I am more than happy to trade-off living space (that I don’t really need) for a better location. It means I get the benefit of driving less and enjoying the city more.
But as more of us move to urban centers, we are finding ourselves having to do more with less space. Often this means creating flexible and multi-purpose spaces.
One strategy for this that I really like – which I just learned about through 5 Kids 1 Condo – is the idea of square foot hours. Here’s how it works:
“The concept behind ft2hours (square-foot hours) is to add a time-based measurement to how we assess and use our space. So if your 10′ x 12′ bedroom is used only eight hours a day (i.e., when you’re sleeping), your actual usage is 120 ft2 divided by three (one-third of the day), which is just 40 ft2hours of used space.”
In many ways, this happens intuitively. If you really want to maximize a space, you figure out how to use it more often throughout the day. But I like the idea of applying some math to it.
Of course, this runs counter to the notion that some spaces should be reserved for specific uses. In the case of a bedroom, it’s sleeping and sex. This is so that your mind doesn’t start associating it with things like work, which might start to disrupt your quality of sleep. But perhaps that’s about to become an anachronism in the modern city.
Without having the above formula in mind, I have thought along similar lines for my own apartment.
When I think about where I spend most of my waking hours, it’s bouncing between the kitchen and the living room. And yet my kitchen isn’t up against the windows; it’s recessed towards the back. Instead, my bedroom – where the blinds are almost always drawn – got the windows. (Access to light is a code requirement.)
If it were up to me, I would have flipped my bedroom and the kitchen. But typically in the real estate world, “recessed bedrooms” are considered less desirable.
I don’t think I’ve heard many people complain about a recessed kitchen, but maybe that will change once we start thinking more about things like square foot hours.
UberPOOL launched in Toronto last week. It was tested in Toronto last summer and it’s been available in other cities for awhile, but now it’s officially here.
If you’re not yet familiar with UberPOOL, it basically allows you to share your ride with other people who are headed in the same direction. I’ve heard some people on Twitter complain about route inefficiencies, but I’ve had only positive experiences with it so far.
The disadvantage of this system is that it’s a bit slower. You’re stopping to pick up other people on the way. But the advantages of this system are twofold. First, it’s cheaper, which means it’s already starting to eat into my transit usage. And second, you get to meet new people everywhere you go.
This second piece is really interesting to me, because I place a lot of emphasis on getting to know as many people as I can. That’s one of the reasons I blog every day and one of the reasons I spend a lot of time on Twitter. I get exposed to people that I might otherwise not meet. And I believe there’s huge value in that. I want to sit down and have a coffee with everyone. (Time doesn’t always allow that to happen.)
Because since the beginning of cities, personal connections is one of the things that has made urban life so valuable. Here’s an excerpt from a CityLab article published back in 2013:
“If you look at the interaction patterns of cities,” Pan says, “You will see that they grow super-linearly with population with the same growth rate as productivity, as innovation, as crime, as HIV, as STDs.”
All of those facets of urban life have appeared until now to share a somewhat mysterious mathematical relationship. But this research suggests that this particular super-linear growth rate is directly tied to how dense cities enable us to connect to each other. As cities grow, our connections to each other grow by an exponential factor. And those connections are the root of productivity.
“What really happens when you move to a big city is you get to know a lot of different people, although they are not necessarily your ‘friends,’” Pan says. “These are the people who bring different ideas, bring different opportunities, and meetings with other great people that may help you.”
Clearly there can also be some negative externalities associated with urban life – such as crime and disease. But it’s also clear that for a many people, the benefits far outweigh the potential negatives. Big cities tend to make us more productive. And as we’ve discussed here before, they can also bring us happiness in ways not associated with economic success.
If you’ve used UberPOOL before, I would be curious to hear about your experiences in the comment section below.
When I was a kid growing up in the suburbs of Toronto, I never played in the backyard. I played in the streets. That’s where all the kids came together.
We would play baseball in somebody’s driveway, using one of the garage door “squares” as the strike zone. We would play football on corner lots, where it was tackle on the grass and “two-hand touch” on the street. And we would wax our curbs so that we could skateboard them.
None of these spaces were ever really intended for baseball, football, or skateboarding, but we kids repurposed them.
As people, including families, continue to move into urban centers around the world, I have no doubt that the next generation of children will once again repurpose spaces for play. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have work to do when it comes to properly preparing our communities for people of all shapes and sizes.
One of the most interesting design challenges facing us today has to do with our towers.
Architects have long been obsessed with the idea of vertical villages. Le Corbusier’s Unité d'habitation in Marseille had two shopping streets embedded within the tower that were intended to act as public spines. I don’t know how well they did, but it was a highly progressive idea for the time.
Following on this idea, I was recently watching a TED talk with architect Ole Scheeren (thanks Mariane) and I was fascinated by his obsession with breaking down the raw verticality of towers.
His belief was that, yes, cities are and will continue to become more dense through tall buildings, but that most towers isolate rather than connect people. His work strives to do the opposite.
And this one of the big trends that I think we will see more of in our cites. We will see new forms of urban connectedness and a blurring of private, public, and semi-public spaces. Screw Euclidean zoning.
On that note, I am reminded that I owe the ATC community a post on my predictions for 2016. I hope to get that out shortly.
Diagram via Büro Ole Scheeren