Lost and found in the Beta Area

My second post looking at what small scale urban interventions could be trialled in Dublin City Councils Beta Area, here is an overview of the project and my first post on a simple strategy to begin greening the area. This post again looks to Amsterdam for creative interventions in the public realm.

A lonely lost glove or a small child’s toy gone astray is a familiar sight as we walk through any city.  They often manage to make their way to the nearest safe point where passers by might notice them, but how their original owners are ever going to find them remains a game of hide and seek. Enter the work of Dutch Artist Annemarieke Weber who came up with the concept for the “vindhek” or found fence. An ingeniously simple concept, its a cylindrical wire fence adorned with hooks onto which you can attach found items.  The addition of a simple roof at the top, to keep those found items dry, and a bench around the base turn the fence into a neighbourhood landmark and a meeting point. The accumulation of these different functions make this an essential piece of street furniture for any city.

The vindhek on the Kinkerstraat Photo: Annemarieke Weber

Looking at the Beta Area I am wondering where such a piece of street furniture might be situated, and what found items might appear at that location. The first and most obvious location is to the south east of the Beta Area at the corner of Grattan Bridge. You can just imagine how many people cross this point daily coming from the Boardwalk or crossing from the North to the Southside.

Potential location for a Lost and Found fence

A second location would be in the small park at Little Britain Street, where it could be an element in the park itself or as transformation of the existing park railings. This is the original vindhek in Vondelpark in Amsterdam that started out as a simple fence with hooks and a sign attached. Its not very pretty but its a quick and easy of implementing and testing the idea and I think this is the key to success with anything in the Beta Area.

Original concept Vindhek in Vondelpark Photo: Annemarieke Weber

Potential location for a Lost and Found fence on Little Britain St.

This is a quick example of how easy it would be to locate and install a test version of this concept along the park railings at Little Britain St.

The search for locations has led me to wonder exactly how much stuff is lost in our urban areas? And what frequency of found it  fences would be needed to cope with all these items? Would they become as regular as post boxes? Can they be an urban element that replaces or repurposes once familiar urban elements such as the phonebox? Only a testing ground like the Beta Area can let us find out.

Here are some links

the original site in Dutch

an article in the New York Times about the concept

DCC Beta Area : "Design Blogging"

Today I am going to get the blog aspect of my website off the ground, by taking up the urban design challenge offered by Dublin City Council with their DCC Beta Area initiative. This defines an area of Dublin (see below) as a Beta area, a “testing ground”  where small scale urban projects and interventions can be trialled before they are implemented on a city wide scale. I really like the concept behind the initiative, it offers a real location for finding and researching urban problems and proposing solutions.

View Beta Area in a larger map

As I am based in London at the moment this “design by blogging” is being carried out remotely so apologies in advance for any errors with outdated google street view imagery. I hope to look at different aspects of the Beta Area over a number of blog posts. As I have lived in a Amsterdam for a number of years a lot of the solutions – but not all – that I will reference are Dutch. For this first post I am going to look at the residential ladder of streets in the northwest corner of the site, here is an image of one of the streets Church Avenue South.

Church Avenue South

and a second image of Church terrace

Church Terrace

These streets are quiet dull, lacking in any green and are dominated by the car. They don’t provide much amenity space for the residents. The first Beta project I would like to propose, is a simple intervention to “green” the facades of the houses and soften the public private threshold on the streets. It is policy in many Dutch cities to encourage residents to plant climbers and other plants in a small “geveltuin” this translates as “facade garden”. Their implementation is simple: 30cm of hard paving is removed from the front of the facade and a planting box is created, this is then filled with topsoil and plants that encourage and promote biodiversity. The residents can often apply for a small subsidy towards the work.

A small garden in front of a facade in Amsterdam

Utrecht Council has published guidelines on what types of plants are suitable for planting to help attract and promote biodiversity. The full guidelines are available here (a pdf in Dutch) for this post I will provide a quick translation:

To attract butterflies you should have plants with lots of nectar, the plants should preferably be in a sheltered place, preferably on the south facade in connection with the heat that butterflies need to fly. The following plants are happy in the sun.

• Marjolijn and thyme, flowers in the summer, also delicious in the kitchen
• Lavender, blooms in summer
• Primrose, blooms in spring, yellow (light shade)
• Fall Aster, blooms in autumn, lilac-blue color
• Crown Meadow, blooms in summer, color lilac
• Queen’s Spice, blooms in summer, light-purple color
• Hyssop, blooms in summer and autumn, color blue

Plants that attract Bumblebees and honeybees are also nectar based, they also select flowers by color. As colonies of  honeybees are currently collapsing around the world, encouraging biodiversity in urban areas is increasingly important to help maintain healthy and diverse populations. The following plants are recommended:

• Meadow Clary, blue-purple
• Bush-ivy flowers in autumn
• Daffodil, color yellow
• Foxglove, various colors
• Hollyhock, various colors

Finally there is a section on plants with berries that provides food to attract birds:

• Ivy, climbs along walls and can be in the (semi) shade, blooms from September to December
• Honeysuckle, climbing plant requires support blooms in late May.
• Holly can stand in the shade and blooms from May to June

Street with "geveltuinen" Amsterdam

This simple intervention while helping promote biodiversity has a number of advantages for residents themselves. It provides a welcome threshold to the street that increases privacy and can help reduce overlooking and noise. This mini garden can become a nice place to sit in the sun and for people without a garden it can provide some of the health benefits associated with gardening, all while improving local air quality. In some dutch streets, they organise “geveltuin” day where all the local residents get together to help each other out with planting and maintenance. This could be an ideal event to get such a project off the ground in the Beta Area, getting residents involved in the Beta concept and promoting community involvement in the Beta process.

Over the next weeks I will propose a number of other possible interventions. Towards the end these can be collated together to provide a more holistic plan for the area.  I will try to keep the interventions proposed in a similar vein to the “green facades” but for sheer simplicity and effectiveness in creating a high quality public realm this one is hard to beat.