15 Tyne Street, Carlton Vic.

For our hundredth post, we ask: how does this plot of vacant land fit into the 'Internal Reserves' world? Well, it does and it doesn't - but it definitely could. 

The space is here, behind a bustling section of Lygon Street. It is certainly an area bereft of park space which would undoubtedly benefit from a pocket park off a laneway space (Tyne Street, however it is delineated, is definitely not a through street). The block here no doubt once contained a shop and/or business and is now basically a backstreet car park; it is a prime candidate for the kind of space we advocate.

Birds love it, people tend not to, but that second aspect could be changed without too much trouble - it is, however, prime real estate which is the major issue (and the traders, particularly the cafe owners and restauranteurs of the area probably don't want to see places where people can just sit without buying something!).

Christopher Tunnard 1939

Read about Tunnard here. 

'System Garden', University of Melbourne

Seems silly to have avoided this one for so long, particularly as it is about five minutes' walk from where I work every day. The System Garden is celebrating its 160th anniversary this year, except it's a shadow of (i.e. about a quarter of the size of) its original incarnation. Not to say it's not a delightful space.

It conforms to most of our internal reserve rules, although of course (?) the surrounding buildings are all university offices/labs/classrooms etc, not residences, and the idea of 'street frontage' on a university campus is kind of fluid, too. In terms of its content, landscaping and usage, though, it's a great grab bag of ideas.

It's also worth remembering that one of the inspirations for Raymond Unwin in his creation/advocacy of internal reserves was the court spaces he saw at university campuses.

Read more about it here or look at the google map here.

Trussville Springs, Alabama

A new urbanist development in Alabama, designed by Duany/Plater Zyberk and discussed here. Here's the google map. Note what may or may not be two formal or more likely informal internal reserves at the top.

Unnamed reserve between Over Dam, Francis Davant, Grace Park; Habersham, South Carolina

A new urbanist development in SC. Haven't visited, have only a google earth idea of what the actual IR looks like. You can check it out here.

Balrampur, India

Source: Volker M. Welter 'The 1925 Master-Plan for Tel Aviv by Patrick Geddes' Israel Studies 14:3, p. 108

Word is none of Geddes' Indian plans were ever realised, but have fun looking in Balrampur.

Belgian Congo Film Image

A frame from the 2001 documentary From Congo to Zaire directed by Olivier Moser and Frederic Tadino (New York, NY: Filmakers Library) shows an example of public housing planning from (presumably) the late 1950s. The specific location is not made clear. This occurs at approximately the 9 minute mark in the film and represents Belgian activities in the last years of its colonial rule. 

Talpiot (Talpioth), Jerusalem

At least two internal reserves here (slightly to the right of the middle), perhaps more - the two obvious ones might be to the right of a group of four. Note the orientation of this plan is sideways. See the area as built (not very closely to this design) here; there may be one IR in this suburb, south of Ein Gedi St/ west of Efrata St, but satellite pics of Israeli urban areas are never very clear. 

'Talpiot was... planned by Richard Kauffmann, who came to Palestine from Germany in 1920 at the invitation of Arthur Ruppin, a Zionist thinker and leader, and one of the founders of Tel Aviv. Under the British Mandate Kauffmann was one of the chief actors in the planning of agricultural and (sub) urban Jerish settlements. It was in this context that garden city inspiration was most evident in Palestine, especially from the 1920s onward... Although Kauffmann's original plans were not fully implemented, they bore the influence of garden city rhetoric and an explicit vision of Talpiot as a "suburban garden city"'.
Yossi Katz and Liora Bigon, 'Urban development and the "garden city": examples from late Ottoman-era Palestine and the late British Mandate, in Bigon and Katz (eds) Garden Cities and Colonial Planning: Transnationality and urban ideas in Africa and Palestine Manchester UP, 2014, p. 151-3

See this website for more on Kauffmann.

Proposed T. B. Village Settlement, Picton Lakes, NSW

A search on something else entirely led me to the June 1927 issue of one of Florence Taylor's publications, Construction and Local Government Journal, and this peculiarity, a proposal for the design of the Picton Lakes Village Settlement for sufferers from tuberculosis. An article in the Picton Post 8 September 1926 (p. 3) discusses a visit to the site where a 'village settlement' is to be constructed and mentions that it is to be based conceptually on Papworth Village Settlement in Cambridgeshire (now Papworth Hospital). The article accompanying, which is a somewhat bald descriptive piece devised mainly around what anyone could tell from looking at the plan (except that which is hard to glean from the digitised microfilm used by Trove) is surely the work of Taylor herself, who never missed a chance to denigrate Canberra whenever she could.

The Sydney Morning Herald announced the competition in retrospect on 6 April 1927 open to 'students of architecture at the University and Technical College'.  Infuriatingly (or is that putting it too strongly) I can find little further evidence of the competition (and unsurprisingly, this plan was never brought into being). But the village did exist, in Couridjah; here's a slightly earlier announcement of building industry involvement in the creation of housing stock, from the Sunday Times of Sydney on the 15 August 1926 (p. 2):

Back to the plan: Duncan McPhee Smith, the winner from 14 entrants, was a twenty-year old Sydney Technical College student employed in the office of John Reid. In fact (we are told in the Picton Post for 22 June 1927, p. 2) Smith won not only the prize for best layout but also separate prizes for an administration block design and a chalet. This item also confirms that the Smith layout involves internal reserves (I count 25 blocks, many of which surely have internal reserves, but it's not entirely sure what each section is coded to represent): 'the architect has arranged... that each home will radiate around a Central Village Green.' 

In 1928, Duncan McPhee Smith graduated and received a travelling scholarship - the Byera Hadley Scholarship - 'to assist the winner in undertaking postgraduate studies in one of the capitals of the Commonwealth, Sydney excepted' (Sydney Morning Herald, 4 August 1928 p. 16). He chose to use these funds to study town planning in Adelaide and died in 1987. 

I'm unsure where the Picton Village was actually located; using South St. Couridjah as a bearing, though, I'm assuming that McPhee Smith's plan was intended to be laid out in this general area.