The U.K. Department of Transportation released its Traffic Signs Review, making it easier to install and amend road signage. Photo by Wally Gobetz

Welcome back to TheCityFix Picks, our series highlighting the newsy and noteworthy of the past week. Each Friday, we’ll run down the headlines falling under TheCityFix’s five themes: integrated transport, urban development and accessibility, air quality and climate change, health and road safety, and communications and marketing.

Integrated transport

Ghana’s Deputy Minister for Transport Dzifa Attivor announced that the country will receive $3 billion in loans from China for transport infrastructure.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel proposed a $2 “congestion fee” tax to be added on top of existing downtown parking lot and garage parking taxes.

Devices to improve driver efficiency, such as downloadable smart phone applications, are being developed by University of Leeds researchers in the four-year, eco-Driver project.

The U.S. Federal Transit Authority awarded the city of Indianapolis, Ind. $2 million to analyze “central corridors” for use in a forthcoming bus rapid transit (BRT) system.

EMBARQ Director of Research and Practice Dario Hidalgo presented on global best practices in implementing bus rapid transit (BRT) systems at a recent Surat Municipal Corporation (SMC) workshop. SMC is currently deveoping 30 kilometers of new BRT lines.

Urban Development + Accessibility

The EcoMobility Congress 2011 begins tomorrow in Changwon, South Korea. The three-day conference focuses on creating more sustainable cities through minimal car mode-share.

The Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) received $12 million in U.S. federal funding, as part of a $1 billion federal funding allotment to local transit agencies around the country.

The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) is holding its annual meeting and expo in San Diego, Calif. from October 30 through November 2. Register here.

Since Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’ pro-cycling initiatives have produced 56 miles of new asphalt, new bike lanes on 15 city streets, and a ranking in 2010 as the 12th best bicycle commuting city in the country—an 84 percent increase since 2005.

Air Quality + Climate Change

The California Air Resources Board enacted the final cap-and-trade plan today, as part of California’s statewide climate plan.

International Electrotechnical Commission published two new international electric vehicle charging standards.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency awarded $ 6.6 million to eight universities to study the effects of black carbon on air and water quality, as well as its behavior in the atmosphere.

The findings of a new Stanford University study dissuades the inclination to emphasize the “urban heat island” effect more so than greenhouse gas emissions as a contributor to global climate change.

Health + Road Safety

The London Department for Transportation released the Traffic Signs Review, whose purpose includes making it easier for local authorities to install or amend road signage.

London Green Party Mayoral Candidate Jenny Jones called on London Mayor Boris Johnson to improve the city’s cycling safety following the death of a young woman cyclist last week.

A one-of-a-kind research facility at Oregon State University in Corvallis is conducting real-time laboratory traffic experiments using car and bicycle simulators with interactive capabilities.

Communications + Marketing

A U.S. cyclist completed a 5,847-kilometer ride from Portugal to Turkey to raise awareness for climate change.

Nascar’s youngest sanctioned racer, 15-year-old Andrew Murray is promoting awareness of the dangers of distracted driving.

The TriMet transit agency in Portland, Ore. launched Regional Trip Planner today, the first open-source, multi-modal trip planner used by a U.S. transit agency.

Capital Metro in Austin, Texas provided the opportunity for the public to peruse the buses that will be used in the city’s future MetroRapid bus rapid transit (BRT) project.

The H Street Pop-Up Lab was a hub for activities during last year's Digital Capital Week, a technology festival in Washington, D.C. Photo by kmf164.

Temporary urbanism—the trend of “pop-up places”—is growing in popularity, especially among retailers, politicians, planners, artists, landscape architects, entrepreneurs and activists. The concept of utilizing public or unused space for a short amount of time, in part, has become trendy because it creates a sense of urgency, encouraging consumption. Pop-up retail is particularly appealing to marketers: We found a high-end store called Vacant that shows exclusive designs in unoccupied spaces in select cities for only a few months. In a way, temporary retail spaces are not dissimilar to daily deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial.

The High Line Park in Chelsea, New York has food vendors in temporary carts.

Yet this sort of activity has always existed. In much of the world, business opportunity occurs informally because it’s cheaper (and often more efficient.) There are many examples: streets hawkers in India, nighttime vending along a recently completed bus rapid transit line in Lagos, Nigeria, artists squatting in vacant spaces in New York City’s East Village in the early 1980s, and people picking apart trash heaps for computer parts or other recyclables. These activities can bring vibrancy to the cityscape. They fill in dead places. They can revitalize sections of a neighborhood. Another example: The High Line, New York’s famous elevated walkway, houses a food stand where restaurants in the city temporarily sell their goods.

Reshaping space for changing needs, encouraging the use of blighted locations in creative ways, and creating a vibrant street culture improves the economic competitiveness of a city. Commercial development can take many years to happen, leaving what could be useful spaces in a liminal status for months, if not years.

Recently, local governments in the U.S. have started to support policies that encourage the temporary usage of buildings and empty lots to prevent eyesores that lower property values. However, government involvement generally means laws, rules and paperwork that seem to contradict the sort of ground-up, collaborative potential of the community use of empty public spaces, whether it’s graffiti, an art opening, a garden or a fruit stand. At the same time, community-driven activities assume a lot, namely, that residents and entrepreneurs will take advantage of fluctuating, short-lived or risky business opportunities.

Nation’s Capital Turns to Art-Based Retail

Washington, D.C. has officially taken an interest in the concept of “temporary urbanism.” Recently, Director of the D.C. Office of Planning Harriet Tregoning asked Target Corp. to bring in temporary retail stands to the District, as it has done in New York City, before the company built its official store. The city sees that temporary sites can revitalize neighborhoods by bringing people to streets or to spaces that they might not have previously frequented.

The District’s focus within its Temporary Urbanism Initiative is retail. The Office of Planning says it wants to create opportunities for artists to sell their work by marketing neighborhoods as sites of unique services and activities. The effort is part of the city’s focus, at least nominally, on revitalizing under-served neighborhoods by leveraging the creative sector. A report called “Creative Capital,” commissioned by the District during former Mayor Adrian Fenty’s term, recommends furthering a “sense of place” in “distinctive D.C. communities” by enlivening streets and neighborhoods and creating more opportunities for impact at the planning level.

The District’s heavy hand in planning these temporary initiatives means more money for start-up projects and an opportunity to use city-owned land and buildings. Last summer, a vacant, single-room library became a temporary retail site for artists. The R.L Christian Library is located off H Street in Northeast D.C., a neighborhood decimated since the 1960s that is now seeing a mix of urban and residential renewal. The library was one of a handful set up in the 1970s in poor D.C. neighborhoods without access to full-service libraries. A few D.C. agencies collaborated with the arts organizations The Pink Line Project and Green Door Advisors to transform the space into a summer Wi-Fi lounge and design shop. Local companies like iStrategy Labs and Affinity Lab helped organize events to catalyze activities in the space.

Government Involvement Contradicts the Concept of Temporary Space

Graffiti in Bushwick, Brooklyn brings life to a street corner. Photo by Jonna McKone.

But is government involvement taking the place of what artists and residents might do on their own? Projects coined “temporary urbanism,” supported with grants from a government initiative, risk creating a formulaic model—in this case, venues for retail.

Philippa Hughes of the Pink Line Project, part-conceiver of last summer’s library space, supports the concept, but she worries the future spaces will fit into the same mold. “We don’t necessarily have to create venues for people to sell stuff,” she said, explaining that there are other non-retail ways of enlivening a place.

Art gatherings, squatters, street vendors and even urban gardeners often function outside formal systems. Sometimes such entrepreneurs lose out by doing so (no insurance, exclusion from earning credit, unfair costs) and gain more by achieving legality. Whatever the case, street businesses often bristle at the codification of how they should do things.

The front page of Street Vendor Project’s website, a project of the Urban Justice Center, is entitled, “What Justice?” The stories of New York City street vendors that follow are of excessive fines, or non-native English speakers facing difficulty navigating bureaucratic red tape and lack of government support for informal businesses. New York City has extensive regulations for street cart vendors, given the multiple uses of the streetscape and sheer number of food businesses. A previous post on TheCityFix explores similar challenges faced by food trucks across the country.

In D.C., it will be interesting to see how the city government expands the “temporary urbanism” program and whether communities take to it. Neighborhoods on the cusp of gentrification are likely to see government intervention that encourages art and business as top-down gentrification. Others might see these projects as interventions that take away ownership from something that should be fluid and community-driven. Yet, if D.C.’s temporary projects result in economic and social co-benefits for a community, perhaps residents will see such projects as a good thing.

The Mount Pleasant Temporium transforms a vacant space into an arts and crafts retail exhibit. Photo by Brian Tropiano.

Neighborhood “Temporium”

The Mount Pleasant Temporium is the District’s second “temporary urbanism initiative.”  It’s a retail space located in a residential neighborhood that, since the 1990s, when the neighborhood was predominantly Latino, has seen a tremendous rise in the cost of housing. Mount Pleasant has a small retail corridor peppered with mostly independently run food businesses.

The Temporium will be open for 25 days (it opened this past weekend) until it morphs into a new site for a vintage retail shop called Nana. The space houses handmade goods from artists and crafty retailers. According to the Temporium’s website: “Visitors are highly encouraged to explore the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood and its businesses. During the 24-day run of the project, several Mt. Pleasant businesses will feature their own stories in storefront displays and offer specials to Temporium customers.”

There are lessons to take from these sorts of temporary spaces and activities. Indoor and outdoor sites should fluctuate in their use. It is clear that people are demanding something more from their streets and public spaces, including empty storefronts or a sidewalks. At different times of day and throughout the year, these pop-up businesses take advantage of changing opportunities. Perhaps policies and more regulations can adjust to the temporary status of small businesses, such that legality can protect and encourage pop-up vendors, performers and artists. Just as cities grow, they hopefully meet the needs of residents while providing unique services.

View from of High Line. Photo by Seth Lassman.

If you were asked to identify the best city blocks for walking, what would you say? I can only speak from experience, but I would say Manhattan’s High Line, built from the city’s industrial remnants, is the most pleasurable space to stroll that I’ve ever been.

The park does what a city should do for the senses — it inspires imagination.  New York City seems like a futuristic place from a Superman comic book when experienced from the High Line. A Gehry building in the background, the Standard Hotel that bridges over the park, a glass encased seating area looming over 10th Avenue, as well as the towering presence of the city itself all add to this feel.  But the native species of plants that smell of the ocean, the opportunities for people watching and the vendors selling food remind the visitor that this park is not the future.

The High Line is open from 7a.m. to 10 p.m and admission is free. The lighting in the evening is remarkable; and there’s wooden chairs that move back and forth, inspired by the history of the structure.  And biking to the High Line from Brooklyn is fun.  From North Brooklyn where I lived, it’s easy to hop over the Williamsburg Bridge, dart through Chinatown and navigate across town on 9th St.  And then, there you are, at what I think is the grandest place to walk, anywhere.  The park is well connected to other parts of the city too. For the non-biker, there’s a number of trains and buses nearby and eventually the High Line will extend beyond 20th St to end at 33th St, near the city’s transportation hub and Hell’s Kitchen.

Another view the High Line. Photo by Marcin Wojcik.

The High Line was built in the 1930′s as a massive public-private infrastructure project to elevate freight traffic (mostly food products) from the street level, a dangerous hazard since the 1840′s. When the High Line was in use, goods traveled by train directly to the doorstep — or even inside — the City’s factories. But the High Line has been without trains since the 1980′s.  Citizen advocacy as well as government partnerships led to the preservation of certain sections of the former railway.  According to the conservancy responsible for managing the park and raising funds, Friends of the High Line: “new tax revenues created by the public space will be greater than the costs of construction.”

The team selected to design the High Line was James Corner Field Operations, a landscape architecture firm and architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

So what do you think, what are the best few blocks for walking you’ve been to?

Mixed-use developments can transform the suburbs into more livable communities. Photo by citta-vita.

Live blogging from the American Society of Landscape Architects 2010 Expo and Design Conference in Washington, D.C., held at the Convention Center on September 10-12.

The ASLA’s annual conference involves, tours, workshops, educational sessions, people trying to sell design-type stuff (like Crate & Barrel’s indoor sitting area in a hallway of the conference center), and well, lots of sitting. Majora Carter, founder of Sustainable South Bronx, is a keynote speaker along with Richard Jackson of UCLA’s School of Public Health.

I attended a session called “Retrofitting Surburban Corridors” that highlighted some of the mixed-use options for development in low-density, suburban areas. The planners and designers who presented – all based in the Baltimore region – discussed the conflict of malls and Big Box stores with smart design. They also discussed how to improve five-lane roadways that one presenter called “The Beast.”  The session highlighted a few case studies and techniques that can transform a space functioning as a corridor for cars into development that attracts people and incorporates county and state master plans for smart growth.

The major ways to reform such a multi-lane road corridor, the speakers said, are to re-envision the streetscape through the following ways:

1. Develop a wider sidewalk
2. Put parking in the rear of buildings
3. Bring buildings closer to the street so that their entrances are right along the sidewalk
4. Focus on 3- to 5-storey buildings that encourage multi-use, as opposed to a 1-storey sprawling building.

The discussion on Big Box stores focused on their inevitably and some of the methods architects and planners might employ to create a sense of place. Although hard to finance and find a willing developer, these designs are becoming more common:

1. Focus on connectivity: Strip malls can link to other strip malls so people are easily able to walk from one to the other.
2. Establish mixed-use zoning: Apartments above a grocery store might seem unusual but it encourages clustered development and stronger communities.
3. Be creative about design: There are examples of Big Box stores integrating themselves more sensitively with their surroundings. For example, a Wal-Mart could be located behind and restaurants placed in front. And the store could have a smaller, less visible entrance with parking in the back, not the front. Rather than a blank wall, it’s possible for these stores to have a more varied relationship with their surroundings.

The speakers at the conference included:

Matthew D’Amico, Design Collective, Inc.

Arnold F. Keller, Baltimore County Office of Planning

Marsha McLaughlin, Howard County Office of Planning and Zoning