Daylighting Melbourne: how we can transform our cities, street by street
By: Dan Hill
Tags: Design, Urbanism, Mobility, Cities, Urban Planning

Daylighting Melbourne: how we can transform our cities, street by street

Let us Not-Plan. Instead, let’s break urban transformation into a series of small, progressive steps, enabling people, technology, place, and environment to be aligned a little more carefully, and unlocking better streets as we go

Cars have laid waste to our cities. The sister article to this piece lays out how, but also what some cities are beginning to do about it. And within that article is a note about a particular design strategy for unpicking the car-dominated street, bit by bit. This piece expands upon that, working as a kind of extended footnote. Note: as a playbook entry, it’s detailed; so perhaps read it in pieces.

The street is the basic unit of city. It is where the city comes together. It is unique to the city, in a way that other roads, or buildings, are not. It is not the freeway (despite some transport planners’ best efforts) nor is it the residential cul-de-sac or country lane. It is where we live, work and play, where the slightly higher density of interactions forces contradiction and complexity, yet in a way which is entirely everyday. It is, to paraphrase Sennett, where we learn to live well with people who are not like us; in other words, the whole point of cities.

For that to happen, we need to rebalance the street as a series of slow and fast layers of change: to enable adaptation and flexibility to the fast moving layers of mobility technologies, in ways that the heavy, distinctly 20th century infrastructure for the car and truck does not, whilst reinforcing the slower, more valuable characteristics of streets, like places for open, social and civic interaction, whether markets, playgrounds, theatre, gardens, or culture and cultures. But put simply, our approach to the former, designing for 20thC mobility, has tended to destroy the latter.

Despite cities making statements to the contrary, the transport planner (really a traffic engineer in most cases) has inadvertently been allowed to define what the street is about — as if we invented streets in order to generate traffic. The street is only incidentally about traffic yet that is largely how it is managed, and so that is what it becomes.

Put traffic engineers in charge of the street and you get traffic. If we put gardeners in charge of the street, we’d get gardens.

From a design and policy point-of-view, we generally are left with the challenge of a toolkit for streets still tuned to 20th century. We have to reverse that now.

Melbourne as a prototype

A few questions spring to mind:

How do we describe new ‘north stars’ to steer with, framed around challenges like climate, health, and social justice? And how can these deliver richer, more ‘everyday complex’, diverse and delightful streets?

How do policymakers and planners uncover new methods for these new outcomes?

How do we elegantly, carefully yet ambitiously take advantage of the new mobility technologies?

How do we really unlock the power of the street by unhooking it from the idea of the car as progress?

How do we take people with us through this transformation, as we reverse the polarity of all that 20th century advertising and engineering?

Whilst helping devise the initial vision and strategy for Melbourne’s Innovation District with my former team Arup Digital Studio, we wanted to explore how we might address these questions, showing how existing streets could be ‘flipped’ over time, describing a different practice to traditional planning, and using a richer array of tools. Working closely with the brilliant Chris Green in my team, we created ourselves a little brief within the broader project, and called on the expertise of Arup’s Global Transport Leader Isabel Dedring. (Chris and I had worked together on numerous projects ‘future street’ projects at Arup, from Sidewalk Labs to Gemeente Amsterdam, and Isabel had actually run much of London’s transport, whilst deputy mayor there.)

With Isabel’s guidance, Chris and I sketched out an approach to transforming a typical inner-Melbourne street by progressively switching out its car-based mobility over time. We wanted to describe how a series of small apparently tactical moves could in fact be strategic, combining to great effect over time, building footholds as we go. Given the ongoing failure of planning to understand tech, it would be important to suggest how to take advantage of today’s technology, and tomorrow’s as it becomes useful. In particular, we wanted to describe a participative approach to interventions, enabling people to engage step-by-step. And crucially, to describe how focusing on outcomes — ends rather than means — and using a ‘North Star’ for societal outcomes, as with mission-oriented innovation, might enable a richer set of values in play.

Generalising wildly, admittedly, such an approach would the opposite of urban planning, a kind of Un-Planning (though not the same as Non-Plan at all, given it still is a directed, design-led practice). It would instead deploy an ‘adaptive design’ philosophy and practice: iterative, agile, engaged, working in slow and fast layers simultaneously, common to interaction design, service design, and other contemporary design practices honed in the tech sector. As usual in my work, it would adapt a ‘small pieces, loosely joined’ design philosophy derived from designing on the internet, and thus human-centred, yet try to place this in the context of cities and urbanism, and thus beyond individually-oriented user-centred design, and into the broader circuits of urban systems and the biosphere.

Incidentally, Melbourne could work as a prototype here as it is in many ways a perfect collision of European, American and Asian urban influences. It is its own place—and most of all, Wurundjeri—but at the same time has weathered waves of post-colonial development. Its history includes modified European models (not just British, but also Italian, Greek, and other southern and eastern European cultures), North American urban development perhaps most of all, as usual with Australia, and more recently, significant Asian influence. As such, it is an endlessly interesting and complex place, yet could stand in, almost like a movie set, for many other urban types elsewhere.

Frame by frame

The area in question for us, just outside the central business district of Melbourne, is still in fully 20th century mode—and so it’s typical of many cities. How could it be iteratively transformed to become more valuable, in every sense, via a design process which is equitable, participative and replicable?

We had an overall vision for the district in mind, avoiding the trap of using property development as the engine for change, and instead threading together the existing city via a diverse series of different interventions, creating ribbons of new activity running on the existing streets. (More on this project later, perhaps.) Still, this diagram illustrates how an individual street transformation could be part of a wider ‘play’, progressively weaving a tapestry-like pattern across these grids of city. These activities are all ‘lighter’ layers, generally requiring little in the way of large capital investment, and each capable of being tested and iterated in place.