The Mississauga Muse
Active Member
Last Monday I sat in on a remarkable talk on Placemaking and liveable cities. You know, like what makes truly-liveable cities. Danish architect Helle Søholt gave her presentation at Clarke Hall in Port Credit, Mississauga.
As much as I got my first real understanding of "liveable city", I also gained an even greater appreciation for city planners who manage to make it so.
I videotaped the entire presentation and posted it to Google Video. It's a must-see for people trying to understand what makes people-cities.
Danish architect Helle Søholt's presentation on "Improving Life in Cities" emphasizes the importance of "human scale" with Copenhagen and Melbourne highlighted as examples.
Please click here for --> IMPROVING LIFE IN CITIES PRESENTATION --Helle Søholt
I've also included John Stewart's Blog for his insights into the evening.
SOURCE: MISSISSAUGA NEWS "Random Access" Blog
Port Credit placemaking
By: John Stewart:
It was one of many intriguing images that Danish architect Helle Søholt showed last night at Clarke Hall: four baby carriages double-parked outside a café in downtown Copenhagen.
If you looked carefully, you could see the young mothers who owned the carriages sitting beside the glass walls on the inside of the restaurant, monitoring their babies while they shared coffee and laughs with other young mothers.
“There was a Danish woman who did the same thing in New York and she was arrested,” Søholt told the gathering of residents last night at Clarke Hall in Port Credit, where she was delivering a talk on the lessons that former town can learn from what has worked in other cities, and what hasn’t worked. “She was separated from her child for hours. You do not leave your baby outdoors in New York.”
How’s that for a dramatic demonstration of the difference between a liveable city and a city where lots of people live?
In fact, Søholt masterfully showed us how all planning must begin with consideration of what it is to be human.
Put a bench in the middle of a sterile square and no one will sit there. Put benches along a sunny wall up against a building, invite the local farmers to sell their produce in the square and watch the crowds show up to people-watch.
Understanding successful cities means understanding how humans interact and building from there. We put enormous energy into designing and building public spaces, then provide no resources to program them to attract people, the architect said.
In most places in the world, we get it wrong more than we get it right, repeating cardinal errors: letting the car dictate the rules, promoting gridlock during the day and creating an “empty, useless city centre” at night.
A couple of Søholt’s slides provided dramatic evidence that, even in a City like Mississauga where the battle might seem lost on many fronts, there is always hope.
A square in Copenhagen was once a vehicular roundabout with a solitary booth in the middle. Today, it is a huge square with markets, cafés and sitting areas. The 75,000 daily pedestrians now exceed the daily vehicular count on the adjacent Hans Christian Andersen Boulevard.
In an even more dramatic example, the architect showed a photo of grubby back lanes in Melbourne which were once home to garbage bins, graffiti and air conditioning units. The “after” shot shows how cafés with multi-coloured umbrellas, restaurants and art shops have turned a detriment into a showcase.
The audience last night included a number of representatives of ratepayer groups from Port Credit, Lakeview, Clarkson-Lorne Park and Park Royal, who are going to be part of a new umbrella super-group being formed in southern Mississauga, to be called VIVA (Village Inspired Vision Alliance.)
The group was born in part from disillusionment with the review process for the Fram/Slokker application that prompted the ill-fated proposal to move Port Credit Library and resulted, ultimately, in the demolition of the Gray House.
Dorothy Tomiuk, one of the organizers, says Soeholt (seen above during yesterday’s tour of Fram/Slokker’s Port Credit Village development with Gil Penalosa, Executive Director of Walk & Bike for Life) provided, “a really uplifting, hopeful message.”
The main thing Tomiuk took away was a message that Port Credit, which is just about to enter a placemaking exercise to make it a vibrant destination point, has a right to seek the best.
Or as she put it, much more succinctly, “We should be asking the question: ‘Why the hell not?’ about all the things we want to see here.”
As much as I got my first real understanding of "liveable city", I also gained an even greater appreciation for city planners who manage to make it so.
I videotaped the entire presentation and posted it to Google Video. It's a must-see for people trying to understand what makes people-cities.
Danish architect Helle Søholt's presentation on "Improving Life in Cities" emphasizes the importance of "human scale" with Copenhagen and Melbourne highlighted as examples.
Please click here for --> IMPROVING LIFE IN CITIES PRESENTATION --Helle Søholt
I've also included John Stewart's Blog for his insights into the evening.
SOURCE: MISSISSAUGA NEWS "Random Access" Blog
Port Credit placemaking
By: John Stewart:
It was one of many intriguing images that Danish architect Helle Søholt showed last night at Clarke Hall: four baby carriages double-parked outside a café in downtown Copenhagen.
If you looked carefully, you could see the young mothers who owned the carriages sitting beside the glass walls on the inside of the restaurant, monitoring their babies while they shared coffee and laughs with other young mothers.
“There was a Danish woman who did the same thing in New York and she was arrested,” Søholt told the gathering of residents last night at Clarke Hall in Port Credit, where she was delivering a talk on the lessons that former town can learn from what has worked in other cities, and what hasn’t worked. “She was separated from her child for hours. You do not leave your baby outdoors in New York.”
How’s that for a dramatic demonstration of the difference between a liveable city and a city where lots of people live?
In fact, Søholt masterfully showed us how all planning must begin with consideration of what it is to be human.
Put a bench in the middle of a sterile square and no one will sit there. Put benches along a sunny wall up against a building, invite the local farmers to sell their produce in the square and watch the crowds show up to people-watch.
Understanding successful cities means understanding how humans interact and building from there. We put enormous energy into designing and building public spaces, then provide no resources to program them to attract people, the architect said.
In most places in the world, we get it wrong more than we get it right, repeating cardinal errors: letting the car dictate the rules, promoting gridlock during the day and creating an “empty, useless city centre” at night.
A couple of Søholt’s slides provided dramatic evidence that, even in a City like Mississauga where the battle might seem lost on many fronts, there is always hope.
A square in Copenhagen was once a vehicular roundabout with a solitary booth in the middle. Today, it is a huge square with markets, cafés and sitting areas. The 75,000 daily pedestrians now exceed the daily vehicular count on the adjacent Hans Christian Andersen Boulevard.
In an even more dramatic example, the architect showed a photo of grubby back lanes in Melbourne which were once home to garbage bins, graffiti and air conditioning units. The “after” shot shows how cafés with multi-coloured umbrellas, restaurants and art shops have turned a detriment into a showcase.
The audience last night included a number of representatives of ratepayer groups from Port Credit, Lakeview, Clarkson-Lorne Park and Park Royal, who are going to be part of a new umbrella super-group being formed in southern Mississauga, to be called VIVA (Village Inspired Vision Alliance.)
The group was born in part from disillusionment with the review process for the Fram/Slokker application that prompted the ill-fated proposal to move Port Credit Library and resulted, ultimately, in the demolition of the Gray House.
Dorothy Tomiuk, one of the organizers, says Soeholt (seen above during yesterday’s tour of Fram/Slokker’s Port Credit Village development with Gil Penalosa, Executive Director of Walk & Bike for Life) provided, “a really uplifting, hopeful message.”
The main thing Tomiuk took away was a message that Port Credit, which is just about to enter a placemaking exercise to make it a vibrant destination point, has a right to seek the best.
Or as she put it, much more succinctly, “We should be asking the question: ‘Why the hell not?’ about all the things we want to see here.”
