Table of contents for N.106 in Topos

Growing up in a small village where the crow of the cock woke me up in the morning, the smell of the dunghill was a daily unconscious experience, and green trees and flourishing fields were around everywhere, I do have good memories of my childhood. But I also remember the social challenges and conflicts our family experienced as immigrants in a small, value-driven community where social control was as pervasive as strong opinions and even prejudice. The situation changed when I moved to the nearby city. In this urban environment, I was able to talk about my inner experience and broach the questions that I had on my chest with many of my new friends; I learned about different lifestyles, felt culturally stimulated, and, in contrast to earlier years, felt…

When the aversion towards living in large multi-family houses in new high-rise suburbs culminated in apartments remaining vacant, Swedish housing construction shifted focus towards low-rise townhouses and detached houses in the 1980s. Sure, for the individual this meant economic advantages, but not for society in general. The new small-scale construction required a considerable amount of land and demanded costly investments in service, roads, and public transport. For cities like Stockholm, this also meant higher expenses for the city. People with good incomes left the city for neighboring municipalities, resulting in huge losses in local tax revenue. For many families with two working parents, long and time-consuming commutes to centrally located workplaces became a burden. The city lost its attractiveness. The salvation was to turn the city’s growth inward, towards the…

Tim Rettler: Lucy, you have been developing “Healthy Streets” for several years. Could you outline the origins and the development of this new approach? LUCY SAUNDERS: I worked in many areas of public health. Throughout my career I was wondering if one could only do one thing, what would have the biggest impact on improving health and reducing health inequalities? I saw that the big challenges are predominantly related to physical activity, but also issues like loneliness and social isolation. If you add the other impacts that come from everyday activities – exposure to air pollution, road danger and noise – you start to realise that the way we design our cities, and what our streets look and feel like has the biggest impact on public health. Rettler: What is…

To what extent do memorials contribute to healing? Memorials may, through their designs, represent and commemorate victims of war or terror, and help groups and individuals make sense of and recover from trauma and loss. However, there is another motivation for the erection of memorials that may override the potential therapeutic intentions. That is, to influence the narrative of the commemorated event, and ensure that a specific version of history prevails: memorials tend to have the definitive say on the past. When a memorial is realised, the ‘truth’ of what has happened is virtually carved in stone. This seems to have been a key function of memorials throughout history. In ancient Rome, for example, burials were permitted only outside city walls, and memorials were lining the roads outside the city.…

If you wish to leave urban stress and the city’s hustle and bustle behind you, you should try Shinrin-yoku. In translation the term means “bathing in the forest air”, which was coined by the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries in the early 1980s. Meanwhile, forest bathing in Japan has established itself as part of health care and is a serious field of research. There are more than sixty forest therapy centres and specially designed therapy paths in the country. The cradle of Shinrin-yoku is the 728-hectare Akasawa Natural Recreational Forest near the town of Agematsu, with its 300-year-old Kiso cypress trees. A strong connection to forests and the worship of trees has a long tradition in the Far East and especially in Japan. Trees have always been considered…

When the Lakeview Chamber of Commerce in Chicago drafted its master plan in 2012, among its top priorities was development of the property located below the “L” tracks, known as the Lakeview Low-Line. The Chamber’s goal was to develop a walkway that would connect the neighborhood’s Southport and Paulina train station plazas and ultimately the Southport and Lincoln Avenue corridors, both major retail and restaurant areas. The Chamber, Friends of Lakeview, the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), and the funding arm Special Service Area 27 were all stakeholders in the project. Port Urbanism, a Chicago-based landscape architecture firm, was awarded the project. They selected Landscape Forms’ Studio 431, the in-house designer group of the American site furniture producer, to help create site furnishings and a Low-Line experience for commuters, residents, and…

The grass has withered, the soil is parched. Anything that still has a bit of life in it has to be protected behind glass, a separate climate zone. Is there a flaming inferno at a distance, yet threatening to come closer? In his mystical series "A cure for Anthropocene", photographer George Marazakis looks at the link between civilization and nature, thus addressing the transformation of the landscape through human activity. He equates the earth with an organism that has been afflicted with a disease called “human beings” – the Anthropocene as an age of self-destruction. Marazakis takes photographs on his native Crete – during the winter, in the diffident, soft light. At first, his pictures tempt us to take pleasure in their apparent aesthetics. A second glance, however, leaves us…

La Mexicana was the name of a vast sand and gravel mine opened on the southwestern outskirts of Mexico City in the 1930s. The toponym was emblematic of the idea – and the civic pride – behind mineral extraction. The raw materials facilitated the development of the country. The growing construction industry transformed the lake bed from which Mexico City arose from a rural landscape of small farming villages into a sequence of neighborhoods that merged into the largest city in North America. In the 1960s, following its conversion into the city’s largest landfill, the site retained its original name, which paradoxically became symbolic of the devastating consequences for the environmental and social structure of Mexico City caused by uncontrolled urbanization. Since 2017 the area has again changed the meaning…

“We [Tulsa] got more and more divided over time by geography, race, and class, so getting people together is step number one.” This is what George Kaiser remarked in a New York Times article from August 10, 2018. Kaiser, Tulsa native, billionaire, and primary donor to the park, focuses his philanthropic interests through the George Kaiser Family Foundation (GKFF) on improving the lives of children through three main initiatives: parent engagement and early education, health and family well-being, and civic enhancement. He saw the Gathering Place, branded as ‘A Park for Everyone’, as an opportunity to accomplish all three objectives. Sprawling along Zink Lake, a dammed section of the Arkansas River, and set against the backdrop of the downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma, skyline, the Gathering Place offers plenty of recreational and…

The civil uprising in Syria started in 2011 and emerged from a deep-rooted desire for a better life and equality regarding access to opportunities. Syria has since been exposed to tragic violence, causing a great loss of human life and the displacement of more than five million people who fled the country. Nearly 45 per cent of the population have been displaced. Cities such as Aleppo, Homs and Damascus have been extensively damaged, and some urban and rural areas have nearly disappeared from the map. The conversation about Syria’s reconstruction has been focused mainly on the basic physical infrastructure and quick fixes, but the country needs more, it needs another approach that takes people’s strong ties with the landscape into account. Thus, Syria is in need of an holistic approach…

During the Stockholm Design Week 2019, the Norwegian street furniture manufacturer Vestre presented the results of their new cooperation with the Swedish design studio Front: “Folk”, a timeless furniture series comprising various kinds of park benches, but also refuse bins and bike racks. In Nordic towns and villages, benches can be found almost everywhere; they are a self-evident feature of squares and parks. Cooperation between Vestre and Front began with a discussion about the significance of public squares, and above all the function of seating in the urban space. Park benches are meeting points where citizens encounter one another in person. “We started out by looking at street furniture that we came across during our trip and at different reference images; it was exciting to analyze the many variations. Vestre…

Bloubosrand lies south of Johannesburg in South Africa. The villas that stand there cost well over a million dollars. Only one street divides the city’s millionaires from its poorest citizens. On one side, informal corrugated tin shacks line up next to each other on the sandy soil. The view from the air clearly demonstrates the inequalities of this world and shows just how close wealth and poverty can be to each other. In this case, they're only one street-width apart. Photographer Johnny Miller has made it his task to capture political and social inequalities. His most important tool is a drone equipped with a camera that reveals rare perspectives from the air. The motifs are landscapes and cities in which two worlds collide. But the pictures also show that the…

topos: Why do we all want to live in cities when we find them so stressful? MAZDA ADLI: For most of us, cities mean freedom and personal fulfilment. On a global average, the living conditions of urban dwellers have improved steadily since industrialisation began. Standards of living are better, access to education is improved, health infrastructure is better and cultural wealth is enormous. People move to the city because they expect prosperity from it and a secure future for their children. And, in the city I can find the right form of stimulation for every kind of mental and spiritual condition, which is not what rural life can offer me. topos: That’s one side of the coin. The other is that cities continue to grow, and more and more people…

Healthcare in the US is in crisis, not only due to the dispute on whether healthcare is a right or a privilege. This dualism of political creeds not only appears alien to many Europeans, it also obscures the historic and cultural root causes for socio-economic disadvantage in the US. In addition, the effectiveness of health care is jeopardized by behavioral circumstances. The suburban way of life with cars as the dominant form of mobility, high-calorie convenience foods, and lack of physical activity have led to health risks and chronic diseases, such as obesity and diabetes. At the same time, an aging population requires health care services, and disadvantaged communities are confronted with increased health risks. The overwhelming majority of money is spent for clinical care and oriented on preventable chronic…

In the metropolitan agglomeration of Greater Miami, which stretches between Florida’s archipelagic Atlantic Coast and the Everglades swamp, everything revolves around flows: of water, of energy, and of capital. The name Miami meant ‘sweet water’ or ‘big water’ in the language of the extinct Native American Mayaimi people. But in the past century, wrestling with water in this tropical monsoon climate became a seasonal sport, a state of mind that can be gathered from the fact that the city has declared an official ‘Hurricane Season’ from June to November, and named its football team the Miami Hurricanes. Despite several initiatives to mitigate the effects of sea-level rise in the last decade, the city’s infrastructure, sidewalks, and homes are inundated yearly, as 40 percent of its houses and many of the…

The idea of supporting development through architecture is a complex one, especially when dealing with projects in remote, developing countries. There is no guarantee that idealistic designs will deliver desired results, regardless of goals. Such endeavors occasionally reveal how plans and designs that fail to address the local context are derailed by vague bureaucratic procedures or disagreements regarding processes and time requirements. Or simply by too much or too little rain, or where the planner failed to anticipate it. However, cross-cultural experiments in building and construction can also produce unexpected benefits for everyone involved, by producing spaces for creativity and learning. This matches our experience in Ulyankulu, Tanzania. Ulyankulu is a former refugee settlement in the Tabora region, located in the western part of Tanzania. The inhabitants of Ulyankulu fled…

“Transformation” was the motto for the conversion of the Westergas factory grounds in Amsterdam into a culture park, designed by Gustafson Porter + Bowman in cooperation with Mecanoo. The coal gas factory, built between 1883 and 1904, had been in use until 1967, when natural gas was found in the north of the Netherlands. After the closure, most factory buildings were demolished. Only the 15 most beautiful examples – ornamental brick buildings designed by architect Isaac Gosschalk – and a large gasometer were preserved, although nobody really knew what to do with them. In 1992 the municipality decided to offer the buildings for rent as temporary cultural venues, in order to prevent them from being squatted. This proved a big success, and the idea was born to transform the factory…