Marcel Smets (urban planner, architect, Professor, Leuven, Belgium):
The theme “from road to street” looks at important questions relating in particular to urban sustainability. We need to know if we can use or redevelop space originally intended for traffic. The tendency has always been to separate infrastructures from other urban functions, and traffic has always been seen as an obstacle to be kept away from where people live. Would it not be possible to integrate road infrastructures into the urban fabric?
In the modern city, rather than a mesh of small towns, what is important is the distinction between two scales of traffic network. The local network and the network that links towns together through trunk routes. These play an important strategic role, since competitiveness depends on speed. They also influence the notion of proximity, in the way that the high-speed train reduces distances.
How should architects deal with this dual scale? One might be tempted to follow the Modern Movement in accepting this two-speed city and introducing a spatial separation between towns and road networks. Another possible solution is horizontal integration, by juxtaposing categories. However, this is still a form of separation, but now on a single axis. Instead, integration should allow juxtaposition on all planes, on all horizons.

The two examples presented – the Arnhem Rijnboog project in the Netherlands and the Europan 6 construction in Burgos – relate directly to this preliminary set of questions.

ARNHEM RIJNBOOG (THE NETHERLANDS)

Luc Vrolijks  (urban designer, contact person between the city and the project ):
Arnhem is a small town in the East of the Netherlands, which together with Nijmegen forms a sort of conurbation. Since its foundation in 1250, the town has expanded considerably along the Rhine. The perimeter of the project stands between the heart of the historic centre and the river. This district has experienced major transformations, as a victim of World War II demolitions followed by fast and cheap rebuilding. Today, the objective of the Rijnboog (Rhine quays) project is to transform this district into something more urban, whilst preserving buildings that are interesting and typical of the town. This is why we speak of a “restructuring” of the neighbourhood. The seven main goals of this refurbishment are as follows: to increase the continuity between this district and the surrounding districts, to contribute to the revitalisation of Arnhem, to create pleasant living conditions in the town centre, to revitalise the latter’s economy, to provide space for cultural activities and institutions, to make optimum use of spaces and functions, and finally, to make this neighbourhood a place people can be proud of.
Thus, the aim is to turn the neighbourhood into a contemporary transitional space between the river and the old town. The original site plan dates back to 1993 and was revised in 2000 by a new team of town planners and architects. We are now at the stage of completing the different sections of the project. The project as a whole is an initiative by the municipality of Arnhem in association with five private partners. The legal structure is a mixed investment company – as is common in the Netherlands for big development projects – of investors, property developers and architects all working as a team. The Barcelona architect, Manuel de Solà-Morales, was selected for the final site plan. I myself am part of the design office involved in this mixed project.
The main proposal for the Rijnboog redevelopment contains four strategic components in the transformation of the urban structure, the basic element of the “reurbanisation” process. The first operation is to create a ring of greenery around the neighbourhood. The second level is to introduce a new pedestrian zone between the station and the old town. The third element, which occasioned much debate, aims to enhance the bank by incorporating the river frontage into the old town, in order to link the town’s historic heart and the river. The goal of the fourth level is to transform the infrastructure situated to the west into a normal urban landscape.
The aim of the project is to create a public space of better quality, the necessary substrate for the transformation and addition of more than 400,000 m2 of housing, cultural institutions and offices at the very heart of the town. We also want to alter the transport base and reinforce the town’s identity for its population. By extending the town’s natural axes, in particular the pedestrian network, as far as the river banks, we want to encourage people to move around the town centre on foot. The new port, although controversial, is a very important component of the project and will be an integral part of the town’s identity.
It is also very important for the land to have multiple uses, a mix of shops, culture, leisure and housing. Another aim is to incorporate the public spaces into the network of pedestrian areas.
Nelson Mandela Bridge, an enormous and typical late 1960s road interchange, has no access for pedestrians or to the river banks. Our proposal for this area of car-dominated big roads and interchanges is threefold. First, the demolition of the part of the bridge that runs to the station area in order to gain urban space. Second, at ground level, a roundabout which will distribute traffic where the roads meet. Thirdly, the construction of an underground car park to resolve the parking problem. These three operations will involve redirecting the pedestrian axes towards the river bank and constructing buildings that will make it a destination rather than a transit zone.  Demolishing part of the bridge will make the site much more attractive and greener. We also simplified the traffic plan by reorganising it at the roundabout, and proposed building around 5,000,000 m2 of offices, housing and leisure activities around or on the roundabout. This forms the basis of the interface, so that people can walk from the town to the riverbank.
At the moment, these axes are completely blocked by traffic. We propose to demolish two of the main roads to release pedestrian potential on the east-west axis. The traffic flows will be redirected to the Arnhem “heights”. The goal is to restore citizens to their rightful place, by removing the dominant yoke of the car. We also also plan green spaces to create continuity.
The urban plan is to open the neighbourhood to the river and its bank through a mesh of greenery. Three or four pedestrian routes will run down to the river frontage. As regards the land, the aim is for mixed use. The objective too is to end the the hegemony of concrete.

This proposal is not trying to turn this neighbourhood into just another town. But the river frontage has to be made more accessible, and in order to attract people to the neighbourhood, a mix of amenities is needed.
However, it should be said that we encountered certain obstacles to implementation. The main difficulty is always to convince politicians and public opinion of the need for this transformation. Traffic reduction is a thorny subject. We had trouble persuading people of the need to extend public transport networks by a few dozen metres to link districts. It is also difficult for the people we are dealing with to picture a place that is now dominated by traffic transformed into a quiet and pleasant neighbourhood to live in. The third difficulty is to convince them that this space, associated with noise and pollution, can be reconciled with residential use, even partial.

BURGOS (SPAIN),  EUROPAN 6 PROJECT

Andreas Quednau (architect, Europan 6 winner in Burgos):
Our project won Europan 6 in 2000 in Burgos in Spain. Burgos is situated north of Madrid, two thirds of the way to San Sebastien. The site programme, a riverbank town extension near a motorway, essentially consisted of housing. Since the site is close to the open landscape of the countryside around the town, we looked for an urban strategy that would link the river and its banks to the area alongside the motorway.
The proposal submitted for the competition was thus based on this desire to establish a proper link between the surrounding landscape and the town. The morphology of the proposed public leisure amenity development had to allow for the presence of the motorway crossing the valley. In order to introduce housing into this complex location, we developed typologies based on several principles. Creating a sort of constructional envelope as protection against noise and elevated interior courtyards which emphasise the importance of the housing zone. In addition, we put ourselves in the position of people living in this housing by creating streets that would take them directly from their dwellings into the countryside. We added local routes to facilitate access to the dwellings. The resulting courtyards and interior passages emerge into the surrounding landscape.

The different loops formed by the public spaces thus reflect the individual locations and thereby create interstices between the different buildings.   The overall development plan includes individual and collective housing, the motorway, sports grounds forming transitional spaces, a public square that is both a market square and offers local access only, and finally a number of towers, marking the loops as physical links with the landscape. These towers constitute a sort of access way to the town and provide a view over the landscape.
However, the competition project did not take account of a certain number of regulations and constraints associated with the land. In the subsequent operational urban studies we were asked to do, we had to deal with these and incorporate them into the project, although the strength of our proposal was precisely that it went beyond the site by incorporating it into a broader framework of ideas. Apart from the reduction in the operational surface area, certain zones actually had to be added, doubling the area of the original site. The programme required more public green areas and 15% of public and leisure amenities.
The buildings were considered too low, since they all faced in one direction, so in order to make them viable we added further floors while still retaining the loop shape. The height of the towers was also increased.

We followed simple boundary principles by outlining plots or setting divisions between public and private space. Whereas the different loops create an artificial horizon, the towers constitute a moving line. The buildings near the road are high, while the buildings further away are lower, forming an artificial skyline.
The sports and leisure amenities were supposed to form a transition straddling the motorway, but that was not possible because Spanish motorways are under national rather than municipal control.
Moreover, our approach was based on the typology of the buildings and on the possibility of handling the noise issue by creating transitions between the buildings and the landscape. Implementing this proved impossible.  Because of the procedure, we could not begin by designing the buildings and then dealing with the consequences in urbanistic terms. Today we are in charge of the site plan, and the challenge is to ensure that the architects working on the different buildings maintain the typologies devised for the competition and developed in the study. Nevertheless, we have set everything that could be set under the regulations, i.e. the layout and height of the buildings.

The configuration of the public spaces relates to the features of the surrounding landscape.  The new location of the sports grounds and public amenities was negotiated with the municipality, to ensure that they would fit into the landscape. Work has begun on the first building.

I would like to finish by talking about the relations between public and private sector clients. Immediately following the competition, the municipality sold the site to a private developer who wanted to bring in his own architect for the construction. We nevertheless managed to convince the municipality that our proposal could be built even with other architects, and although the initial specifications – beyond the urban plan – were not entirely within regulations, we hope that they will be followed.

DEBATE: FROM NETWORK TO THE STREET

Pascal Amphoux (architect, geographer, Switzerland): 
What we have here are virtually opposite approaches because of very different contexts. The first, in Arnhem, starts with the town and with a statement of urban objectives in which the bridgehead and interchange project is only one amongst five or six overlapping urban projects. In Burgos, we start with the problem of creating defences against a very heavy infrastructure, and the development of a suitable typology, which leads to an approach – the creation of a new skyline – that is more about landscape and visual priorities than about urban development. We can even imagine a soundscape that goes beyond the practical aspect of noise protection.
In Arnhem, what I see as giving the project all its value is this commitment to clarifying the distinction between urban atmosphere and road atmosphere, which runs counter to a technical –  not to say technocratic – approach to urban planning. The aim of partially demolishing the northern part is not to remove the whole system, but to rebalance the connection between urban priorities and a certain type of speed in relation with the public space, and road transport priorities and the technique of using the interchange to slow traffic down. Clarifying rather than separating this relationship represents a break with the more usual approach in urban management. I find the idea of the new interface ring very clever, combining as it does a system for slowing down car traffic with all sorts of events, starting with the signage symbolising entry into the town. Paradoxically, the second ring constitutes a sort of morphological escalation of the infrastructure and establishes a continuity rather than a break in the transport system. Moreover, the double interchange becomes a place to occupy (the car park) and to cross (the pedestrian route) and ceases to be seen as an enclave. Finally, the fact that people arriving by car at high speed have a destination, removes the purely transitional function.
This project encourages us to a more complex form of urbanity by creating new types of public space, yet without excluding traditional streets and public spaces. This way of staging multiple speeds, in a progressive relation between the pedestrian’s speed and the car’s, also reminds us that there is no such thing as public space without mobility. We could call it a “dromotypological” approach, from the Greek “dromos” meaning speed. This project represents a genuine typological effort, which reverses the tradition of morphological analysis by using speed-related constraints to invent something different.
In the Burgos project, one is fully aware of the determination to fashion things in this motorway environment in accordance with two principles: firstly the principle of using protective envelopes and direct access to the landscape; and secondly, the separation of the courtyards as a result of the shielding effect of the buildings. As for the towers, they more reflect the idea of a separation between the living world in the landscape method and the symbolic world as signal.

Marcel Smets:
In Arnhem, it is about overturning the structure to make it an integrated public space, whereas the Burgos model necessarily accepts the idea of speed and uses rhythm to create a sort of protected, cocooned environment, a kind of enclave opening onto the landscape.

The debate is now open to representatives of the sites particularly concerned by these themes.
Calahora in Spain, Tartü in Estonia and Reggio-Emilia in Italy could form an initial family. Here, the solution seems to be implicit in the problem, somewhat like in Burgos. In both cases, an infrastructure enveloping the whole site like a sort of independent appendix, bypasses the site without really adding value, leaving it to itself. As an urban planner, I would be tempted to take an introverted approach, by creating an enclave in order to protect against all this unpleasantness. What do you think?

Reggio-Emilia representative (Italy):
It is true that our site contains a railway infrastructure alongside the motorway, a heavy infrastructure, which you can’t ignore. However, it also represents an opportunity as a node in the fast railway connection between Bologna and Milan. Our concern is more to exploit this added value and integrate the site into the rest of the urban landscape.  We would like to create a dialogue between public space and private buildings with a return to roots, a return to the site’s past.

Tartü representative (Estonia):
For us, it is a bit different, because the roads that bypass the site are speed limited (50 kph). So here the aim is to create an efficient road network. There are very few inhabitants, around 100,000. The debate is more about issues of concentration and density. In fact, the challenge is to concentrate urban life at a few points.

Marcel Smets:
The second grouping I suggest is illustrated by the sites at Ørestat, close to Copenhagen in Denmark, and Vantaa in Finland, which already provide entrants with a kind of site plan. There is an existing road network and this notion of differentiation between high speeds to reach the town and the slower speeds of greener traffic modes. Ørestat would seem to be something of a hybrid of Arnhem and Burgos. The road runs by the site, and a sort of enclave protected from environmental nuisance emerges on to a new road. I have the impression that the proposed site plan tries to create a confined cocoon protecting the site from outside incursions.  Is that really the intention in Ørestad and Vantaa?

Ørestad representative (Denmark):
This site is situated at the mouth of a green area, and we want it to act as a transition between the town and nature, hence this road we are trying to protect the neighbourhood from. The plan is for almost 10,000 inhabitants and 20,000 jobs here. So it is not a little village. That is why we have moved the main road. Both the regional and local scale are targeted here.

Marcel Smets:
The Loures site in Portugal contains an astonishing motorway junction. When you look more closely, you realise that it is the interconnection between two motorways, linking with the city of Lisbon. The site is literally right next to these interchanges, yet still part of the local urban fabric and the history of the town. Here, the question is whether anything can be done. Moving the junction would seem tricky. So, if nothing can be done with the motorway interchange, what is the intention?
The Herning site in Denmark seems similar. Rather than altering the interchange, I have the impression that the perimeter and redevelopment of the site are more about a problem of transport policy, particularly traffic.

Herning representative (Denmark):
Our site is special in that it is the only available land we have left to the west of the town. In addition, it is near a cultural institution. A new north-south motorway section will be opened in October 2007. So the aim is to find a link between the cultural institution and the motorway, the famous dialogue with the interchange. What do we do with the motorway? Should we accept it, even live with it? How will people experience its closeness? How will the town be perceived by people passing it on the motorway?  In addition, it is a very fragmented site with many small allotments and big apartment buildings, on completely different scales. The arrival of the motorway also raises the question of adjusting the space to a plurality of speeds.

Marcel Smets:
It seems to me that you should emphasise this latter point, so that entrants take a global approach to these three speeds rather than treating them separately. It is true that Herning is part of a conurbation, but it is important to consider the different concentrations of activities and types of speeds. It would be good if you could specify that you want to see the three levels handled within a single design approach.

This takes us to my third category of sites, which are not primarily faced with problems of main roads or infrastructures and even seem to have found a balance.
The Austrian site in Linz is at the end of a main road. One gets the sense of two spaces, two atmospheres with somewhat blurred boundaries. It would be legitimate to look for proposals that integrate and homogenise the different layers into a more uniform urban texture.
The challenge of the Nijmegen site in the Netherlands is to integrate different speeds, uses, atmospheres and contexts in order eventually to create a new type of urban environment. The road network has already become a space in its own right. It would be interesting to create a new urban atmosphere by using all these elements whilst slightly adjusting their configuration.

Nijmegen representative (The Netherlands):
The aim in fact is to merge the two roads which are both six-lane highways. The programme also includes the possibility of housing, which would enhance the industrial site. Almost 5000 people now work there, and it is also possible to live there.

Linz representative (Austria):
The aim is to connect two old trunk roads coming from the South and the West. The problem is that part of this land stock is not built up and that the place has no specific identity. There are two possible approaches. On the one hand, you could decide to get rid of the traffic, assuming that is possible. Or conversely, as in the Burgos, you could set up noise protection systems. But how then can you have smooth flowing traffic without the associated nuisance? We are also trying to introduce a structure that would manage access to the town more effectively. We in fact face the dilemma you refer to, which is a political issue: can traffic be restricted? Politicians and urban planners often find their enthusiasm dampened. Projects like Arnhem can structure things and show that everyone has something to gain.

Marcel Smets:
Finally, the sites of Sion in Switzerland and Ottignies in Belgium are the most obvious cases of integration, because car traffic there causes no insurmountable mobility problems. Both of them are located near the railway and stations. In the existing fabric, it is sometimes difficult to tell what is parking and what is part of the railway footprint. In Sion, there are indefinable plots which are not specifically traffic zones. Here, the aim is not to moderate traffic but to integrate it more effectively. Similarly, at Ottignies, we have open spaces which are overlarge and hard to define, where it would be possible to build or to refurbish public space.

Rodolphe Luscher (architect, Europan Switzerland):
The Sion site is very interesting because the traffic, although it doesn’t seem to present a problem, nevertheless does, since it is the area in Switzerland with the highest level of multimodal transport. Indeed, trains arrive at this point in the city from east and west and buses and coaches from all the big Alpine ski resorts. So there is a constant flow of tourists in winter and of residents of Sion travelling elsewhere to work. In addition, most of the people who come and work in Sion have to live elsewhere, since there is virtually no more housing left in the town. This site is a sort of wasteland created by the demolition of a wine warehouse, and is currently occupied by car parks. It is therefore a site of big interchanges between different methods of transport, where the city would like to have people living, since it is the only construction land in the town available for housing. The question is therefore as follows: how do you create housing at the intersection of different transport flows?

Ottignies representative (Belgium):
Our site is only 800 metres from the station, which we would like to link to the town centre. Between now and 2012, we are expecting the number of people using the station to double following the construction of a regional express network (RER).  The definition of the perimeter might seem arbitrary, and it will probably be necessary to go beyond the railway lines, to the east and west, in order to define a project of genuinely urban value near the hypercentre.

Pascal Amphoux:
Mobility has been the leitmotif of the urban plan for three or four years. At the same time, mobility can refer to everything and anything, from the motion of a pendulum to the movement of a car to mobility of mind. I have therefore got into the habit of separating three connotations of this word in order to distinguish between three meanings of mobility and to visualise different kind of challenge that any urban project must take up, respectively motion, movement and emotion.
Motion relates to mobility in the very technical sense of the term, associated with the idea of calming rather than prevention, as in the case of pedestrian only zones.
Movement rather refers to the social dimension of crowd movements in the public space. These are more about acceleration than speed, or speeds in relation to each other. This is an effective way of describing social mobility, with a dual sense of physical movement and movements in ideas. It is also the paradox of public space which refers both to the public stage but also the space of the public, in the abstract sense, the place of reason, of the res publica. We have seen several times that we now need to learn to pass through rather than to enclose. On this, one point we have not looked at is the coexistence of speeds in the evolution of traffic management in the street, where we are shifting from an approach that sought to keep things separate to an approach whereby, for example, two methods of transport are combined (pedestrian and bicycle, bicycle and bus, etc.).
The third category is emotion. The etymology of the word obviously includes motion. In this context, it refers to ambiences, aesthetics. What we will retain here is that it is better to point out than to point.
I think that these three criteria can be used to situate the respective perimeters of the sites, remembering that they are not necessarily radial-concentric. And here, I will refer a final time to the Arnhem project, where varied urban projects overlap with different perimeters that are not necessarily interwoven but complementary.