Was ist die Webseite?

HumifQuir

Kontaktinformationen, Karte und Wegbeschreibungen, Kontaktformulare, Öffnungszeiten, Dienstleistungen, Bewertungen, Fotos, Videos und Ankündigungen von HumifQuir, Zeitschrift, Reutlingen.

11/02/2022

Birmingham plans to become a supersized low-traffic neighbourhood – will it work?
Birmingham was redesigned in the 1960s to make travelling by car as easy as possible. But the UK’s second city has been falling out of love with cars ever since. The council’s latest plan (Birmingham Transport Plan 2031) makes it clear: the days of private cars are numbered.

To reduce carbon emissions and the negative effect cars have on people, the council plans to reallocate road space to public transport, extending the metro, improving bus services and expanding the cycle-lane network.

To prioritise walking and cycling and the use of public transport, it will build a ring road around the city centre within which private vehicles cannot travel. The council will also impose a 20mph limit on all local roads and car-free zones around schools.

Lastly, it will reduce the number of parking spaces and increase fees for those that remain (including fining companies for providing parking for employees). But can this plan really work?

Cars speed on an underpass in Birmingham
Birmingham does not have a great track record with ring roads. Adam Jones | Unsplash, FAL
Reducing carbon emissions
For the city to reduce its carbon emissions, the proposed ring road is crucial, but, when it comes to ring roads, what works in one city won’t necessarily work in another. However, research has shown that ring roads can reduce traffic when supported by the promotion of environmentally friendly transport alternatives as well as changes to the layout of the city so where people live, work and play are within easy reach of each other. Without these add-ons, traffic is doomed to increase.

Crucial to Birmingham’s success, then, is a prolonged commitment from the council to support public transport and land-use changes. This is because the reason we travel is to get to and from places, so where those places are located, and the options we have for getting to them, matter. The risk is that such commitment is costly and easily falls victim to funding cuts and changes in the political wind.

Birmingham’s previous ring road, built between 1960 and 1971 and later dubbed the concrete collar, was a social and economic disaster. It destroyed heritage buildings and isolated the city centre from the surrounding communities, it made walking and cycling unsafe and it limited the growth of the city centre.

In the end, it was removed – mostly. The tunnel sections remain, as do some of the raised sections, now at ground level. The process took decades and cost millions of pounds. It was a high price to pay for poor design.

An aerial view of Birmingham city centre and the Gravelly Hill Interchange on the M6, AKA Spaghetti Junction.
An aerial view of Birmingham city centre and the Gravelly Hill Interchange on the M6, AKA Spaghetti Junction. UAV 4
Improving lives
Birmingham wants its city centre to become a super-sized low-traffic neighbourhood. This means no access for private vehicles and no more rat runs.

The evidence from existing low-traffic neighbourhood schemes suggests that traffic won’t necessarily be displaced, causing problems in surrounding streets. The picture as to why isn’t completely clear, but it could be that in some cases displaced traffic is finding different routes through the city.

Public opinion is deeply divided over the efficacy of low-traffic neighbourhoods. This is not surprising given that what constitutes a low-traffic neighbourhood varies from existing roads blocked by large potted plants to purpose-built neighbourhoods. Some designs will inevitably be more effective than others.

The problem here is that Birmingham is attempting to apply the concept not to a residential neighbourhood community but a city centre.

Neighbourhood-scale living is, of course, possible in cities. Local centres, those that already exist and new ones that develop, form a network of so-called urban villages within which both daily and essential services must be provided. In Birmingham, however, such services – the bus network, in particular – currently decrease with distance from the city centre.

Other cities have opted for the 15-minute city model, which promotes meeting people’s needs within a quarter-hour walk or cycle from where they live. The problem with this is that when time, and by extension speed, is prioritised it compromises equitable access as the distance people can traverse in any given period of time isn’t the same.

Birmingham Transport Plan 2031 moves Birmingham towards what urbanists call the polycentric city - that is, a city with many “centres”. Such cities require transport solutions that focus on local trips within the context of the wider city. Compared to the traditional monocentric city - that has only one centre into and out of which traffic flows - polycentric cities should mean shorter journeys.

The plan’s success will depend on the city council taking a truly holistic approach to the city and supporting fair access to services. This requires a shift in focus away from the city centre and towards local centres – something the city doesn’t look entirely ready to do.

10/02/2022

Heart health: design cities differently and it can help us live longer
By 2050, it is projected that almost 70% of the world’s population will be living in cities, up from 55% today. The fastest urban growth is happening in Asia and Africa, which is also where we’re seeing a rapid rise in people suffering from, and dying of, heart disease.

The impact of non-communicable diseases on the world population’s health is growing. Non-communicable diseases are those that are not directly transmissible from one person to another. By 2030, scientists predict they will account for 77% of the global burden of disease. Cardiovascular or heart disease is the most common type, responsible for 44% of all deaths related to this category.

New research from the University Medical Centre in Mainz, Germany, explores how urbanisation exacerbates the risks of such diseases. Young people are increasingly concentrated in the world’s cities. Their future health is at risk. Can city planning can be harnessed to protect their health?

A growing problem
The Mainz study synthesises the existing evidence on the impact of several urban environmental risks. These include air pollution (over half of the global deaths from air pollution are due to cardiovascular disease); transport noise (which contributes to the risk of metabolic disease by raising stress hormones levels, heart rate, and blood pressure); and light pollution at night (associated with changes to the circadian rhythm, which is linked to conditions including obesity and heart disease).

The study then highlights how human health and climate change are linked, and what can be done to help. Urban infrastructure is destroyed and populations harmed by the effects of extreme weather, floods and heat stress.

Scholars speak about this enmeshing of human health and the wellbeing of the natural systems on which we depend as planetary health. Increasingly, this is seen as a guiding principle that should drive all urban policies.

Commuter cyclists set off from a green light at a busy road junction in Central London
Cities shaped around cycling and walking encourage healthier living. Joe Dunckley / Alamy Stock Photo
Healthful urban planning
Building cities for cars and urban sprawl encourages car use, traffic congestion, air pollution and noise. The result is more stress, road trauma and physical inactivity as well as worse health overall and more deaths.

It follows that we need better designs for our cities. Research has shown, for instance, that 20% of all deaths could be prevented if cities were designed to meet the recommendations for physical activity, air pollution, noise, heat and green space.

The Mainz authors have identified four urban models that can be described as healthy. The first is the compact city: high-density, with direct public transport and bountiful green space. Melbourne is currently being transformed along these lines.

The second model is the superblock city. Here, blocks are bounded by arterial roads, within which pedestrians and cyclists have priority and residential traffic only is permitted, with a maximum speed limit. In Barcelona, urban planning in this way is estimated to prevent almost 700 premature deaths every year from air pollution, road traffic noise and heat.

The 15-minute city, meanwhile, has recently regained popularity as a means of rebuilding in the wake of the pandemic. Here, the idea –– to which Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, pegged her 2020 re-election campaign –– is that all residents be able to easily fulfil their essential needs (grocery shopping, the school run) within a 15-minute walk or bike ride from their home.

Lastly, the car-free city model, of which the Vauban neighbourhood of Freiburg in Germany is a successful example, reduces unnecessary, private traffic and provides easy access to active and public transportation.

All four models are designed to promote active transportation and to minimise car use. This in turn reduces air pollution, noise and heat and increases physical activity which improves heart health.

While laudable, these models don’t take into consideration the urban sprawl that characterises the cities growing the most rapidly across the globe. Without due consideration of the historical and colonial contexts of spatial segregation, as in, say, South Africa’s urban centres, the 15-minute city could inadvertently exacerbate spatial inequity.

Similarly, the informal ways in which residents in these cities appropriate the built environment require different approaches to promote active living. In Indonesia, Colombia, Rwanda and Nigeria, to name a few, people are increasingly implementing temporary programmes – such as car-free days – to promote active living. These creative initiatives are crucial, as is robustly investigating the health benefits they bring.

An aerial view of the Lagos city centre and shoreline
By 2050, the population of Nigeria is forecast to reach 400 million, with more than half of the country’s citizens living in cities, including Lagos (here) Eye Ubiquitous / Alamy Stock Photo
Embracing complexity
To grapple with the complexity of how non-communicable disease and environmental exposure are related, the Mainz study proposes what is known as an exposome approach. The exposome is defined as the totality of environmental exposures from a variety of sources.

Things like air pollution, green space and housing are obviously all interconnected. Thinking about them as contributing in different, interlinked ways to our urban exposures can help to understand how, together, they cause ill health, and how socio-economic status influences the extent of their impact.

The study identifies several knowledge gaps, including the need for better measures for assessing environmental exposures and for greater citizen participation to ensure such assessments reflect people’s actual lived experiences. Crucially, however, it fails to address the fact that existing models are western-centric.

The urbanisation taking place across Asia and Africa is very different to that underpinning cities in Europe and North America. A 2014 study on built environmental factors and physical activity among adolescents in Nigeria, for example, showed that active travel – walking and cycling - by girls and women was frowned upon. Recommendations should therefore take specific cultural and social norms into account, to avoid widening health and social inequalities.

Ultimately, whether it’s our transport, our energy sources or our housing options, there is an urgent need to consider all the urban factors that impact our wellbeing. Doing so would position urban designers and planners as de facto health professionals, with the attendant responsibility to protect human and planetary health.

10/02/2022

The breathtaking Mont Saint-Michel during a magical sunset 🏰

📸

09/02/2022

Walt Disney’s radical vision for a new kind of city
Since Epcot’s inception, millions of tourists have descended upon the theme park famous for its Spaceship Earth geodesic sphere and its celebration of international cultures.

But the version of Epcot visitors encounter at Disney World – currently in the midst of its 50th anniversary celebrations – is hardly what Walt Disney imagined.

In 1966, Disney announced his intention to build Epcot, an acronym for “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.” It was to be no mere theme park but, as Disney put it, “the creation of a living blueprint for the future” unlike “anyplace else in the world” – an entire new city built from scratch.

Disney died later that year; his vision was scaled down, and then scrapped altogether. But when I was writing my book on urban idealism in America, I was drawn to this planned community.

Since the arrival of the first colonists, Americans have experimented with new patterns of settlement. Imagining new kinds of places to live is an American tradition, and Disney was an eager participant.

A city of the future
A captivating 25-minute film produced by Walt Disney Enterprises remains the best window into Walt’s vision.

In it, Disney – speaking kindly and slowly, as if to a group of children – detailed what would become of the 27,400 acres, or 43 square miles, of central Florida that he had acquired.

Echoing the rhetoric of American pioneers, he noted how the abundance of land was the key. Here he would achieve all that could not be done at Disneyland, his first theme park in Anaheim, California, that opened in 1955 and had since been encroached upon by rapid suburban development. He proudly pointed out that the land on which Disney World would be built was twice the size of the island of Manhattan and five times larger than Disneyland’s Magic Kingdom.

Walt Disney announces his ambitious vision for Disney World and Epcot.
Among the remarkable components of Disney’s Epcot would be a community of 20,000 residents living in neighborhoods that would double as a showcase of industrial and civic ingenuity – a running experiment in planning, building design, management and governance. There would be a 1,000-acre office park for developing new technologies, and when, say, an innovation in refrigerator design would be developed, every household in Epcot would be the first to receive and test the product before it was released for the rest of the world.

Drawing of hotel surrounded by businesses.
A concept sketch of the hotel that would greet visitors to Epcot. Wikimedia Commons
An airport would enable anyone to fly directly to Disney World, while a “vacation land” would provide resort accommodations for visitors. A central arrival complex included a 30-story hotel and convention center, with the downtown featuring a weather-protected zone of themed shops.

Epcot’s more modest wage-earners would be able to live nearby in a ring of high-rise apartment buildings. And there would be a park belt and recreational zone surrounding this downtown area, separating the low-density, cul-de-sac neighborhoods beyond that would house the majority of residents. There would be no unemployment, and it was not to be a retirement community.

“I don’t believe there is a challenge anywhere in the world that’s more important to people everywhere than finding solutions to the problems of our cities,” Disney said.

‘New Towns’ abound
During the 1960s, the aspiration of building anew was much in the air.

Americans were becoming increasingly concerned about the well-being of the nation’s cities. And they were unsatisfied with the effort – and, especially, the consequences – of urban renewal.

They felt insecure in the face of growing urban poverty, unrest and crime, and frustrated about increasing traffic congestion. Families continued to move to the suburbs, but planners, opinion leaders and even ordinary citizens raised concerns about consuming so much land for low-density development.

Sprawl as a pejorative term for poorly planned development was gaining currency as a fledgling environmental movement emerged. In his popular 1960s ballad “Little Boxes,” Pete Seeger sang of “Little boxes on the hillside / Little boxes made of ticky tacky” to criticize the uniform suburban and exurban tracts of housing rippling out from America’s cities.

A hope emerged that building new towns might be an alternative for unlovely and unloved city neighborhoods and for soulless peripheral subdivisions.

Self-described “town founders,” most of them wealthy businesspeople with ideals dependent on real estate success, led America’s New Towns movement. As Disney was preparing for his Epcot presentation, the Irvine Company was already deep into the process of developing the holdings of the old Irvine Ranch into the model town of Irvine, California. Today, Irvine boasts nearly 300,000 residents.

Cows graze on hill overlooking suburban development.
Irvine, Calif., was built on a ranch. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
Meanwhile, real estate entrepreneur Robert E. Simon sold New York’s Carnegie Hall and, with his earnings, bought 6,700 acres of farmland outside of Washington so he could create Reston, Virginia. Fifty miles away, shopping center developer James Rouse started planning Columbia, Maryland. And oil industry investor George P. Mitchell, keeping an eye on the successes and setbacks of Rouse and Simon, would soon take advantage of a new federal funding program and embark on establishing The Woodlands, near Houston, which today has a population of over 100,000 people.

These new towns hoped to incorporate the liveliness and diversity of cities while retaining the intimacy of neighborhoods and other charms associated with small towns.

Disney’s dream today
Disney, however, didn’t want to simply spruce up existing suburbs.

He wanted to upend preexisting notions of how a city could be built and run. And for all of its utopian promise, the genius of Disney’s Epcot was that it all seemed doable, an agglomeration of elements commonly found in any modern metropolitan area, but fused into a singular vision and managed by a single authority.

An important innovation was the banishing of the automobile. A vast underground system was designed to enable cars to arrive, park or buzz under the city without being seen. A separate underground layer would accommodate trucks and service functions. Residents and visitors would traverse the entire 12-mile length of Disney World and all of its attractions on a high-speed monorail, far more extensive than anything achieved at Disneyland.

In the car-crazed America of the 1960s, this was a truly radical idea.

Given Walt Disney’s legendary tenacity, it would have been fascinating to witness how far his vision would have advanced. After his death, some sought to fulfill his plans. But when urged by a Disney designer to carry through on Walt’s broader civic-minded vision, Walt’s brother Roy, who had taken the reins of the company, answered, “Walt is dead.”

Today, Disney’s utopian spirit is alive and well. You see it in former Walmart executive Marc Lore’s ambitions to build a 5-million-person city called “Telosa” in a U.S. desert and Blockchains LLC’s proposal for a self-governing “smart city” in Nevada.

But more often, you’ll see efforts that tap into the nostalgia of a bucolic past. The Disney Corporation did, in fact, develop a town during the 1990s on one of its Florida landholdings.

Dubbed “Celebration,” it was initially heralded as an exemplar of the turn-of-the century movement called New Urbanism, which sought to design suburbs in ways that conjured up the small American town: walkable neighborhoods, a town center, a range of housing choices and less dependence on cars.

However, Celebration has no monorail or underground transport networks, no hubs of technological innovation or policies like universal employment.

That sort of city of tomorrow, it seems, will have to wait.

08/02/2022

Why condos caught on in America
The tragic collapse of Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida, on June 24, 2021, made millions of Americans focus for the first time on the risks of high-rise construction and oceanfront living. Many also became more aware of the pitfalls of condominiums and other forms of co-ownership in which each unit in a multifamily building or other kind of housing complex is individually owned, while the structure itself is owned, and managed, collectively.

As I explain in my book “High Life,” however, there are many benefits to co-ownership. People who buy condos can more easily afford choice locations, have less maintenance to deal with and get the freedom to remodel. Those advantages have made this kind of lifestyle popular for more than a century.

Location, location, location
As U.S. cities grew dramatically in the 19th century, many of the people moving into urban areas clustered together in new kinds of housing. Low-income Americans moved into tenements, the middle class resided in boarding houses and residential hotels, and the prosperous inhabited apartments.

Many Americans, though, were squeamish about sharing a building with other families, especially if their neighbors would be temporary. There were also complaints about sky-high rents. By the 1880s, about a decade after the first apartment buildings went up, the co-ownership model emerged in U.S. cities.

At first, mainly upper-middle-class bohemian types bought these properties, especially successful artists and writers like Impressionist painter Childe Hassam and novelist William Dean Howells. Lawyers, doctors, bankers and businessmen quickly joined them. By the 1920s, affordable co-owned buildings were being built in New York City.

Buying rather than renting an apartment, owners believed, transformed a relatively public space into a more private home and helped strengthen a community of neighbors. It also allowed many people to own homes in places they otherwise couldn’t afford to.

Initially, most co-owned buildings were in popular areas, including Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Chicago’s lakefront, San Francisco’s Nob Hill and the area around Rock Creek Park in Washington.

After World War II, more Americans moved to Florida and other warm-weather resort areas, either permanently or for regular stints. These newcomers and visitors often sought beachfront views.

Old-fashioned ad for the beachfront Fountainhead condo in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.
This 1964 ad in Florida Architecture touted ‘the private world’ of the Fountainhead condo in Ft. Lauderdale. Matthew Gordon Lasner
Affordability is part of the appeal
Not only does co-ownership allow people to share housing in convenient or beautiful locations, it usually keeps their home-related expenses down.

Part of the savings comes from sharing land. Many families can live on a lot that might otherwise have fit just a few houses. Paying for services as a group saves money, too. It’s cheaper to share boilers, roofs, doormen and janitors than to pay for all that on your own. Apartment owners can also share the expense of amenities like gyms and swimming pools.

Further savings come from the fact that buildings aren’t owned by landlords but by their residents. And those people do much of the management themselves. In co-owned buildings, walls, roofs, parking lots and other common elements technically belong to a special kind of nonprofit, usually a condominium association, run by an elected board of tenant directors who volunteer their time.

This kind of housing also typically keeps costs stable because renters are more vulnerable to inflation and other shifts in the housing market – with some exceptions.

These and other savings help explain why apartment ownership has always appealed to Americans living on fixed incomes, such as retirees.

This is especially true of those with enough cash to buy their apartments without a mortgage. Retirees selling houses up north – often originally bought with the help of the government through the Federal Housing Administration or GI Bill – moved into Florida condos by the hundreds of thousands between the 1960s and 1980s.

An old-fashioned advertisement for co-op apartments featuring a man in a suit and tie
This ad in the Sept. 21, 1958, edition of The New York Times emphasized the fancy amenities at the Salisbury Manor co-op along the Hudson River in Nyack. Matthew Gordon Lasner
Fostering a sense of community
There’s no guarantee you will like your neighbors, and plenty of condo buildings are susceptible to squabbling and the financial limitations of owners. But this kind of ownership brings people together, however begrudgingly.

Most owners had much in common in the earliest co-owned buildings in many parts of the country, including New York, Washington and South Florida. Many were women who, at a time when it was considered risqué for them to live on their own, found that the arrangement made them feel safer.

As developers started putting up larger buildings full of unrelated buyers, they began to screen prospective residents by requiring personal references. Often that meant keeping out people who belonged to racial, ethnic and religious minorities – including Jews, Catholics, and African Americans.

An old-fashioned advertisement for co-op apartments that emphasized how 'refined' its residents were
This Feb. 24, 1927, ad in the Chicago Tribune for a co-owned building noted that residency would be limited to ‘people of means and refinement.’ Matthew Gordon Lasner
The elected boards of directors at some expensive buildings in New York still screen buyers in this way. To date, their owners have largely been shielded from the Fair Housing Act of 1968 by claims that they have other reasons, usually financial, for rejecting applicants.

By the 1960s, however, as demand for co-ownership exploded – and segregation came under attack in all arenas of American life – developers realized that Americans didn’t need this kind of prejudiced crutch to come together and manage an apartment building. So they did away with the practice.

With more and more Americans living alone, co-ownership’s blend of privacy and community is more important than ever.

Condos of all kinds, everywhere
It’s currently possible to buy a condo just about anywhere, including in underground bunkers or trailer parks. You can occupy a condo that’s a single-family detached house without having to deal with your own yard. Some 30 million Americans live in co-owned homes, including 1 in 5 homeowners in metropolitan areas.

The deadly collapse of Champlain Towers South is a reminder that these complexes can be more fragile than they appear. And even if the vast majority of condo buildings aren’t structurally dangerous, many don’t have enough money set aside for major repairs.

Owners and board members up and down the Florida coast and around the country are now reviewing their buildings’ financial and engineering reports, and lawmakers are calling for increased governmental oversight.

But this is also an opportunity to take stock of what I consider a remarkable achievement: a system that allows millions of people who don’t want or need whole houses, or who can’t afford them, to live in dignity – or even luxury – in apartments of their own.

08/02/2022

Lightning meets a rainbow ⚡🌈

📸

07/02/2022

More parks and waterways in cities could prevent premature deaths, study finds
For city dwellers, having access to green space is generally touted as a guardian of good health. Research shows that spending time in parks and urban woodlands, green streets and gardens contributes to fewer mental-health problems, less heart disease, better cognitive functioning in both children and the elderly, and healthier babies.

This is particularly true for children. Those who go to greener schools with more trees and natural play areas have been shown to have better brain development and exams results. Research also shows that early childhood exposure to green space can lead to fewer mental health problems in adult life.

Our research confirms that access to urban parks and other green space contributes to lower premature mortality and longer life expectancy. We have found that up to 43,000 premature deaths could be prevented annually in more than 1,000 European cities if they achieved the recommendations set out by the World Health Organization (WHO) in terms of residential proximity to green space.

Green spaces in between high-rise buildings, seen from above
Green space is only beneficial if designers ensure people can use it. CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash, FAL
Official guidelines
The WHO recommends universal access to green space and recommends that there should be a green space measuring at least 0.5 hectares (3.7 acres) no more than 300 metres from every home. However, our results showed that 62% of the population in the nearly 1,000 European cities lives in areas with less green space than recommended. Particularly in poorer neighbourhoods, there isn’t enough green space close to where people live. This means people don’t get the health benefits they could.

For urban planners, as a rule of thumb, every citizen should be able to see at least three trees from their home, have 30% of tree-canopy cover in their neighbourhood and live within 300 metres of the nearest park or green space. This is the so-called 3-30-300 rule originally proposed by Dutch urban forestry expert Cecil Konijnendijk.

Health professionals increasingly also underline the importance of so-called blue space in urban environments: rivers, lakes, beaches and seafronts. Going for a walk along a canal or being on the water in a boat brings health benefits, as does swimming.

It has been shown to lead to better mental health and more physical activity and, to a less extent, to better general health. Research has found it helps to reduce obesity and heart disease. It may help reduce urban heat-island effects in cities: city planners have long highlighted the vital contributions bodies of water can play in cooling urban centres. Once again, there is not enough of it near to where people live in cities.

Missing spaces
The mere presence of green or blue space, however, is not enough. People need access to them. To maintain good health and wellbeing, at least two hours per week of visits to green or blue space are recommended.

A ferry on the Seine in Paris
Blue space, the city’s underrated benefactor. Bastien Nvs on Unsplash, FAL
The EU-funded GoGreenRoutes project, currently underway in cities across Europe, Latin America and China, aims to make city-dwellers more connected to nature. It is looking at how to use green and blue space to enhance inhabitants’ physical and mental health in cities including Burgas in Romania, Tallinn in Estonia and Umea in Sweden. This includes increasing the number of shared walkways, stretches of greenery such as canal towpaths or disused railbeds, and so-called pocket parks, which are the irregular bits of land on street corners or vacant lots that can be landscaped into tiny green spaces.

More generally, European cities should focus on reclaiming urban land to provide more green space. This could take the shape of everything from planting gardens on rooftops and building garden walls to adding trees and pocket parks to street corners. It is about rerouting traffic, digging up asphalt and replacing it with as much greenery as possible. Similarly, waterways should be made accessible to all.

Adresse

Reutlingen

Webseite

http://mariegrue486.com/

Benachrichtigungen

Lassen Sie sich von uns eine E-Mail senden und seien Sie der erste der Neuigkeiten und Aktionen von HumifQuir erfährt. Ihre E-Mail-Adresse wird nicht für andere Zwecke verwendet und Sie können sich jederzeit abmelden.