shared space – Mental Flowers

People who practice parkour, called traceurs or tracers, often get a bad rap by city officials, saying they are disturbing or damaging public property. But in fact, often traceurs are some of the most vocal activists for preserving and protecting their environments. Take this story from The Atlantic, for example:

On warm days, when office-tower émigrés can enjoy their lunches next to its calming water features, Calgary’s Century Gardens Park serves as a popular daytime downtown retreat.

But at 38 years-old, the Brutalist public space is starting to show its age. The color of its odd concrete features has faded to a dreary ash, the foliage is overgrown, and the water pumps are failing. Angular slabs create both barriers to pedestrian access and places for miscreants to hide—city park staff complain of finding evidence of overnight drinking and drug use.

The city is itching to overhaul Century Gardens, though how much of the park might survive the process remains to be seen. Early proposals range from sprucing up the existing park and keeping it mostly intact to completely razing it and building a new park from scratch. The park’s age and need for refurbishment has given the city the opportunity to address its magnetism for social disorder, as well as apply a more contemporary approach to urban design.In the meantime Calgary’s parkour community—for whom the park’s structures are perfectly suited—have allied themselves with a local heritage group to try to save it.”Century Gardens is one of the coolest locations around for parkour. Not just in Calgary, but Canada-wide, and internationally,” says Steve Nagy, editor of the Calgary-based parkour magazine Breathe and co-owner of a local parkour gym. The Netherlands-based MunkiMotion parkour group also included it in their YouTube series, “Best Parkour Spots in the World”

more via The Calgary Park Thats United Historic Preservationists and Parkour Athletes – Brandon Beasley – The Atlantic Cities.

This group of traceurs is banding together with a preservationist group in Calgary to save the park. It’s a great example of two seemingly incompatible groups joining forces to preserve an urban space.

I think this kind of collaboration can and should be done more often.

In many peoples’ eyes these older parks, structures, or abandoned lots are just seen as wasted space, or maybe even dangerous, and certainly many old playgrounds don’t meet current safety codes. But for traceurs, or any adults that likes to climb or jump around, these spaces offer endless playful opportunities. I believe traceurs are some of the best urban playground spotters, and they know a good playground or playful space when they see it. Preserving or adjusting these spaces, rather than tearing them down and starting from scratch, is a viable alternative that can appease all parties involved.

I am glad The Atlantic is looking at this challenge over balancing use of space by different groups in urban environments.

Juliet Vong, President of HBB Landscape Architecture, Tyson Cecka, Executive Director of Parkour Visions, and I proposed a session about this topic for the annual meeting for the American Society of Landscape Architects. Sadly, it was turned down, I believe primarily because we didn’t explain what parkour was well enough to the panel. Hopefully next year we’ll be accepted, because I STILL think this is an important topic that needs to be explored more, and we are happy to come chat about it with your school, company, or conference. Just ping me. 🙂

The Calgary Park That’s United Historic Preservationists and Parkour Athletes (theatlanticcities.com)
Why Toowoomba needs a Park for Parkour (sykose.com)

Most of us these days work in a cubicle, although the past ten years have really seen a transformation of space and place at the workplace in order to create happier, and therefore more productive, workers. This article in the NYTimes focused on some organizations in Seattle that have embraced a more open work floor plan:

open office — Is this your idea of a perfect work environment?

MARTHA CHOE’S ideal working space is not her private office, nice though it is, but rather a long, narrow table in the vast atrium of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation headquarters here.

Ms. Choe, a former member of the City Council here, is the foundation’s chief administrative officer, and she had considerable input in the building’s design. One objective from the start was to give the 1,000 employees a variety of spaces to accommodate different kinds of work. “There’s a recognition that we work in different modes, and we’ve designed spaces to accommodate them,” she says. “I think one of the lessons is to understand your business, and understand what your people need to do their best work.”

The building was designed by NBBJ, a 700-employee architecture firm whose largest operation is in Seattle. The structure is a culmination of ideas about the 21st-century workplace that NBBJ has been exploring in corporate office designs worldwide, including its own offices here.

These are the main concepts: Buzz — conversational noise and commotion — is good. Private offices and expressions of hierarchy are of debatable value. Less space per worker may be inevitable for cost-effectiveness, but it can enhance the working environment, not degrade it. Daylight, lots of it, is indispensable. Chance encounters yield creative energy. And mobility is essential.

This isn’t a suddenly exploding trend. NBBJ’s research has found that two-thirds of American office space is now configured in some sort of open arrangement. But even as these designs save employers space and money, they can make office workers feel like so many cattle. So how to humanize the setting?

SEATTLE serves as a test tube because of several converging factors: There’s a lot of money here to experiment with projects. The work force is relatively young and open to innovation. And the local culture places a high value on informality, autonomy and egalitarianism. People will put in long hours under high pressure if they feel respected, but they won’t tolerate being treated like Dilberts.

Most office workers in Seattle and elsewhere labor in environments much less inspiring than Ms. Choe’s. And most employers have much less to spend to make things pleasant. (Bill and Melinda Gates personally contributed $350 million of the campus’s $500 million cost.) But staying competitive requires coming up with the best ideas, and the office environment can be the incubator for them.

Read the full article.

I am all for creating spaces that encourage collaboration and make workers feel comfortable and ready to get down to business. My only question is lack of meeting space. In my last two jobs it has been very hard to find private spaces to meet, although both were cubicle-based workspaces so that layout doesn’t necessarily solve things either. And I’m not alone in my concerns, as the article points out:

NOT all of NBBJ’s corporate clients have boarded the informality-and-buzz bandwagon. When the R.C. Hedreen Company, a real estate development firm based in Seattle, commissioned a renovation of a 10,800-square-foot floor in an old downtown office building five years ago, it specified a perimeter of private offices. Collaborative spaces are provided for creative teamwork, but the traditional offices remain the executives’ home ports.

“Individually, a lot of our workday is taken up with tasks that are better served by working alone in private offices,” says David Thyer, Hedreen’s president.

Susan Cain, author of “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking,” is skeptical of open-office environments — for introverts and extroverts alike, though she says the first group suffers much more amid noise and bustle.

What are your thoughts on work space? Do you like having an open space to share, or do you prefer your own cubicle or booth? How do you handle the meeting privacy issues at your office? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.