking lots are only used/full for about eight hours a day; the rest of the time they are wasted space. A better use would be for the city to move the parking underground and convert the surface space into a public square or other public use facility.

Movable Seating in the Square

Public squares (as long as they are not in shadow most of the day) tend to attract people who like to linger and people watch and, by extension, stimulate economic growth around their periphery. They also increase interaction between city residents and, by extension, trust and a feeling of community by allowing the public to spend time around each other. They serve as a place to stop, to consider the city around us, rest, and converse with those around us. The redevelopment of Younge-Dundas Square is a great example of how a public square can be created without losing parking spaces simply by moving the parking below grade.

It doesn’t even have to be below in some cases. In the city of Suwon, South Korea, I came across a very imaginative parking structure that was in an area with slope. There was a pedestrian bridge the width of 4 lanes that started on the higher terrain and crossed a major street connecting on the lower side to a ‘parkade park’ (if you will). The parkade park was a two storey parking structure that fronted on to the next street over and was clad in stone to look like a castle base, but had a park on the top level which provided a respite from the noise and traffic two storeys down, creating a peaceful oasis in a very busy commercial area (too bad I didn’t have my camera.)

While some might scoff or complain about the expense of burying parking lots, the idea represents a win-win situation in the long term for cities as conversions like this offer the opportunity to build increased parking capacity by adding levels and increased parking space means increased parking revenue.

Public squares are pretty scarce in North America, but used frequently in most European cities. Most are from past eras when cities were not designed with private transportation in mind. Where we in the new world have the advantage is that we don’t need to reverse engineer parking into active public squares.  It is just a matter of converting a parking lot into a space that both enhances the city and provides more parking for those who would like to use their cars to get there.

European Style Public Square

Click here for the link to the Toronto Sun commentary.