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Year of Public Service Comes to Alaska

Posted in Active Design, Landscape Architecture, Policy and Regulation on 04/23/2013 | Leave a Comment »

2013 is the Year of Public Service at ASLA. The goal is to highlight the public service activities performed by landscape architects and advocate for a deeper commitment to community service by all. ASLA invites current members to submit projects. Selected projects will be highlighted in the campaign’s Web site and outreach materials. Descriptions, quotes, and multimedia content may be used – with proper credit – on the YPS2013 web site, blog and The Understory Facebook page. Here are two recent public service projects, performed as part of the ASLA’s partnership with the National Park Service Rivers and Trails Conservation Assistance Program. These projects were recently submitted by Heather Rice, NPS-RTCA & Jonny Hayes, ASLA, ASLA’s Alaska Chapter.

Kachemak Bay Water Trail (KBWT): ASLA Alaska Chapter members Jonny Hayes, ASLA, and Mark Kimerer, ASLA, have been actively engaged in this project from its inception, working in tandem with the KBWT Steering Committee, National Park Service Rivers and Trails Conservation Assistance Program, and City of Homer.

Hayes and Kimerer began the trail branding process by working with a special committee of KBWT to facilitate and generate logo concepts. The pair worked with the committee during the process to refine the selected concept and produce a final logo that has been used extensively to promote the water trail vision, which will serve as a basis to guide future marketing efforts. Hayes and Kimerer have continued to lend their expertise to assist the Steering Committee to identify water trail branding options, develop a site inventory review form, evaluate potential launch sites, and prepare an RFP for the design and build of a water trail web site.

In April, Hayes will be leading a planning and programming design charrette with key stakeholders and the City of Homer to begin the design and permitting of the Kachemak Bay Water Trail launch in Homer, with a similar effort to take place in Seldovia at a later date.

Palmer Bike Park: The Palmer Bike Park, in Palmer, Alaska, is envisioned as a place where cyclists of any ability can hone their biking skills so they can enjoy all types of terrain. Cyclists of all ages will be able to learn how to bike safely and have fun. At the park, they will gain the confidence they need to ride their bikes anywhere, from sidewalks to roadway bike lanes to back country mountain bike trails.

To help move this project forward, Eric Morey, ASLA, Alaska Chapter, and Luanne Urfer, ASLA, Washington Chapter, collaborated with the the National Park Service Rivers, Trails and Conservation Assistance Program. They volunteered a generous amount of their time and expertise as participants in every part of the planning and early concept development process, including crafting the initial vision and building community support.

Viewed as stepping stones toward the larger Palmer Bike Park, smaller neighborhood parks and bike pump parks are also being developed to encourage kids and families to get outside and play. The goal is to create a constituency for the bike park. In the Wilson Neighborhood Park, Morey, Urfer, and Zach Babb, ASLA, Alaska Chapter, put kids’ dreams to paper during the 2012 Wilson Neighborhood Park design charrette. Thanks to these ASLA members’ colorful conceptual drawings, the City of Palmer approved funding for design and engineering and the community now looks forward to construction beginning this summer. With continued support from ASLA – and the community – the Palmer Bike Park is sure to be a success soon.

Image credits: Heather Rice, NPS-RTCA & Jonny Hayes, ASLA

Contact Phil Stamper at pstamper@asla.org with any questions related to the Year of Public Service. Join the conversation on Twitter by using the hashtag #YPS2013.

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Grown in Detroit

Posted in Active Design, Agriculture, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization on 03/28/2013 | 3 Comments »

On a modest site downtown, Lafayette Greens yields a good deal more than just food.

By Linda McIntyre

Detroit is having quite a moment in the media at a time of renewed interest in the trials and tribulations of cities, but it’s still kind of surprising to find a small, trapezoid-shaped edible garden thriving among the towers of its downtown. This is Lafayette Greens, designed by Kenneth Weikal Landscape Architecture, on a block that, until now, was best known for its homegrown fast food rivals American Coney Island and Lafayette Coney Island (“Coney Island” is Detroitspeak for chili dog). Now the Coneys are improbably sharing the neighborhood with vegetables, herbs, fruit, and flowers, all grown on a scant half-acre at a busy intersection across from the historic Book Cadillac Hotel (now part of the Westin chain) and the city’s federal office building and courthouse.

A little more than a decade ago, the notion of a neat, well-designed garden here at the paved epicenter of car culture—the General Motors headquarters is a few blocks away—would have seemed like a hallucination. The site’s previous occupant, the Lafayette Building, was a 14-story V-shaped Italian Renaissance tower built in 1923. It was demolished in late 2009, having been vacant since 1997. It had become one of the beautiful ruins for which Detroit has become ghoulishly famous, with broken windows, graffiti tags, squatting hipster artists, and weedy trees growing out of the roof.

But although abandoned buildings and vacant lots are still vexing issues in many parts of the city, this section of the downtown core has been transformed. The waterfront along the Detroit River is slowly developing into a series of linked green spaces and public plazas. Sports venues, even the home of the hard-luck Lions pro football team, draw hordes of loyal fans downtown. New cafés and pop-up retail spaces lure shoppers from suburban malls. Companies such as Compuware and Quicken Loans have opened big offices here and brought in employees from outside the city.

Compuware was one of the first companies to come back downtown, and one of its founders, Peter Karmanos Jr., has been a steady force in efforts to revitalize downtown Detroit. Karmanos, who stepped down as CEO in 2011 (he’s currently the company’s executive chairman), was one of the leaders of a group of businesspeople and philanthropists who raised $20 million to design, build, and maintain Campus Martius Park across the street from the company’s headquarters and just up Michigan Avenue from Lafayette Greens (see “Miracle on Woodward Avenue,” LAM, November 2006).

Lafayette Greens is a Compuware project too. Meg Heeres, the company’s art and community programs manager and the project director for the garden, says that Karmanos (who’s a Master Gardener) originally wanted to start an urban farm somewhere in the business district.

That’s not as weird as it might sound: Detroit is huge—almost 140 square miles—and by some estimates there are as many as 40 square miles of vacant land. There’s a long history of farming here, starting with French settlers’ early-18th-century “ribbon farms” along the Detroit River. Grassroots gardeners have started community gardens all over the low-density city, which has an abundance of single-family houses with yards. Detroit’s historic Eastern Market wholesale and retail food complex has a lot of local fruit and vegetable vendors. And in December, the city planning commission approved a new urban agriculture ordinance that updates the zoning code to allow land uses such as farms, tree farms, and orchards.

Compuware wanted the project done fast, but it also needed a design firm with the right kind of sensibility. “We knew this was not a straight-ahead landscape architecture project,” Heeres told me. “The designers had to understand the community here, how to engage a lot of different stakeholders and create a welcoming space for all, while meeting our demands for a strong aesthetic and innovation. My involvement as the client would be very, very hands on, and they had to be okay with that.”

Ken Weikal, ASLA, who started his firm in the Detroit suburbs in 1989, and Beth Hagenbuch, Associate ASLA, a partner in the firm and the project’s lead designer, were already involved in GrowTown, a nonprofit group formed to help improve derelict urban sites with easy and inexpensive design interventions and technology. They had recently worked on a community project in the north central part of the city.

The design quickly evolved from the simple kitchen garden concept that Heeres pitched to Weikal and Hagenbuch—raised planting beds divided by mulch paths—into a modern riff on the French potager. Corrugated steel clads the raised beds and plays off the concrete and high-rise buildings that surround the space, as well as the dramatic weathered brick wall of an adjacent building that serves as a backdrop to the greenery. The shiny metal and the reclaimed wood used to build a trio of wacky storage sheds were inexpensive and manufactured locally. They also give the space an industrial vibe that suits Motown quite well.

Compuware loved the design and wanted it built as soon as possible. But the city owns the site, and Mayor Dave Bing’s administration has been looking at creative ways to use vacant land, including larger-scale urban agriculture. A lot of consultation and negotiation by Heeres was required to hammer out the year-to-year lease agreement in a short time. The design was made final by January 2011, the city’s blessing was secured in time to start work in June, and most of the work was done by the end of July.

The prep work for the garden was not as hard as you might expect. Weikal says that after the Lafayette Building was demolished, the site was excavated about 15 feet down, and soil was hauled in to bring it up to grade. The team replaced the top few feet of that soil but didn’t have to deal with a huge contamination legacy.

The designers manipulated the site in subtle ways to give the garden a spatial charge. Two gravel paths radiate out from a paved terrace and gradually diverge from each other, widening for a forced perspective. This arrangement makes Shelby Street, to the west, look farther away than it is from the terrace. They integrated the site’s four-foot grade change into the design. It helps the hardscape drain into a swale edged with gabions and planted with redtwig dogwoods and other water-tolerant plants. It also varies the height of the raised beds for comfortable and accessible gardening. The tops of the planters all rise to the same flat level, but the bases follow the slope, resulting in a range of bed heights, from eight to 40 inches, and an intriguing sense of depth across the whole garden.

A small, circular children’s garden, 38 feet in diameter, sits at the southeast corner. It is edged with fruiting shrubs and sunflowers, and its planters are filled with colorful flowers, sweet-smelling herbs, fuzzy lamb’s ears, and spiky succulents. Made from recycled 55-gallon steel juice barrels, they repeat, in a smaller size, the children’s garden’s circular shape. These geometric shapes, and the strong lines of the rest of the garden, bring order to all of the lushly planted raised beds and help the small space hold its own in the tall and dense urban streetscape.

All of the planting in the 2,000 square feet of raised beds was done on one sweltering and labor-intensive day in July 2011, during which the landscape contractor, the WH Canon Landscape Company, executed what Weikal describes as a “military-style operation.” Plants were grown from seed off-site in the nearby town of Howell by Motave Meadows, a small organic grower, in 12-inch pots that could be slotted in to the raised beds without much root disturbance. “The challenge that day was to plant several thousand tender transplants into more than 30 beds according to a very detailed planting scheme,” says Hagenbuch. “Getting the plants into the right beds, the specified patterns, watered in, and drip irrigation in place and properly adjusted on a very hot day required dedicated teamwork.”

Apple and pear trees, and swaths of lawn, were installed separately. Weikal says the lawns, planted with fescue that doesn’t require a lot of irrigation, help the garden look good all winter and open up more space for programming. Along with gravel paths, they also contribute to the site’s mostly (70 percent) porous surface. As in most cities, stormwater management is a problem in Detroit: According to a 2012 report by the Alliance for the Great Lakes, in 2011 the city sent 7 billion gallons of stormwater and untreated sewage into the Detroit and Rouge Rivers. The city government is trying to use more green infrastructure, but its dire financial situation has slowed progress.

Since its official opening in late August 2011, Lafayette Greens has been a big success. In 2012, its first full growing season, the garden produced almost 1,800 pounds of fresh produce according to Gwen Meyer, who manages the garden for Compuware full-time. The food, which is grown organically, is donated to Gleaners, a local food bank, and other community groups (volunteers can take small amounts with them). Kids from Compuware’s in-house day-care center and other nearby programs come to learn and play. Volunteers from Compuware, the federal building, and other nearby offices show up regularly to pull weeds (the raised beds and overall tidiness make it easy for people in work clothes to do a bit of gardening at lunchtime) or hear talks on beekeeping, vermicomposting, and other garden topics.

And some people come just to hang out, which is fine with Meyer. “Our whole purpose is to be available for people to sit and relax, take a break,” she told me. “They can get involved if they want to.” The garden is open year-round, and so are volunteer hours, from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday. In the winter, fewer volunteers show up, but the ones who do shovel snow, keep an eye on the covered hoop houses Meyer is trying as an experiment, and plan for the next growing season.

Some concessions to the reality of urban parks had to be made. Heeres says that Compuware would have preferred to leave the site open, but the city insisted on a fence. The garden is locked up at night and on most weekends, and a camera allows Compuware security staff to monitor the site, which is well lit at night.

Vegetable theft hasn’t been a big problem, Meyer says, but it happens. “We’d rather engage people than reprimand them,” she told me. “I might ask them to pick more so I can take it to Gleaners. Honestly, I’d rather train thieves to harvest properly so the plants continue to grow. It doesn’t occupy much of my time.”

Lafayette Greens doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Urban farming has become something of a class-based flash point here. The concept was mocked by some residents in the recent documentary Detropia, and the city council’s December approval of the sale of about 1,500 city-owned lots to a local businessman, John Hantz, who wants to start a tree farm, was controversial.

Compuware has been careful not to fan any flames. Heeres and Meyer stress that Lafayette Greens is by no means the first or only edible effort in the city. “The media attention is positive, but it doesn’t always fully represent how deeply spread out growing is here,” Meyer says. At the dedication in 2011, Heeres focused on the park aspect of the project. “It’s like Campus Martius with vegetables,” she told the Detroit Free Press.

Heeres says that the ecofriendly aspect of Lafayette Greens is nice, but it wasn’t what drove the project—it was about building relationships in the community. The project offers some timely lessons. Green spaces are part of Detroit Future City, a long-awaited strategic plan released by the Bing administration in January. The product of a two-year process led by local government, business, academic, and nonprofit leaders, the plan is a broad blueprint for improving the city’s economy and making better, more efficient use of its vast amount of land over the next 50 years. Among other things, it envisions more walkable, high-density neighborhoods with inviting parks and gardens. Kind of like what Compuware has done on a smaller scale.

Other companies, whose willingness to deeply engage has the potential to make or break the strategic plan, might be paying attention to the company’s success. Heeres says she’s had “probably a half-dozen calls” about the process. “None of those have come to fruition yet, but we would love for that to happen.”

The city, and the people who live and work there, will benefit if it does. “Lafayette Greens has created a real amenity in downtown Detroit,” John Gallagher, a business and development reporter for the Free Press, told me. “The design of the park is very much advanced over the usual community garden in a neighborhood setting. The organization of the garden, with Compuware volunteers tending the plants, maintains the quality level.” Few places need that kind of amenity as urgently as this one.

Linda McIntyre, a Detroit-area native, is a former staff writer and frequent contributor to LAM.

In honor of National Landscape Architecture Month (NLAM), the entire April issue of LAM is available for free.

Image credits: (1-2) Lafayette Greens / Beth Hagenbuch, Associate ASLA

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USGBC’s Fedrizzi Takes Aim at Detractors: “We Are Right”

Posted in Active Design, Climate Change, Education, Green Buildings, Policy and Regulation on 11/14/2012 | 1 Comment »

In a full-frontal attack on the “so called journalists” behind a recent USA Today investigative report, which called into question the effectiveness and integrity of the U.S. Green Building Council, along with other “cynics, scoundrels, and detractors,” Rick Fedrizzi, founder and president of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) argued that the green building movement is “right” at the opening of the 2012 Greenbuild conference in San Francisco . Comparing the green building movement to the movement for human rights, women’s pursuit of the right to vote, equal rights for African Americans, and marriage equality for gay Americans, Fedrizzi argued that “LEED [its rating system] is not perfect but evolutionary by design.” He also stated that “no one can deny that the built environment is far more healthy and hospitable than it was 20 years ago.”

Fedrizzi asked, “so you can’t wear a business suit and be an environmentalist at the same time?” USGBC members can “do their core businesses – green buildings — more responsibly while also doing well.” In fact, “in capitalism, growth is essential.” Any movement that “creates new markets and jobs” while improving the health of well being of people living and working within buildings “must be doing something right.” He said detractors argues that “toxins are just a fact of life.” Fedrizzi said USGBC members want “teachers and students to be in schools that keep everyone healthy. Our focus is on the people working within these green buildings, not the emblem on the front of the building.” The U.S. green building movement also aims to “reduce carbon emissions and energy use while creating millions of new jobs.”

The head of the USGBC also took aim at climate change deniers, arguing that Hurricane Sandy clearly demonstrates that rising sea levels can have a significant impact. Unfortunately, the presidential candidates “hardly mentioned climate change at all during the last campaign, and from 2009 to 2011, stories that featured climate change fell by 42 percent.” He applauded Bloomberg BusinessWeek‘s latest cover story, “It’s Global Warming, Stupid.”

With President Obama elected to a second term, the shift now needs to be on improved environmental governance. “Obama needs to do more to push green buildings forward.” In a political segment featuring images of Rush Limbaugh, Fedrizzi said the administration and USGBC also needs to “attack special interests” who are holding back progress. But perhaps the overall message was bipartisan: “This can’t be about blue or red states, but green states.”

USGBC members can help “break the cycle of denial” about the environment. As an example, he argued that only with a campaign for increased transparency can we understand the impact of unhealthy materials in the built environment. He pointed to asbestos, asking whether building designers and contractors would “use this material given what we know now.” Volatile organic compounds (VOCs), endrocrine disruptors, “all of these things hurt our kids.” Transparency “helps us make better decisions.” So, Fedrizzi announced a new campaign to get building product manufacturers to “prove that their products are the best and healthiest.” This effort also got a major boost with the announcement that Google would be providing USGBC with a $3 million grant to research materials and public health.

In an earlier speech, San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee said San Francisco has become the greenest city in the US in part because of its full embrace of LEED. The city now has 48 million square feet of LEED buildings and recently won an award for its green building policies from an international green building group. Lee wants to further improve the city’s already impressive indicators. San Francisco diverts 80 percent of its waste from landfills and has the highest rates of compost and recycling in the nation. “We also have the best compost. Our compost is sent to Napa Valley to create the nation’s best wines.” The mayor then highlighted efforts to create a LEED platinum city center through retrofitting existing infrastructure and buildings and creating a new multimodal transportation hub.

Image credit: ASLA 2009 General Design Honor Award. California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco / image copyright Tom Fox

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Multi-use Infrastructure at Its Most Innovative

Posted in Active Design, Ecosystem Restoration, Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces, Sustainable Design, Water Management on 10/04/2012 | Leave a Comment »

New York City is certainly willing to pay top dollar for excellent design. A new $3 billion water treatment plant is taking shape in Van Cortlandt park in the Bronx. The Croton water treatment by Grimshaw Architects and Ken Smith Landscape Architects includes some $250 million in new buildings, plazas, wetlands and meadows, and a public golf driving range, which, amazingly, sits right on top of the plant. In a session at the 2012 ASLA Annual Meeting in Phoenix, Ken Smith, ASLA, Ken Smith Landscape Architects; David Burke, Grimshaw Architects; and Charles McKinney, Affiliate ASLA, City of New York, Department of Parks and Recreation, explained how the project is the result of NYC’s design, stormwater management, and parks policies. And while these numerous policies and design requirements were sometimes in conflict, said Smith, the design eventually succeeded because it cleverly integrated security and stormwater management features with public amenities.

McKinney explained that NYC’s government under Mayor Bloomberg has been consistently encouraging practices that create great design, but by necessity, not just out of big city ego. Mayor Bloomberg believes that design excellence yields better results, improves property values, and strengthens investor confidence. In reality, though, it’s about being able to pay the money required to achieve a range of goals, in the area of climate change, public parks, and stormwater management. Under Bloomberg’s PlaNYC, all of the city’s commissioners had to come up with new ways of doing things to accommodate the expected one million people that will move into the city over the next 20 years while also preparing for climate change. For the parks department, this meant holding themselves to the new goal of having every citizen within a 10 minute walk of a park and creating major new parks. An off-shoot of PlaNYC that also relates to the city’s parks is NYC’s bold green infrastructure plan, which helps the city achieve its new goals related to managing stormwater. The new multi-billion dollar green infrastructure plan is expected to decrease the amount of overflow rainwater that overcomes the city’s old combined sewer system by billions of gallons.

Other NYC initiatives help boost performance in different realms: the Active Design Guidelines combat obesity, the Street Design Guidelines encourage new forms of mobility, the High Performance Infrastructure Guidelines help create greener infrastructure systems, the High Performance Landscape Guidelines will help ensure the city’s parks are greener, and the Department of Design and Construction’s Design Excellence Program means projects will be selected on merit and quality instead of price. McKinney said through these programs “all city residents have benefited.” And in the case of the the Croton project, the design result is even “transcendent.”

NYC’s water conveyance system is as crucial to making the city what it is today as the elevator, said Smith, quoting Norval White’s book, New York: A Physical History. Together, the water system and elevators enabled NYC’s density. And while the grid was laid out in 1812, the water system from the 19th century really made the city work. Before, Smith said, there were “private water systems, primitive distribution systems.”

The Croton water treatment plant was built because of fears about the city’s water quality. The Croton watershed had been jeopardy due to naturally-occurring compounds, said Burke. After reviewing 14 possible sites, the city found that a spot in Van Cortlandt park would actually be the most cost-effective. After the city dithered on moving forward with the Bronx site, the federal government issued a mandate saying the facility had to be built. The federal government also said that while aspects of the park had to be uprooted during construction, all pieces had to be replaced after the plant went in. That meant eventually restoring the original golf course driving range found there.

The 9-acre-square plant is set below ground, up to 100 feet deep in some spots. Driving through sheer bedrock, the complex plant being created by infrastructure engineers will help the city purify the huge amount of water it uses daily, about 1.23 million gallons. Smith, the landscape architect designing all the landscape elements, said the roof of the plant was now in place, creating the largest green roof in the country.

Smith and Burke walked the crowd through the many challenges in knitting the design together while addressing all of NYC’s issues. One entrance to the facility needs to be highly secure, with space for car and truck X-ray machines, while other access points need to be easy, public. There had to be room for a chemical discharge station, which is used to funnel the chemicals needed to clean the water. All stormwater had to be captured on site, so there had to be a careful analysis of the terrain and existing riparian woodlots. The site also needed to channel or produce water for the golf range and native meadows and wetlands.

Smith outlined how an ingenious system of water conveyance was created that leveraged existing water flows. New bioswales and natural treatment systems were put in to help retain water and also channel it to a man-made lake. The NYC government said the project really had to be more of a landscape project than a building one so artistic integration of the buildings into the landscape was also a key issue. Burke, an architect, said “we had to blur the lines between landscape and building,” which for him was a learning experience.

Multiple schemes were batted around before everyone settled on a circular design that provides multiple benefits, said Smith. The round shape not only provides some coherence for the golf course but also obscured a reading of the invaluable plant underneath. Like the layers in a onion, the design provides 2-miles of gabioned, stone-clad, and core-ten steel walls in rings at different heights, each providing different functions. To block vehicular traffic, there are 3-feet high walls, while intruders on foot will be stopped by 10-feet sheer walls. Smith said the site design uses a moat, “a primitive military mechanism,” to solve contemporary challenges. The moat itself is filled with bioretention systems but really it’s there to enable dramatic grade shifts so the walls don’t seem too intrusive.

McKinney stepped in to add that the original design, well, wasn’t really a design at all, but an “engineering solution,” offering a big box in a park, which was “not a good thing.” Now, the design is a “landscape. This is the breakthrough.”

The public golf driving range also works with the moat. Golfers will send their ball out over the moat, while the roof itself will use a “Xmas tree” formation of targets to enable golfers at different skill levels to enjoy.

The green roof itself is inaccessible to the public. Smith said months of research went into making the sub-structures, which consist of many layers, work. Grades had to be carefully thought out, too, to ensure maintenance vehicles and ball collectors could get on the roof. Eventually, a bowl shaped was settled on for the course for aesthetic and technical reasons. Smith, who’s known for his deep appreciation of materials, described his examination of all the different foams, natural and artificial turfs, and soils he and the golf consultants tested at great length.

McKinney, Burke, and Smith all described lessons learned from the project. For Burke, the lead on the project, the learning curve working with such an interdisciplinary team was steep. Solving multiple challenges in a collaborative environment was new. “We worked with many consultant we don’t usually work with and had to learn their language.” Smith said working with some “retrograde engineers” who were part of the original team was a real problem, as they didn’t understand why a design team was coming in to design the stormwater management systems and green roof. He said infrastructural engineers are excellent at what they do, but “public space design is not in their skill set.”

One audience member seemed to wonder why this landscape architecture project was led by an architect, David Burke at Grimshaw, instead of the landscape architect, Ken Smith. Little known fact: under NYC’s design excellence program rules, projects like these can’t be led by a landscape architect. This is one of the only instances where this is the case among design excellence programs. Hopefully, as the central work of Smith on this project demonstrates, interdisciplinary projects can just as easily be led by a landscape architect as an architect. In fact, Burke seemed to say as much when he said it didn’t really matter who was the lead or sub-contractor in this effort, the effort was a deep collaboration between architect and landscape architect. Let’s hope the city starts to understand this, too.

Explore the project in depth.

Image credits: Grimshaw Architects and Ken Smith Workshop

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Parks Are Part of Our Healthcare System

Posted in Active Design, Policy and Regulation, Public Spaces, Urban Design on 08/01/2012 | 9 Comments »

“Parks are a part of our healthcare system,” said Dr. Daphne Miller, a professor of family and community medicine, University of California, San Francisco, at the Greater & Greener: Reimagining Parks for 21st Century Cities, a conference in New York City. She said these green spaces are crucial to solving hypertension, anxiety, depression, diabetes — “the diseases of indoor living.” The more someone spends outdoors, the less likely they are to suffer from mental or physical disorders. But she said parks officials and the medical profession still needs more data to take aim at the many “naysayers on the other side” who don’t believe in what every landscape architect values.

Lucky for all of us, a few scientists are doing innovative research, trying to capture that data. In a separate panel on healthcare and parks, Dr. Deborah Cohen, senior natural scientist at RAND, and Sarah Messiah, a research professor at the University of Miami presented some exciting results.

In a National Institute of Health (NIH)-financed study, Cohen has used “systematic observations” measuring “play in communities” to determine if and how people burn calories in parks (see downloadable app). Every hour 3 or 4 days a week, her team of researchers visited and counted people in target areas. Cohen was particularly interested in “vigorous” physical activity — the healthy kind of activity needed to get hearts pumping. Vigorous activity is defined as brisk walking, jogging, or running.

She said some 50 percent of all vigorous activity occurs in parks. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean all that much for most because “hardly anyone engages in vigorous activity anymore.” For boys, the average is 2 minutes a day, and girls — just 1 minute a day. She found that while parks are the sites of that rare vigorous activity, they are still “underutilized.”

To measure the impact of new parks on the activity levels of people using these facilities, Cohen did a before and after study. She examined the activity levels of residents before three pocket parks came into low-income, high-crime areas in Los Angeles and then after. These are tiny parks (less than half an acre), mainly playgrounds, which aren’t staffed. She found that for two of the new parks, “the parks were better used than the larger parks serving larger areas.” People were “more likely to walk to the smaller neighborhood parks, which were perceived to be safer than the larger neighborhood park.” Walking gets the heart pumping.

Then, Cohen evaluated 12 “fitness zones,” otherwise just known as outdoor exercise equipment areas, installed by the Trust for Public Land (TPL), in Los Angeles. She found that these 12 fitness zones served a possible half a million people. Of the 23,500 people who used the parks, some 2,500 were in the fitness zones. Cohen found 2-4 people using them each hour on average. She said these fitness zones led to “increases in moderate, vigorous activity.” In comparison with neighborhood parks, there was a boost “but not a statistically-significant one.” Fitness zone use increased where they were accessible in higher density areas. Overall, she concluded these systems were “relatively cost-effective.” At $45,000 a piece, with a 15-year lifespan, these systems offer 11 cents per metabolic equivalent of task (MET), referring to the metric for measuring the energy use of physical activities. She said “anything under 50 cents per MET is worth it.”

Next, Cohen looked at the MET value of new facilities costing upwards of $1 million. In one L.A. park, she found that after the major improvements, the actual use of the park fell from 2,000 to 1,500 a day. She said this shows how important park programs are and how parks aren’t effective as calorie burners without them. The loss of people was due to “reduced hours, cut programs, less maintenance, and a shorter baseball season.” In the park, “less was happening so people went less.” She also added that the data told her “improved safety” isn’t a guarantee of improved use.

Looking at 50 parks in a randomized survey, Cohen went on to examine the impact of outreach or programs. One “control group” of parks didn’t receive any money. Another set was given $4,000 to do signage, courses, activities, really anything they want. The “control parks saw user levels fall, while the intervention parks saw increased users.” Each intervention saw an increase of about 174 more users per week, expending 521 more METs. Her conclusion: “There’s lots of competition for leisure time. Parks need to compete. That attention requires a modest investment” (but perhaps not a million dollar one).

Sarah Messiah with the Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami and the Miami-Dade parks and pediatrics department is focusing her research on parks and childhood obesity. She said First Lady Michelle Obama was right: there is a national crisis with childhood obesity, with some 30 percent of American children now obese. She’s now seeing lots of kids with scary adult diseases like fatty liver disease and metabolic syndrome. “This generation could be the first that has a shorter lifespan than their parents.”

Miami-Dade has the third largest park system in the U.S.,with some 260+ parks over nearly 13,000 acres used by 2.5 million and visited by 10 million annually. With the park system as a platform, Messiah and her team wanted to test the effectiveness of after school programs in reaching a set of goals. Applying Fit2Play, a national ”interactive, fun wellness program” locally, the parks officials and researchers wanted to measure success on: (1) increasing physical activity, (2) eating right (nutrition), (3) improving school performance, and (4) building social skills and self esteem. The team also used SPARK after school programs, which offer a 400-page binder of activities, to train staff on activities to do in parks.

After school, kids from “dangerous” low-income neighborhoods were bused in. They spent an hour doing homework and then an hour of SPARK programs in the park for a year. Health and fitness coordinators and interns worked with park staff to obtain certification in fitness and wellness. Looking at Fit2Play outcomes, the researchers then collected a range of data on the 5-13 year olds, entering the actual data at parks. BMI, blood pressure, physical fitness, nutrition knowledge was all collected. The mean age for the study group was 9.3 years old, and there were half boys and girls.

The researchers found that the after-school programs were extremely beneficial. “The kids were growing normally,” said Messiah, instead of ballooning up abnormally. “There were statistically significant decreases in blood pressure,” which is “just important as weight.” Test performance “significantly improved over the year.” Nutrition knowledge improved, too.

Messiah said the key to the program’s success was the partnership between the parks system and university. “This was a team approach with lots of fluid communication both ways.” She realized that parks officials were really busy so the researchers had to “compromise on the time dedicated to measurement and data collection.” These people “can’t be expected to collect data all the time.” She also said it was also important to get parents to buy in and “sign those participation forms.”

Messiah and Cohen’s programs show that parks not only provide a safe place for people (and especially kids) in dangerous neighborhoods but are possibly key to their health and wellbeing. However, park space alone isn’t enough. The park programs are equally as critical. Without these opportunities, Messiah said, kids in these dangerous neighborhoods just sit inside, playing video games, eating junk food, growing into sedentary unhealthy adults disconnected from nature. While the investments needed clearly don’t need to be huge, parks still ”must be competitive in making their pitches in this tough financing environment.”

Image credit: ASLA 2011 Professional General Design Award / Manassas Park Elementary School Landscape, Manassas Park, Virginia. Siteworks, Charlottesville, VA

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Preview: Prospect Park’s Upcoming Lakeside Center

Posted in Active Design, Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces, Urban Design on 07/19/2012 | Leave a Comment »

For many landscape architects, Central Park isn’t Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s masterpiece. It’s Prospect Park, a 585-acre urban park in Brooklyn. Amazingly, Olmsted and Vaux carved a 60-acre lake and created a 90-acre meadow out of a swamp. A forest was planted, making it the only forest existing in Brooklyn today. Given the park receives some 8 million visitors a year, it needs to be continually updated and actively preserved, and all that takes money. In the case of a new project that will restore Olmsted and Vaux’s original vision for a key piece of the park and build out a new esplanade and ice-skating and hockey rink, the Prospect Park Alliance raised some $75 million from the federal, state, and city government, along with board members.

In a tour of the new project at Greater & Greener: Reimagining Parks for 21st Century Cities, a conference, Christian Zimmerman, FASLA, the landscape architect leading the work at the Prospect Park Alliance, said he’s been focused on historic preservation, ecological restoration, and modern design.

Man-made islands had once offered a way to visually wade into the vast 60-acre lake from Olmsted’s main promenade. They had been covered by a huge ice-skating rink plopped right in the middle of one of the most gorgeous vistas around. To undo the damage, Zimmerman’s team removed the crumbling rink and filled in 5 acres of the lake to re-create the original islands (seen above).

Removing the rink, the team found some of the original stone slabs separating the promenade from the lake. Designed by architect Thomas Wisedell (who also created the fountains at Central Park), they were dug out and re-set. New walkways were built with local blue granite.

Given the lack of historical documentation on Olmsted’s planting schemes, a new one was created for the islands and added to the park’s comprehensive planting plan.

Zimmerman’s contemporary addition — an esplanade around the corner from this spot — is respectful of Olmsted’s design. Providing access to the lake, people will use the esplanade to launch kayaks. The granite textures used play well with the setting.

So where will all those ice-skaters now go? According to Prospect Park administrator Emily Llloyd, it will be to a new LEED-Gold Lakeside Center, a few hundred feet over, where a parking lot once was. Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects, the team who recently designed the new Barnes Foundation Museum in Philadelphia, are creating a combined hockey and ice-skating rink, which will be topped in green roofs that in some places will connect to the ground through berms. The idea is for spectators to stroll up the low-incline berms to roof decks where they can look down at the players.

In the summer, the smaller ice-skating rinks will become a water play area. The different jets will resemble those in Millennium Park.

In the same way, the larger hockey rink will also transform in warmer temperatures, becoming a rollerskating derby. Lloyd said they had brought in one of the world’s top rollerskaters to design the best course.

The new esplanade by Zimmerman will open in late 2012, with the rinks coming in late 2013.

Image credits: (1-4) Ryan Donahue, (5-6) Prospect Park Lakeside Center / Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects

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A Yankee Ballpark for the Locals

Posted in Active Design, Historic Preservation, Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization, Water Management on 05/16/2012 | Leave a Comment »

It’s not often that a new work of landscape architecture makes it on to the front page of The New York Times, even if it isn’t described as such. In April, that paper ran a story about the successful conclusion to a major local dispute in the Bronx, which had flared up because of the closing of the many parks surrounding the old Yankee Stadium. When the city decided to build a new ballpark on top of the bones of two old public parks and close nearby parks during the construction process, Bronx residents were rightly irate that their parkland had disappeared. The city finally made amends with an ensemble of eight new or restored parks, designed and built at a cost of more than $190 million. The new 10.8-acre Heritage Field ballpark designed by Stantec and Thomas Balsley Associates, which is found across the street from the new stadium and on the site of the old, demolished one, cost $50 million alone, but it may be the best public ballpark ever if you are a Yankees fan.

The New York Times writes: “Nearly every inch, from the pavement stones underfoot to the three natural grass ball fields, has been elaborately designed to pay homage to the Yankees and their celebrated former home. Even the sod is the same that the Yankees, professional baseball’s biggest spender, chose for their new stadium.” That was intentional. According to Adrian Benepe, the city’s parks commissioner, “We felt an obligation to deliver superb parks to this community in particular because of the disruption they had to endure.”

Thomas Balsley, FASLA, the landscape architect who leads Thomas Balsley Associates, says the new public ballpark was built with ”extensive community input.” The idea was to commemorate the “history and heritage of the stadium in a vibrant space with broad appeal throughout the seasons.” Stantec’s Gary Sorge, FASLA, Practice Leader, Planning and Landscape Architecture, added: “This is sacred ground for the community and baseball fans all over the world.”

Other projects completed by the same team include Mill Pond Park along the Harlem River and Macombs Dam Park (site of the new Heritage Field), which fans out across from the new stadium. These parks bring back what was lost but also totally reconceive these spaces, making them more flexible and accomodating of multiple uses, as well as more sustainable. The cost of these projects were largely out of the hands of the designers — the numbers grew because of the clean-up challenges. According to The New York Times, the timeline was ultimately extended by a year to deal with the poor soils and left-over structures.

Thomas Balsley Associates clearly thinks the wait was worth it though. The Macombs Dam Park, an adaptive reuse of the old space, now offers ”active and passive recreation and fosters social connections and healthy lifestyles. The new park partners with Yankee stadium to bring activity and economic vibrancy to the neighborhood beyond the obvious game days.”

Heritage Field, the community ball fields, which sits where the old Yankee Stadium once stood, now features lots of commemorative design elements that cost a bundle but tie the site to its illustrious sports history. The New York Times writes: “The city splurged for $1.2 million in commemorative touches to enhance Heritage Field, including $450,000 for a 12-ton chunk of the old Yankee Stadium frieze that has been preserved like the Berlin Wall in one corner. Another stadium relic — a 130-foot-high chimney shaped like a baseball bat — cost $120,000 to refurbish, though it no longer serves a purpose other than as a local landmark. Even the old diamond and outfield have been saved, delineated with five-foot-wide swaths of blue polymer fiber stitched into the sod by a Desso Grassmaster machine that had to be shipped over from the Netherlands.”

In a non-scientific survey of local residents by the Times, many locals seemed thrilled with the new site. Oldanny Morillo, 18, who plays second base for the nearby Cardinal Hayes High School baseball team, said: “Usually when we run in the outfield, we have to watch for ditches and bird poop, and there’s none of that. Here it’s like a carpet.”

Now, many want to play in the places where Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle played so many years ago. Apparently, there’s been an explosion in applications from teams who want the “chance to swing a bat on the same site.”

Read the article.

Also, check out another landscape designer who made it into The New York Times. Melissa Potter Ix, ASLA, a principal of SiteWorks, a landscape architecture firm, is now teaching middle school students in Queens how to design the eco-playgrounds the Trust for Public Land is building in five NYC schools.

Image credits: Thomas Balsley Associates and Stantec

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The Edible City

Posted in Active Design, Agriculture, Desertification, Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization, Water Management on 04/30/2012 | 5 Comments »

Watch a new animation from ASLA’s “Designing Our Future: Sustainable Landscapes” online exhibition that shows how to turn a conventional community into an edible city. Learn how to transform unproductive spaces into agricultural landscapes that help fight obesity and reduce food deserts:

According to the United Nations, some one-fourth of all agricultural land is seriously degraded. As a result, people are now turning to untapped urban land. In fact, some 800 million people a year worldwide are practicing urban agriculture. Beyond creating green spaces, urban agriculture may aid those who don’t have secure access to food. In the U.S. alone, some 49 million Americans experience food insecurity and another 23 million live in food deserts where there is little fresh produce or public space. To fight insecurity, many Americans, even those in poorer areas, are taking food production into their own hands: Some 38 percent of households or 41 million people grew vegetables, fruits, or herbs on their property. (Sources: Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations; RUAF Foundation and Feeding America; “Urban Agriculture: Practices to Improve Cities,” Mia Lehrer and Maya Dunne, UrbanLand, Urban Land Institute )

While growing food breaks the law in many U.S. cities, innovators like New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and smaller cities like Madison, Wisconsin, are now changing regulations to accommodate the growing numbers of urban farmers. In those communities, many types of private and public spaces — front and backyards, courtyards in multi-family complexes, abandoned lots, and building rooftops — can now be legally transformed from unproductive spaces into low-cost sources of nutrition. In Washington, D.C and Portland, homeowners can even lease out their yards to local organizations and reap the benefits. In Cleveland and Detroit, abandoned lots owned by the city are leased at almost zero cost to farmers if they promise to grow things on them. In Chicago, the rooftop of one youth center was redesigned as a farm and now produces 1,000 pounds of organic produce each year while teaching urban kids where food comes from. (Sources: Backyard Farmer; DC City Farmer; Rooftop Haven for Urban Agriculture, Designing Our Future: Sustainable Landscapes, ASLA / Gary Comer Youth Center, Chicago, Illinois; and “Keeping Urban Farmers Safe,” The Dirt, ASLA)

Commercial urban farmers are also starting to make money on rooftops. In New York City, the Brooklyn Grange, a 40,000 square foot farm, grew some 15,000 pounds last year. Underutilized spaces can be leased out for around $1 a square foot, creating enough financial incentive for urban farmers to take root. Another great idea being considered: big-box stores could lease out their massive rooftops to farmers, and then purchase the food there to re-sell. However, many landscape architects argue that for these new urban agriculture projects to really work, they need to be knit together into a network. Produce grown in neighborhoods can be distributed via farmers’ markets, shops, coops, food banks, even mobile storefronts. With local networks in place, nearby suburban farms can also participate, finding new markets and creating a more healthy food system in the process. (Sources: “Farm the Rooftops,” The Dirt, ASLA and “Urban Agriculture: Practices to Improve Cities,” Mia Lehrer and Maya Dunne, UrbanLand, Urban Land Institute)

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Playa Vista Overcomes Its Obstacles

Posted in Active Design, Ecosystem Restoration, Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces, Real Estate Development, Residential Design, Smart Growth, Urban Design, Water Management, Wildlife on 04/25/2012 | 2 Comments »

Once mired in litigation and always fraught with controversy, Playa Vista, a 1,000-plus acre wetland, residential community, and commercial development in western Los Angeles, may now be considered a success story. While parts of the 3-mile-long by 1.5-mile-wide site are still in contention, Playa Vista’s combined parklands, residential community, and commercial district certainly offers an improvement on the usual Los Angeles model: sprawl on steroids. Sure, residents still need to drive to this publicly-accessible yet privately maintained community, but once there, cars are hidden in underground parking lots and residents can walk on nice sidewalks, bike, go to cafes, walk their dog, or chill in one of the many parks. Film and multimedia studio employees in the commercial sector can walk to the site’s central park or even hike a trail along the ridgeline. And at a tour of the site during the conference of the American Planning Association, bicyclists were even seen carrying trays of coffee, making their way to studios.

Playa Vista’s innovative master plan was created in the 1990s by OLIN, a leading urban and landscape design firm, and other firms. There were a few major segments in the plan: a protected wetland, central park, multiple residential communities, and a commercial area, which houses Howard Hughes’ old aircraft facilities, structures that are mostly protected under California’s historic preservation rules. Then Playa Vista Capital and the Trust for Public Land worked off that plan to create an updated master plan that sets aside some 70 percent of the land as open space.

Indeed, they may have had to set aside a big chunk as protected nature. A major share of the site is one of the last remaining wetlands in California and lies within the coastal zone. Also, lawsuits in the mid-80s prevented an earlier development team from damaging the Ballona wetlands so Playa Vista Capital decided to hand this piece over to the state. Preserving this area was a great thing though: the wetlands are lush, but could be further improved if the state moves forward with a major restoration project that will take out the narrow concrete lining parts of the river in favor of a meandering natural system. That’s still being debated between a number of local organizations and the state.

There’s some forward-thinking green infrastructure systems here that connects the development to the greater ecological system of the area. A 51-acre riparian corridor and reconstructed marsh (see image above) was designed by Friends of the Ballona Wetland, Psomas & Associates, landscape architecture firm Collaborative West, and Erik Streaker, a water quality expert, to cleanse and manage the development’s stormwater and connect with the wetlands. Already, the new marsh has brought in 100+ plus birds, including an endangered species. A new central park by the Michael Maltzan Architects and the Office of James Burnett is already in place to welcome the second residential segment, the new ”Village,” now underway (moving forward only after more lawsuits were finally settled after they went to the State Supreme Court). Maltzan’s park provides a sustainable, multi-functional public space bridging the residential and commercial sides, which is also now under development.

First conceived as a New Urbanist community, given its tight density, multi-family housing complexes, and use of street grids, the first residential community diverges from that rigid model in a few key ways. There’s lots of affordable housing units. Diverse parks and street landscapes play a central role in making the community, a two-square mile development, seem a bit less like the creepy community in the Truman Show. According to Mark Huffman, Playa Vista Capital, the landscape architecture was central to making Playa Vista work so well. There are 17 acres of “active parks” and another 12 acres of “passive recreation” set within distinct park districts, with a “concert” park, “fountain” park, and others.

Streets, which have bicycle lanes, each have their own plant-based identities. “We want people to be able to find their own street,” said Huffman. Some of the buildings do look very similar to each other, even though many architects worked on the different buildings within the complex. Huffman added that 50 percent of all plants are native and drought tolerant, but some “did better than others,” with some trees felled by mites.

An innovative homeowners fee finances the upkeep of the landscapes, green infrastructure, and much of the community work. Given some 3,200 residences have been purchased, meaning some 6,000 people are living in these two square miles, the fees must not be onerous. In fact, one of the selling points of the fees may be that they help ensure the community keeps close watch over the initiatives that make this development more environmentally and socially-sound than others in Los Angeles. While the marsh is self-sustaining, said Huffman, fees are needed to cover all the permits and regulatory reporting and control the cattails in the marsh and corridor. The cattails, which are the heart of the constructed wetland system that remove pollutants from the water, often grow too wild so they have to be pruned back. Fees also help finance programs for the community, including widening the 4-lane street right out front of the development, and new computer labs for nearby schools.

Throughout, there are other sensitive ways of dealing with water. All the parks are watered with recycled water provided by automated systems. A new wetland ”discovery” park designed by Levin & Associates still isn’t quite open to the public because the groups involved first need to finalize the details on the non-profit that will run the site, but that also promises to educate the public about the critical importance of water and wetlands.

While the development isn’t really the “Live, Work, Play” development it’s sold as — given most of its residents still face a long car ride to their workplaces — the commercial district isn’t too far for those lucky ones that live nearby, perhaps a 10-15 bicycle ride. The commercial side, which is run by The Ratvokich Company, offers very nice reuse of historic buildings. The Hercules Campus is named after the Hercules, the wooden plane Howard Hughes created in World War II and was deemed the “Spruce Goose” by the press. Hercules was built in the old hangers now leased out by Ratkovich to movie studios. (We had to sign a non-disclosure agreement so can’t talk about the new Hollywood movie being produced there).

The beautiful, gargantuan hangers from the 1940s are actually made entirely of wood, like large boats turned upside down. There are molded, glued wood beams that tower 72 feet and provide the frame of the structures. New tenants coming in to use other buildings for “production support” include Google, with its new YouTube channel; social media marketing; and multimedia production studios. In Los Angeles, buildings can be zoned for “production support,” which is different from plain-old office space.

Milan Ratvokich, one of the developers, seemed bemused by what “creative professionals” like in these old buildings – the cavernous loft spaces and the old, authentic materials – but clearly “saw a place with a lot of opportunities.” Designed by a sensitive interior designer, the old spaces, one of which includes an old vault Hughes kept his plane designs in, could be amazing new creative spaces for movie and Web workers.

Ratvokich proves that they are at the cutting-edge of development: They are not only looking at bringing in a new hydrogen-powered fuel cell to serve as a generator for a cluster of buildings, but also working to preserve the 100-year old Sycamore trees that line the old 1940′s Hughes offices.

Image credits: (1) Ballona Marsh / Friends of the Ballona Wetlands. Lisa Fimiani (2) Central Park, Michael Maltzan Architects / Iwan Baan copyright, (3-4) Playa Vista Concert Park and Spyglass Park / Playa Vista Capital, (5) Playa Vista streetscape / Debra Berman and Pat Kandel Real Estate, (6) Ballona Wetland Park / Friends of Ballona Wetland, (7) Howard Hughes’ “Spruce Goose” aircraft hangar, Playa Vista / The Wall Street Journal, (8-10) Buildings at Hercules Campus / The Ratvokich Company.

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The Case for a National Academy of Environmental Design

Posted in Active Design, Landscape Architecture, Policy and Regulation on 04/19/2012 | 2 Comments »

At the national conference of the American Planning Association, Fritz Steiner, FASLA, Dean of the School of Architecture, University of Texas, Austin, and one of the forces behind the Sustainable Sites Initiative (SITES), Dr. Nisha Botchwey, Associate Professor, School of City and Regional Planning, Georgia Tech University, and Michael Monti, Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, made the case for the National Academy of Environmental Design (NAED), a new organization they hope will become the equivalent of the National Academy of Sciences or the National Institute of Health (NIH), but for planners, landscape architects, architects, industrial and interior designers, and construction professionals. Steiner said this wasn’t a crazy idea given the NIH was actually created pretty recently.

A robust NAED would help improve the visibility of the professions that are responsible for the design of our built environment among policymakers in Washington, D.C. The organization could be a boon for academics — membership would be valuable to promotion. A NAED could also raise lots of money from the government and foundations to get new research supporting “evidence-based design” out to the many thousand design professionals worldwide, bolstering the credibility of designers in the process.

Some of the goals of NAED: ”promote the flourishing of individuals, communities, and the natural world” through environmentally-sustainable design; improve cooperation with federal and state governments; and organize cross-disciplinary research around critical environmental, social, and economic challenges like disaster-proofing communities or using the built environment to fight obesity and diabetes (instead of enabling the spread of these epidemics). The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), American Planning Association (APA), and American Institute of Architects (AIA) each have two members in the new governing steering committee, and a research committee is now being led by MIT planning professor James Wescoat, Jr.

Steiner said a whole host of symposia has already been held, with more in the works. One on the potential for “water wars” in Florida in the near future held at the University of Florida looked at how design professionals can influence public water consumption, design communities resilient to changes in water availability, and also create systems that meet the “aesthetics” communities want. Others focused on SITES and “disaster resilient design.” The goal of these events are to match design professionals with experts from other fields, including public health specialists, while drawing in key government agencies. Monti said: “these symposia include lots of charrettes, co-creation. They help in the translation between the professions.”

One exciting research project of the still-forming NAED was a research symposium on green design and public health. Botchwey said “changing behavior alone is not enough to combat childhood obesity. Environmental factors influence when, where, and how much people eat and drink and how physically active they are.” A pretty powerful statement. She added that school facilities are one of the most critical platforms for creating healthier lifestyles, given some 25 percent of the U.S. population is now in school.

Their day-long event, which was co-developed with the U.S. Green Building Council’s Center for Green Schools as well as the National Collaborative on Childhood Obesity Research (NCCOR), examined all scales — from the neighborhood to the building to the actual school yard and grounds, right down to the cafeteria — to see how schools could become healthier places, physically.

“Translation” seems to be the critical piece. For example, public health researchers and landscape architects, who could do so much exciting research together to determine which kinds of designs are most effective at improving health, don’t speak the same language or use the same methodologies or tools. Translation is always needed.

One way to collaborate would be to develop ”place-based research reflecting what’s happening, and who’s involved in it,” said Monti. These case studies can then lead to evidence, which would help bolster ”evidence-based practice” among more designers. Botchwey added that design professionals may actually need to become multi-lingual, too, speaking the language of public health researchers and others to be heard.

Image credit: ASLA 2011 General Design Honor Award. City of Greensburg Main Street Streetscape, Greensburg, KS / BNIM and Farad Assassi

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