Inside

City

A is for Amsterdam

I was in Amsterdam last week and had time to look more into the canals and their potential for living with nature. Initially a novel concept to reclaim land from the North Sea this spirit of innovation lives on today in Schoonschip.

This community in the North of the city tethers to a river bank in Buiksloterham, a former industrial precinct. It includes 46 floating homes for 144 people with negligible energy needs and emissions. Residents designed the community together, share EVs, bikes and some assets and separate grey and black water, turning the latter into energy.

The Schoonschip community

It’s notsomuch the particular design or features of this village that make it a model for others. The freedom of the water and a precedent for problem-solving are what we can borrow.

Novel approaches to land titles, finance and ownership can be a way to live better in our environment, if law-makers get on board. It’s happening here in Barcelona and could happen anywhere.

Take me to the Schoonschip.

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Concept

Competition for space

Let’s start with the obvious: cities are for living. They are for socialising, learning, recreation and activities that nourish us. There is a useful and necessary overlap with commerce but where commerce drives design and planning decisions we suffer.

Take this example from one of the pioneers of ecological design, Ian McHarg: “I spent my childhood and adolescence squarely between two diametrically different environments, the poles of man and nature. Almost ten miles from my home lay the city of Glasgow, one of the most implacable testaments to the city of toil in all of Christendom, a memorial to an inordinate capacity to create ugliness, a sandstone excretion cemented with smoke and grime. Each night its pall on the eastern horizon was lit by the flames of the blast furnaces, a Turner fantasy made real.”

Today most cities are not a hard duel for space between industry and repose, thankfully. Over the past century urban populations have exploded at the cost of rural ones, industry has shifted to the edges of cities or to other countries (in the West) and green spaces that used to be farmland or formal gardens now vary a lot.

If anything we are at risk from being swamped by infrastructure: roads, carparks, logistics hubs, shopping centres and hospitals. Things we need, but not things we want.

What do we want? To ‘live in connection with place and nature’ is a common answer for many people.

Every decision we make about our urban environment could answer: ‘How can we live here better with nature?’

This does not mean planting trees or collecting rainwater per se, but living with the local ecosystem front of mind as we design for humans and non-humans.

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Plan

Casa Tierra, Spain

I love projects where we not only work with nature as it stands but the result is better than we could have imagined from a blank slate.

Casa Tierra is burrowed into the calcarenite stone in the foothills of of Sierra Morena, south of Madrid. The stone strata here angles up catching the rain and creating shelters used by shepherds and farmers over the centuries. This project converted the existing shelters into a comfortable home making use of the formations and spaces already in place.

To work with the existing conditions and materials the architects used local stone for the floors where possible, angled the windows to catch the southern sun and warmed up the rooms with timber furniture.

Buildings like this extend nature in new and exciting ways and create less emissions compared to new builds (50% of lifetime emissions are in the materials themselves). You may not need a cave: working with an existing building envelope will do. You’ll save the emissions used to create the original one and avoid those from creating a new one.

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Idea

Park frog

One of the concepts I’m working on has a need for points of interest that aren’t critical to the concept itself, so I’ve been playing with park furniture doubling as animal habitat. In dense cities animal populations need to travel easily from one location to another to survive and habitat is key here.

Inspired by the Parc Güell lizard I’ve created a frog for one concept that draws people in, provides a seat and creates habitat at night for travelling creatures.

Should I keep it?

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Photo

A forest near Amsterdam

This image is so satisfying. Despite the cold weather, everything is alive and abundant. Cities today rely on far too simple a mode of nature cultivation. In reality we need complexity to thrive - and that’s not hard, it’s the original state.

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