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Book Review: Soft City by David Sim, 2019, Island Press

Authors:
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650 BUILT  ENVIRONMENT   VOL  46   NO  4
with diagrams,
cross-sections
and photographs
– capturing
life in-between
buildings, on streets
and in backyards.
Particularly
appealing are the
street–building–
courtyard
cross-sections, as on the cover, depicting
a diversity of people and activities.
Inspired by Texier’s classic drawing of the
nineteenth-century Parisian apartment and
the social mix of its occupants, these cross-
sections illustrate how built form mediates
connections between people, in public,
communal and private spaces.
This manifesto-like book is advocating
the benefits of the five-storey perimeter
block type. It shows how it can produce
relatively high densities while 20 per cent
of the total floor area is at ground level
supporting street activities. Sim’s ideal
urban blocks are short, subdivided in
many lots and containing a vertical mix of
functions, or a mix of apartment types. They
have diverse forms and create a diversity of
open spaces. They incorporate a multiplicity
of communal spaces: staircases, shared
terraces and courtyards, where children
can play safely, and neighbours socialize in
wind protected environments. A strength of
the book lies in the systematic and detailed
description of how the various parts of the
block relate to each other and work together
spatially, functionally and environmentally,
and how these impact on everyday life.
Streetlife is described as contingent on
walking, sustained by the perimeter block
morphology, but also linked to a range of
micro-morphological features: sidewalks,
pavements, public-private interfaces,
entries, awnings, medians. Mobility beyond
the neighbourhood scale is acknowledged
as well. Besides cycling, for which the
‘Copenhagen model’ of segregated lanes
a place offers, and how to develop it in
a way that someone less talented, or less
experienced, would never have thought
possible.
Other capabilities that urban designers
need to have relate to the specific
processes of creating places. They include
assessing design quality; preparing urban
design policy, guidance and statements;
masterplanning; and communicating in
two and three dimensions (by hand and
computer).
The last of these, as Graphics for Urban
Design shows, has become much easier in
the past few years. At the same time, as
Design Drawing shows, the creative art of
designing, and of drawing for design, is
as difficult as ever. But drawing is a key to
creativity in urban design, so it is time to
get our pencils out.
Two final things to mention. Ching’s is
an American book, so the units he quotes
are Imperial. And there are no colour
illustrations, which makes some of the
illustrations of issues relating to colour a
little odd, though on balance it leads to
Design Drawing successfully concentrating
on line alone.
Rob Cowan
Director
Urban Design Skills
Where Density has a Human
Dimension
Soft City: Building Density for
Everyday Life, by David Sim, 2019,
Island Press
Soft City by David Sim of Gehl Architects
continues a half-century long advocacy
by Jan Gehl and partners for people-
centred design, this time with a focus
on the perimeter block. The book is an
enjoyable soft read, beautifully illustrated
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BUILT  ENVIRONMENT   VOL  46   NO  4
‘smaller carbon footprint’ and ‘greater
biodiversity’, to which small-scale design
can contribute.
Sim converges with Jacobs in affirming
that density is not a sufficient condition
to enable streetlife vitality and he is right
not to set a minimum residential density
target as high as her gross 525 p/ha. Of
the examples shown, Donningensgade in
Copenhagen has a gross residential density
of 190 p/ha and floor area ratio (FAR) of
1.5, within a 16 ha reference area. For the
other examples no population densities are
provided but the gross FARs range from 0.8
to 1.9. That almost sixty years after Jacobs’s
call for broader and more detailed density
data, we still lack measures of the various
densities of residents, jobs, visitors, floor
areas and open spaces we study, illustrates
how little progress has been made, and how
much scope there still is to advance urban
research. While well informed by the vast
collective experience of Gehl Architects,
Soft City does not provide much empirical
evidence of the social and environmental
success of the case studies it presents. This
is curious because the Gehl office has long
been research-based and has published How
to Study Public Life (by Gehl and Svarre)
listing a broad spectrum of empirical
research methods.
To some extent Soft City aligns with the
attempts of the New Urbanism movement
to raise interest in the pre-modernist city,
its walking-based fine-grained mixed-
use urban forms, as an alternative to the
mass-production of car-dependent mono-
functional suburbia. Like common New
Urbanist practices, this is a Jacobs-light
approach that largely avoids critique of
the forces that lead to the production
of large-grain spatial structures under
conditions of neoliberal governance. A few
exceptions to this are the pages discussing
how co-housing models in Freiburg and
Tübingen have enabled the production
of neighbourhoods with a fine-grained
property structure, and how functions
is advocated, Sim argues for ‘street-based’
public transport: light-rail and buses.
Taking a strong stance, underground metro,
elevators, and high-rise Transit Oriented
Developments (TODs) are summarily
dismissed, and newer technologies
disregarded. This makes Soft City a
provocative counterpoint to the naïve high-
tech enthusiasm of ‘smart city’ discourses,
but it risks falling into a similarly
misguided low-tech enthusiasm. The
challenge is not to choose one technology
over the other, but of finding ways of using
existing technologies to enable rather than
hinder social encounter in public space.
Certainly, the underground metros of Paris
or London contribute to the diversity of
connections within the city, enabling short-
cuts and fast links between distant parts
that street-based transport cannot achieve.
Surely, taller buildings enabled by elevator
access can enrich the diversity of dwelling
types.
The urban theory that is underlying
Soft City (but seldom made explicit) can
be traced to Jane Jacobs, and her four
preconditions for streetlife vitality: high
density, short blocks, functional mix and
fine grain. However, apart from a few
fleeting sentences, it avoids mention of
conflicting forces that are part of urban
life and shape cities. While saturated
with calls for diversity, it depicts this as
frictionless. Neither is there much appetite
to take on the ideological and institutional
barriers to good urban design as Jacobs
did so vigorously. This conflict-avoidance
is also reflected in the use of cautious
positive language, which does mean that
the ‘soft’ of the title stands for everything
that is advocated for, including strong
demarcations between public and private
property, and between various modes of
transport. The concluding ‘Nine Criteria
for Livable Urban Density’ include seven
neighbourhood- and micro-scale built form
attributes derived from Jacobs and Gehl,
and two global environmental factors:
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652 BUILT  ENVIRONMENT   VOL  46   NO  4
and plain language useful. More broadly,
the book may prove an effective entry point
to urban design for anyone unfamiliar with
this highly contested field.
Elek Pa a
Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning
University of Melbourne
that require larger floorplates such as
supermarkets can be integrated without
reducing diversity at ground level.
Soft City will help readers to understand
better a key urban building type – the
perimeter block – that is less well known
outside Europe. While for urban designers
there will not be many surprises, many will
find the high-quality visual communication
... Sim's criteria are a useful starting point for an assessment of liveable density. However, his highly illustrated, evocative text presents a somewhat idealistic version of urban life and does not take into account some of the inherent conflicts within complex urban environments (Pafka, 2019). There is also an issue of scale in application of the criteria. ...
... Sim has 9 criteria but only 7 are used here. Criteria 8 "smaller carbon footprint" and criteria 9 "greater biodiversity" have been excluded as they are "global environmental factors" (Pafka, 2020) not easily accessible at the scale of a neighbourhood. For each criteria Sim has 7-8 sub criteria of "what to look for". ...
Thesis
Full-text available
Density is a deceptively simple quantitative concept-how much of a thing is there in an area-with major impacts on transportation, economics and environmental performance. Yet it also has a highly complex qualitative dimension critically influencing streetlife, place character and diversity. This study went looking in Melbourne for the missing middle or "Goldilocks" density (Alter, 2014). It has then examined four case study neighbourhoods and assessed them against criteria for "livable density" developed by Sim, (2019). Sim's framework was critically evaluated and adapted to remove overlapping criteria and to make it more suited to the urban morphology existing in the Australian context. The research found very little medium density urban fabric. There are distinct clusters of medium density but the predominant pattern of density is high-rise at activity centres and urban renewal sites rather than neighbourhoods with an even spread of medium density. The case studies selected however did rate well overall on the framework for liveable density. All cases are relatively low density by world standards featuring population densities of around 90 people per hectare and floor area ratios less than 1.0. Goldilocks density does exist in Melbourne but it is in a low-rise, lower-medium density form. The implication here for planners and the community is that this type of lower density will need to be spread over a larger area necessitating change in more suburbs. The case studies in this research demonstrate that densities of 50 dwellings a hectare can produce highly livable environments in the Australian context but to ensure a quality built form, planning needs to adopt more nuanced density measures. These measures should include floor area ratios, site coverage, open space ratios and measures of interface quality. Word Count: 10,324
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