Among other priorities in the past couple of weeks I’ve been reading David Sim’s book, Soft City: Building Density for Everyday Life.
Sim is a Scottish-born architect and urban designer who now lives and works in Copenhagen as Partner and Creative Director at Gehl , the business founded and inspired by urban design guru Jan Gehl. A ‘soft city’ is a city which is enjoyable and easy to live in, which is easy to get around, and which has a gentle impact on our environment.
How does Sim think we should do this? He proposes nine criteria.
1. Diversity of Built Form
A neighbourhood should have a variety of building types, scales and designs. These should enable a variety of uses and make it possible for these uses to change over time. This way you can have housing, retail outlets of various scales, offices, studios, workshops and so on, all in the one community. This leads to a vibrant, diverse neighbourhood where there are people living and working all the time.
2. Diversity of Outdoor Spaces
He advocates a form of development where building are built on the edge of the block, with enclosed or semi-enclosed courtyards behind. Unlike the Radburn design which public housing authorities in Australia have spent years undoing, the buildings face the street and this is where people enter or leave to go elsewhere, but the rear of the building is a mix of private spaces next to people’s back doors and semi-public spaces shared by everyone in the block. This creates a gradation – private space, semi-public space that clearly ‘belongs’ to certain people even if anyone can go there, and public space such as streets, public squares and parks.
3. Flexibility
The buildings and the neighbourhood layout need to be flexible over time. Well-designed buildings can easily and inexpensively change uses (e.g. from commercial to residential or vice versa), and can also change in scale, for instance with extra floors or extra outbuildings added as needed.
4. Human Scale
Sim believes that neighbourhoods need to be built to an appropriate scale for human interaction. For him this is medium-rise buildings, no more than four or five stories high but covering a fair amount of the ground. This means you can have a dense city without the buildings towering over the people, the entire building can be accessible via stairs (you can still have a lift for disability access and heavy loads) and you have few enough people in your building and block that you can get to know them.
5. Walkability
Both buildings and neighbourhoods should be walkable – that is, it should be safe and pleasant to walk, and most things you need should be within walking distance. This means that instead of leaving your home in your car you leave it on foot, interacting with your neighbours, improving your own health and lowering your carbon footprint.
6. A sense of control and identity.
Because your home opens both onto the street and onto a semi-public courtyard space you feel you have some ownership of these spaces – your building is not so tall you can’t see the street from the upper floors, your neighbours are few enough to be recognisable and you have spaces that clearly belong either to you, or to a small community of which you feel a part.
7. A pleasant micro-climate
The low rise design with varying public, semi-public and private spaces allows for a better local climate, enabling a mix of shade and sunshine appropriate for the local climate, softening and cooling the environment with plants and water, and allowing access to breezes or keeping out high wind. The details will depend on where you are.
8. Smaller carbon footprint
Medium-rise housing allows for greater energy-efficiency both in the materials used for the building, and in its heating and cooling. You don’t need heavy engineering for your foundations, you can get away with minimal lift usage, you can build with through ventilation and good insulation to reduce heating and cooling costs. In addition, walkability and good active and public transport infrastructure can ensure low-carbon transport.
9. Greater Biodiversity
Finally, he advocates designing landscapes for maximum biodiversity. If you plant a variety of plant species, have a variety of open spaces and small wooded enclaves, open water-courses (whether natural or human-made) and different shaped roof spaces you allow, in turn, various species of birds, reptiles, insects and mammals to thrive alongside the humans.
*
A lot of the ideas in this book would need to some adaptation for Australian conditions, although he does show some Melbourne examples. However, a lot of what he says is directly relevant to our mission here of making our housing less carbon-intensive and more sustainable. Using his ideas we can reduce the impact of our buildings at construction and in use, and reduce associated transport emissions through walkability and safe active transport. He also has a clear idea of the need to adapt to more severe climate extremes, crucial in the decades to come.
As an added bonus, I borrowed the copy I read from my local library, so there’s a good chance it might be in yours too. Check it out!
Comments