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Archive for October, 2011

Montgomery: “Social Ties Are the Most Important Contributor to Happiness”

Posted in Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization on 10/31/2011 | 1 Comment »

Charles Montgomery, a dynamic young Canadian author and speaker, who will soon publish Happy City, a work he has spent a “half decade researching,” gave one of the keynotes at the 2011 ASLA Annual Meeting. He argued that “places, stories, rituals control our behavior,” but indeed place may matter the most for our collective happiness. Landscape [...]

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Is Your Firm an Elephant or a Cheetah?

Posted in Climate Change, Landscape Architecture, Policy and Regulation, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization on 10/31/2011 | 1 Comment »

At the ASLA 2011 Annual Meeting, Mark Johnson, FASLA, Civitas, ably moderated a session on how mid-size firms can better compete with the big multidisciplinary shops, asking pointed questions of some of leading landscape architects practicing in the U.S. and Europe today, including Martha Schwartz, ASLA, Martha Schwartz Partners, Peter Walker, FASLA, PWP Landscape Architecture, Lucinda Sanders, FASLA, [...]

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Net-Zero Park Design

Posted in Climate Change, Landscape Architecture, Sustainable Design on 10/31/2011 | 4 Comments »

John “Bill” Taylor, ASLA, of Carol R. Johnson Associates, and Mark Walsh-Cooke and Tom Kennedy of Arup, gave a talk on “The Next Generation of Net-Zero Park Design” at the 2011 ASLA annual meeting. Problem: the earth’s resources are finite. The amount of usable freshwater, air, and, of course, oil, make up a very small amount [...]

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It Takes a Village to Raise a Mayor

Posted in Landscape Architecture, Policy and Regulation, Public Spaces, Real Estate Development, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization on 10/31/2011 | Leave a Comment »

Smart mayors who get the value design and its ability to transform communities don’t just grow on trees. They are the product of lots of different advisors and their thinking is shaped by organizations like the Mayor’s Institute on City Design (MICD), an initiative founded in the mid-1980s by the American Architectural Foundation, U.S. Conference of Mayors, and National Endowment for [...]

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Communities Rally to Get into Planetizen’s List of the Top 100 Public Spaces

Posted in Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces on 10/27/2011 | 1 Comment »

Planetizen and the Project for Public Spaces (PPS) started a crowdsourcing project earlier this year to get a sense for what communities, planners, and designers see as the top 100 public spaces in the U.S. and Canada. However, instead of presenting an “impartial list of the most revered, tested, and acclaimed public spaces” that reflects a dispassionate assessment of sites’ qualities, Planetizen and PPS instead announced [...]

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Cleveland Gets Serious About Fixing Its Problems

Posted in Policy and Regulation, Public Spaces, Real Estate Development, Smart Growth, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization, Water Management on 10/27/2011 | Leave a Comment »

Facing continued economic decline and an ever-shrinking population, Cleveland, which has some of the highest foreclosure rates in the country, has come up with an aggressive plan to bring the city back. The new Reimagining Cleveland sustainability vision aims to reinvest in dense urban neighborhoods, build “catalytic infrastructure,” and turn vacant, abandoned lots into green open space, commercial and residential farms, [...]

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Green Infrastructure Means Jobs

Posted in Landscape Architecture, Water Management on 10/26/2011 | 2 Comments »

At a packed briefing on Capitol Hill, an official from a regional wastewater management authority, a New York-based landscape designer, and the head of a niche-yet-growing green infrastructure engineering firm made the case that green infrastructure means more jobs for skilled designers and engineers as well as less-skilled maintenance crews. The meeting, which was organized by American Rivers, the American Society of Landscape Architects, [...]

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Developer Financed, Community Designed

Posted in Gardens, Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces, Real Estate Development, Smart Growth, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization, Water Management on 10/26/2011 | Leave a Comment »

A 4.2-acre park is slowly taking shape where a huge parking lot now exists on the southwest waterfront in Washington, D.C. Interestingly, the park, which is just a tiny piece of the $1.5 billion, 51-acre redevelopment project moving forward along the Washington Channel, is developer financed but community designed. Developers PN Hoffman and MadisonMarquette responded to community demands for their park to be [...]

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ArtPlace Offers $14m in “Creative Placemaking” Grants

Posted in Opportunities, Public Spaces, Urban Revitalization on 10/26/2011 | Leave a Comment »

ArtPlace, an innovative private-public organization that sees arts as a key driver of economic development and community revitalization, has $14 million in grants available for “creative placemaking” projects. Non-profit organizations, local governments, artists, designers, and even companies are eligible to apply. The organization’s first round of grants, which were announced in September, resulted in $11.5 million in investments in 34 [...]

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Interview with Bjarke Ingels

Posted in Green Buildings, Green Roofs, Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization on 10/24/2011 | 3 Comments »

Bjarke Ingels is founding partner of Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). Ingels, who rated as one of the 100 most creative people in business by Fast Company, is also a visiting professor at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. You’ve been calling for a new approach, “hedonistic sustainability,” which is “sustainability that improves the quality of [...]

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