As urban planners grapple with the need for creative flood management systems in cities around the world, Zaha Hadid Architects provides an interesting example in Hamburg.

Located along the Elbe River, the new Niederhafen River Promenade offers two functions in one: a flood wall and a riverfront promenade. Set in a popular tourist area alongside one of the city’s most important public spaces, the new promenade offers views of the Elbe, links to adjacent neighborhoods and lots of room for pedestrians, food stalls, cafes and street performers, with shops and public utilities set into the structure at street level on the side that faces the city.

The barrier at Niederhafen was first built in the 1960s in the aftermath of severe storm surge floods that caused 315 fatalities and destroyed the homes of 60,000 residents, but according to modern calculations, it was no longer high enough to be effective. In addition to raising the total height of the barrier by .8 meters, the overburdened supporting elements of the structure needed to be replaced. The city announced a competition to design a redevelopment, awarding the project to Zaha Hadid Architects.

Standing 8.6 meters (28 feet) high on the eastern side and 8.9 meters (29 feet) high on the western side, the barrier is now tall enough to protect the city from maximum winter storm surges and extreme high tides. The architects carved sculptural staircases into the sides at various points, creating angular amphitheaters that encourage people to linger and enjoy the views and “generating an oscillating sequence in the river promenade as it repeatedly widens and narrows.”

“Dedicated cycle lanes at street level run the length of the flood protection barrier. Wide ramps at Baumwell and Langdungsbrücken connect the river promenade with street level and provide accessibility for all. A third central ramp enables service vehicles to access the promenade and Überseebrücke.”

“The river promenade is divided into two sections with different spatial qualities. The zone to the west is at a larger scale, offering wide views downstream of all shipping activity on the river. To the east, the port’s marina creates amore intimate atmosphere with a long ramp alongside the amphitheater leading visitors down to the water’s edge.”

Of course, concrete flood walls aren’t right for every city, especially those where aquatic wildlife habitats have been destroyed and need to be restored. Some cities are working on plans to do just that, like Chicago’s “Wild Mile.” Read more about how “urban rewinding” can help make cities more flood resistant.

Photos by Piet Niemann via Zaha Hadid Architects

These days, “user experience” tends to refer more to the digital realm than our physical environment, but it’s no less relevant to roads and sidewalks than to websites and software. When creating something that people will interact with, no matter what it is, the goals are often the same: it should be useful, usable, accessible, findable, desirable and valuable (add “credible” when it comes to information). It gives you what you need, when you need it, in precisely the right form.

But in the process of designing something one hopes will be beautiful, sometimes user experience falls by the wayside. So-called “desire paths” are one example of what can happen as a result. Formed when people forge a path across unpaved land, regardless of any nearby walkways that may already exist, these paths are an organic and often unconscious form of urban hacking, when users decide what works best for them in the environments they occupy every day.

Who would’ve guessed from r/DesirePath

People made a desire pentagram inside a big roundabout. from r/DesirePath

Desire paths are almost like a litmus test for built environments; when they appear, they’re signaling that somewhere along the way, someone likely failed to determine what the design was supposed to do, and for whom. At its root, urban planning is a tool of social control, attempting to impose order upon the wild and intuitive, with a goal of producing an efficient system that’s easy to manage. Of course, it’s essential to maintaining the complexity of modern cities, and the grids and patterns that form the basis of most cities have their purposes, like streamlining traffic and navigation.

That may be fine when you’re driving, but walking is a different story. Most of us want efficiency when we’re walking, too, and that means cutting out unnecessary corners and curves along the way. Enormous pedestrian roundabouts might fit neatly within traffic circles and look nice from above, but when you’re just trying to get from point A to point B, spending the extra minutes it takes to keep to the concrete circle rather than cutting through the grass feels like a waste.

Illicit trails reveal a lot about a given place, the people who populate it, what their needs are and whether those needs are being met. That’s especially true when it comes to accessibility. Over time, it can become abundantly clear that ramps should be built for people who can’t navigate staircases (as it should have been from the very beginning).

A common miserable desire path found during a typical Canadian winter.

Blocked off alley doesn’t stop people. from r/DesirePath

Once you start looking for them, you’ll spot desire paths everywhere; there’s even a fascinating and enthusiastic subreddit devoted to them. They can change according to the weather, appearing when sidewalks get icy; snow can sometimes reveal invisible common paths taken to cut across hard surfaces like asphalt.

View from my dormitory, huge one with a fork at the end from r/DesirePath

Desire paths don’t always result from a design failure. Sometimes they just reflect the fact that people want to walk, run or bike on a natural surface instead of following pavement. Sometimes they illustrate the need for cities to be more adaptive; a system of sidewalks that worked twenty years ago stops serving its users when new popular destinations pop up in different spots along the way. And sometimes, when walkways are attempting to protect sensitive natural habitats, user-determined paths can be legitimately harmful.

A local college is trying to thwart this desire path by planting a tree in the middle of it. from r/DesirePath

The Oval walkways at Ohio State University were paved based on the students’ desire paths from r/DesirePath

My University giving into the desire path from r/DesirePath

Those in charge of determining the location and layout of official pedestrian paths may try to fight user-created routes with obstacles, but it’s a fool’s errand, much like trying to hold back the ocean. The paths will simply multiply. Rebellious in spirit, desire paths are a physical manifestation of the untamed parts of us that defy control by external systems. Sometimes there’s nothing for urban planners to do but accept the wisdom of the people who actually use the paths, and make them official.

Top image by wetwebwork/Flickr CC by 2.0

Conventional design only welcomes a certain type of person: the one arbitrarily deemed “normal.” It’s easy for designers, or even the casual observer, to define the most typical user of a space as one who requires no modifications in order to access it. But “normal” doesn’t really exist, and you can’t necessarily tell by looking at someone whether they’re having a lot of trouble heaving open a heavy door, struggling to mount stairs, feeling confused by a complex access system or excluded from using it altogether. In that sense, the appearance of being “typical” is useless, just like the space you’ve created is to a large segment of people who might otherwise want or need to participate. That’s where Universal Design comes in.

The Disability Act of 2005 defines Universal Design as “the design and composition of an environment so that it may be accessed, understood and used to the greatest possible extent, in the most independent and natural manner possible, in the widest possible range of situations, without the need for adaptation, modification, assistive devices or specialized solutions, by any persons of any age or size or having any particular physical, sensory, mental health or intellectual ability or disability.” In electronic systems, it also means designing “any electronics-based process of creating products, services or systems so that they may be used by any person.”

In 1997, a group of architects, product engineers, engineers and environmental design researchers developed seven principles of Universal Design to help guide their professions in meeting these goals. To summarize:

• The design is useful and marketable to people with diverse abilities.
• The design accommodates a wide range of individual preferences and abilities.
• Use of the design is easy to understand, regardless of the user’s experience, knowledge, language skills, or current concentration level.
• The design communicates necessary information effectively to the user, regardless of ambient conditions or the user’s sensory abilities.
• The design minimizes hazards and the adverse consequences of accidental or unintended actions.
• The design can be used efficiently and comfortably and with a minimum of fatigue.
• Appropriate size and space is provided for approach, reach, manipulation, and use regardless of user’s body size, posture, or mobility.

Universal Design doesn’t necessarily set out to create a “one size fits all” solution, but rather to push the boundaries of “mainstream” products, services and environments to include as many people as possible, and provide the ability for customization to minimize the difficulties of particular users. That may sound like a tall order, but the key is that no single designer can ever successfully pull it off alone.

How to Begin Making Spaces More Inclusive

To start, Universal Design means going beyond legal accessibility requirements to serve as many people as possible without segregating those with different needs. Putting it into action might mean altering a building that has stairs at the front entrance and an accessible entrance in the back to offer a single entrance for everyone to use. Most of the time, this can be done without affecting the overall integrity of the design. After all, most able-bodied people don’t mind walking up a ramp instead of using stairs. This approach to design works for “virtually” everyone, but there are also ways to accommodate the people who tend to fall through the cracks implied in this statement.

Whereas Universal Design relates to the final product, “inclusive design” relates to the process of designing, testing and refining it. It asks who can interact with a given environment in its current state, and who is left out – and then involves those people in the process of creating something better. The contributions of the people who need these variations the most are integral to a successful result.

Inclusive design is “a methodology that enables and draws on a full range of human diversity,” says designer Kat Holmes, author of a book on inclusive design called “Mismatch.” Ideally, the two approaches would work together to produce objects, experiences and spaces that are accessible to the greatest possible number of people. (By the way, many disability justice activists prefer use of the word “accessible” to describe the resulting spaces rather than “handicap.”)

Examples of Universal Design

So what does all this mean in the real world? Often, the changes required to accommodate and include more people are simple. Placing standard electrical receptacles higher on the walls, selecting wider doorways that can fit wheelchairs and people of all sizes, making entrances flat, installing louver door handles and creating storage spaces that are within reach of people of all heights are some examples offered by the Accessible Society. When more than one option is available for a design feature, choose the one that’s the most inclusive – or lead the charge in demanding a new one.

But Universal Design also means adapting both existing architecture and new building projects to recognize the vast array of abilities, limitations and differences that exist within our communities. To really embrace it, designers, architects and planners must challenge their assumptions of what the “normal” usage of a space will be, particularly since so many disabilities can be invisible to the casual observer. Here are some examples of what that can look like.

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Universal Design Creating Better Buildings Cities For All

A bustling car-filled street by day and a 1,500-foot pedestrian promenade on weekend nights, Sai Yeung Choi Street South in the dense neighborhood of Mong Kok was the stage upon which urban life in Hong Kong played out – markets, music, dancing, protests, parties. Clashes with police. Noise. So much noise, in fact, that after 1,200 complaints in a single year, the district council decided to end the street’s 18-year run as a part time pedestrian zone and reopen it to vehicular traffic 24/7. What will this mean for a city where public transit accounts for 90 percent of daily passenger trips, yet infrastructure revolves around cars?

Some Hong Kong residents see the Mong Kok street’s closure as emblematic of the cultural battle between everyday transit-riding urbanites who embrace city life and everything that comes along with it (including noise) and ‘elites’ who flood cities from elsewhere and expect to change how they operate to better fit their own needs. This might sound familiar to, say, San Franciscans. Walkability is a crucial quality-of-life factor for many city dwellers, but it remains in tension with both car culture and a general lack of affordability. So why do some major pedestrian zones in big cities flourish while others fail?

A History of Mixed Success

The pedestrian mall as we know it today was born in the German city of Kassel soon after the end of World War II. British bombers had leveled 80 percent of the city. City planners tasked with rebuilding decided it was the perfect opportunity to re-orient the old town’s streets to create a direct connection from the center square to the main railway station and create a distinct shopping district where pedestrians could stroll along the streets without worrying about cars.

The fountain-filled square, called Treppenstrasse, was soon copied by other German cities, and the idea spread throughout Europe. Meanwhile, in America, the first pedestrian mall opened in 1959 in Kalamazoo, Michigan and multiplied in a similar fashion, all in the hope of reviving depressed downtown areas.

What these pedestrian zones were essentially trying to recapture – in a shiny new package befitting the 1950s – was the charm of meandering medieval streets no more than a few meters wide. Crucially, these often cobblestoned streets were built at a human scale, designed to accommodate people strolling along with carts and horses rather than rows of parked vehicles and 48-foot-long semi trucks. That’s rarely the case now, especially when attempting to retrofit spaces built for cars into pedestrian-friendly areas that attract a lot of foot traffic and, ultimately, spending.

There was one major problem with ‘50s pedestrian malls right off the bat. At the time, few people lived downtown. As soon as workers went home for the day, the promenades were abandoned. It would be decades before populations began to shift toward urban centers en masse, and in the meantime, the pedestrian mall experiment was declared a failure. Fewer than 15 percent of the malls that opened during that era remain in place today.

This process of pedestrianizing certain blocks and then reopening them to traffic continued throughout the 1970s, ‘80s and ’90s, by which time shoppers were demanding plenty of free parking and covered spaces. Walking outdoors to shop and dine was old fashioned; the suburban mall reigned supreme.

Chicago’s State Street pedestrian mall closed after 17 years in 1996 due to a drop in commercial activity. In Buffalo, New York, there weren’t enough people spending time downtown to support its pedestrian zone. In Sacramento, K Street went from a vibrant destination to a wasteland to a bustling pedestrian zone and back to a wasteland before the city ripped out the pedestrian-friendly infrastructure and reopened it to traffic in 2011 – only for locals to call for reversing the decision yet again, just five years later.

But what about the ones that work? New York City temporarily closed a 2.5 acre-section of Times Square to vehicular traffic for safety reasons, but it became so popular with pedestrians, the city made it a permanent feature and even had the architecture firm Snøhetta redesign it. Denver’s 16th street mall is thriving, as is Miami’s Lincoln Road Mall. Smaller college towns like Charlottesville, Iowa City and Madison have maintained popular pedestrian zones as crucial parts of their identities. In Europe, the cities of London, Paris, Oslo, Madrid, Milan, Dublin and Stockholm all have plans to create or expand significant car-free areas.

Walkability Requires Careful Planning – And Greater Equality

From all these failures and successes, it seems like the keys to making cities more walkable long-term are tailoring the scale and design of pedestrian zones to the setting, expecting roughly 15-year cycles of changing trends, accommodating businesses with features like early morning loading zones, figuring out where all the vehicular traffic will go instead to avoid worsening congestion and standing firm in commitment to reducing car usage in the area. That last point might just be the hardest one to tackle.

Some shoppers would rather give up on trying to access downtown areas due to a lack of parking than ride the bus instead, and as long as city planners continue to build massive parking garages, urban streets will remain snarled. Pedestrian zones must be integrated with public transit, taking the pressure off the streets and allowing equitable access. By many accounts, we’re moving toward an era in which car sharing will vastly reduce the number of vehicles on the roads, so we might as well begin planning for it now.

Closing certain blocks to vehicular traffic part-time, like Austin’s Sixth Street, could be a convenient workaround for many cities, or at least a way to test the waters. But that brings us back to Mong Kok, which could set a precedent for the closure of Hong Kong’s other pedestrian zones due to noise complaints amidst worsening air quality from automobile emissions. Licensing systems for vendors and performers could help, but the greater problem remains the fact that Hong Kong has begun to prioritize the needs of drivers over those of the vast majority of the population.

If we want thriving cities where people actually want to congregate, walk around and spend money, we have to preserve their historic character, cultural traditions and mix of income levels. That means addressing inequality directly and limiting the influence of wealthy residents who try to sweep evidence of that inequality under the rug, like homelessness in San Francisco.

Beneath the revival of big cities around the world is a deep economic rift that makes it hard for service workers, teachers, nurses and firefighters to live in the cities where they work, let alone shop. The urban tides might pull the affluent back out into the suburbs before long, anyway, so our cities should be designed to thrive with or without them.

Top image: Times Square pedestrian redesign by Snøhetta

In an age of mass extinctions and climate chaos, can we reverse-engineer some aspects of our built environments to live in greater harmony with nature? Many of our cities are built on former wetlands, fighting a losing battle with erosion and the sea. We’ve lined important ecological corridors with concrete. We’ve hunted into oblivion many of the very species that could help keep the rest of the food chain in check. Much of our architecture is focused on shutting ourselves away from nature, as if we could escape it. But advocates for ‘rewilding’ say all we have to do to repair some of the damage humanity has wrought upon the Earth is let go of our obsession with control.

The concept of rewilding has been around for decades, and it’s not necessarily a cohesive movement or concept, but rather a collection of related goals. Some define ‘rewilding’ specifically as the reintroduction of apex predators to certain regions, but just as often, it simply means allowing nature to take over far more often than we do. That might look like any number of things: removing sea walls and dams, reinstating river meanders, protecting certain marine sites from fishing and harvesting, allowing brownfield sites to grow wild after cleanup, making concrete channels more hospitable to wildlife or restoring floodplains.

Of course, we still have to build things. We need housing, agricultural fields, industry and transportation infrastructure. A metropolis like New York isn’t likely to pack up and move elsewhere in the face of rising seas anytime soon. But many cities around the world are already taking small steps toward rewilding, whether they define it that way or not.

Faux Riverbanks in Chicago

In Chicago, a nonprofit called Urban Rivers manages a project called The Wild Mile, which is in the process of transforming the manmade, steel-walled North Branch Canal of the Chicago River into a haven for wildlife. A few small sections are already complete, and by 2020, the canal will have wetlands, forest, walkways and kayak access points. The basis of the initiative is the creation of faux riverbanks anchored to the channel, made of coconut-fiber beds. The root systems reach into the water to filter and break down pollutants in this neglected section of the canal, and provide a place for mussels, birds and other species.

The Urban Wildlands of Dessau, Germany

The town of Dessau in Germany is shrinking. It never really recovered after its destruction at the end of World War II; it later became part of East Germany, its citizens mostly working in factories, but those industries ground to a halt when Germany was reunited in 1990. Many people left, and the residents left were mostly older. Before long, Dessau was essentially a ghost town, with wide swaths of empty parking lots and abandoned Communist housing blocks. The more it declined, the more people moved away. Instead of trying to lure people back in, the city’s government made an unusual decision: intentionally giving the land back to nature.

Many of the abandoned buildings were removed, and Dessau is in the process of buying up property along a nearly 300-acre belt that they hope to turn into a greenway – but they don’t have a lot of money for landscape design. Their solution mostly consists of wildflower meadows, which will grow into woodlands over time.

Restoring the Shoreline of New York City

Surrounded by water, with many sections built right on former swamplands, New York City will likely see the kind of flooding wrought by Hurricane Sandy more frequently in the near future. It was that particular disaster that prompted Rebuild by Design, a federally funded program that solicited shoreline restoration proposals from major architecture firms like Bjarke Ingels Group. While many of the other submissions focused on areas like Staten Island and Hoboken, New Jersey, BIG’s Dryline proposal essentially wraps the Manhattan shore in 10 continuous miles of green carpet acting as a high water barrier. This “protective park” incorporates parks, bike shelters, skateboard ramps, seating and pavilions.

BIG’s vision may be – well – big, but whether or not it’s ever really built, similar buffers are popping up on a smaller scale, like the recently completed Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park in Long Island City. Other projects managed by city governments are restoring beach dunes, removing intrusive infrastructure and restoring coastal habitats or constructing new wetlands to help anchor soil in place. The installation of vegetated islands floating offshore could help break waves and host wildlife at the same time.

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Urban Rewilding Reverse Engineering Cities To Save Nature And Ourselves