Loading summary
Transcript43 lines
- [00:00]
A
This episode of the Urbanist is brought to you by arup. Arup, the firm behind some of the world's most iconic public and structural projects, works with leaders to plan and deliver the systems that shape how cities and societies function across transport, energy, water and buildings. Arup's approach to design is how complex
- [00:20]
B
decisions get made, seeing the whole picture
- [00:22]
A
and creating outcomes that work in the real world.
- [00:26]
B
Because the future does not just arrive,
- [00:28]
A
it's shaped by the choices we make today. Learn more at@arup.com Next Arup Design for what's next,
- [00:53]
B
Especially these big connecting bridges where there hasn't been a bridge before, a river is a real obstacle. And putting a bridge over something, it seems like an obvious thing, but it can have a really big impact.
- [01:03]
A
How can building a bridge connect communities beyond just the physical and enhance the experience of our urban environments? This is the Urbanist Monocours program, all about the cities we live in. I'm your host Andrew Tuck. This week we talk to a bridge designer to discover how their craft is about more than getting us from one side to another. Then we learn about the impact that tiny gardens we find all over cities have had throughout history. That's all ahead right here on the Urbanist. With me, Andrew Tuck. Ezra Groskin builds bridges in every sense of those words. Groskin is a director at London and Aberdeenshire based firm Moxon Architects and he designs bridges that match his practice's goals to bring landscape fed infrastructure into the urban environment that also celebrates the art of design. And for Ezra, the best bridges don't just span gaps, they also bring together communities and coax people to interact and consider the spaces that they're in. Ezra joined me recently in studio and I began by asking him how he became a bridge builder.
- [02:18]
B
I actually kind of fell into it by accident. I trained as an architect in the States and then I became obsessed with the way things are buil and then also with structures that kind of express their function. So discovered kind of British high tech which I think took that to the next level. But I was really interested in these structures that expressed themselves and I didn't even know there was such a thing as a bridge architect until moving to London in 2008 just before the bubble burst. But I was kind of interviewing at different practices and one of them had a bridge team and all they did was design bridges and my skill set matched that quite well. Ended up up there kind of learning the trade and then have done it ever since. But balancing doing buildings and bridges at the same time. Because I think it's quite healthy to keep that wider view on architecture. But then specializing in bridges, I guess
- [03:11]
A
there's two ways to come to the bridge, as it were. One is through pure engineering. I guess lots of the big engineering companies would say, okay, come to us with your contract, we can make a bridge for you and then we can make it look nice at the end of the process. Whereas an architecture company, I presume you're thinking about aesthetics and of course, engineering, because the damn thing needs to stay up. Is that the advantage of an architecture company being commissioned to make a bridge?
- [03:33]
B
Yeah, I think two things. One thing is understanding the bridge and the way it looks and the way it feels and the way people use it, but then also understanding how it sits in the wider context, how it connects to the ends where people are coming from, where they're going to. And I think good engineers consider that stuff. But I think we're trained to look at the bigger picture all the time. So we're more interested in the urban context than your focused engineer who just knows how to do their specific job. So I think we bring a lot of different parts together and sometimes it is an engineer. I think the bridges we get involved in always have an aspiration to be more attractive, more expressive, more enjoyable to use. And in those situations, it usually is kind of architect and engineering coming together from day one. So it's not as if an architect does a sketch and then finds an engineer who can make it stand up. And it's not as if an engineer has an idea for something really straightforward and they ask an architect to dress it up. So for us, it's kind of a collaboration from day one.
- [04:30]
A
Now, I've looked at Moxon's site. There's some very nice bridges on there. Some of these are bridges for people on foot or by bicycle. Some are larger than that, I guess. Some are for vehicles and things. What's the scale of bridges that you're involved in?
- [04:43]
B
I mean, kind of anything. I think the ones that stand out are the kind of smaller, really human scaled ones. So the ones going across the canal at King's Cross or something like that, so it's like 25 meter footbridge for people and cyclists. Those you have a lot of freedom, I think, to really think about the human scale and design it in such a way where, you know, people are going to be touching it and feeling it. But at the other end of the spectrum, I mean, we're doing competitions for really long suspension bridges, big spans, structures like that. And I think it's almost like the same amount of design goes into it, whether it's 20 meters long or 200 meters long. You still have to think about the same challenges and the way people will experience it.
- [05:24]
A
Well, let's talk about that footbridge here in London, which is in Kings Cross. So this was a part of London that was. I always think it's like two years ago, it's over a decade now. Ago was. Was reimagined as a part of London. So it was warehouses, it was semi industrial, it was underused, unless you were going to a rave in a warehouse there. They needed this footbridge to take you across a canal and connect the land around the station with this, what had been a no man's land, in a way. Tell us, what was the significance of the bridge there and what your ambitions.
- [05:54]
B
We've actually done two bridges there. The first one crosses the canal and it's part of a larger cycle network. It connects this new kind of shopping district, Khaldrops Yard, to a nature reserve and then onwards to Camden. And that one, it was the first commission. The regeneration was in its early stages, so it was all about infrastructure and this, it was about wider connections. So it's part of this longer cycle network and it's getting people from A to B over the canal and onwards. And then a few years later, they brought us back to do a second bridge about 100 meters along the canal. And this one is different. It's funny, it's spanning the same canal right around the corner, but this one was about creating something where people would come and linger on the bridge. Or it was an identifiable bridge where people could say, you know, let's go meet on the red bridge, then we'll get dinner. Or you come to the red bridge and you see the steps down to the canal and it kind of creates part of that urban space where you get people in the summer hanging out, watching Wimbledon and watching sports events on a big screen. So that one, it's about connecting over the river, but it's also creating a place. It's a place making bridge, it's a destination bridge. And it's funny there also, because there's a third bridge which wasn't ours, but that's only 50 meters further along and works quite well, can handle the people. But they wanted lots of connections over the canal so you could almost just go across the canal without even thinking about it. You didn't have to, like, wander out of your way and then come back around. So you get this high traffic going backwards. And forwards over the canal and like total connection. And you have big businesses to the south of the canal and then more residential and you have Central Saint Martin's the school to the north and the shopping. And it's about creating that connection between the two halves of the site.
- [07:35]
A
I've often wondered about that, that you deliberately created the bridge where people wouldn't just walk across the bridge. You wanted people to stop and linger. Certainly some of those bridges, in the example you're giving in King's Cross, they're often jammed in the summer, like people just hanging out on the bridge. There's something about this moment. You get a different perspective of your city. You're suspended, you're ab. The city as you normally see it, that's kind of magical and does stop people in their tracks. Are you aware of that kind of magic as you design?
- [08:02]
B
I don't think you really appreciate it until you're there and you see the people using the bridge. Like one of the tricks is that bridge that you're talking about where you linger. We've actually made the top of the parapet, the top rail. It's an inclined plate, so you can actually. It invites you to like lean your arms on it and look over. And, you know, we think about tricks like that. But until you actually are there, seeing people use the bridge, I don't think you can anticipate kind of the connection people will make to it and the way they'll observe what's going on around, what's going on below the bridge and things like that.
- [08:30]
A
Well, I'm looking at your lovely website now and there's lots of them here. There's the Wendover Dean Viaduct, which is another really beautiful bridge. Give me another example of something where you feel it delivered more than a piece of functional engineering to get you from A to B.
- [08:44]
B
The German ones are really interesting because that has brought sustainability to our bridges in a way that we hadn't been able to do yet. And those are timber bridges, so.
- [08:54]
A
Because they're timber.
- [08:54]
B
Yeah. So this is actually, actually a massive change in the way we're working. I mean, as architects, we learn about building in timber from day one. But I think there's been a real reluctance recently to build bridges and infrastructure out of timber in this country in different areas. But in Germany, it's almost like one of their go to materials for pedestrian bridges. So we've entered a few competitions in Germany with a German timber bridge specialist. And this one, the main structure is timber. It's about 40 meters long. So Similar in length to the King's Cross bridges, but like a fraction of the carbon went into it and actually cost less. Was pretty straightforward to build. It requires probably more detailing and more knowledge of actually how buildings go together because you've got to keep the timber dry and you've got to be able to maintain it. But it's kind of opened our eyes to this other way of actually bringing a lot of our architectural knowledge into bridges and infrastructure.
- [09:49]
A
Another thing I think is fascinating is if some idiot like me was given the job of designing a bridge, you'd think, okay, it goes from point A to B. I think what's so wonderful is what if the bridge doesn't go straight from A to B, but it kinks and curves and I presume it has a practical measure sometimes for slowing down cyclists and things. But it's not just about getting from A to B in the shortest span, is it?
- [10:09]
B
Yeah, no. And actually we're sort of developing a reputation on those types of bridges, which we kind of call like meandering bridges, where you are kind of zigzagging across an obstacle. And it does serve a functional thing, slows down cyclists. It might help you kind of get up a hill without going straight up the hill. But the other thing, and I didn't really appreciate this until you're on these bridges or until you've built some of them, but if you're zigzagging, you can actually see the structure of the bridge around the corner, so you actually see the bridge that you're about to be onto. Normally, if you're on a straight bridge, you don't really know what's holding you up. But when you do the zigzag, you kind of get this glimpse of the structure as it kind of snakes ahead of you, which is kind of exciting. So it's even more reason to make the structure look good and be fun to cross.
- [10:53]
A
Interesting looking at the examples you've created, certainly ones I've seen, you're not going in for big suspension arcs of metal holding up the bridge, as you say, they almost seem to float, just fit into place. Is that just the way that you like to approach bridge making or is these days, in the materials and the way the engineering's done that you need less structures and support on display to make a bridge stay in place.
- [11:16]
B
The pendulum kind of swings, I think, I don't know. To go back 20 years, there was the millennium bubble and you had all these really expressive, kind of high tech bridges. And I think at that time it was Kind of a race to see who could make, like, the slimmest bridge or the most ambitious bridge. And you'd put all this effort into engineering, and you end up with these very complicated structures that are very difficult to maintain and only specialists can maintain them. And while they are really impressive, I think in the long run, because it requires this specific type of maintenance, maybe clients realize that maybe it's not worth it. So then you kind of dial it back and you're looking at what are the simple structures that are tried and tested. And some of those are just trusses, like a normal bridge that you might see over a railway from 100 years ago or 150 years ago. This was the case at King's Cross. It was. How do we reference that kind of historic structure, which engineers love, because it's really efficient and it works, but how do we do it? Kind of reinterpret it in a way that uses current technology and current craft and really get into the details in the same way. The Victorians, they would have been really into the details at that time. Materials were expensive and labor was cheap. So they could. They actually made quite elegant, really minimalist structures with lots of rivets and lots of kind of metalwork in the details. So I think we've kind of come back around to that in a way. I mean, we, as a practice, we are very much interested in the way things come together and the way joints are articulated and all about the details, but also about the bigger form the same way.
- [12:47]
A
Just tell me. I touched on this at the beginning of the program, and it is a serious point that wherever you build bridges, it kind of re engineers a city. Two communities that didn't come together, come together, even if that's just like boroughs in London, for example, where people didn't cross back and forth. Bridges have changed the dynamics of cities in many ways. And we talk about building bridges for that very reason. Is there this social, philosophical element? Sometimes when you think about the power
- [13:14]
B
of what a bridge can do, I think massively, yeah. I think especially these big connecting bridges where there hasn't been a bridge before. And, you know, speaking of London, I think east London, very limited bridges, especially for pedestrians. So it's kind of surprising that there hasn't been more proposals there. We recently. It's not quite London scale, but we recently finished the bridge in Worcester, where it's north of the city. It's an area, you know, there's students on one side. There's a lot of older kind of retired people in the area. And it connects a park over to a new community and the nearest bridge is like 10 miles upstream or something, and people have to drive to get around. And we've created this bridge and I don't think we anticipated just the impact it would have on these communities. So you have people who lived on other sides of the river for years and years and years and were never able to kind of visit their friends in the same way they can now. So it's just. It's a small thing, but it is influencing, like, the daily lives of people, kind of expanding their network, changing their habits, changing the way they get to work. There are now more people cycling, or you could even be walking to work, to get to a bus stop or a train station, things like that. And it is the bridge. I mean, a river is a real obstacle and putting a bridge over seems like an obvious thing, but it can have a really big impact.
- [14:30]
A
Yeah. And even it's a bridge across a highway that has the same power to divide a city. And we've seen in many cities how it segregated people properly, socially, in wealth, in access to education, all sorts of things. And then suddenly a bridge comes along and then it really kind of changes the neighbourhood. And we've been to many cities in Eastern Europe where bridges were used to divide people and to separate communities and to manage revolts and all sorts of things. Again, it's, of course, when there's a war or something, what's the first thing that gets taken out is the bridges, because it's communication, it's connection, it's how societies flourish. But back to a Sunday topic. Tell something you're working on at the moment, but something you're excited to be working on.
- [15:12]
B
I think sticking to the London theme. We're working on a bridge in the Royal Victoria Dock and actually really sticking to this meandering bridge theme. It's a bridge that will connect transport hub to entirely new neighborhood. Total regeneration of a kind of former industrial site. And this bridge, it kind of wiggles its way over the dock and it does that to get you up high enough so that boats can come under. But then the kind of most exciting part is the middle of the bridge is actually going to open, so once in a while a tall ship will need to go through and this bridge kind of twists open in this really unexpected way, which I think should be a kind of nice. Almost like a spectacle to come and see when it opens, whether it opens like once a month or once a week, something like that. But I think one of the other things Is these projects take a lot of time.
- [16:02]
A
I was going to ask that. It sounds. These aren't quick fixes.
- [16:04]
B
No, this one, I think we started working on it 10 years ago and it comes and goes and it kind of gets momentum and then it slows down. But everything indicates it could be under construction by the end of this year. And it will be amazing to go see it get built. And it's getting built in my home city. So extra exciting.
- [16:23]
A
My thanks there to Ezra Groskin. Next up, we look at how small gardens and allotments have shaped cities and civilization for centuries. Often born out of necessity, these small plots have recycled nutrients, remedied contaminated soil, and transformed our relationship to the Earth. In her new book, Tiny Gardens Everywhere, MIT Professor Kate Brown shows what happens when urban gardens are not seen as retreats from the city, but become part of its social fabric, woven with histories of displacement, conflict, resistance, and the quiet revolutions that begin when someone plants a seed. Kate recently joined me to discuss more about this fascinating new book.
- [17:10]
C
Tiny Gardens Everywhere is exactly as the title suggests. It's about tiny gardens that emerge everywhere, especially in cities. And you know, the story we've told about cities for ages is that people move to cities, they leave behind their livestock and their seeds and dirt and animals, you know, wild animals, and they become urban people who purchase everything they need and consumers. What's been missing in this story? It's like, why are cities then today some of the most hotspots of biodiversity? How did that happen? How do we even have green spaces in cities? And when I started to look, I saw that as soon as cities started to emerge as big metropolitan regions, London, Paris, Berlin, New York City, people were moving into these cities who came from rural areas where they had access to commons and they had notions of common rights and the use of wastes as productive materials and spaces for self provisioning. And they bring those ideas with them to the cities. They go to the margins of the cities. They're like, look, nobody's using this land. And they're like, look, there's this pile of, of rotting beet pulp here or beer mash or garbage, you know, kitchen scraps or manure, let's use it, put it on this gravel or sand or hard packed earth and create good human engineered soils. And that's what people did. They produced in cities the most productive agriculture and recorded human history.
- [18:45]
A
I know that your book charts quite a period of history. So you're charting the period from when workers are kind of pushed into the city so that they bring with them, some of their knowledge of rural ways of how to tend and grow plants and crops. How has that changed across time? Is it. Can you still feel that influence now when you go to guerrilla gardens, people's back gardens, and you see people who've moved to the city, are these small gardens still functioning in the same way for many working people?
- [19:15]
C
I would say yes. You know, one thing that happened as people developed these kind of spontaneous guerrilla gardens, and sometimes, like in Berlin, 30 households would get together and they would rent what was basically a city, and they would chop up the land into almost equal proportions. And what they do, you know, they grow food, they get little animals. They're able to get by on starvation wages. They're able to get by when they're out of work. They're able to have the power to go on strike because of these gardens. But they also come together. As they come together, they solve other problems that they have. You know, they elect a little council, they have a leader that they've elected. And, you know, all of a sudden they'll be like, wait, the kids don't have anything to do during the summer holidays. Start a children's camp. Or we have people coming in with tb. Let's build a little shack over there. We'll make it our sanatorium. Or sometimes neighbors have disputes, we'll set up a arbitration court, and we'll have it right over there under the oak tree. And so what I see happening is before professional class, elite, or lawmakers think of it, people in practice are working out the first sinews of what we would now call the Social Security state or the social welfare networks. So these have course exist and remain in cities to this day. And you know, what I found over time is that the people who were most likely to be scraping by, the people who were most likely to be dispossessed, were the ones who had the creativity to come up with innovations about how to grow in cities and tiny spaces. In this book, I'm writing about what happened in the past, while I'm also joining these gardening projects in the present
- [20:54]
A
tense, just as you describe that. Of course, when you look at contemporary times, the very actions that you're talking about provide answers to many of the questions, I guess we. We have about city living and about environment and many other things. You know, there's reusing waste material to grow something new, to find spaces within our cities where we can grow crops that don't have to travel kilometers to get to our table. These tiny gardens have the potential to be Very modern, useful additions to our cities as well.
- [21:25]
C
Absolutely. I mean, we know that cities have these heat island effects. So, you know, in Washington, D.C. subtropical region, my friend and I planted one mother fig tree and we took cuttings from the fig tree and we planted, I think about a dozen fig trees around this school on the south, west and east facing walls, you know, brick walls of the school, there's just a tiny bit of soil there. It's dry and hard. But that's just what fig trees live. They think that they're in the south of Italy. And these trees have just exploded around this school. And as they grow, they shade, they shade the building, they make the building a little cooler. And August and September, people are just flocking to these fig trees. There's just bushels and bushels of figs that come out of these trees. And then the trees are busy, like soaking up water that comes off the sidewalks, off the hard surfaces and stopping flood situations. So the more we have green in cities, the more we are resilient, not just to food ways, but also to heat, floods. All green spaces and certainly healthy soils are far more absorbent, certainly than pavement, but even than turf grass.
- [22:35]
A
It's interesting, as you talked and you were talking about you planting these fig trees, I know that you describe the book as being part history, which we've slightly touched on, but you say it is also memoir and manifesto as well. I think we have beginning to see some hints what the manifesto might be. But for you, this is about your life as well, your connection to small gardens. What do these spaces mean to you?
- [22:56]
C
Well, you know, ever since I've been an adult, well, even I grew up in Chicago and my mother always had a garden. And ever since I've been off on my own, I've found community gardens because I lived in an apartment or something, and I. And I realized long time ago that on a space about the size of a large dining room table, I can grow enough food, you know, fresh greens and vegetables to keep my household going for eight to nine months out of the year. And the rest of the year I can have stocks of sauerkraut and kimchi and root vegetables and winter squash that keep us going too. And I guess that was the insight I had, that it doesn't take much space to produce an awful lot of food in my tiny garden here in Cambridge. Probably about three or four households feed off of it because healthy soils produce this abundance that we can't even eat on our own. And so that's what I. I guess the Manifesto part is. But also there's just another thing. Like everywhere I looked into the past, in the present, when people come together over these commons, these green spaces, green growing spaces in cities, they also start to approach other problems that they have, whether they're social or cultural or economic. And so we know that people being in green spaces, forest bathing, really helps our mental health, it helps recenter our focus. But we also know that people share a lot when they share gardening spaces. So like instead of a curbside parking space in front of my apartment building, there could be a curbside allotment garden. And you know, I'd be out there gardening, but you might be my neighbor Andrew, and you might not like to garden. So I say, that's okay, I'll take your plot and I will, you know, you can have whatever you want out of it. And so you come out and you see me harvesting these carrots, and I give you a bunch of carrots, and they're so deeply orange that you take a bite right away. And so now you have the dirt from the soil. Not a bad thing to imbibe the microbes from that soil, the microbes from my hand. And now we're sharing in a microbiome. And microbiologists tell us that when people share common species in their microbiome, they get along better, they cooperate more, they're more collective. And we can see that in evolutionary history, humans have evolved to exchange kisses, hugs, handshakes, to share common meals, their hand in common bowls and break bread together because somehow, instinctively, they knew that that is how you build community, is by finding means to exchange microbes. And that's exactly what this manifesto is telling us, is that we're locked inside a politics of fear and hatred. And if we were outside more, exchanging more both culturally but also biologically, I think we can start to break through, to find ways to talk to each other again, to find ways to agree on politics that weren't about expropriation and extermination and exploitation.
- [25:57]
A
It's an amazing book. And just hearing you talk about it, it starts with such a small premise, literally a tiny garden. And you begin to see how many ideas are nurtured on this plot of land, as well as vegetables and fruit, for example. There's lots of people who would benefit from this, who we know are eating ultra processed food, who don't have a huge amount of money, don't have access to giving their kids, for example, the nutrition that you're talking about. How do you make sure that these people are also Included in the story because it's great when the usual suspects get involved. But how do we get more people involved in this? Because what you're describing has such a potential for change in our cities.
- [26:34]
C
Yeah. Again, let's look to recent history. The Soviet Union had trouble feeding its population. That's an ongoing story ever since collectivization began in 1933, and there was a mass famine. And in that year, 1933, Soviet citizens won the right to garden. That meant, you know, the municipalities and collective farms would hand out public land for private self provisioning. And millions of Soviet households joined garden associations. These were green belts around cities of allotments that people joined. There were more people in these garden associations than members of the Communist Party party. It's the biggest civic movement in the Soviet Union. And what we see is the Soviet Union collapses, the economy collapses. 1996, there's fears of famine, but there was no famine in the 1990s. And that was because people went out to their allotment gardens and they doubled down on them. And by 1996, 91% of the potatoes people eat are coming from these tiny urban gardens. That's on 1.5% of the arable land. What I'm saying here is that we have a lot of common space in our cities today. London increasingly needs far fewer cars and people are shifting over to public transportation and electric people movers. And that's the same with Paris, Amsterdam, New York, and increasingly places like Boston, where I live. So we could let the cities continue to be real estate developers and take that public commons that we devote now to moving and parking cars and turn them into high rises and housing for middle class and elite. But we could also instead say, listen, we want to keep that land and we want to turn it into green space for everyone. And we want this to be instead of big arteries for cars, we want to have edible boulevards again, instead of curbside parking, curbside allotment gardens. Now everybody can have access to this land. And again, it shouldn't be a free for all people come together in commons. Commons are not free for all. They are well regulated spaces where a limited group of people who belong to that collective are part of the group and they agree on a common set of rules. So say there's this edible boulevard going through the neighborhood. When the plums or the pears come ripe, people are all set up to go out there and collectively harvest them, bring them to a communal kitchen, and together they pull them together into dried fruit or plum jam or plum wine or whatever they agree to make. But these would be spaces that are regulated by the community as a common.
- [29:05]
A
Just before I let you go, it was evocative for me. When I was a little kid, my dad had an allotment and we used to go to that allotment every weekend. And I was a little five year old and I would watch him digging and I enjoy pulling the spuds out the soil and he would point out the birds and things that came to feed there as well. So it was an introduction to me for nature that stuck with me ever since. So these tiny gardens, I think they have a way of the soil getting in your blood as it was were absolutely.
- [29:31]
C
And you know, as again, microbiologists say kids with their hands in the soil is essential for childhood development.
- [29:38]
A
My thanks there to Kate Brown and her book Tiny Gardens Everywhere is out now. And that's all for this week's episode of the Urbanist. You can follow us for new editions of the show every week. And you can subscribe to Monocle magazine for reports on all things design, architecture and urban urbanism too. Just visit monocle.com the urbanist. Well, it's produced by David Stevens. I'm Andrew Tuck. Goodbye and thank you for listening. City lovers.