green streets

By 2031, this summer's Olympic site should be a dense checkerboard of housing and parkland.

The afterlife of London’s Olympic Park was partially confirmed last week, when officials agreed to plans for the construction of a new neighborhood on part of its site once this summer's games are over.

Called Chobham Manor, the 960-home neighborhood should be ready by autumn 2013, and will cover the current location of the Olympic basketball court (plus, one imagines, a little bit more of the park). It’s just the beginning of plans to cover London’s Lower Lea Valley area with badly needed new housing – four other neighborhoods providing a total of 6,800 homes are also in the pipeline, and by 2031, the former Olympic site should be a dense checkerboard of housing and parkland.

In an area that currently attracts few professionals with children, the new neighborhood aims to be especially family friendly, with four schools included in the blueprints. The plan so far is to have 35 percent of its housing fixed at affordable rents, making some of it suitable for people already living in this lower income area...

It could be argued that the pinnacle of urban landscape architecture was reached in seventeenth century France and the French formal gardens of Jacques Boyceau and André Le Nôtre, or in Britain in the ninenteenth century, when Joseph Paxton and John Nash were transforming former Royal Hunting grounds into places for Victorian gentry to promenade.

Contemporary urban architects and designers are rarely afforded the same amount of space, money and time as their antecedents and are more often tasked with transforming abandoned plots, redundant structures or characterless inner city areas into suitable places for public recreation. Here, Architonic looks at some recent successes that add value to their surroundings by pushing the boundaries of park design.

Finding new spaces in towns and cities that can be turned into communal parks is extremely difficult with every available plot in such high demand and the reuse or re-appropriation of existing land has become a popular alternative. The shining example of this practice is New York’s hugely popular High Line development, which has converted a disused freight rail line elevated above the streets of Manhattan into a popular park and walkway...

With pressure on urban space increasing as populations grow and building becomes more intensive, will gardens be a less common sight in future cities? Those interested in this subject might enjoy the upcoming Serpentine Gallery's Garden Marathon.

The site is situated in the Karancs-Medves landscape area in North-East Hungary. Around and in the city of Salgótarján, the memorials, geological and mining attractions form a hiking trail. Along this trail is set the “Dance floor” Recreation and Memorial Park, a site is embraced by the surrounding hills and huge hillside trees. The architectural concept aimed to preserve and strengthen this special character of the place, so the park would function as an exhibition for the mining memorials and as a natural recreational area. The organizing element in the park is a wall providing covered space. This space can be used for exhibitions and performances. Open air theatre may also function here, the covered space is used for stage and the “Dance floor” as auditorium.

Besides the “Dance floor” Recreation and Memorial Park, Gusztav Tunnel Entrance no. 4 reconstruction is another attraction along the hiking trail. The tunnel is out of use, and this entrance imploded and was closed with a wall at 15 metres from the entrance. The imploded part is planned to be reconstructed and transformed into a tourist attraction. The information wall introduces the visitors into the basics of mining and the history of Gusztav Tunnel. Seating is placed where visitors can stop and rest and see old mining tools, machines and an ancient bogie on a railway track.

The concept of urban agriculture is fast taking root in our cities, and while images of towering vertical farms with high-altitude pastures and verdant exteriors may captivate us with their fantastical designs, the greatest leaps and bounds in this area stem from simple, tried and true farming methods and adaptive reuse of pre-existing structures. The latest “farm of the future” on the horizon: the Frisch vom Dach, or the Fresh from the Roof project in Berlin. Der Spiegel recently reported on the efforts of three German entrepreneurs to transform the expansive rooftop of a former malt factory in Berlin into a sustainable urban farm projected to produce tons of vegetables and fish for the city each month.

As the needs of cities change, older buildings can find themselves a bit redundant. The challenge for urban areas is to find a new purpose for these buildings, one which is historically respectful but at the same time creates a space that meets the modern needs of a city. This is exactly what has happened in Toronto, where a former distillery has been transformed into a varied, vibrant, and immensely popular destination for locals and tourists alike.

New York City is removing its last single-space parking meter in Manhattan today, The New York Times reports. Instead of collecting parking fees for individual spots, the New York City Department of Transportation is converting to Muni-Meters that take up less space on sidewalks and have a better record on vandalism.

More interestingly, the old single-space parking meters will be dismantled and the poles will be repurposed as bicycle racks, the NYT reports.

The term “alt use” has become a catchall encompassing all sorts of clever upcycling of everything from tree stumps to discarded airplanes. And if you keep your eyes open, there is no shortage of fantastic projects creating new and inventive uses for the spaces we move through daily, be they the street corner, the laundromat or our homes.