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by Arlene Gould, for Corporate Knights Magazine, Urbanization and Investment issue.

Can designers save our cities? Building and landscape architects, along with industrial, interior, and graphic designers and artists can all play a pivotal role.

Most of the 91,000 designers in Canada, including architects, landscape architects, industrial, interior, graphic and fashion designers, live and work in cities. With 25,000, Toronto is third in North America (behind New York and Boston) in the number of designers the city employs [DIAC Design Industry Study, 2004]. With so much creative brainpower at their disposal, you would expect Canadian cities to be at the forefront of urban innovation. Yes they have LEED-certified buildings and iconic architecture—but is that all it takes? Are designers really making an impact on sustainable city-building when it comes to economic competitiveness, social equality, public safety, an aging population, and reducing environmental impacts?

Most of our cities are led by utilitarian bureaucrats rather than design thinkers. We can also lay some of the blame at the feet of a design community whose members have failed to deliver a consolidated protest against the lack of representation of their profession at city hall, or the mean-spirited RFPs that don’t allow the scope, time or money designers need to deliver breakthrough results.

Design works on a grand scale, but its most profound benefits are experienced on a human level: beauty, accessibility, functionality and cohesiveness, to name a few. Our cities are missing design-led innovation in the public realm. A growing number of Canadian buildings are energy-efficient and environmentally designed. But when it comes to public space, we are still design-deprived. Most of our major cities lack the infrastructure and master plans that would inspire and enable design-led change at every level.

In a humble attempt to fill the void, here are five relatively low-cost ways we can use design to enrich the fabric of our cities.

Sidewalks

Sidewalks are the cornerstones of city building. Urban visionaries from Jane Jacobs to Kevin Lynch have extolled the virtues of the sidewalk as an instrument of civic engagement and safety; a place for play, economic enterprise and social convergence. Well-designed streetscapes can even help reduce violent crime. But tragically, our sidewalks are being debased and ignored.

Industrial and lighting designers could define our urban walkways with customized, user-friendly street furniture and theatrical lighting to establish touch points with residents. Seasoned Quebec designer Michel Dallaire provides a good model with his multiple awarding-winning urban furniture scheme for the Montreal International District (Quartier International), the vast urban development between the central business district and Old Montreal, which was designed by Daoust Lestage Architects and completed in 2003. Working with aluminum as the base material, Dallaire used advanced technological processes to fashion street and park benches, tandem lighting fixtures and posts, bicycle stands and garbage receptacles. The furniture and fixtures help extend the vision of the architects’ master plan to the street.

Stories and Spaces

Half of the 40,000 designers in Ontario specialize in graphic arts or visual communications. The corporate world relies on their ability to engage, inform and persuade, but they are underutilized by the public sector, particularly in public city spaces.

Graphic designers combine typography, colours, symbols and pictographs to produce signage systems and environmental graphics that improve spatial orientation. These elements can also be used to characterize and brand public space, and to deliver key messages about the history and culture of specific geographic locations. Our cities could use graphic designers to create cognitive maps that would connect with various target audiences, and illustrate our cities’ unique personalities.

Urban Ecology

Designers and landscape (...read more...)