Urban design and the changing economy

Its hard to get away from news about the economy, especially in the building industries. Unemployment rate at 11% for construction workers, several major Atlanta design firms instituting layoffs, the Architectural Billings Index at an all time low. These changes are expected to last into 2010 and to not directly follow the traditional V-shaped economic graph.

The reason the economists are having so much trouble predicting the length of the current downturn has to do with human behavior. Tax cuts, job development, infrastructure investment, and bank bail outs can all cause very different reactions amongst various segments of the population. Fascinating to me is that urban designers deal with this same uncertainty. Human activities, and their collective choices, are the basis for most design decisions in the urban realm. And in declining economic situations, people’s behavior changes.

• Where are the people going? As unemployment rises, fewer people have long commutes. And their destinations change.

• How do people get there? As incomes decrease, people look for ways to pinch pennies by taking public transportation, car pooling and combining trips.

• Is the destination setting conducive to people feeling positive? Urban designers have a stake in assuring that the workplace fits comfortably into its surroundings. As global and local economic structures change, our basic assumptions of the office typology might change as well.

Urban Design and People

‘For urban designers and community people, location and connectivity factors of how individuals make a living, along with the economic context and its trends are of great importance, from the regional or macro scale to the individual work place”

This quote is from my professor’s upcoming book, Urban Design and People. I was struck by its relevance not only for the current economic climate, but for the future of the urban design professional as well. This economic crisis is doing more than making it difficult to gain an initial job out of college, it’s changing very base patterns that my field follows.

Office environments are more flexible. Social and business networking increasingly takes place online. The need for centralized working locations is still important, but the demand for smaller public spaces where many people can work online, on a variety of different tasks for different companies in different industries, while still being around people, is growing. People look more towards part time and freelance opportunities while unemployment. These people need to network outside a traditional one company, one office environment.

Octane Coffee Bar

Working from home doesn’t hold much appeal to a social, energetic professional who was recently laid off. They want to get out, meet people, set up opportunities for casual networking while updating their resume, writing an article for a trade magazine, or engaging others for industry updates. Can urban design help them?

 

How to be a better meeting participant.

This morning, I attended my first public meeting in months. Its been a while for two reasons:

• One, I was out of town for four months for two summer internships in various cities.
• And two, the fall semester I returned to near about squelched my desire to do any type of extra curricular activity, much less my own degree requirements.

I was taking four hours over the institute allowed 21 semester hours in order to finish my degree on time; working extra hours at my architecture co-op in response to the state wide increases in tuition; and struggling to wrap up thesis research at the same time that I was in a typical, required architectural studio – a College of Architecture scheduling failure if you ask me

So, it was quite entertaining to get out of my own little world and plop my big toe back into the going-ons of the city. I attended a monthly meeting held by the Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development on the topic of Healthy Places.  January’s speaker was John Moore from Gladding Jackson, introducing the Connect Atlanta Plan, the city’s new comprehensive transportation planning document.

Ask a question!

The presentation was highly informative, if only because I’m probably the only person left in my degree program who has yet to attend a presentation somewhere: at work, through a class, an evening lecture, etc. on the information contained in the document. I’ll be blogging on other tangential notes I took during presentation, but I’ll start with the question I asked during the comments section at the end. Not the actual question, but just the idea of asking one. And yes, I have to consciously force myself to do this. I’m not very good at putting myself out there, but its beneficial for several reasons:

• It forces you to pay more attention to the presentation when you know you’ll be required to ask a somewhat put together and comprehensible question at the end.

• It gives you something to start with if you approach the speaker afterwards. Better to introduce yourself and say, “I asked the (very insightful) question about blah, blah, blah, earlier and I really enjoyed what you had to say on such and such“ rather than “Hi, I sat in the back, uninterested / unmotivated enough to pay attention”.

• Speaking about what you’ve learned, rather than purely listening to it, helps cement the information in your mind for future reference.

• Asking questions also raises your interaction with the other attendees, both during the comments time and afterwards. It gives you a chance to respond to the speaker, and the audience a chance to respond to you, or to the speakers’ response, to further the conversation.

Now, for obvious reasons, this isn’t always possible and it is largely correlated to the size of the audience. There isn’t the time for everyone to ask a question. However, most people usually don’t, so that leaves plenty of room if you’re interested enough in the topic.