A holistic approach to asset management in the Netherlands

The objective of the national agency for road and water infrastructure in the Netherlands is to deliver best service to the public at lowest life cycle cost, given public acceptable risk. This requires a sound and well-structured system of management and maintenance. Such a system consists of elements such as reliable asset data, long-term performance based maintenance programmes, clear steering objectives and transparent procurement strategies. Asset management will make it possible to show what network performance can be achieved, at which costs and with which associated risks. A model defining an asset owner role, an asset manager role and a service provider role was chosen as a governing principle for the design of the asset management process. The design of the process described in the paper sets the boundary conditions to carry out projects with the minimum amount of hindrance for the user while involving the market in the best possible way.     

AN EVIDENCE-BASED METHODOLOGY FOR LANDSCAPE DESIGN

As a design method supported by scientific knowledge and findings, evidence-based design now is widely applied in the field of architectural and landscape design. This design process makes architects and landscape designers’ decisions about built environment sound and reliable. Combining two practice cases — the Urban Ecological Corridor Planning of College Station of Texas, a regional planning project, and Landscape Design of the Yangpu Bridge Park in Shanghai, an urban public space project — this article illustrates the concept and process of key issue identification and response, a pivotal step in evidence-based design, and points out the challenges in related applications of this method.     

以栖息地修复为导向的 湿地公园设计方法 ——以云南省保山市青华湿地为例

Wetland park design seeks to protect and restore the wetland ecosystems of sites through scientific approaches. However, in practice, the relevant ecological principles about wetland restoration are often not effectively understood or applied by landscape designers, resulting in compromised ecological benefits after the restoration, especially in biodiversity and habitat benefits. The authors highlighted the main causal factors in wetland—flooding and fertility—and adopted wetland birds as indicator species to simplify the evaluation method. Based on years of practice, the authors summarized a hydrology-based wetland design method for habitat restoration, aiming to translate ecological principles and research findings into design guidelines that can be easily understood and applied by landscape designers to spatial design. This design method includes 7 steps, namely 1) targeted species selection and goal setting; 2) design of habitat types and spatial arrangement; 3) landform design; 4) water level design; 5) plant community building; 6) landscape design with minimal intervention; and 7) spatial design for natural succession. The article then expanded each step using an illustrative design case, the Qinghua Wetland in Baoshan, Yunnan Province.     

From Rubble to Refuge—Tommy Thompson Park in Toronto,Canada

Tommy Thompson Park in the city of Toronto, Canada was originally a massive landfilling project that extended 5 kilometers out into Lake Ontario. It was constructed from construction rubble and harbor dredge from the 1950s through the late 1970s, when the project was halted due to changing economic conditions. Left to its own devices, the landfill spontaneously evolved into a “nature preserve” when innumerable plants from around the world established themselves and hundreds of migrating bird species descended on the site for nesting and feeding. In the 1990s, the city of Toronto took control of the site and transformed it into a park—Tommy Thompson Park—after a carefully planned design and construction process. The design interventions enhanced public accessibility, wildlife and habitat diversity, and ecological functionality. Tommy Thompson Park is an ideal case study for examining the dynamic interaction between spontaneity and design and for how, over time, these seemingly contradictory processes can come together harmoniously.     

SHANGHAI SANLIN VALLEY PARK — LANDSCAPE DESIGN OF AN URBAN GREEN WEDGE

As one of the eight major green wedges within Shanghai’s overall urban planning in the city center, Sanlin Valley Park serves as an important intersection between ecological corridors along the Huangpu River and Shanghai’s outer ring road. During the rapid urbanization process, the city’s ecology has been facing constant deterioration. Furthermore, the city is experiencing an alarming loss of biodiversity, as well as increasingly severe urban heat island effect. To alleviate these issues, the project adopts a “valley” concept as the core of its design and utilizes thoughtful design strategies in five aspects: water management, wind corridors and micro-climates, ecosystem, transportation, and program and experience. With these strategies, the design team aims to improve the site’s connectivity, restore its ecology, reshape habitats, create a resilient landscape, and forge a vibrant urban hub that can also serve as the city’s ecological research base. During the design process, the design team adopts certain principles of landscape practices within the USA — that a project should encourage public participation of all socio-economic levels and place emphasis on the experience and benefits of the public. This form of multi-lateral cooperation allows for the park to constantly have its design plan reviewed and improved. It also allows for iterative responses to issues on the ground during construction. Last but not least, it instigates careful considerations of how to manage the park and its ecosystem, both in terms of cost and feasibility. By adopting all of these principles, the design team aspires to truly accede to citizens’ needs, all while introducing a sustainable ecosystem that would, ultimately, contribute to a much improved ecology and economy.     

From Intuition-Driven to Product-Driven Design: Changes in Design Values and Responsibilities

In this interview, combining his career experience as an architect, a landscape architect, and an entrepreneur, Zhu Shengxuan, the interviewee, shares his insights on values and responsibilities of design. He argues that designers should coordinate the interests of all stakeholders and take public benefits into account, and believes that design can be better promoted as a product under a commercial thinking. Through an integration of design, construction, and operation, Zhu creatively introduces a combination of commercial thinking and design values to create a greater social influence. He also encourages addressing China’s rural revitalization with diverse, future-oriented concepts, and points out that the breakthrough of institutions may bring more economic benefits to rural locals.     

Mise-en-Scène—Design Research Through Multiple Lenses

Mise-en-Scène is a design research project in the form of a book that expands the ways in which we think about the creative roles of publication and communication, and about our connections as a discipline to the issues and world around us. Taking from its title, Mise-en-Scène is an arrangement of the actors and sceneries that constitute our cities and lives. This project is characterized by four features. Communication—Distinct from a design monograph, Mise-en-Scène is a collaboration between landscape architect Chris Reed and photojournalist Mike Belleme, directed towards a general audience. Arrangement—An arrangement of photographs, drawings, models, sketches, essays, literary excerpts, and community engagement quotes from designers, activists, and ecologists, offering greater multiplicity to the narrative and provoking new associations across cities, projects, and experiences. Perspective—A reflection of how Stoss Landscape Urbanism observes, investigates, and engages with our urban landscapes. Opportunity—Mise-en-Scène puts forth a new model of integrating interdisciplinary perspectives, as well as public audiences, within the formation of design research. Built and speculative works, from Reed and the practice of Stoss, spatialize how these conditions coalesce—whether at the scale of a bench or the entirety of the city fabric. And through a foregrounding of human connection, rather than design, Belleme’s photography elucidates both the quotidian and fantastical occupation of these urban landscapes.     

Prototyping a Park—Landscape Design of Jubileumsparken in Gothenburg,Sweden

The design of Jubileumsparken in Gothenburg, Sweden runs on two parallel tracks—a permanent park will be completed and opened in late 2021, and before that a series of temporary parks and installations had been set up during several public workshops since 2014. The gradual evolution of the site allows ecosystems to adapt and invites the public to leave their imprint on the park through not only directly building and planting, but even more importantly, indirectly voicing their interests and desires which impacts the final design of the permanent park. With a focus on the existing fragile ruderal and coastal ecosystems, as well as the socio-cultural heritage of the site, a 1:1 scale landscape laboratory—the Shoreline Park—was built up together with the public. It allowed for testing new materials, work methods, planting and maintenance techniques that would then be used in the permanent Play & Learn Park. The design process also highlights the need for a closer collaboration between landscape architects and maintenance staff to achieve the sustainability goals and the aesthetic value of the park over a longer period, as well as the importance of landscape architects’ continuous involvement in park maintenance and the use of digital tools. The project also adopted geotechnic infrastructure to create a gently sloping wetland and proposed a mixed planting plan of indigenous species, natural succession and exotics to address climate change, and to create preconditions for high biodiversity even in the long term. Through such prototyping and testing, the wider public, maintenance staff, and experts got engaged in this project, which initiated a dialogue about the persistence in landscape between urban ecosystems, wildscapes, and aesthetics.     

Art and Ecology at the Edge of Osaka,Japan

City as Nature is an ecological art and media studio based primarily in Kitakagaya, a former shipbuilding district on the outskirts of Osaka, Japan. Working with local and international practitioners, and public and private organizations across multiple disciplines and sectors, they produce ecological art projects that re-connect people, process, and place with the ecosystems in which we dwell. Two narrative project studies in Kitakagaya are presented here: 1) The Branch Osaka, a physical ecological space built inside a typical wood-and-earth row house in an 80-year-old marketplace—rebuilt by City as Nature, using locally recycled materials, it now serves as a residence and ecological art space, with a natural garden and donation-based programming; 2) City as Nature Festival, an ecological neighborhood “happening,” taking place in multiple local public and privately-owned spaces. The festival explores urban relationships with the nature through art-driven dialogs between practitioners, the general public, and the urban space itself. From these projects, City as Nature hopes to explore approaches to cultivating relationships—individual, meaningful relationships between designers, executives, civic leaders, citizens, and the communities of ecosystems in and around our cities. Through an ongoing, truthful dialog with the environment, people might just discover the possible city, an equitable place for all beings.     

后新冠肺炎疫情时代城市的加速智能化

Governments, developers and big-tech companies have become enamoured with the possibility of the smart city: an efficient, convenient (and profitable) “smart” metropolis to help accommodate and optimize rapid urban growth. While it is tempting to wash renders of future cities with the typical smart city visions of drones, segways, and shiny reflective glass towers—the reality is that good (smart) cities incorporate a bottom-up messiness and urban vitality which is fundamental to the overall thriving of the city. In Hassell’s competition winning scheme for the Xinqiao District in Shenzhen—the design team explored the ideas that a smart and innovative city that first and foremost uphold—a place which fosters inclusivity, diversity, collaboration, and resilience. Now through times of ongoing uncertainty in the COVID-19 era, Hassell’s design team expects an even greater adoption of smart cities rhetoric as a form of necessary urban surveillance and to manage and support communities and the containment of the COVID-19—building urban resilience against big disaster events, enabling adaptive environments that can re-calibrate, reorganize, and evolve in real-time as needed. Can urban designers go beyond resilience to imagine cities which thrive and grow out of disaster events?     

Engaging Luni: A Critical Zone of Wetness rather than a River

When the ground is understood as a geographic surface, Luni is articulated to be a seasonal river that flows through the Thar Desert in India. In this paradigm, the desert is perceived as empty or as a place of scarcity to which water must be brought in pipes and canals. However, when situated within a “critical zone of wetness” that extends from clouds to aquifers, Luni is a culturally vibrant open terrain where various traditional practices of habitation—salt production, pottery, music, block printing, and dyeing—are acutely tuned to the monsoon. The design studio organized and instructed by Professor Anuradha Mathur in 2018 at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania engages the latter through analog prints, imprints, and montages to construct another ground. This approach pursues Luni as ubiquitous wetness, rather than understanding the Luni-as-a-river differently. The design project “Resonating Instruments” is an outcome of this studio. Instead of working with maps that construct the ground as a geographic surface, the project uses drawing, photography, printmaking, and montage as techniques of negotiation to construct the ground as a “critical zone of wetness.” These techniques were used to engage the Luni and to construct the instruments in a “critical zone of wetness,” where negotiation, flexibility, fluidity, and gradients are favored over rigidity, separation, and strict delineations and definitions.     

儿童友好型社区营造中的参与者社会网络构建与分析 —以湖南省长沙市育才第三小学"娃娃农园"营造实践为例

Introducing the case of the Kids’ Gardens in Yucai No. 3 Primary School in Changsha City, Hunan Province, this study established sociograms upon the contact-frequency-based network with UCINET to systematically analyze the characteristics of different participants in the process of the childfriendly community building and the varying pattern of all social relations, aiming at addressing problems emerging in public participation and multi-stakeholder collaboration in Chinese mainland. It was found that by bonding stakeholders including citizens, the government and party organizations, universities, and public institutions and enterprises, this practice encouraged the school — as a community — to leverage its internal resources. The school finally overcame the organizational inertia and achieved independent operation and growth during the process of community building. The study also demonstrated that the social network of participants was developed and defined with both independent and dependent modes from an overall perspective, of which the former characterized for its dominant internal ties and a dense tree-like hierarchical management structure might be more efficient. From a participant perspective, the brokerage roles in key nodes were critical to the community building. Finally, spatial design strategies, including enhancing the spatial affordance to serve diverse activities, space zoning and allocation, offering “half-done” spaces, and phased development, were provided for similar community building practice.     

OPERATIONALIZING POLYCENTRICITY FOR LANDSCAPE RESILIENCE

Landscapes are complex adaptive socialecological systems that encompass human and natural and built environments, and provide essential public and common goods to societies. Facing fast socio-economic, environmental, and policy changes and increasing uncertainties, building resilience has emerged as a main objective for landscape planning, design, and management. A key strategy to make landscape social-ecological systems resilient is to form appropriate governance forms that can be responsive and adaptive to external shocks and other stressors. Polycentricity is such a form that has been proven to enhance resilience. By analyzing a variety of cases, it demonstrates polycentricity — both its breadth of inclusion and collaborative degree — can affect governance outcomes. This is the best of times to become more plural in theory and methodology in order to have a stronger capacity of navigating the complexities of landscape social-ecological systems.     

城市儿童空间设计中的认知科学

An important consideration in designing urban spaces for children is that it should aid children’s development and learning. An extensive literature from Cognitive Science has established that children’s social, cognitive, and motor development is promoted by various, wellresearched types of play. This article reviews the body of knowledge from Cognitive and Developmental Science concerning the benefits of play for learning and explains that it can and should be harnessed by urban designers. First, the review shows that different types of play confer different learning benefits. Urban space design that attempts to maximize learning from play should consider design’s affordance — what types of play are afforded by the design. Second, evidence from Cognitive Science show that children’s learning and exploration are fostered by challenge and ambiguity. Design that embraces these increases learning and creativity. Third, play is critical for children’s social learning, as it gives children the opportunity to practice social interaction. Urban design can catalyze social learning by creating spaces and structures that invite play among peers, as well as parent-child play. Beyond this theoretical review, this article also illustrates how to realistically implement these Cognitive Science-oriented urban design with an authentic case study.     

From justification to evaluation: Building information modeling for asset owners

Building information modeling (BIM) is an emerging technology focused methodology that can be used to improve the performance and productivity of an asset's design, construction, operation and maintenance process. Typically the investment justification process for BIM has been based upon the utilization of the return on investment (ROI). This measure does not accurately reflect the ‘real’ costs and benefits that are associated with implementing BIM by an asset owner. With this in mind, a benefits evaluation framework that looks beyond ROI and takes into account the evolving nature of BIM by incorporating intangible benefits and indirect costs is presented and discussed. To acquire the wide range of benefits that BIM can offer asset owners, it is proffered that they should shift their mindsets away from justification using ROI to a process of evaluation that encompasses the appraisal of value and benefits' realization.     

浅述石油库综合污染防控

随着石油库数量的不断增加和公众环境保护意识的增强,石油库环境污染问题越来越引人关注.正确认识和合理预防、控制油库污染对于实现企业经济、社会以及环境效益的协调发展起着非常重要的作用.文章简要分析了石油库的常规环境污染途径、方式及火灾爆炸事故造成的环境风险,分别从规划、设计和运行三个阶段论述了常规环境污染控制以及事故状态下的风险防控,并提出此项工作应贯穿于规划、设计和运行的全过程中.     

ÍCHNI: DEVICES FOR A JOYFUL ARCHITECTURE

Can architecture prompt the body into more complex actions? An active body is a joyful body, and our sedentary behaviors are inhibiting the delightful encounters of spaces. Architecture should, in fact, inspire active and engaging experiences. Íchni is a playful exploration into how spatial devices can increase the body’s potential to act through the use of interactive technology; an investigation in generating affective feedback loops between surrounding objects and the body through a physical-digital system. Through developing “choreographic devices” — playable structures embedded with physical sensors —and a virtual projection overlay, the physical forces of movements are captured as data points, then translated and projected back into the environment, heightening the awareness of our actions to affect the manner in which we move through a generative environment.     

边境棕地: 后工业及后冲突棕地景观

The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) landscape between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Republic of Korea is currently the most dangerous and heavily fortified territory in the world and has produced a series of continuously linked brownfield lands on a divided Korean Peninsula through the continued intense presence of military troops and equipment, a significant amount of defense infrastructure, and pollutant buildup over the last seventy years. The political and social reunification of the two Koreas may occur in the coming years and any work in the future to address the landscape of a unified peninsula would be required to carry out in the DMZ. The work includes a complete characterization of the land area and water bodies and the existing military infrastructure and abandoned equipment, with the proposed remediation of soils, groundwater, and drainage systems as well as the concerns of brownfield land reuse, adding new industrial manufacturing to the area, the increase of tourism into the region, and the development of both traditional and new forms of regional energy generation. The brownfields in the DMZ can be considered an extreme version of the more conventional post-industrial sites that are addressed in other urban or ex-urban venues through the methods and conventions of brownfield regeneration. Or indeed it may become a new type of brownfield site — the “brownfield border” — with its own characterization, on-site pollutants, and methods to address its ongoing remediation and reuse programs. The intention of this paper is to examine the DMZ through a recent academic study carried out through a graduate design studio at Harvard University focused on the outcomes of unification on the Korean peninsula, the remediation of border landscapes as a new type of brownfield practice, and potential planning and design of alternative futures.     

WORKPLACE AS LANDSCAPE — DESIGN OF FACEBOOK HEADQUARTERS IN SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA

This article is broadly about Facebook Headquarters in Menlo Park, California, with a focus on the planning, design, and ongoing construction of the Bayfront Campus. The project is rooted in ecological principles, restoring a post-industrial brownfield site to a biodiverse and resilient landscape. It reaches to merge the functional needs of workplace culture with habitat created by the establishment of natural systems. Two of three new buildings — MPK 20 and MPK 21 — are now completed, fluidly integrating the architecture and landscape. Together, they form a rich and complex campus landscape that brings people close to each other and to nature, reduces and treats stormwater runoff, minimizes head island effects, and maximizes open space. Responding to ongoing site and program needs, the observations and feedback from MPK 20 (completed in 2015) provided valuable insights on the improvement of MPK 21 (completed in 2018). The design provides abundant landscape services, not only enhancing the knowledge of species that define local California native habitats, but also allowing people to learn through osmosis — relaxing the mind, expanding perception, and stimulating imagination.