peter c. bosselmann

P. Bosselmann 2018, New York: Routledge

Adaptations of the Metropolitan Landscape in Delta Regions is about environmental quality and the long term livability of urban areas. In decades to come, climate change will affect cities everywhere, but nowhere have the effects of climate change already been felt as strongly as in low-lying coastal cities, cities located in large river deltas and near tidal estuaries. This book reflects on the contribution that spatial planning and urban design can make to a complex discussion about how city form and landscapes will need to adapt within metropolitan areas. The book’s focus is on the urban form of three delta regions: the Pearl River Delta in Southern China; the Rhine, Maas, and Scheldt Delta in the Netherlands; and the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California. The three regions differ greatly, but despite their different political systems, history, culture and locations in three different climate zones, all three regions will be forced to respond to similar issues that will trigger transformations and adaptations to their urban form.

Richly illustrated in color with detailed diagrams, models, photographs and sketches, the book is written for students, scholars and practitioners of environmental planning, and designers who need to respond to the future form of cities in light of climate change. For the professions shaping the physical world of cities and regions, the challenge is not only one of designing physical geometries but of social consequences.

Part I. The San Francisco Estuary and Inland Delta

Part II. The Pearl River Delta

Part III. The Dutch Delta

P. Bosselmann 2008, Washington, DC: Island Press

What is known to us about cities and landscapes is partly a matter of our own experiences and partly what has reached us in one form or another from other sources. This book combines the experiential knowledge that was committed to memory with the knowledge of concepts that were read - or listened to and that, at times, have lit up whole landscapes around us.

This book focuses on the transformation of cities, the knowledge of the changing form of cities, and how cities compare with each other. We are curious about the underlying structure of the built landscape, the social and the natural world, one shaping the other. The book is intended to give an introduction to the field of city design, an overview of the issues that city designers address, the knowledge base needed, and how such knowledge is acquired.

This book is intended to make a contribution to a field of knowledge that is expanding because of the growing need for professionals equipped to deal with the challenges of the rapidly urbanizing world, depletion of natural resources, and mounting social problems in cities. In the transformation of cities much attention is given to economic forces. Rightfully so, but designing the qualities of the physical settings, and the process of shaping environments requires knowledge that goes beyond an understanding of market forces. Those interested in becoming city designers learn to balance monetary gains with social and ecological gains. City design remains a political, social, and environmental affair.

CHAPTER ONE. TO COMPARE: CITIES, SIZE, SCALE, AND FORM

CHAPTER TWO. TO OBSERVE: SOME OBSERVATIONS OF COPENHAGEN'S CITY FORM AT THE TIME OF GLOBAL CHANGE

CHAPTER THREE. TO MEASURE: VITALITY, LIVABILITY, AND SENSE OF PLACE

P.Bosselmann, 1998, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Before architects and city designers can begin to make changes in the actual physical environment, they must create representations of their designs. These can range from two-dimensional maps, charts, and diagrams to computer models. Each presents an abstraction, reducing reality to facts that can be clearly conveyed. Although architects and planners know how to read these representations, few outside the profession can interpret them, let alone understand what it would be like to walk along the streets such representations describe.

In Representation of Places the author asks how the experience of a rich and complex world – both the world we know and the changed world designers envision – can be adequately communicated. The designers’ representation of planned structures and their environment significantly influences what gets built. Can images accurately match a designer’s conception to a future reality?

In addition to providing a timely discussion for professionals of the relation between new technologies and strategies of visual communication, Representation of Places has much to offer the general reader interested in the form of cities. The author outlines a critical, normative framework needed to evaluate representations of design.

PART I. A HISTORY OF REPRESENTATION IN CITY DESIGN

PART II. THE CITY IN THE LABORATORY

PART III. REALITY AND REALISM

History

Most estuaries emerged 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, during the Holocene Period, when sea levels began to rise at the end of the last ice age. This is also partly true for the San Francisco Bay, an estuary of the Pacific Ocean and the inland delta formed by the Sacramento and San Joachim Rivers. But given the location of the Bay in a zone of great seismic activity, tidal and riverine dynamics were also shaped by tectonic forces. The two large tectonic plates, the North American and the Pacific Plates, slide past each other at a current speed of 2.5 cm per year (Stoffer&Gordon, 2001, pp. 61-86). The coastal ridges in Northern California started to uplift two to four million years ago when pressure along the North American Plate and the Pacific Plate increased along the plate boundaries. The valley between the two coastal ridges where the Bay resides began to form two to three million years ago. Geologists suspect that the lateral movement along the San Andreas Fault zone may be responsible for a major structural break in the western coastal ridge at the Golden Gate, causing a 130 degree clockwise rotation of the headlands.

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Urbanization

Human settlements in the San Francisco Bay Area originated where Native Americans had settled in 126 small villages (Milliken, 2009). The native population in the Bay Area amounted to approximately 17,000 at the time of Spanish arrival in 1769. Due to Spain’s policy of prohibiting foreign ships from entering ports on the west coast of the Americas, trade was limited, thus urbanization was virtually nonexistent in the rural areas around San Francisco Bay.

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Water, Land and Places, the Origins of Urban Form in the San Francisco Bay Area

The oldest cities around San Francisco Bay are barely 200 years old. Urbanization has changed natural systems, but to a far lesser extent than in the settlements of the Dutch Delta with their origins in the Middle Ages, or the nearly one thousand years that shaped the villages and towns in the water landscape of the Pearl River Delta.

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Why No-one Would Build What I Have Drawn

I harbor no illusions: substantial opposition will meet my drawings. First, the argument will be made that the current practice of road design does not allow the conversion of limited access roads to roads that allow driveways to individual homes or clusters of homes. That argument is relatively easy to counter. The current practices, though codified in ordinances came about at a time when subdivision standards focused on mobility for vehicular traffic. There is support for re-examining such standards and focusing instead on improved access for all modes of movements, especially non-motorized.

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Adaptations of the Metropolitan Landscape in Delta Regions

Making of the Maps

In a global comparison involving many cities, it was not possible to verify on the ground the urban boundary delineation. Therefore, we checked the boundaries against visual information. In general, we preferred to make maps from data that we could compare to multiple sources; we found images in books and on the internet. We georeferenced the images, compared the planar projection against a consistent source, the city map portion of the 2003 Oxford Atlas of the World and used a feature extraction method involved composite viewing or layering of two, sometimes up to four, satellite images for interpretation of visible features along the urban edge. We then traced the extent of settlements in a consistent manner.

Comparison Between Cities

San Francisco Bay Area compared to Hongkong and the Randstad (figures shown below). The three maps were reproduced at the same graphic scale; all three show urbanized regions that accommodate nearly the same number of inhabitants, seven million people. The comparison is made possible by computing the surface of each of the three urbanized areas and expressing it as a percentage of a fifty by fifty kilometer square.

URBAN TRANSFORMATION – UNDERSTANDING CITY DESIGN

A modern camera equipped with an adjustable zoom lens can reframe the view to take in everything Brunelleschi would have seen through the frame of the cathedral door. To take in the entire 90-degree field of view, the zoom lens would have to be adjusted to a 21 mm focal length. In the viewfinder (at 21 mm), however, the Baptistery appears farther away than it actually is, and the piazza more spacious. If the zoom lens is adjusted until the dimensions of the Baptistery in the viewfinder are identical to those of the Baptistery as the eye sees it, that is ,to a 65 mm focal length, the field of view in the viewfinder becomes much narrower – approximately 30 degrees, or one-third of the view seen through the cathedral door frame. Although the Baptistery appears at the same distance and size, one cannot take all of it in through the viewfinder.

The experiment with an adjustable focal length demonstrates one of the shortcomings of a linear perspective as a two-dimensional recording of the three-dimensional world around us. The problem lies in its imposed conditions. To close one eye and hold the head still at a single predetermined point in space is not the normal way of looking at the world. Under such conditions, matters that relate to the distance and dimensions of objects cannot be judged with certainty.

It would be possible to overcome some of the problems inherent in linear perspective by keeping the zoom lens fixed at 65 mm and using the camera to scan the scene. Photographic prints of these negatives at a size of 4*6 inches mounted on a large board show the full 90-degree field of view. If the photoboard is held at eye level, approximately 12 inches away, it shows the actual distance relationship the eye sees in the scene.

The figures below show composite view created from twenty images taken with a 27-degree horizontal angle, 65 mm focal length, and multiple-station-point perspective created based on the composite view.

The Pearl River Delta as a Cultural Landscape - New Life for a Traditional Water Village

The historian Spiro Kostof reminds us that the administrative coming together of proximate villages to form a town has been repeatedly attested to in world history since ancient times (Kostof, 1991, p.59). He uses the term synoecism to describe how villages are absorbed into a new town in a process in which the villagers exchange their pastoral ways and the laws of their tribe or clan for the presumably free and durable institutions of the city. The transaction is of a political nature with strong physical and social consequences; and, as Kostof points out, history shows that such unions have mostly been involuntary, thus strongly resisted. The physical consequences of the merger produce a form that Kostof describes as “organic” next to planned or orthogonal development patterns. Through history, well known examples include Athens, Siena, and numerous cities in Iran, such as Kazvin. Calcutta, in India, and even Greenwich Village in Manhattan were also forced into synoecism. In these locations and many more, the juxtaposition of forms remains traceable, thus the dynamics of the long-ago social integration can still be recalled or imagined as part of cultural progress. For a historian (AI, 2014) or anthropologist interested in the morphology of cities, the Pearl River Delta is a rich study area where the small scale organic form of a village is encapsulated by the orthogonal street grids of urban expansion.

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Adaptations of the Metropolitan Landscape in Delta Regions

The process of human perception has fascinated philosophers through the ages. In modern times, human perception has been partially explained by three theories that emerged in the twentieth century: the Gestalt theory, ecological theory of perception, and finally, building on Gestalt and partially  contradicting ecological theory, a third theory of perception, the so-called probabilistic theory, claims that sensory information is never perfectly correlated with reality.

In this chapter the inner city of Copenhagen serves as an example. I have been somewhat familiar with the city for several years, but in the year 2000, during a six-month stay, sufficient time was available to take walks through the city and gain insight into the city’s spatial structure.

URBAN TRANSFORMATION – UNDERSTANDING CITY DESIGN

Time Square, New York

“ The internationally celebrated crossroad” was the term Adolf Ochs used to characterize the bow-tie intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue. After purchasing the New York Times in 1904, Ochs sought a new business address and acquired, at great expense, the triangular block bounded by Forty-second Street, Broadway, and Seventh Avenue, surrounded by a growing cluster of theaters and hotels including the Olympia, owned by Oscar Hammerstein, Sr. For the site, Oches commissioned the Times Tower, Manhattan’s tallest building at that time; it soon became a Broadway landmark. The subway station in the basement of the Times building became the transfer point for riders from Queens and the Bronx, who commuted to work and often stayed on for the nighttime entertainment.

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Downtown San Francisco

In San Francisco, the Mission Bay project had been under discussion for several decades, from the 1960s to the 1990s. The original owner of the 90-acre site, a railroad company, had offered to build housing there, but the ground was heavily contaminated and cleanup work very expensive. In 1984, when the land development branch of the railroad company argued for the inclusion of office buildings to support reasonably priced housing units, city officials questioned the proposed balance between the two kinds of land use. In the mid-1980s public discussion focused on the appropriate use of the land. Local planners used maps to explain the railroad company’s proposal to politicians. They described the development, who might live there, how many people could be accommodated, and how traffic would circulate in and out. Although such discussions gave the politicians and the public a sketchy impression of the proposal, few could understand the physical scale of the “new town” or its relationship to adjacent neighborhoods and the city as a whole. The architects had not unveiled their detailed plans.

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Downtown Toronto: Urban Form and Climate

In 1990 planners in Toronto were searching for a rationale for setting new building height limits and density controls near the city’s downtown. The Environmental Simulation Laboratory was commissioned to carry out modeling experiments on the effects of urban form on microclimatic conditions there. The laboratory examined the effects of buildings on wind conditions at street level and evaluated pedestrian comfort in relation to sun and wind conditions. Rather than focus on individual buildings, members of the laboratory team looked at the cumulative effects of area-wide development, comparing existing conditions with those of development permissible under controls reflecting the laboratory’s recommendations.

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REPRESENTATION OF PLACES

The Making of the Dutch Delta

At a time 130,000 years ago, at the end of the Saalian Glaciation, when large surface areas of the earth were covered by ice, the south to north draining Northern European rivers discharged water below the ice shield and started to shape the land and the deltas of the Low Countries.

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An Archipelago of Cities – Five Delta Towns

All observation suffers from the well-known fact that we only understand the things we see if we know something about them. Consulting maps made by Jacob van Deventer and topographic maps from the early 20th century allowed me to verify or refute my observations. Even then, the interpretations developed from such observations risk being short-lived unless verified from sources with in-depth knowledge. Fortunately, information about the form of Dutch towns during their development from the 12th to the 15th century (Zweerink, 2011) has received recent attention in the literature (Borger, et al., 2011).

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Contemporary Examples and Strategies for the Future

In the light of climate change and an expected acceleration in sea level rise, there is wide agreement that a long-range view is required. Indeed, a long-range view would acknowledge that raising levees, strengthening dams and dune barriers, and building more powerful pumping stations has never been robust enough in the long run. The 1970s Delta works need to be strengthened, as do the river dikes along the Ijssel and the two great rivers, Rhine and Maas, with their many distributaries. The future of the Low Countries is made more precarious by the inescapable fact that all land on peat formation continues to subside. That accounts for much of the northern and western parts of the Netherlands.

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Adaptations of the Metropolitan Landscape in Delta Regions

All three concepts, livability, sense of place, and vitality, suffer from the lack of detailed knowledge that designers could apply with predictable results to many cultural and physical contexts. The three concepts are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they overlap substantially. The distinctions between the three concepts have more to do with the degree of concreteness and ease of measuring. Prerequisites for vitality are the presence of other people and a sense of enjoyment among those who participate in public life; not only those people who have to be there but also those who feel invited to linger and stay for a while, according to the norms of their culture and the choices they have in being elsewhere.

This chapter is divided into three parts; each part demonstrates how to measure one concept: vitality, livability, or sense of place. It should be seen as an invitation to conduct systematic inquiries into professional biases, and as fellow New Yorker journalist Brendan Gill said about the importance of Tony Hiss’s work, “to rouse ourselves for the future’s sake as well as our own. The work that lies ahead of us is not one of Sisyphus but one of Hercules.” It examines some of the prominent biases urban designers hold and explains ways to substantiate knowledge through direct measurements. This includes the need to refute some biases that cannot be substantiated.

URBAN TRANSFORMATION – UNDERSTANDING CITY DESIGN

The notion of a correct viewing distance in linear perspective is troublesome because such a distance is not observed - indeed, cannot be observed - in practice, for example, in viewing television and computer screens. Thus judgments about dimensions and the scale of objects can be erroneous, as an experiment demonstrated. At the Berkeley simulation laboratory, a scale model was made of the 1,946-foot Television City Tower proposed for Manhattan’s Upper West Side and buildings in the surrounding neighborhoods and Central Park, showing how the new structure’s height would exceed that of everything around it. The same building in electronically composed photographs of the model appeared much lower.

Professional photographers know that they can achieve a realistic perspective when they include in their images a continuous set of reference points, ranging from foreground to middle ground to background. But tall buildings lack such reference points: only sky surrounds them. In photographs of the proposed tower the viewing distance of observation was carefully controlled. Large prints made for a public exhibit were mounted at eye level, and a red line was taped horizontally over each view, as a reminder that such a tall building cannot be taken in without an upward movement of the eyes and sometimes the head. To see the building from the middle of Central Park, one mile away, required a 10-degree tilt of the head. To see it from a playground near the foot of the structure required a 75-degree tilt. Without the line indicating the upper limit of vision, these pictures would have created a misleading impression.

REPRESENTATION OF PLACES