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Urban Rethink

Written by: Neil Crofts

Article Overview: Innovation is about turning problems into opportunities. The more you can shift your world view from "problem" to "opportunity" the more innovative you can be. We know that we cannot keep on the way we have been going, so innovation is the only way.

Urban Rethink

How did we let the free passage of cars, trucks and busses come to be the dominant design criteria for our villages, towns and cities? Surely people walking and cycling, kids, prams, wheel chairs should be the main criteria for the way we design our urban spaces?

We need to re-think the technology and we need to innovate our cultural ideas about what urban spaces are for. What are urban spaces great at?

Urban spaces are great for living in community. They are great for specialism, because the more densely populated an area the more likely that a specialist restaurant, shop, show or whatever will find an audience. They are great for socialising and meeting people.

What they are not great for, on the whole, is the movement of goods and people over any distance.

The great misunderstanding of our present urban culture is office working. Most offices have more to do with control than they do with productivity. The internet liberates people to work wherever and we need to take advantage of it. We certainly do not need to commute for up to 1.5 hours per day (the UK average) just to do e-mail and speak on the phone.

Coming together with our colleagues should be about co-creation, support and productivity. The normal working situation should look like a cafe with informal meetings going on and a workshop with brainstorming team working going on. It should absolutely not look like rows of cubicles with people working away on computers.

We should be in the “office” one or two days per week and the rest of the time we should be working from home or from a flexi office close to home. The Hub is just such a solution.

Just think of the cost saving to individuals, businesses and society of people cutting three fifths of their commuting!!!! Smaller offices and less equipment, massively reduced travel congestion, massive time savings and, from my experience, increased productivity - once people get the hang of it.

We can also rethink street design. If we start with the premise that we want to get traffic and parked cars off as many streets as possible so that they are available for pedestrians and cyclists we open up some intriguing possibilities.

Medellin in Columbia has an urban gondola system that transports people silently above the streets. No need to wait for a bus, just hop onto a gondola. I just love the idea of urban gondolas criss crossing a city with stations on the 5th floor of taller buildings. Imagine Oxford street, 5th Avenue, the Champs Elysee or La Rambla as pedestrian streets with gondolas floating above.

Zipcar presages a society where people no longer own cars but hire them by the hour, one way, if necessary leave them on arrival and then hire another one on the way back. Since most cars are parked 90% of the time the Zipcar model could help remove parked cars from the streetscape.

With a combination of these solutions people could reclaim their towns, cities and communities for real life. What stands in the way is not technology, but the cultural innovation to change.

It is often said that people (particularly employees) do not like change. This is not true. People do not like imposed change. If they are part of articulating the problem as well as defining and creating the solutions - people love change.

Besides - business as usual is not an option.

Neil Crofts

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Article Tags: busses, congestion, cubicles, design criteria, dominant design, e mail, free passage, informal meetings, massive time, misunderstanding, prams, productivity, socialising, three fifths, time savings, towns and cities, urban culture, urban spaces, wheel chairs, working from home



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