Ecosystem Restoration

Archive for the ‘Ecosystem Restoration’ Category

Frederick Law Olmsted Is Holding Us Back (There. I Said It.)

Posted in Climate Change, Ecosystem Restoration, Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces, Urban Design on 02/06/2012 | 25 Comments »

This article is reprinted from the February issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine. I don’t mean to say that dear old Olmsted, our cherished hero, our symbolic leader, has been acting like an overbearing parent. Our problem with Frederick Sr. is something that we as landscape architects keep bringing on ourselves by clinging to him too [...]

Read Full Post »

What’s Happening to Orange County Great Park’s Master Plan?

Posted in Ecosystem Restoration, Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces, Wildlife on 01/06/2012 | 1 Comment »

Is Orange Country Great Park’s master plan becoming irrelevant or simply evolving in the face of new economic and political realities? According to The Orange County Register, the master plan for the nearly 1,500-acre park, which was created by Ken Smith Workshop West along with Mia Lehrer + Associates, is being dramatically altered, raising questions as to whether [...]

Read Full Post »

E.P.A. Offers $1.8 million in Urban Green Infrastructure Grants

Posted in Ecosystem Restoration, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization, Water Management on 12/21/2011 | Leave a Comment »

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.) is offering up to $1.8 million in new grants for urban green infrastructure projects that both improve water quality and support community revitalization. Projects that support the restoration of canals, rivers, lakes, wetlands, aquifers, estuaries, bays and oceans qualify. The E.P.A. argues that improving urban water quality is central to sustainable urban development. “Many urban waterways have been [...]

Read Full Post »

Interview with Emma Marris, Author of Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World

Posted in Climate Change, Ecosystem Restoration, Landscape Architecture, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization, Wildlife on 12/14/2011 | 13 Comments »

Emma Marris is author of Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World and has also written for Nature. Read her op-ed on the Anthropocene in The New York Times. In your new book, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Nature World, you argue that “we are already running the whole Earth, whether we admit or [...]

Read Full Post »

Interview with Elizabeth Mossop on How Landscape Architects Can Protect New Orleans

Posted in Ecosystem Restoration, Environment, Landscape Architecture, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization, Water Management, Wildlife on 12/07/2011 | 1 Comment »

Elizabeth Mossop, ASLA, is professor of landscape architecture and former director of the Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture at Louisiana State University. Mossop is also a principal at Spackman, Mossop + Michaels, which has won numerous ASLA professional analysis and planning awards. Since becoming the director of the School of Landscape Architecture at Louisiana State [...]

Read Full Post »

City Landscapes, Urban Habitat

Posted in Ecosystem Restoration, Ecosystem Services, Technology, Urban Revitalization, Waste, Water Management on 11/30/2011 | 1 Comment »

The landfill of Kearny, New Jersey, is the site of Steven Handel’s early work restoring urban habitat. It is constructed on top of a wetland. The fill material specified for landfill cover make poor soils, and the railroads, interstates, and cloverleaf interchanges work as barriers to dispersal. His work began with a question: “What can a [...]

Read Full Post »

Rethinking Urban Renewal

Posted in Ecosystem Restoration, Historic Preservation, Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization, Water Management on 11/23/2011 | Leave a Comment »

Landscape architects were implicated in misguided urban renewal schemes, said Thaisa Way, PhD, ASLA, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, University of Washington at The Second Wave of Modernism II: Landscape Complexity and Transformation, a day-long conference organized by the Cultural Landscape Foundation at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. Before Jane Jacobs [...]

Read Full Post »

Dunham-Jones: “Underperforming Space Is an Opportunity to Retrofit”

Posted in Ecosystem Restoration, Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces, Smart Growth, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization, Water Management, Wildlife on 11/21/2011 | Leave a Comment »

On day two of The Atlantic Magazine’s Green Intelligence forum, Ellen Dunham-Jones, Professor at Georgia Tech and co-author of Retrofitting Suburbia: Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs, talked about how some of the detritus of suburbia—the vacant big box stores, crumbling parking lots, dying strip malls—can be re-purposed. Today, a third of enclosed shopping malls are dead [...]

Read Full Post »

Gateway: Visions for an Urban National Park

Posted in Ecosystem Restoration, Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization on 11/15/2011 | Leave a Comment »

“In its mixture of opportunity and indeterminacy, the Envisioning Gateway process is emblematic of the current state of landscape architecture and landscape urbanism—full of rich potential and minefields, conceptual and practical, at virtually every turn.” – Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic, The Los Angeles Times The National Park Service (NPS) faces a challenge of identity. If the [...]

Read Full Post »

Re-envision Decommissioned Military Sites

Posted in Ecosystem Restoration, Environment, Landscape Architecture, Opportunities, Public Spaces on 11/09/2011 | Leave a Comment »

Architecture for Humanity has launched [UN] RESTRICTED ACCESS, its 2011 Open Architecture Challenge, which asks landscape architects, architects, and other design professionals to synch up with community groups and develop innovative approaches that reenvision closed, abandoned, or de-commissioned military sites. In fact, designers are required to work with community groups trying to transform these sites of conflict [...]

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »