This past Sunday night I was out for a bike ride with a few friends all around downtown Toronto. According to Strava, we did almost 22 km. Click here to see our route. During the ride, one of my friends said something to me that stood out. He said that when he’s on a bike he wants all cars off the road; but when he’s in a car, he wants all bikes off the road.

Now, this may seem like a fairly banal statement, but I think it demonstrates a number of things about people and the way we interact with cities. First, we’re all probably pretty selfish. We want what we want at a specific moment in time and we easily forget what it’s like to be on the other side of a situation.

Second, I think it reinforces what I wrote a month ago in a post called: Every street can’t be everything to everyone. If we want to improve the user experience for a variety of different use cases (driving, biking, walking and so on), we should decide when and where we’re going to optimize for each. 

The reason my friend said what he said was because we were riding on a road with no bike lanes. We were swerving in and around cars. And when the street is shared like this it naturally becomes a competition of who can be the most aggressive and dominate the road–bikes or cars. But as exciting as that might be, it’s probably not an ideal way to build our cities.

The “ground plane” is an important reference in architecture. The ground is typically where people walk. The ground is where our fabricated buildings meet the earth. And the ground is where our experience of the urban environment–however good or bad it may be–truly takes shape. Often times I feel that we, city dwellers, spend far too much time worrying about the height of buildings and not enough time worry about the ground floor.

But what if there were no clearly defined ground plane? This morning I stumbled upon an interesting book called, Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook. The authors call it “a manifesto for a new theory of urban form.” And the argument is that Hong Kong has developed a unique series of public/private spaces that allow it to function as a fully three-dimensional city. 

Through underground tunnels, above ground walkways, escalators, and other connective infrastructure, Hong Kong is reinventing the way we typically think about cities–both from a user experience and a real estate standpoint. Here’s an excerpt from the Guardian architecture and design blog:

The phenomenon began in the 1960s, when the Hongkong Land company, one of the main developers in the region, built an elevated walkway to connect a luxury hotel to the second storey of an adjacent shopping mall. An insignificant move, perhaps, but it in fact had the effect of changing the rentable values within the building: suddenly the mall’s second floor units could be rented out for more than those at ground level. It entirely recalibrated the vertical logic of real estate value.

Now, you could argue that Hong Kong is a unique place. And it is. Other, less dense cities, have found above and below grade walkways to be a destroyer of urban vibrancy. But in Hong Kong it works and, as many other cities around the world focus their energies on urban intensification, we may find that Hong Kong is indeed a new model for urban form.

If you’re a regular reader of Architect This City, you’ll know that I’m a supporter of congestion and road pricing. Any valuable good or service, such as a road, that’s offered for all intents and purposes as free, will never be able to keep up with demand. You need to price it.

However, the political risk associated with implementing something like this has made it such that few cities around the world have done it. London and Singapore are the two most common examples.

The more populist solution is to simply build more roads and highways, even though study after study shows that this doesn’t work. If it did, we would have already solved the problem of traffic congestion. And we most certainly haven’t.

Which is why I’m excited about a new startup that recently launched called Urban Engines. Their solution is twofold. It’s based on incentives and on treating people and cars in cities as sensors that feed back data into their network. Here’s a brief video. If you can’t see it below, click here.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaCp5Tl-uAc]

The data piece is almost a no-brainer (provided they can get the data). The more data we can collect about the way people and cars move in a city, the more they’ll be able to optimize and manage the flows. The possibilities are endless.

But what I found really interesting is their incentives based approach. Typical road pricing methods are, one could argue, a punitive approach. As traffic increases so does the price of the road. (I like to look at it as efficient pricing.)

With Urban Engines, their approach is the opposite: it’s to reward people–through money and lotteries–for driving during off peak times. It’s smart because selling a reward program to cities will be a lot easier than selling a new charge.

Overall, this a great example of how startups are stepping up to solve some of our most important societal problems. For more information on Urban Engines, check out their website and this writeup on CityLab.