From palm fronds to urbanism

The spaces between buildings are as important as the buildings themselves.

The creation of Sheikh Zayed Road was one of the significant steps in Dubai’s expansion.

Cities around the world are increasingly made up of non-places. This is a characteristic of cities made for mobility and consumption. Yet it is possible to avoid the making of such generic and monotonous spaces. The abundance of large, open outdoor spaces and the need to provide a variety of lifestyles should lead to new design opportunities for innovative, habitable and in-between-building spaces.

It is also an opportunity to think creatively and design landscaped surfaces, which require little water and maintenance. Furthermore, outdoor surfaces and new landscape layouts can generate mixed-use of a space through open-air, informal and public activities.

Landscape is, at one level, an art of surface. Landscape's traditional terrain is the extended horizontal surface. This has an obvious attraction to architects today, where surface has become a primary instrument in design. However, distinct from the proliferation of thin, transparent surfaces in contemporary architectural design, landscape surfaces are always differentiated by their material and performance characteristics - or better, in landscape, performance is a direct outcome of material.

Slope, porosity, hardness, soil chemistry, consistency, etc - all these variables influence the life that a surface will support, and its own development. By careful attention to these surface conditions - not only configuration, but also material and performance - designers can activate space and produce
urban effects.

Furthermore, street furniture, temporary and small-scale structures, canopies, shading devises and playgrounds can add a human scale and act as mediators between open spaces and buildings. The new landscape design will have to consider outdoors that can be used almost all year long.

As landscape design can be integrated into the domain of urbanism, the new emerging landscape urbanism sets out to develop new models of practice, which directly engage with contemporary social and environmental conditions as forces that continuously reconfigure the city. It is also a way to focus on how the landscape - in terms of land form, geology, climate and water systems - has influenced the development of urbanism.

The study for the new town development extracted the inherent logic embedded within the traditional patterns of local land distribution and cultivation to propose a strategy that integrates natural, cultural and artificial landscapes based on the intensification of land use and the potential for associative, revenue-generating activities. The new field of emerging synthetic urbanism is at the intersection of architecture, landscape and urbanism and it is characterised by surface, programme, information and process.

Green deserts

Before the rapid expansion of the 1970s, Dubai was a small town, and houses were generally built of materials that were readily available and were easily transported by dhows. The area around the end of the creek provided the much needed coral rocks and slabs for the city's construction requirements.

The abundance of palm trees throughout the UAE led to the construction of palm frond dwellings in a variety of geographical locations. The roofs of early houses would be made of palm fronds and often covered with mud.

Bastakiya and early settlements along the Creek were organic and not planned. Recent master plans in Dubai's search for expansion have been seen as garden cities set against the linear grid of the city's 1970 expansion.

Print | Email | Discuss this article |

USER COMMENTS (0 COMMENTS)

POST A COMMENT

CLICK HERE TO POST A COMMENT

Add your Comment All posts are sent to the administrator for review and are published only after approval. ArabianBusiness.com reserves the right to remove any comment at any time for any reason. Please keep your responses appropriate and on topic.
Name *
Remember me on this computer
Email *	(Your email address will not be published)
City
Country
Subject *
Comment *
Notify me of further comments
Security Code *
Please click post only once - your comment will not be published immediately.