[events]

Mayors' Institute on City Design: Adaptive Re-Use

[06.2004]

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One symptom of the weak State in America is the fissure that separates, "design" from "policy" at the scale of the city. The very idea that our cities might take on formal and sociological qualities other than what can be guaranteed by the most formulaic economics of land-use value-add models has become itself a suspect, and even subversive provocation. The pre-suppostion that governance is nothing if not the governance of how space is configured and distributed above the aggregate microeconomics of atomic drivers/consumers/users/voters is unfortunately all too alien.

It is not for lack of thinking. Design schools are overflowing with strong ideas. But government has been relegated to such a distorted and handicapped posture that we as a society are left without any collectively-accountable institutional medium through which such design and ideas could enforce themselves into urban space. And so "the market" (which not a thing but a process) absorbs this role for which it is utterly unqualified.

There are programs that suggest real alternatives to the alienation of design from policy in the US. The Mayor's Institute on City Design is an NEA/ U.S. Conference of Mayors project whereby the mayors of cities (by default the Chief Design Officer of their city, whether they wish to be or not) present development projects of varying size that are already on the boards or in the planning stages in their cities to a select panel of America's best designers, design theorists and developers, and get, free of charge to them, world-class consulting feedback on what they should consider doing.

It is a kind of urban design boot camp for mayors. While the agenda is "post-partisan" (our Bush 2 appointed NEA sponsor, Jeff Speck is a movementarian New Urbanist) it is far less post-political, than it is actually political. The working presumptions are that the design of cities is a something that democratically elected governments do, and that an economy is the function of the society (and city) that it serves and not the other way around.

Based on a brief co-written with David Bergman and Michael Speaks, I programmed, hosted and moderated the 2004 event at SCI_Arc, on the theme of the adaptive re-use of existing urban stock
and infrastructure (a strategy that gets more critical every year.)

For 2 days, the mayors (without their staffs of advisors) presented their projects one by one to the design panel, and we successfully, if temporarily, bridged more than one gap.


Download Program Book PDF Designed by HOLA (Jeffrey Inaba and Heather Flood)
196pp.

Download Event Findings Book PDF Designed by HOLA
(Check back for link)


From the program guide:

"Welcome to SCI_Arc and to Adaptive Re-Use, a special session of the Mayors? Institute on City Design. We are very pleased that you have accepted our invitation to join our panel of mayors and city design experts to discuss the future of the Western city, and to work with us to define an agenda for its wise administration and development. Our cities are now part of social economies very different than those around which they were first planned. For us, this represents an exciting opportunity to reimagine the built infrastructure of the American city in the image of what it is becoming, not just what it has been.

The core of Los Angeles is presently undergoing dramatic repurposing of capital stock for new and innovative adaptive reuses. As such, Los Angeles will serve both as a backdrop and laboratory for the proposed conference. Discussions with project developers, designers, and planning and public policy officials involved in implementation will be supplemented with site visits to representative projects located in the immediate area.   

In fact, SCI_Arc itself is an adaptive reuse of a railroad depot that has served as an important component of its emerging arts district.

Contemporary adaptive reuse strategies in Los Angeles represent a radical departure from previous projects that have been undertaken in other American cities. Examples of these projects include the Power Plant in Baltimore?s inner harbor or The Grand Avenue in Milwaukee. These projects were large-scale, capital- intensive, and required significant levels of public participation. The goal of this type of adaptive reuse was to make the core of the city competitive with the periphery by offering spaces that would accommodate typical suburban users, including development programs that could accommodate nationally branded retailers within their preferred formats.

In Los Angeles, the process has been more organic, on a smaller scale, requiring little direct public participation for development financing. In fact, the success of these projects and their collective effect of revitalizing the urban core of Los Angeles stands in stark contrast to the large-scale, capital- intensive redevelopment projects that have yet to fulfill their vision of the creation of active, vital, and catalytic urban places.

While Los Angeles represents an exciting laboratory for successful adaptive reuse strategies, it is not a purely local issue, nor is it an urban design question limited only to large cities. Consider the following examples:

? In Detroit, the Lofts at Woodward converted an old department store to market-rate housing.
? Fort Worth Texas has seen a mixed-use development, including housing and retail, formed from an adaptive reuse of a 1920s-era office tower.
? In Washington, DC, The Hotel Monaco was developed by the Kimpton Group from a turn-of-the-century post office.
? Hudson, Ohio, a city of 22,000 residents, is experiencing a mixed-use program for adaptive reuse of a former industrial campus adjacent to its downtown.
? For 25 years, Staunton, Virginia (population 24,000) has undertaken numerous adaptive reuse projects as part of a consistent economic development strategy.

The focus of this conference will be on technology transfer that will integrate theoretical approaches to adaptive reuse of buildings from a design and architectural standpoint, integrated with the constraints of market viability and the role of public policy interventions. Interest in the adaptive reuse of the urban core is a national phenomenon that is affecting cities of varying scales. Some of the major trends driving this interest include:

? Development of a sense of place
? A premium on residential sites located near employment centers
? Live/work space for ?creative-class? workers
? Transit-oriented development
? Urbanism/new urbanism dichotomy

The focus of this seminar will be for participants to walk away with a better understanding of best practices and design strategies that will allow cities to develop approaches for urban development, centering on the following themes.

1. Accommodation of new demands for growth in the context of the city?s existing capital stock
2. Focus of new investment on older parts of the city
3. Understanding of how policy via zoning and entitlements can be used as a tool to revitalize the city."


Design

Mayors

NEA
Program and Moderator

Benjamin H. Bratton

Tags: architecture, conferences, sci-arc

Published: 06.15.2006

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