10 ideas: If your city was decimated by earthquake, planning principles for the rebuild

A big question this week thinking about the fabric of your city. Imagine the city was decimated by a natural disaster to the point of complete rebuild.

There’s a blank canvas. What 10 principles or elements would you want included in the rebuild?

This post is a collection of responses from the weekly 10 ideas email. If you’d like to be more creative every week, you can sign up to receive the email here.

Some of my favourites this week:

• So simple, so sensible: Track how many people are on the streets & dim the lights if there is no one around.
• Why not make bikes a public good? Cost would be negligible relative to traffic congestion: Have ample bike stations, with free bikes for people to utilise.
• Building for autonomous vehicles from the ground up: Fundamentally built for ground based Autonomous vehicles, which will force quick adoption.
  — compatible street signage (easily understandable by computer vision)
  — wireless beacons to avoid the need for computer vision (next generation)
  — new simpler road rules (e.g. no hook turns)
  — minimal car parking, as AVs will likely go to service model without car ownership, and therefore cars will drop you off and leave to provide a ride to someone else

The full list:

Parks and Beautification

1. A fractal parks system where at every scale parks and open space must make up 15%. So every street has 15% parks, every block has 15% parks, every suburb has 15% parks, and the whole city has 15% parks
2. All commercial roofing needs to be “greened” wherever possible. Want foliage on commercial roofs to promote heat absorption (ultimately a cooler city)
3. Creek and river restoration for more parkland and better management of urban floods.
4. As many green spaces as possible

Utilities and infrastructure

1. Instrumented infrastructure. Sensors built into buildings and footpaths. This could provide usage metrics to provide more relevant and on-demand services such as lighting only when people are there. It could also be used to alert authorities when maintenance is required, before failures, avoiding more costly repairs or injuries.
2. Track how many people are on the streets & dim the lights if there is no one around.
3. All high voltage transmission lines underground
4. Recycled water systems in every suburb for garden watering.
5. Solar everywhere — exploit surface area more efficiently to generate energy to power public utilities and go back into the grid.
6. Solar as a key construction requirement

Pedestrians and bikes

1. Covered arterial bike highways, so that there’s express cycling routes into and out of the city (these may be elevated)
2. Active footpaths. Power generation through force transducers built into walkways.
3. Pedestrian city centres
4. Life designed around walking
5. Have ample bike stations, with free bikes for people to utilise.

Interaction and public spaces

1. Retail boulevards in every suburb that are deliberately designed to encourage loitering and social interaction. Cafe and social spaces.
2. Build streets as boulevards with trees and a green strip down the middle including bike paths, walking paths and benches. This is done in Tel Aviv (for a number of passages up/down and across the city). It results in a greener city, and fully integrated social spaces where people congregate, meet and interact. It also makes it easy to get around the city by foot or bike which is cleaner, more fun and healthier.
3. Promoting social mixing
4. Work and play centres together
5. Neighbourhood entertainment
6. Every suburb needs a library that overlooks a park.
7. All apartment buildings should have communal kitchens, reading rooms, lounges, bars, gym facilities & pools & communal vegetable gardens.

Cars

1. No on-street parking, anywhere.
2. Fundamentally built for ground based Autonomous vehicles, which will force quick adoption.
   — compatible street signage (easily understandable by computer vision)
   — wireless beacons to avoid the need for computer vision (next generation)
   — new simpler road rules (e.g. no hook turns)
   — minimal car parking, as AVs will likely go to service model without car ownership, and therefore cars will drop you off and leave to provide a ride to someone else
3. Infrastructure to support Electronic Vehicle such as charging infrastructure (even if standards are not yet established, the fundamental infrastructure can be built).
4. Fundamentally built for air based Autonomous vehicles, which will encourage adoption. Landing areas, regulations for the use of airspace, charging station infrastructure.
5. Complete separation of people and vehicles
6. Support electric cars by providing adequate charging stations.

Schools

1. Evenly distributed schools with large grounds that double as public space and parks

Housing

1. Build adequate amount of housing & let people use superannuation (deposit only) to buy their first home.

Changing use

1. No golf courses in the inner suburbs. A huge waste of space in dense urban areas (relative to usage). I’ve got nothing against golf — but the space can be used so much better in dense urban areas. Golf should be restricted to the suburban fringe.
2. Moving the port out of the centre of the city and using the space for better inner city density / redevelopment.

Public transport

1. All major shopping centres must be connected to heavy rail. The shopping centre management organisation pays a tariff to support this connection.
2. Small scale rail/tram cars

Urban farms and food use

1. Food generation: make public spaces amenable to communal farming. Fruit trees and vegetables.
2. Market gardens and allotments
3. Ban supermarkets from throwing out food. It must go to charities & food banks that distribute food to those who need it.
4. Every suburb needs a communal vegetable garden.

This post is a collection of responses from the weekly 10 ideas email. If you’d like to be more creative every week, you can sign up to receive the email here.