No, this is not a science fiction thriller about 20-foot humanoids, although...that would be a good follow-up!
If you look at the featured picture for this post, it's a street sign for the topic of the post. And in that street sign, people (even kids!) are bigger than cars. The reason for this will become evident if you just read on.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about The Built Environment and what that means for people in general, but also very special people – project leaders.
So let me start with the term, “Built Environment”(there will be more terms as well here, some in other languages, so fasten your linguistic seat belts).
What is The Built Environment? Some may say it’s just another word for ‘construction’ or for buildings. That’s a partially correct answer but it is nowhere near fully correct.
(The Built Environment encompasses) the buildings we live in, the distribution systems that provide us with water and electricity, and the roads, bridges, and transportation systems we use to get from place to place. It can generally be described as the man-made or modified structures that provide people with living, working, and recreational spaces.
So, not just buildings, it’s anything that we humans make or modify to make our lives comfortable, productive, and fun.
I’ll be posting about this topic a lot in the next few months – its an area of focus that project managers will need to learn about because of the amount of money business and governments are applying to infrastructure projects. And PMI knows this, having recently introduced the PMI-CP® certification.
My first post in this vein is a concept that has begun to catch hold worldwide, although it started about 70 years ago in Delft, The Netherlands. I told you – you’d learn new terms in this post, and here is one I am not only going to define, I am going to get you to pronounce it properly! Respect language!
The term is Woonerf. It is a mashup of two Dutch words, woon and nerf (literally ‘living’ and ‘grain’) Together, however, the word woonerf becomes “living yard”, and practically, it describes a ‘shared space’.
Let’s get the pronunciation right, though.
The “woon” part does NOT rhyme with “tune”. Woon is pronounced something like “phone”, with a slightly voiced ‘f’, almost a v.
The “nerf” part does not rhyme with “surf”. It’s close to “neer-uff”.
A woonerf is a place where cars, trucks, bikes, kids, dogs, people share a space and in which the motorized vehicles do NOT have the right of way, and in which there is less demarcation between the road and a ‘sidewalk’, and in which the roadway is often either narrow, populated with barriers (not speed bumps, but pieces of art, for example) that prevent fast driving.
The four principles of a woonerf (see pic below) are:
Visible Entrances
Physical Barriers
Shared and paved space
Landscaping and “street furniture” (often sculptures, plants, benches, artwork)
From a project management perspective, there is a very interesting angle – one that involves culture and communications and stakeholder engagement. A very good example is this one, which compares the introduction of a woonerf in two different Canadian cities.
It’s a short video. But watch it -very interesting to note the project management lessons learned here.
Below is a photo of the successful woonerf in Banff.
I find it amazing how one word – in this case, woonerf – in effect, killed a project because it carried the ‘baggage’ of a Euro-centric culture that ‘won’t work here’, according to some key stakeholders.
But the second part of the video shows how the woonerf concept did work in Banff. And it’s catching on all over the world in the past decade. This article from Bloomberg talks about six examples, from the USA, New Zealand, Germany, England, Sweden, and, of course, The Netherlands. And that’s from 2015. Since then, it’s become much more popular, with woonerf projects taking place everywhere.
Here’s a recent example of a woonerf in Singapore:
And I close with a great summary of how a woonerf works in The Netherlands.
Stay tuned to this blog for more upskilling in linguistics and the Built Environment! We’ll be covering software platforms that facilitate planning and executing building projects with sustainability in mind.
