SNIFF turns commuting into community building
Photo Courtesy of Urban Re:Vision
SNIFF turns commuting into community building
Photo Courtesy of Urban Re:Vision
Imagine a city where energy is renewably generated from helium-filled “solar balloons” floating hundreds of feet above the rooftops. Imagine a city where public transportation doesn’t follow regular routes, but is instead efficiently directed on the fly, on demand — via cell phone and GPS technology. A city where residential structures designed to keep people apart — like walls and fences — are replaced with facilities that bring neighbors together, like shared kitchen gardens or childcare centers. A city where commercial systems are designed to generate social capital, as well as cold hard cash.
Sound pie-in-the-sky? Maybe. But the folks at Urban Re:Vision think that asking people to completely re-imagine the way urban environments are designed is the key to finding real-world solutions that can make city life healthier — for humans as well as the environment. The San Francisco organization is using a series of design competitions to solicit new ideas — both viable and futuristic — for urban energy, transportation, commercial and community systems.
The final competition, which will take place next year, will challenge entrants to submit blueprints for transforming an entire real-world city block into a more sustainable system. The organization plans to implement the winning blueprint as a showcase project in an actual American city, which they hope will become a prototype replicated around the world.
It’s a heady goal, given that development costs of an actual city block will likely run into the tens of millions of dollars. But the project’s creator, Stacey Frost, a former real estate developer who used to butt heads with builders over the toxic materials involved in construction, is optimistic. “I’m hoping that the design we come up with will be able to be communicated in such a way that, on paper, it wouldn’t make sense to say no,” Frost says.
Sustainable design and green building are burgeoning and energetic, though ultimately scattered, fields. Designers and entrepreneurs tend to tackle individual pieces of the puzzle, such as green building practices, new ways of creating energy, or alternatives to toxic materials — but few are thinking systemically about how all the pieces fit together. Frost hopes Urban Re:Vision will help stimulate more organic thinking and produce solutions that could be applied holistically. Launched a year ago, the project has since received supportive nods from leaders in the field, like best-selling environmentalist author Paul Hawken and Architecture for Humanity’s Cameron Sinclair, as well as the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), an organization of over 700 municipal governments working on sustainability.
While the project will ultimately produce a design for a city block, the organizers realized it would be too daunting to ask people to think that big right out of the gate. They decided to walk before they ran, starting instead with a series of conceptual competitions, asking participants to re-imagine specific components of city living.
The energy and transportation competitions — “Re:Volt” and “Re:Route” — have already taken place, and the deadline for the commerce competition, “Re:Store,” is January 15th. Eric Corey Freed, the principal of San Francisco-based OrganicArchitect and a key adviser to the project, says he was surprised — and encouraged — by the breadth of ideas submitted; everything from using playgrounds and sidewalks to generate energy, to city-wide delivery networks for groceries and other purchases, to social networking systems that alert you to commuters with similar interests.
“I went into it thinking we would get 400 designs for solar-powered skateboards,” Freed says. Instead, the variety of ideas submitted gave him hope that the ingenuity exists out there to solve the many daunting challenges to making city living healthy and sustainable. Freed says he was further buoyed by the absence of entries focused on fossil fuels. It was, he says, a telling development: “I didn’t see one proposal for a new use for oil,” he says. “We’re done with that.”
Urban Re:Vision is in the process of hunting for a specific city and city block where the showcase project could be implemented. They hope to announce their selection this Spring. After selecting the winning design of the final competition, Re:Vision will partner with the designer, a developer and the target city’s leadership to bring the design to life.
About 70 percent of entries for the conceptual competitions so far have come from students, says Urban Re:Vision’s Competitions Director Nicole Cassani, and 30 percent from working professionals. The organization is hoping future competitions will attract entries even among people who don’t necessarily have any specific design, environmental or urban planning experience — but who simply have great ideas. “There are a lot of people out there that desperately want to do something about global warming,” Cassani says. “But they don’t know what, and they don’t know how. We provide hope that there’s going to be a way to make that change.”
Urban Re:Vision is hoping to stimulate further thinking on these topics through the discussion boards it hosts on its website, (UrbanRevision.com) and Re:Vision TV, an online network it created to broadcast videos related to sustainability.
The competition has already started to have ripple effects out in the real world. After designers from Chicago-based Insight Product Design started brainstorming ways to make city cycling safer, their colleagues started biking to work. “Everyone who had previously only thought about it started to take action,” says principal designer John White. “It was the push they needed to take their bike out.” Working on an entry with fellow graduate students at the Presidio School of Design inspired Adam Cornelius to respond differently when he received a notice from the city of San Francisco telling him to fix the broken sidewalk in front of his home. Instead of simply laying down more concrete, Cornelius filled in most of the space with plants and permeable paving stones. He was so delighted with his own results that he’s now started lobbying other neighbors on the block to do the same. If he hadn’t participated in Urban Re:Vision, he says, “I don’t know if I would have approached it in the same way.”
Here are a few of the hundreds of ideas submitted to the Urban Re:Vision Re:Volt (energy) and Re:Route (transportation) competitions. The entries won’t necessarily be assembled Lego-like into the final city block design. But Re:Vision hopes they will inspire future competition participants — as well as real-world designers and sustainability practitioners — to think about new ways to make city life healthier and more sustainable.
Active Energy Playspace
Spend any amount of time at a playground, and you’ll get exhausted simply watching the tykes race hither and thither. Children’s toy and furniture designer Sarah Attwood felt the same way until she realized that the giant amount of energy expended at a typical playground is electricity just waiting to be harnessed. Her Active Energy Playspace, one of the winning entries in the Re:Volt competition, aims to do just that. In its current incarnation, children race on treadmills, bikes and spinners to turn on different colored LEDs in a light sculpture. With a few tweaks, she says, the energy generated could be used for more practical purposes, like powering lights to keep the playground open at night, which, in turn, could help build stronger communities. “It’s going to provide interest for the kids,” Attwood says. “It’s going to enable them to learn about energy production. It’s going to get them out and exercising with their parents.”
Step It Up
New York architect Hazel Go was racing through pedestrian traffic one day when she looked around at her fellow commuters and thought to herself, “Wow, that’s a lot of steps. If you could do something with that, it’d be pretty great.” A little research showed her that a technology already exists to leverage the power in footsteps. It’s called “piezo electricity,” and it enables certain materials to create energy simply by having stress applied to them. One Japanese rail company looking to become greener is already experimenting with this technology to use the motion of passengers passing through turnstiles to produce energy. Go thought to herself, if a train station can use this technology, why not implement in it city sidewalks? Her Step entry envisions doing just that.
Nothing to SNIFF At
Imagine you’ve just discovered a new book or a new band that you’re so jazzed about you can’t wait to talk about it with someone. Now imagine you’re on your daily commute, on a bus or a train, killing time until your stop. Your cell phone beeps, and it’s a notification, telling you there’s another passenger three rows down who’s similarly pumped about your book or band and who would welcome a friendly conversation about it. That’s the idea behind SNIFF, a social networking system and one of the winning entries in the Re:Route competition. It was designed by Abhishek Bali, an industrial designer based in Ahmedabad, India. “It always pains me to see faces getting dull under the pressure of the urban lifestyle, and urban transport simply adds to that tyranny,” Bali says. “The essential requirement of every human being is ‘connectedness….’ SNIFF leaves you with just the right information you need in order to ‘break the ice’ with a stranger.”
Intelligently Integrated Transport
City buses travel fixed routes, which can be inconvenient for passengers wanting to head in a direction not directly served by the system. The buses also follow those same routes irrespective whether there are passengers waiting for them or not. A business person would consider this an inefficient use of resources. But it doesn’t have to be this way, said a team of urban planning graduate students at the University of Virginia, the academic home of sustainable building guru William McDonough. Intelligently Integrated Transport, one of the winning entries in the Re:Route competition, envisions a new system that would use cell phones, GPS systems and in-dash navigational tools as the backbone of a network that would make up bus routes on the fly, directing them to pick up passengers upon request and deliver them to their desired locations. Sound impossible? The students don’t think so. “UPS and other shipping companies already route their drivers according to specific deliveries and traffic conditions, and in fact do this very well,” says Bob Batz, one of the team members. “The challenge is simply to convince a city or company that it is an idea worth investing resources into.”
Luma Lane
Anyone who rides a bicycle in the city knows it’s just a matter of time before they end up on the losing end of a one-on-one with a car. Bike lanes are supposed to give cyclists the space they need to stay safe, but designers at Insight Product Development, whose headquarters are in Chicago, noticed what every cyclist has experienced: motorists often don’t pay attention to the lanes and sometimes don’t even see cyclists next to them. Luma Lane aims to change that. Using an RFID sensing technology, small light pods on the outsides of bike lanes would light up when they detected the presence of cyclists. The dynamic lights could be the extra signal motorists need to steer clear of the lane. The hope is that by making in-city cycling safer, more people will choose to forgo their cars in favor of this greener form of transportation. “Giving cyclists more confidence to share the road allows more cyclists to do it,” says designer John White.
ReCharge
Brian McLaughlin, a solar energy designer who recently moved from California to Michigan, designed a complementary system of solar panels and wind turbines, which his calculations determined could generate enough energy to power the homes and businesses on his imaginary city block — with enough left over to charge 56 electric cars. The block he envisioned in ReCharge, one of the winning entries in the Re:Volt competition, also included kitchen gardens, composting systems and a community gym which would generate power from treadmills and exercise bikes. The biggest challenge, says McLaughlin, who is in the process of buying a Prius to convert to fully electric, was figuring out how to incorporate his ideas into an attractive setting for living and working. “Anything you can think up can work,” he says, “but it doesn’t mean people want to live there.”
E.B. Boyd lives and works in San Francisco where she never ceases to be delighted by innovative solutions to tough challenges.