Assignment 4

Download assignment 4 Word file.


UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE PROGRAM

UBC School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture

Environmental Design Program (ENDS)

ENDS 221: DESIGN - Sustainability by Design. Making our Cities Healthy for Humans and Other Living Things.

Winter Term 1, September to December 2012

Professor Patrick M. Condon      

Assignment 4: Designing a Sustainable Region for 4 Million.

Issued: November 5.  

Due on last day of class, Thursday November 29.

Overview:

This project will give you a chance to experiment as a regional designer. You will be working in small four or five person teams, and in a team of your whole tutorial group, and, ultimately, in teamwork with your entire class of over 150 students. Your challenge is to add population and jobs to the region, taking it from a region of two million to a region of four million, and in a way that makes the region much more sustainable than it is now.

Map of region showing who does what labeled by tutorial section. It shows up on the downloadable Word file.

To make it easy for you we require you to use the seven rules of this course and apply them. Your project will be evaluated based on how well you do this. Your challenge will be to apply the seven rules in one 5 km by 5 km portion of the region.

Process

The region has been divided into squares. Your tutorial group will have the squares indicated below.  The numbers indicate which tutorial group is assigned which squares

As you can see, each tutorial group is responsible for four squares, or "tiles", each tile is 5km by 5km. That means that each square contains 25 square km. Since the sheets you will be issued are one meter square, that means that one meter equals 5km or 5,000 meters - or, in design and engineering terms, the map is 5,000 scale.

Population and jobs

We provide you with the total number of new jobs and residential units required for each square below. As you can see some tiles have more capacity to absorb jobs and housing (based on a complex analysis that we did in 2006 which I have radically simplified here). This doesn't make these tiles that much harder or easier to figure out. It just might take longer to draw more buildings on the tiles demanding more jobs and housing than others.

Tutorial	Square	New Dwelling Units	New Jobs
10	G6	40,000	60,000
Surrey Delta	G7	4,000	5,000
	H7	1,100	2,100
	I7	4,000	6,000
5	H5	50,000	70,000
Surrey Langley	H6	35,000	45,000
	I5	2,000	3,000
	I6	4,500	6,000
7	D5	2,000	2,000
Fraser edge	E5	2,200	2,000
	F5	45,000	45,000
	G5	57,000	40,000
2	B5	4,800	6.000
Richmond	C5	13,000	15,000
	B6	4,300	6,500
	C6	9,000	12,000
8	J4	6,500	5,000
Golden Ears	K4	6,500	7,500
	J5	8,500	7,500
	K5	1,900	2,000
3	H3	14,000	16,000
Coquitlam East	I3	3,000	5,000
	H4	8,500	9,500
	I4	3,900	5,500
9	F3	34,000	40,000
Coquitlam West	G3	6,500	7,000
	F4	50,000	40,000
	G4	6,000	7,000
6	D3	60,000	50,000
Burnaby	E3	60,000	50,000
	D4	62,000	45,000
	E4	53,000	27,000
1	B3	45,000	13,000
Vancouver	C3	50,000	20,000
	B4	40,000	18,000
	C4	63,000	26,000
11	J6	33,286	22,639
Langley	J7	51,076	25,000
	K6	4,035	1,800
	K7	10,589	5,200

Process

Using your experience from assignment three, work as a team to add residential units and job sites to your assigned urban tile.  Do this project EXACTLY like project three, only this time as a group and this time on a bigger area.

Step one, locate residential units.

From experience i know that the most difficult part of the task is to locate the housing units. So start with this. Remember that we have taught you how the corridors have the most capacity to absorb new units, but that the "fabric" can also absorb a lot without the need to tear buildings down (or not many anyway).

Step two, locate jobs.

This may seem like the hard part of the assignment, but it's not. Jobs only take up 20 sq meters per job. So one job only takes about 20 percent as much space as one housing unit. Remember that less than 20 percent of jobs are "stinky smelly noisy" jobs requiring separation from other land uses. So the other 80 percent can be located within mixed use blocks and mixed use buildings. The simplest way to do this is to give over the entire first floor of mixed use buildings located along transit corridors for retail, and the second floors (or higher floors potentially) of these same buildings for office use. If you go back and look at the statistics I gave you in my lecture on jobs you can see that about 20 percent of jobs, and thus space, is in retail, 40 percent is in education  (do schools need to be separated? maybe yes maybe no), health care (hospitals? clinics? dentists? your GP?)  and other services, 20 percent is government (city, regional, police, fire, etc).  I am making these numbers very rough and chunky to make it easy on you. So only 20 percent of your job space has to be segregated in jobs only areas. In some areas you will have trouble finding this much land for jobs only areas. In others you will have too much.  If you are lucky enough to have an existing industrial area in your square you can probably absorb more jobs in those areas by proposing to add floors to existing buildings or use the sites more intensively than they are now (we did this in our North Vancouver 100 year plan: http://www.cnv.org/server.aspx?c=3&i=541 )

Step three

Elect one person from your team to fill out the form on the next page.

List Team members:
QUESTION	ANSWER
1. What strategy did you use to locate most dwelling units.  Address affordability and demographics. (200 words.)
2. What strategy did you use to locate most jobs. Address degree of mixing/separation of jobs. (200 words)
3. How did you protect and extend natural systems. (100 words)
4. Where are the major transit ways you depend on for mobility (100 words)
5. Were you able to create alternative transportation networks. Where? (100 words)

 

Step four:

The four students who filled out the form above will elect one of their members to give a five minute presentation in front of all four squares to quickly describe the housing, jobs, transit, and environmental strategy used in your whole tutorial's section/city (i.e. your tutorials four squares) on November 29 during class time. That person will also be responsible for arriving at the lecture hall no later than 4:30  to assist in hanging the four tiles on the wall.

The Map

Draw directly on the map in the same way you did on assignment three, using the same symbols, same method of calculating density, same colors to indicate land uses. Be careful not to mess up the map, as we give you one free but if you mess it up you have to pay over ten dollars on your own to get a new one. If you need a new one that you want to have printed commercially on your own they can be downloaded at: http://www.sxd.sala.ubc.ca/9_resources/gvrd_mosaic/gvrd_mosaic.htm

Grading Criteria.

1.     Extent to which the team applies lessons learned in first part of class:   10%

2.     Demonstrates understanding of how cities can and can't change: 10%

3.     Can  evaluate and choose best strategies to enhance sustainability: 10%

4.     Demonstrates a basic understanding of "scale" (how the size of things in plans relates to the size of things in the real world)  10%

5.     Team demonstrates that they have met the program requirements for jobs and housing units. 20%

6.     Team presents a clear and cogent argument (through design and text) about how their might grow over time towards increased sustainability . 20%

7.     Map is graphically clear (graphic quality of map/plan/proposal). 20%