Last September, Dubai announced a new initiative called the Urban Think Tank & Design Lab (officially D.M-ULab). Then, this month, they announced that architects Santiago Calatrava and Kengo Kuma would be joining the think tank as "principal contributors."
The lab is focused on several key areas, but grouping them together, it's broadly focused on encouraging participatory design (as opposed to top-down planning), driving the use of new technologies such as AI, and enhancing quality of life through human-centric urban design.
This includes the creation of 20-minute communities where 80% of daily needs are within walking or riding distance.
This last focus area is particularly interesting because one could easily argue that modern Dubai started on the opposite end of this spectrum. Rather than focusing on the human scale, it was focused on the global-attention-grabbing-superlative scale.
When a remarkable new building is announced, the focus tends to be on the building as a symbolic object, not how it meets the ground and fits into its broader urban context. That's largely irrelevant to a global audience.
But it is this latter quality that will largely determine how human-centric the city ends up feeling — it's the spaces in between the buildings where public life happens.
So, how does this think tank intend to shift the city's focus? One of the first projects is the renewal of the city's older neighbourhoods through the creation of Barcelona-like superblocks that push vehicular traffic to their edges.
It's an admirable move, but it is noteworthy that this implementation is planned for the city's older neighbourhoods. Older neighbourhoods have the advantage of street grids that are already more human-centric in scale.
The true test of this lab will be whether it can transform its newer neighbourhoods. If it succeeds, it will be a model worth exporting to the rest of the world.
Cover photo by Dubai Travel Blog on Unsplash
I'm back in Toronto. And another "fresh pow annual" is in the books.
The BC interior is a specific kind of ski and snowboard trip. It's not about dancing on tables in neon onesies while Champagne gondolas fly overhead. It's about chasing champagne powder with like-minded middle-aged men, all pretending that they don't otherwise live a sedentary, low-range-of-motion lifestyle for the balance of the year.
Both have their merits.
Creating anything from scratch is more difficult than working from an established base. This is absolutely true when it comes to starting new neighborhoods and communities. What do you build first? What will be the anchors? And how do you balance hard and soft infrastructure to make it an attractive place before a critical mass is achieved?
I was thinking about this over the weekend while walking around Whistler Village, so I tweeted this out. If you've been before, you know it's packed with people all throughout the day. I would characterize it as a successful place.
But the responses I got on Twitter were along the lines of: "Are you joking? It's a fake utopia. It may be busy, but staff are forced to live on the outskirts of the village in dorms."
These comments are not entirely wrong. Resort villages are typically a kind of Disneyland. Attainable workforce housing is a major challenge for resorts, and it's typical to make the building of it a precondition to development. You can't run a resort without staff.
But none of this changes the fact that it is still very difficult to create successful places from scratch. There are lots of ski resorts that don't have the energy of Whistler, and lots of new planned communities that don't have the foot traffic of older neighborhoods. The Canary District in Toronto comes to mind as a place that is still settling in. That is how you know it's challenging.
Creating successful places from scratch requires the right strategy, careful design and programming, patience, and probably the ability to subsidize the right tenants to seed activity early on. It's also helpful if you can avoid going broke before the neighborhood comes alive.
Cover photo by Peter Robbins on
Last September, Dubai announced a new initiative called the Urban Think Tank & Design Lab (officially D.M-ULab). Then, this month, they announced that architects Santiago Calatrava and Kengo Kuma would be joining the think tank as "principal contributors."
The lab is focused on several key areas, but grouping them together, it's broadly focused on encouraging participatory design (as opposed to top-down planning), driving the use of new technologies such as AI, and enhancing quality of life through human-centric urban design.
This includes the creation of 20-minute communities where 80% of daily needs are within walking or riding distance.
This last focus area is particularly interesting because one could easily argue that modern Dubai started on the opposite end of this spectrum. Rather than focusing on the human scale, it was focused on the global-attention-grabbing-superlative scale.
When a remarkable new building is announced, the focus tends to be on the building as a symbolic object, not how it meets the ground and fits into its broader urban context. That's largely irrelevant to a global audience.
But it is this latter quality that will largely determine how human-centric the city ends up feeling — it's the spaces in between the buildings where public life happens.
So, how does this think tank intend to shift the city's focus? One of the first projects is the renewal of the city's older neighbourhoods through the creation of Barcelona-like superblocks that push vehicular traffic to their edges.
It's an admirable move, but it is noteworthy that this implementation is planned for the city's older neighbourhoods. Older neighbourhoods have the advantage of street grids that are already more human-centric in scale.
The true test of this lab will be whether it can transform its newer neighbourhoods. If it succeeds, it will be a model worth exporting to the rest of the world.
Cover photo by Dubai Travel Blog on Unsplash
I'm back in Toronto. And another "fresh pow annual" is in the books.
The BC interior is a specific kind of ski and snowboard trip. It's not about dancing on tables in neon onesies while Champagne gondolas fly overhead. It's about chasing champagne powder with like-minded middle-aged men, all pretending that they don't otherwise live a sedentary, low-range-of-motion lifestyle for the balance of the year.
Both have their merits.
Creating anything from scratch is more difficult than working from an established base. This is absolutely true when it comes to starting new neighborhoods and communities. What do you build first? What will be the anchors? And how do you balance hard and soft infrastructure to make it an attractive place before a critical mass is achieved?
I was thinking about this over the weekend while walking around Whistler Village, so I tweeted this out. If you've been before, you know it's packed with people all throughout the day. I would characterize it as a successful place.
But the responses I got on Twitter were along the lines of: "Are you joking? It's a fake utopia. It may be busy, but staff are forced to live on the outskirts of the village in dorms."
These comments are not entirely wrong. Resort villages are typically a kind of Disneyland. Attainable workforce housing is a major challenge for resorts, and it's typical to make the building of it a precondition to development. You can't run a resort without staff.
But none of this changes the fact that it is still very difficult to create successful places from scratch. There are lots of ski resorts that don't have the energy of Whistler, and lots of new planned communities that don't have the foot traffic of older neighborhoods. The Canary District in Toronto comes to mind as a place that is still settling in. That is how you know it's challenging.
Creating successful places from scratch requires the right strategy, careful design and programming, patience, and probably the ability to subsidize the right tenants to seed activity early on. It's also helpful if you can avoid going broke before the neighborhood comes alive.
Cover photo by Peter Robbins on
We stayed in four different accommodations for this trip, and one of the things that became very apparent is that everyone is trying to over-optimize around "good service." In each case, I was getting text messages and emails before the stay, during the stay, and after the stay.
"Here's how to prepare before check-in." "Is there anything we can do to make your stay more enjoyable?" "How was your stay?" "Please share your experience with us here." In one case, I even received a phone call from the front desk as soon as I got to my room: "We just wanted to see if everything in your room is to your liking."
On the one hand, this level of communication and responsiveness is fantastic when you do need something. But on the other hand, it can be overwhelming. Blasting everyone with automated text messages and emails does not, in my opinion, stand out as exceptional hospitality, especially since everyone now seems to be doing it.
Outstanding hospitality is emotional, rather than technical.
In city-building news, Bloomberg recently published an article about why cities should embrace "messiness." In it, they cite a book that was assembled by some fellow Torontonians:
This premise — that urban planning’s efforts to impose order risk editing out the culture, character, complexity and creative friction that makes cities cities — is a guiding theme in Messy Cities: Why We Can’t Plan Everything, a collection of essays, including Thorne’s, gathered by Toronto-based editors Zahra Ebrahim, Leslie Woo, Dylan Reid and John Lorinc. In it, they argue that “messiness is an essential element of the city.” Case studies from around the world show how imperfection can be embraced, created and preserved, from the informal street eateries of East Los Angeles to the sports facilities carved out of derelict spaces in Mumbai.
Messiness and allowing for ground-up urban interventions are themes that I have written a lot about on this blog over the years. I think we have gone overboard with rules and regulations, to the point that we stamp out many of the things that make cities so wonderful.
Top-down planning will never get everything right. It's impossible. And the big thing about over-planning is that, in the end, we don't actually know what we're missing out on. We don't know what might have been possible if only we had allowed for it or were more flexible in our approaches.
Messiness is a feature of cities, not a bug. We should be embracing it.
We stayed in four different accommodations for this trip, and one of the things that became very apparent is that everyone is trying to over-optimize around "good service." In each case, I was getting text messages and emails before the stay, during the stay, and after the stay.
"Here's how to prepare before check-in." "Is there anything we can do to make your stay more enjoyable?" "How was your stay?" "Please share your experience with us here." In one case, I even received a phone call from the front desk as soon as I got to my room: "We just wanted to see if everything in your room is to your liking."
On the one hand, this level of communication and responsiveness is fantastic when you do need something. But on the other hand, it can be overwhelming. Blasting everyone with automated text messages and emails does not, in my opinion, stand out as exceptional hospitality, especially since everyone now seems to be doing it.
Outstanding hospitality is emotional, rather than technical.
In city-building news, Bloomberg recently published an article about why cities should embrace "messiness." In it, they cite a book that was assembled by some fellow Torontonians:
This premise — that urban planning’s efforts to impose order risk editing out the culture, character, complexity and creative friction that makes cities cities — is a guiding theme in Messy Cities: Why We Can’t Plan Everything, a collection of essays, including Thorne’s, gathered by Toronto-based editors Zahra Ebrahim, Leslie Woo, Dylan Reid and John Lorinc. In it, they argue that “messiness is an essential element of the city.” Case studies from around the world show how imperfection can be embraced, created and preserved, from the informal street eateries of East Los Angeles to the sports facilities carved out of derelict spaces in Mumbai.
Messiness and allowing for ground-up urban interventions are themes that I have written a lot about on this blog over the years. I think we have gone overboard with rules and regulations, to the point that we stamp out many of the things that make cities so wonderful.
Top-down planning will never get everything right. It's impossible. And the big thing about over-planning is that, in the end, we don't actually know what we're missing out on. We don't know what might have been possible if only we had allowed for it or were more flexible in our approaches.
Messiness is a feature of cities, not a bug. We should be embracing it.
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