All pioneering and innovative projects need support to prevent them from getting stuck in the old rut under the pressure of red tape.
The decisions regarding built environment and living environment have a highly extensive and long-term effect and they are often accompanied also by considerable expenses. Therefore, it is important to increase assurance that the choices made are at a high level and in keeping with the long-term goals.
The general plan for the Põhja-Tallinn city district is headed in the overall direction of diminishing the proportion of industry, increasing openness to the sea, developing the mobility environment via public transportation and bicycle traffic, and strengthening the blue-green network of the district.
Spatial design of a city is not a project with a clear beginning and end, but a continuous process, and a wickedly slow one at that.
What kinds of forces bear upon the process of creating a new urban area today? What urban development questions do we already have a grip on? What issues are we still grappling with and how? Indrek Allmann recounts the journey toward climate-neutral Paljassaare.
We do not merely need the spatial policy as a document but also the people to implement it.
For Veronika Valk-Siska, architecture neither begins nor ends with a design or a building. Her career in architecture until now can be read as a reflection of an increasingly expansive understanding of what architecture could be.
How to plan and design the city and public space in a situation where every owner of even a tiniest land parcel has its own interests and every public authority or private company has its own needs? How can it be done if every city department has its own concept of urban planning, if architecture and engineering firms expend all their efforts simply keeping their head above water?
Toomas Paaver admits that solving some problems of spatial planning may indeed seem impossible, however, the self-same impossibility has always intrigued him. His way of thinking is marked by spatial structuredness and ability to find causality in complex connections providing his perception and argumentation with a particular grasp. Would it be possible to work with such a versatile topic as a functioning common space in any other way?
This issue of Maja focusses on infrastructure, first and foremost on the architecture of street space. Good architecture creates unity, is capable of solving problems and enables what at first appear to be conflicting interests to be realised. Connections that go unmade in a[n urban] space are like missed opportunities.
