Water City

Practical Strategies for Climate Change

Matthew Bradbury

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000297904
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Sustainability in Architecture

Water City offers practical solutions to some of the environmental challenges facing 21st-century cities as a result of climate change. The dense compact nature of the contemporary city makes it difficult to generate urban resilience to the effects of climate change, particularly coastal and pluvial flooding.

This book describes a design-led remediation methodology that draws on catchment planning and GIS mapping and analysis to redefine the city as a series of hydrological and ecological systems. Six case studies test the presented methodology, two greenfield and four brownfield sites based in the UK, USA, New Zealand and China. Each case study is illustrated with GIS maps and perspectives. Specific solutions to the environmental problems that will be intensified by climate change are presented.

Water City describes adaptation strategies to help practitioners in the urban landscape tackle these issues and make our cities better places to live. This practical guide is a key read for professionals and stakeholders in landscape architecture, urban design, planning and all those interested in how climate change will affect the future of our cities.

Chapter one

Introduction

This chapter discusses the effects of climate change on the way our contemporary cities are planned. The discussion begins with a description of the genesis of the current urban planning model. This model emphasises constructing urban density through a grid infrastructure network and an intensive building programme. The antecedents of this model are found in the ideas of New Urbanism (CNU, 1993). The model has developed into a highly successfully urban morphology that has been replicated globally. The success of this formula is due to the way that the formula has been adapted to the exergies of real estate planning (Ratcliffe & Stubbs, 2013). A discussion of the structure of real estate planning is outlined with the important metrics described. While this model has proved to be enormously successful both socially and economically, the consequences are that the city becomes highly impervious. The contemporary city model emphasises hard surfaces, building roads, infrastructure, footpaths, bike lanes and hard public spaces, such as squares and plazas. The hydrological consequences are profound: with the paucity of green space, there simply isn’t the ability to absorb rainfall. This means that pluvial flooding and stormwater contamination will increase. A hard-impervious coastal edge also exacerbates the effects of coastal flooding. With climate change these three hydrological conditions will become much more insistent. A closer discussion of how three environmental issues that will be exacerbated by climate change – pluvial flooding, sea-level rise and stormwater contamination – is then considered.

Contemporary urban design

The contemporary urban planning model has its roots in a reaction to modernist urbanism that occurred in the 1980s and 90s. Architects and urbanists started to develop a new model of urban development, taking their inspiration from traditional European urban forms, in particular the use of the grid as a structuring device, and the city block.

Many of these ideas became codified in the Congress for New Urbanism (NU), which was founded in America in 1993 (CNU, 1993). Peter Calthorpe, Michael Corbett, Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Moule, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Stefanos Polyzoides and Daniel Solomon issued a manifesto, the Charter of New Urbanism, which codified the debate of the 1980s into a prescriptive and easy-to-follow formula (Talen, 2013).

The charter begins by defining the problem of contemporary American urbanism: sprawl, environmental degradation and a lack of investment in the central city (though this concern has definitely been reversed with the extraordinary real estate bubble of the 2010s).

The principles of the charter are enunciated at three scales, from the regional to the individual building. The first chapter/section is concerned with the urban configuration within the region, the metropolis, the city and the town. Urban structures within a region should be more clearly defined, that is, there is a well-defined difference between the city/town and nature/agriculture. Social goals such as equable development opportunities throughout a region, the provision of affordable housing and improvement of transport connections with an emphasis on public transport are noted.

The next scale is the neighbourhood, the district and the corridor. This section refers to the action that an individual can take to improve an existing city. The emphasis is on community-driven action that helps people to lead better urban lives. The first building block is the neighbourhood, and these are linked together with corridors (roads, rail and trams). The streets in the neighbourhood are designed for walking and community interaction. The community should have a wide diversity of people through the provision of housing types, including low cost. A mix of civic, business and commercial ventures within a district is advocated; the single use of zone is deliberately avoided.

The last scale addresses more architectural issues: the block, the street, the building. Here the concerns are how the design of new buildings can address urban issues. All urban spaces, the street, the square and the park, are defined by buildings. Important buildings and public spaces should be distinguished from other buildings and spaces by location, prominence and form.

The principles of the NU Charter have filtered down and become a more prescriptive, buildable formula (Steuteville & Langdon, 2009) able to be used by urbanists and architects to build new towns, cities and waterfronts. For the design of a residential quarter, the formula starts with the neighbourhood block. Each neighbourhood should have a centre, a public space, a square or park. The centre is also the location of a public transport stop. All buildings should be within a five-minute walking distance of the centre, giving a distance of roughly half a kilometre. The neighbourhood is to be made up of a variety of different kinds of buildings. A street grid of different widths is advised, with a hierarchy of main streets and smaller mews (or service lanes). The buildings on the main streets are placed close to the street with minimal front yards while garages with dwelling space above occupy the mews.

Since the 1990s the New Urbanist ideas have become extremely influential on urban planning throughout the world (Grant, 2005). This has occurred in two ways: the first is the adoption of the new urbanist principles in toto. This has occurred mostly in the USA in the building of residential subdivisions, often on greenfield sites. The adoption of the new urbanist protocols has often been accompanied by a building programme in traditional architectural styles.

One of the most famous examples is the resort town of Seaside in Florida (Seaside Institute, 2008). This development was begun in 1991 on a 23 ha site on the Florida Panhandle coast. The town has a small civic centre and is made up of mostly small, freestanding residential buildings built in a traditional timber construction with bright colours. This has proved an extremely lucrative real estate development. The other famous (or perhaps infamous) development is the design and construction of the town Celebration by the Disney Corporation in Orlando, Florida (Knack, 1996). The site is 20 km², and the downtown area was completed in 1996. The town is organised around a central axis lined with shops and terminates at an urban promenade on a central lake.

A second development of new urbanist protocols has been a hybrid of NU planning with modernist architecture. Here, the adoption of the new urbanist street grid, the provision of civic buildings in important locations and the creation of public spaces has been combined with modernist high-rise buildings and modernist planning, especially functional zoning. This particular urban model has been most prevalent in the design and construction of new Chinese cities (Wu, 2006).

Property development

This new urban model was accompanied with a move, in the western world, away from government-based property development to private development driven by the free market reform of the 1980s (Hofman & Manuel, 2019; Peiser & Frej, 2003). The uncertainty and complexity around private urban development, especially given the nature of the property cycle, has led to the importance of a knowable development formula. The NU urban model has helped to develop this winning blueprint.

The first part of the NU/developer formula for a successful urban development is a public space, an entertainment zone for the new citizens. This is marketed as a drawcard to attract visitors and citizens to visit the new location and enjoy the new public realm. This space is often built by public money either directly or through tax credits, as an incentive for the development. Once the public infrastructure is in place, private real estate investment is built around the public space. The buildings are often consciously designed as mixed use, with retail activities on the ground floor, and residential and/or commercial above. However, the use, retail, commercial or residential, can be modelled and analysed to find the best fit according to the real estate cycle. The buildings occupy a grid-like master plan (either existing or new) that brings new customers and residents to the urban development. This formula has been successful, especially in waterfront developments. The first recognised water-front project, the Baltimore Inner Harbor, USA, initiated in the early 1970s, is an example of this model (Fitzgerald, 1998). The project was driven by the proximity of the old Baltimore river port to downtown Baltimore. The harbour had gradually silted up, resulting in port operators moving away and abandoning the old port infrastructure. A new waterfront master plan was developed in the 1970s to reinvent the port as a commercial real estate opportunity (Breen & Rigby, 1996). The new waterfront design encompassed a mixture of public and privately financed projects along a public promenade at the edge of the old dock. The first building constructed was the publicly financed Baltimore Convention Centre, finished in 1979; followed by the Harbor Place Mall, developed by the Rouse Company, opened in 1980; then the National Aquarium in 1981; Pier 6, an outdoor entertainment facility, in 1991; the Power Plant, a multiuse building with bookshops, restaurants and a gym, in 1997–1998; and Port Discovery, a children’s museum, in 1998. Along with this development programme was the construction of 11 hotels and two sports stadia. The buildings along the harbour edge are all linked with new public space, including a waterfront promenade, squares and parks. The success of the Inner Harbor development has been aggressively promoted with claims that the project receives more visitors a year than Disneyland, produces $786 million a year in revenue and has generated 16,000 jobs (Hambleton, 2016).

The resilience of this particular urban model is shown in a contemporary urban development, the proposed Aarhus Waterfront (Rosenfield, 2014). The master plan, designed by BIG (Ingels, 2010), proposes seven freestanding residential buildings in an L-shaped configuration around a former dock/basin. The buildings, while formally distinct, all share a similar building footprint. They also follow the traditional form of the European perimeter block with a large internal courtyard for the private use of the building’s occupants. While the seven residential blocks define the basin, the public space, a waterfront promenade, mediates between the blocks and the water’s edge. The architects have ‘bent’ the promenade to extend over the water, producing greater ‘free’ public space. The architects then strung a series of public activities along this new promenade that are more usually associated with summer beach events, such as a lido and an artificial beach. Against the building line are a series of pavilions of different sizes and typologies, including a line of beach huts.

Comparing the Baltimore Inner Harbor to the Aarhus Waterfront, there are obvious stylistic differences; however, there are recognisable similarities, especially the littoral promenade/public space with the programmed public activities backed with the commercial development.

While the architectural style has changed, the essential urban morphology conforms to the NU-derived development model.

While the first part of any urban development relies on an accepted urban morphology, the second part of any private development is understanding the financial return on the project.

Real estate planning

The viability of any property development is determined by specific financial analysis and investment models. The first stage of a property development is driven by a comprehensive development study. This has two parts, a market analysis and financial planning (Peiser & Frej, 2003). The latter stage is made up of a development feasibility study and an understanding of the mechanics of the development contribution.

Market analysis

The market analysis is usually divided into two parts, the first being an analysis of the existing market. This looks at a region’s demographics, work opportunities and economic future. The second part of the analysis looks at the market’s existing real estate history, in particular residential and commercial sales. For this analysis, past records are used to determine which real estate products are liable to do well in a certain area, for example, single-storey houses versus apartments. Similarly, commercial real estate pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Lists of figures
• List of tables
• Author biography
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter one
• Chapter two
• Chapter three
• Chapter four
• Chapter five
• Index