https://vimeo.com/623446741
Five cities. Five stories.
Here is a short film by Nils Clauss and Neil Dowling, which recently premiered at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. (If you can't see the embedded video above, click here.) The film is named after this year's Seoul Biennale (which is going on right now until the end of October) and focuses on five crossroads of city life that were put forward by French architect Dominique Perrault: above/below, heritage/modern, craft/digital, natural/artificial, and safe/risk.
To illustrate these urban crossroads, the filmmakers visit New York, Seoul, Mumbai, Paris, and Nairobi. But instead of interviewing so-called "experts", these crossroads are examined from the perspective of people just living through them. The documentary is very well done. And having just come back from Paris, I can say that I think they chose the right city to tackle the heritage/modern crossroad.
To close things out, I would like to share one screenshot from the film. Here you can see an ingenious little urban table that slips over a street bollard. It's just perfect. There is so much that can be done to better activate our streets and public spaces.
Last year over the holidays, I attended a virtual wine tasting event that was put on by one of our partners. It was with a vineyard / winemaker in Spain and so it was evening for us and some ungodly hour for him.
At the end of the tasting -- which was exceptional, by the way -- I asked him what he thought about the Niagara region. Some of you may know that I love to support local Ontario wines. His response was hilarious and something along the lines of: "When we think of Niagara wines, we think of a part of the world that shouldn't produce wine but somehow does."
Building height and density are not one and the same. You can have tall buildings configured in a low-density way (think post-war towers in the park). And you can have low/mid-rise buildings configured in a high-density way (think Paris and Barcelona). This is one of the reasons why it is important to decouple density and tallness when thinking about our cities.
This line of thinking is the approach that a recent study took when trying to determine the optimal built form for minimizing climate impact. In the study they define four building typologies: 1) high density, high-rise, 2) low density, high-rise, 3) high density, low-rise, and 4) low density, low-rise.
What they found was that taller environments tend to have higher life cycle GHG emissions, but that lower-density environments are (obviously) far more land consumptive. To determine life cycle GHG emissions they looked at both embodied and operating emissions, which is why the taller stuff didn't score as well under their methodology. There's typically a lot of concrete and steel in tall buildings.
This lead the team to conclude that if you want to optimize around climate impact, you should probably aim for that perfect middle ground: dense, but not super tall.
But as Joe Cortright (City Observatory) rightly pointed out in his email newsletter, one of the big limitations of this analysis is that it does not consider transportation-related impacts. And since we know that transportation is one of if not the largest source of GHG emissions and that how we get around is heavily dependent on land use patterns, it is probably an important piece to consider.
Photo by Alfons Taekema on Unsplash
This was maybe the case before. But I think the region, vines, and industry have all matured. We also have some exceptional winemakers, some of which have come from the Old World because our startup-y wine region affords them far more creative freedom.
But you might also argue that things are changing because our climate is changing. The Financial Times recently published an interesting "big read" about how agricultural production and crop types are shifting around the world in the face of climate temperatures.
It turns out that wine grapes are a pretty good leading indicator. A canary in the coal mine if you will. Because climate matters a great deal if you're trying to make exceptional wines. And if you've been harvesting a particular thing at a certain time for the last 5 decades and you're now doing it several weeks earlier, it might be a sign that something is changing.
It also turns out that two countries, in particular, stand to disproportionately benefit from this shifting agricultural landscape: Canada and Russia. As temperatures change, a new agricultural frontier is going to be created. And it is expected that more than 50% of this land will be in these two countries. See image at the top of this post.
Of course, there's a flipside to this change. Countries on the other end of the spectrum with marginal growing climates and/or low production yields, could be severely impacted by higher temperatures. So perhaps it is a good idea to stay on top of what's happening in the world of wine. Might I recommend something from Niagara?
Image: FT
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