Public Square

The recently opened King’s Cross Square in London raised the interest of discussing public space in the city development. The reversion started with Ken Livingstone, former Mayor of London’s brave decision to reverse the roundabout at Trafalgar Square and return it to the people and now the present Mayor, Boris Johnson whom launched the Great Spaces with the aim of bringing back village into city will see the atmosphere of trust and neighbourliness, the essential ingredient for public realm. To ensure it is truly public space, the city manager must make sure that private control such as security guards and brand advertising is negligible and insignificant. Instead, cosmopolitan sensibility, civic pride, social interaction and sheer enjoyment must be the value to be inculcated and instilled. This is especially important now with the mushrooming of gated communities with their own border and compound. We must create the enthusiasm about shared spaces and develop more and more of them. This is about public riches, not private wealth. With more public riches, the objective of social integration and nation building can be built naturally. Until then, the sense of ownership over the Petaling Jaya city will be remained ambiguous.

Networking

Networking is about two way communication and mutual respect for both parties rather than one party is trying to get something out of it from the relationship. Networking is like dating. If you meet someone online and keep talking to each other but never ever to meet face to face, then it will not work at the end of the day. Similarly, networking means we start a relationship and followed with cultivating the relationship to a fruitful and meaningful bonding. The question is who do we want to network with? We should apply strategic marketing approach otherwise we will end up with networking with wrong people. First identify who are they and then where to find them and how to introduce yourself. It is priority matter. Secondly, once a meet up started, trying to find some common things for further discussion and interested other to go for second meet up. You must raise the eyebrow of others, and of course the positive impression from the way you behavior, present, talk and making joke, perhaps. Thirdly, you must follow up on useful meetings and importantly be more persistent. Most of the time, you will come across people of calling you for help but disappear from you after thing get done or worst still that they are of opinion that you are not of help to them. If you come across these people, please avoid them at all cost. These are people who would most likely take advantage of you without seriously looking into maintaining the relationship and growing of networking. For this, the last thing to do is do not waste time.

Renewable Officer

In UK, that is a new profession called renewable officer. The birth of this profession is due to the requirement of each development project to have at least self generating 10% renewable energy at site. The Renewable Officer will assess the installation of renewable method and evaluate its perfomance so as to ensure that compliance to planning permission is observed. This is an interesting development as emerging changes to the World has in turn revolve our thinking, way of doing things and perhaps business model. In other words, nothing is stagnant and unchanged. Everything is subjected to its relevance because of the new changes, new order in the World and of course the eminent changes of environment. Perhaps this is new challenge to many older professions such as engineers, planners, architects, surveyors, lawyers and etc. Either we evolve and embrace new demand or we are out of business.

Low Carbon Energy Planning

Renewable energy is the way forward now because of the escalating price of the fossil fuel and electricity. It is also a requirement to go green now because of the carbon emission has expediting the process of global warming. The World is exploring multiple ways of exploring the cultivation of renewable energy. For countries that consume more energy because of cooling and heating purpose or for the sake industrialisation and development purpose, non-renewable energy, if relying too much on it is definitely not a good strategy. Some cities hve resolved to make it mandatory for buildings and development projects to achieve certain percentage of renewable energy and reduce the carbon emission. For example, in UK it is a legislative requirement that all buildings have to reduce 20% of carbon emission as well as having minimum 10% of renewable energy. Many buildings have installed either solar photovoltaic, solar thermal, heating system, air heating pump system, wind turbine, wind mill or other micropower generation system. The requirement of doing so is embedded in the planning permission. It is a condition for compliance as early as design stage. The developers have to submit building plan incorporating the system and got final approval before building. The Local Authorities will check on compliance upon completion stage. However, now the question is no system or mechanisme have been set to monitor the performance after completion stage and it is not a requirement now to request periodical report from the property owners. Much need to be done now. In Petaling Jaya, the Council has imposed condition for installing rain water harvesting system, but no monitoring mechanisme has been established to monitor the performance or even to verify the existance of the system. For the sake of low carbon green city initiative of PJ, immediate action should be taken or else similar dilemma as in UK will be forthcoming to PJ.

Localising Regional Transportation Infrastructure Planning

When we talked about transportation infrastructure, we will always say the discussion must be in broader view and macro scale simply because there are traffic from externality and the city cannot control the in and out of vehicles from within and also outside of the city. While there are traffic with origin and destination within the city, there are also traffic generated from the city and go out from the city as well as traffic come from elsewhere by passing the city with destination not within the city. Hence, strategic planning when it comes to transportation infrastructure provision is up most important. However, discussing the transportation planning without referring to local condition is also incomplete as although transportation infrastructure should serve the majority and for the good of national and regional context, the interest of local people should not be compromised without any serious consideration. For example, while the rail line is an important component of public transportation network that will lean modal split of travelling towards non private vehicles, the location of station , routing and beam column as well as the scheduling of construction work should have the input and feedback from the local community. This explained why while strategic planning is important in transport infrastructure provision, at time referral to local sentiments and localized issues is unavoidable. The discussion will be getting more complicated if few infrastructure projects with each other inter-linked and present bigger impact will have to be considered at the same time. This might encourage the possibility of power play and private negotiation in discarding projects that might bring in negative impacts to the particular community. It is definitely not an easy task in crystallizing local and individual project and upscale it to the strategic level.

Strategic Transportation Planning

While transportation infrastructure requires strategic planning, this applies to all spheres of city development. Strategic planning requires visionary planning and macro scale of understanding the issues and solutions before embarking into micro and localized problems and actions. This is critical especially so for the city as all components of city are inter-linked and performance of any one component will affect the others. For example, if a neighbourhood area is not served well with an efficient transportation system, then urban problems such as traffic congestion, incompatible land use, safety and health issue will be occurred. Similarly, for an organization without a strategic plan is tantamount to planning to the failure. How can an organization work well if no clear direction and shared vision are put on the table for all stakeholders to understand and uphold to?

Power of Change: New Media and New Communities

In the 21st Century, the power of change will be changed tremendously. It is no more a superpower to monopolize the views of others and to dictate what other should do, but rather the community of cyber world will have better say now. The recent turn of event in United States of bombing Syria for example showed that the US Government or even the President without the support of alliance countries and people of America has to think twice and back track from the decision of evading Syria. This power of change is expedite because of the advancement of new media and new community. The social media optimizing the strength of information technology has expedite the way people disseminate information, broadcasting the news, making an informed decision and framing up own opinion towards an issue. There are pros and cons on this. If the information gathered is genuine and trustworthy, then it help to democratize people’s mind and involvement in the society and development process. However, if fault news are circulated without any authenticity checking, then it is a dangerous of creating chaos and conflict. On the other hand, new community away from the community at neighbourhood area is created with the existence of social media. People sharing the same interest or hobby can form their own community or discussion group. Similarly, if a group of people sharing same vision and passionate about doing some common things, they will use social media as a platform for discussion and meeting or even planning an event together without physically attending to a meeting room. How should we call this kind of community? They are definitely different from the community we know of. Traditionally, community are created because everyone is staying in a place, sharing public facilities and services, using same access road and perhaps going to local school or places of worship together. As time pass on, the sense of community spirit inculcated and getting stronger. They will look after the safety and health issues in their living environment. But with the community in cyber space, will they care about surrounding and happening in their living area? Perhaps it is time now for community in neighbourhood area to change, to adopt to the advancement of technology and apply it in the daily routine, communication, planning and monitoring and etc. Perhaps it is time to reshape the planning guidelines to facilitate the application of social media in the community planning. Without that, without doubt in near future, our next generation might be saying that my soul is elsewhere although I am physically belong to this neighbourhood. Certainly, we do not want this from happening.

Economic Downturn vs. Sustainable Development

We always listen to and discuss about the impact of climate change towards the Earth and human being. We talked about how global warming has melted the iceberg in North Pole and then after the rise of sea water level and the effect of CER reaching 400ppm and beyond. All these are making the World less sustainable. We talked about how to make sustainable development to be sustained further and better. But, who care especially during the economic downturn and financial turmoil crisis now! If majority of the people are adversely affected by their job, income and high inflation that making the cost of living unbearable and reducing their affordability for owning house and better lifestyle for example, certainly we cannot expect them to concentrate their energy and effort on sustainable development. However, unless the notion of achieving sustainable development is also meant to saving one’s pocket without compromising the quality of life, the aim of sustainable development will be distracted because of economic impact. This is the topic of discussion for many in the environmental cycle. The United Nations is taking the lead of initiating a discussion on the impact of global financial and economic crisis on sustainable development. What say you?