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In the Wake of Hurricane Sandy, Design a More Resilient Rockaway

Posted in Landscape Architecture, Opportunities, Policy and Regulation, Water Management on 05/09/2013 | Leave a Comment »

Rockaway, Queens, a low-lying area in New York City, was hit hard by Hurricane Sandy, so a fascinating new design competition seeks to create a more resilient and sustainable form of development for this vulnerable area, and, really, others like it in New York City and other coastal cities. FAR ROC [For a Resilient Rockaway] is a design competition that will delve into “innovative strategies for the planning, design and construction” of a more resilient place at Arverne East, an 80+ acre site on the Rockaway Peninsula. Their ambitious goal: new best practices for development in waterfront areas.

The conference organizers, which include the NYC Department of Housing and Development, AIA NY, and others, write that finding a new approach will be tricky, given many argue that some flood-prone areas should really be left undeveloped. “Costly damage to buildings, roads, and utility systems by the storm raises the controversial question of whether areas of particular geographic vulnerability should be rebuilt, maintained and defended, or simply abandoned.”

Averne Avenue is located in FEMA Special Flood Hazard Area Zone A section of the Rockaways, a place that “experienced significant storm surge inundation” during the storm. Within the 80+ acre location at Averne East, the jury will be looking for imaginative yet practical designs for a “comprehensive, mixed-use, mixed-income, sustainable and storm-resilient community that will meet the new physical and regulatory challenges of waterfront development while maintaining a balance between innovation and affordability. Proposed solutions should promote new housing, employment, and recreational opportunities for area residents and visitors from throughout the region.”

To be specific, landscape architects and other design professionals proposing new design solutions will need to work with 1,500 units of housing, with a mix of low to mid-rise buildings; up to 500,000 square feet of commercial / recreational space; a 35 acre nature preserve; a 9 acre dune preserve; and 3.3 acres minimum of active and/or passive open space.

They add: “The project must incorporate all new infrastructure [roadways, water mains, sanitary and storm sewers, utilities, smart grids, etc.] and both active and passive landscaped open space on the site bordering the Atlantic Ocean waterfront. Proposals should emphasize sustainability and resiliency but present a quality, marketable, and constructable project.”

Once submissions are received, the jury, which includes landscape architect and ecologist Alex Felson, ASLA, will select four finalists. These finalists will each be provided with $30,000 to further flush out their concepts. The winner, who will be announced before the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy, will receive an additional $30,000.

Submit your concepts by June 14.

Another design competition worth exploring: Washington, D.C.’s water utility, DC Water, just launched a $1 million green infrastructure competition to help the District fix its combined sewer overflow (CSO) problems. Green infrastructure projects can include green roofs, rain gardens, rain barrels, and pervious pavements, removing impervious surfaces, and using other natural means to capture and infiltrate rain water. They are targeting the Potomac and Rock Creek drainage areas in D.C.

They write: “This challenge will serve as a model to support DC Water’s proposal to conduct a large-scale, multi-million dollar demonstration project in the Potomac and Rock Creek sewersheds” and also help them “evaluate the feasibility of using green practices, in place of or in conjunction with ‘gray’ engineering solutions.”

Image credit: Rockaway, Queens / FAR ROC

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Wilderness South of Chicago: Beauty Amid Industry

Posted in Ecosystem Restoration, Environment, Water Management, Wildlife on 05/08/2013 | Leave a Comment »

The Calumet region surrounds Chicago and includes Lake Calumet and the Calumet river system. Here, an amazing alliance of nearly 270 organizations, which have banded together under the name Chicago Wilderness, are working towards improving green infrastructure, creating access to nature for children, devising plans for mitigating and adapting to climate change, and preserving and restoring wildlife habitat. In a full-day tour organized for the American Planning Association (APA) conference by The Field Museum, one of Chicago Wilderness’ members and one of the world’s great natural history museums, pockets of nature were uncovered amid the industrial suburbs and bleak, isolated public housing communities far south of Chicago. The tour was led by Mark Bouman, Chicago Field Director; Laurel Ross, Urban Conservation Director; Alaka Wali, curator of North American anthropology; and Doug Stotz, Senior Conservation Ecologist at The Field Museum.

Green Infrastructure in the Burbs

The first stop on the tour was Blue Island, Illinois, a “free standing industrial community” of 25,000 spread over 45 square miles, where city leaders are working with Chicago Wilderness to protect green infrastructure. There, the “stormwater management issue is huge,” said Mary Poulson, community relations director for Blue Island. Currently, the community can’t deal with the issue well, but aims to use “distributed reservoirs and green infrastructure” to handle the problem. To address the broader challenge of water management across the region, the community has joined with 33 other municipalities in the area to create the South Suburban Green Infrastructure Vision.

The town is also working on creating a “more sustainable watershed” around its Midlothian Creek, which runs through part of the community. Part of this effort is to “protect fragmented natural areas.” While they may not be impressive to look at, “they are valuable” from a stormwater management point of view. They are also valuable habitat. Stotz said this place attracts “early bird migrants.”

To make this green infrastructure more accessible to the community, a new bicycle trail will be going in along the creek. In another part of town we saw a boat launch.

Planning efforts were supported by workshops around geography and green infrastructure, which led to a map down to the parcel level. One result is that residential areas are now included in these plans. The city encourages homeowners to install rain barrels. To date, more than 1,000 have been installed and there’s now a waiting list. The city government is pushing for the use of native plants in favor of lawns. Connected with all this green work is an economic development planning process that was started by the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) a few years ago.

Learning about Nature in a Restored Landscape

The Beaubien Woods have been set aside for environmental education purposes, not recreation, but that hasn’t stopped locals from Altgeld Gardens public housing, where President Obama got his start in community organizing, from fishing at the Little Calumet River that runs through the area. At its peak, the housing project had 10,000 people living in more than 2,000 units. Now, there are around 2,500 people in this extremely isolated community. Much of the housing seemed to be falling apart. There seemed to be few shops or services nearby. On top of the isolation and limited opportunities, there are also major odor issues caused by the nearby plants that deal with sewage. “Methane gas is a big problem here,” said Bouman.

The 135-acre Beaubien Woods, which is made up of prairie, woodland and wetland habitats, is part of Cook County’s forest district, which makes up around 11 percent of the total land area. Over the last twenty years, the site has undergone intensive ecological restoration. The site is beautiful. There’s woodlands, a river, and rolling hills in the background. Interestingly, those hills are actually covered garbage dumps, so the woods themselves form the hole in the “toxic donut,” said Bouman.

While the river is so polluted that pamphlets are distributed outlining the dangers of eating fish caught there, Ross said that the river is actually stocked with fish by the Illinois department of natural resources so they are “relatively OK to eat given they aren’t there long.”

Stotz said the site is really rich bird habitat. The area attracts more than 180 bird species, perhaps because there are 209 species of native plants. The local Afro Birders group uses the landscape to teach kids from Altgeld and other communities how to spot different types of birds. The Field Museum along with the Calumet Stewardship Initiative are also doing “place-based kids education” to teach locals about “where they are living and connect them to their landscape.” There are volunteer days organized for removing invasive species and cleaning and restoring the ecosystem. Each June, there’s a “family-friendly free nature festival.” Wali said “African Americans are as concerned about preserving nature as any other group of people, perhaps even more than others.”

Getting out in Front of Climate Change

Chicago has created a climate change action plan, but it’s not for nature, said Stotz, so Chicago Wilderness has done their own plan that addresses the possible impacts to local flora and fauna. They created a “biodiversity recovery plan,” which aims to restore nature in the region to make it more resilient and create a network of green and blue corridors to help species migrate.

The organizations involved have been collecting observations about what has changed. For example, the prairie burn season is now “much, much longer,” said Ross, because it’s gotten warmer. She said this opens up windows of opportunity because “there’s less snow on the ground. Things green up earlier.” Communities don’t burn prairies in the summer anyway because it just adds to the “ozone and particulate matter,” which is already high in hotter months. Prairies, just to explain, are “adapted to fire.” Native Americans burned these ecosystems to drive out wild game during hunting. Now, these landscape need to be periodically burnt to maintain their health. Burning also keeps woody invasive plants out. “These are landscapes by fire.”

The Field Museum and other Chicago Wilderness partners are also looking at “carbon storage in protected areas.” Stotz said there are a variety of projects underway to measure the carbon stored in above-ground trees, but more work is needed to measure the carbon storage value of herbaceous plants as well as carbon in soils.

One goal of the alliance is to engage the local community in climate planning and natural restoration work. Wali said they used an “asset mapping” approach, which is a methodology created by urban planners, to discover “the strength of individuals and their capacities” in the communities involved and create a climate community action toolkit local organizations can themselves use to spur action. In six communities, “we mapped the social strengths, including churches, local gardens, and other networks — the intangibles,” to see how to form bottom-up support networks for biodiversity preservation. This approach is needed because “we have to take an integrated view of nature.”

While the communities that will support these natural areas all depend on industrial work for their livelihoods, the process also showed “these people care about nature.” Their asset mapping work has shown the group that “there are interesting local environmental practices.” People are “actively recycling” even though there are no formal recycling programs. “Junkeros, local recyclers in the latino community, tap their kinship networks to recycle materials.”

Now, the toolkit, which was actually financed with a $100,000 grant by Boeing, is being used by local organizations to tap their networks.

Restoring Nature to Health

Perhaps saving the best for last, the Field Museum scientists then took us to the Powderhorn Prairie Nature Preserve, a deeply rich landscape where prairie, woodland, and oak savannah ecosystems meet. Just a few miles from skyscraper-sized oil refineries owned by BP, there are undulating dunes and swales create a set of “niche habitats.” Bouman said this is the “most biodiverse site in Chicago.”

A recent Bioblitz, an intensive biological survey that involves counting as many species as possible in a 24 hour period, yielded more than 250 species. “This is a rich edge area,” said Stotz. A volunteer program helped bring the area back.

Invasive plants and shrubs were crowding out the rare native species, including Illinois’ only native cactus.

Ross said there was an intensive “reseeding process” to restore the fragile prairie grasses. Then, they were set on fire to remove the invasive plants.

The hydrology of the site was also restored, undoing the damage from nearby drainage projects.

The ecological restoration brought up many questions, said Ross. “Can the damage be undone? What should we restore to?” She said ecological restoration is “creative, challenging work. No one size fits all. You have to know the local areas intimately.”

Stotz said the effort was important. “These are just little patches, but there are worthwhile things here. That’s why I do this.” Nature is amazingly resilient but sometimes just needs a hand.

Image credits: Jared Green / ASLA

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In the Pacific Northwest, Native American Communities Plan for Climate Change

Posted in Climate Change, Sustainable Design, Water Management on 05/06/2013 | 1 Comment »

While we’ve heard a lot about the transformational climate change adaptation plans of New York City, Boston, and San Francisco, and other big coastal cities, small coastal communities are also creating bold plans for how to handle tidal surges, rising sea levels, and temperature changes. If they are smart, they are also figuring out what sustainable development opportunities can arise out of their adaptation efforts, too. At the American Planning Association (APA) conference in Chicago, Edwin Knight, Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, Camano Island, Washington; and Sean Keithly and Steve Moddemeyer, both at Collinswoerman, discussed how the Swinomish Tribe on Camano Island, a small Native American community on the Puget Sound, has taken up the twin challenges of climate change adaptation planning and sustainable development.

Knight said an examination of 650,000 years of Antartic ice data shows that “carbon dioxide emissions are going off the chart. We are currently exceeding our worst-case scenarios.” Temperatures are expected to become hotter than anything for the past 100,000 years. In this century, we can expect a 3-8 degree Fahrenheit rise in temperatures. Rising tides are also expected. In the Seattle area, they are planning for a 3-feet rise this century.

According to Knight, “changes are going to happen regardless of how much we cut carbon dioxide emissions now.” Those changes vary locally. Depending on where a community is, they could face “floods, cold snaps, heat waves, or droughts.” The big worry is that “change could come faster than we think.”

Knight said the primary fear in the Camano Island Swinomish Tribal community is “a tidal surge on top of a high tide,” which would utterly overwhelm the town’s dikes. Currently, the storm surge barriers are about 5 feet above sea level. With a tidal surge, waters could easily rise 8 feet. But even by increasing the height of the dikes, “how long can we expect protection?” Building, say, a 12-foot dike is also not a viable solution because it would be prohibitively expensive.

For a small community with limited resources like Camano Island, the challenge then becomes how to do sustainable development in the face of climate change. “There are many disciplines involved. There are complex issues in changing circumstances. Funding sources are hard to tap. There are long time frames.”

Camano Island is a rural coastal community of about 3,000. They have forested uplands, agricultural lands, and lots of residential areas, but the hub of economic activity is around the coasts, which are increasingly under threat. A few years ago, a storm surge that breached their dike system wrecked havoc. To protect against the next surge, the community secured about $400,000 in funds to conduct a climate change adaptation plan. Some 80 percent of the funds came from the federal government while 20 percent came from the tribe.

During the first year, the tribe focused on conducting an “impact assessment, scoping the strategy.” The analysis included a review of “climate data,” creating an inventory of “vulnerabilities,” which yielded a “risk zone map.” The second year focused on creating a set of recommendations and an action plan for the whole community. The plan had to account for immediate and long-term threats, sustainable development, regional access (including plans for what would happen if connections to the mainland were severed), and long-term levee maintenance.

Keithly at Collinswoerman said his team used a “values-based approach” to create the long-term development plan for the island. “Cultural values underscored everything.” The plan presents “site development opportunities” along with a master plan for future development. The team looked at residential areas along with relatively underused agriculture areas. The waterfront was a key focus area. The island is also set up for recreation so they looked at possible impacts on their key sources of tourism dollars: kayaking, wetland walks, and other eco-tourism. Beyond the natural landscape, the planning team looked at all the buildings and how to make them more resilient.

An original plan included “transition zones,” a new concept that would move coastal buildings from the land to the water through the use of pylons or even floating structures. “This is pro-active sea level rise adaptation.” Development would now be “water based, sustainable over time.” There were ideas for a floating hotel or eco-lodge as a centerpiece. Unfortunately, while the Corps of Engineers gives “some considerations for sea level rise,” water-dependent buildings still can’t be done “under current regulations.” Keithly said “a marina is OK, but proactive adaptation isn’t.” The “regulatory norms are unfortunately pretty impractical.”

So an updated plan was crafted for a mixed-use waterfront with multiple quadrants, organized based on how far they were from the water. Old sites would be raised with soils, while a new mixed-use development would also be elevated. “There will be large flex office space to bring in new commercial tenants.” Hopefully, the floating building plans will eventually be approved, too, but in the interim, a planned eco-lodge and cabins will be designed with the highest sustainable building standards.

Moddemeyer at Collinswoerman said the end goal of the planning effort was to really bring out what the Swinomish already know. They have been living off the land sustainably for thousands of years. They have gone through many cycles of “exploiting and conserving their resources,” and historically planned for “change instead of continuity.”

Their smart plan reflects this understanding of nature’s cycles, and now goes beyond climate change: it’s a tool for dealing with all sorts of variability. Improving the resiliency of the community and built environment is viewed as the primary way to deal with all this. “We need semi-autonomous systems that nest in broader systems. We need networked but independent nodes.”

Explore the Swinomish climate plan.

Image credit: Swinomish Canoe Journey / Mary Evitt. LA Conner News Weekly

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Kim Mathews’ Cinderella Stories

Posted in Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces, Smart Growth, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization, Water Management on 05/06/2013 | Leave a Comment »

In a lecture at the National Building Museum (NBM), Kim Mathews, RLA, ASLA, a founding principal of Mathews Nielsen, discussed resiliency and renewal through her firm’s “Cinderella projects.” The lecture was hosted in celebration of National Landscape Architecture Month (NLAM) and as part of NBM’s Smart Growth lecture series.

“Many of our projects are, in fact, true Cinderella stories,” Mathews explained. “They are stories of perseverance, adaptation, and sometimes just plain good luck. They are landscapes that have been working all their life, often forgotten or out of view of the general public, but given the opportunity to be re-imagined.”

The presentation featured five Cinderella stories, all located in New York City riverfronts, and focus on the physical connections to the community. Here are three of the five projects:

Hunts Point Landing

Hunts Point Landing is one of twenty projects in New York City’s South Bronx Greenway master plan initiative. Mathews Nielsen is leading this major, multi-year planning and design effort. The master plan provides practical strategies for greening the Bronx, environmentally and financially. Hunts Points Landing provides new connections to the river for community residents as well as a host of waterfront activities.

Once a fully paved industrial site overlooking the river, Hunts Point Landing was transformed and now offers panoramic views (see image above). “The circulation and topography within the site were calibrated to ensure that a visitor sees the water and is led to the shoreline upon entering the park,” Mathews exlpained.

Leading to the river, the site transitions smoothly between urban and natural environments. At one end of the park, the Hunts Point extension connects to the greenway. There are sidewalks to enter into the park, the fish market, and some parking. The pathway into the park smoothly becomes more densely populated with trees, grasses, and other native plants, leading into the restored shoreline with natural wetland and tidal pools.

Weehawken Waterfront Park

Located just north of the Lincoln Tunnel in Hudson County, New Jersey, this 12-acre park is the new public centerpiece of the Weehawken restored riverfront. Previously, this area was rail yard and industrial park, a gray, desolate piece of the public esplanade around the river.

The township wanted the park to become a living environment that enables active recreation by visitors. It’s a challenge to identify locations for large play fields within waterfront settings, but Mathews explained that “through careful design, we were able to locate the large fields along the water’s edge, while keeping the sweeping views to the river.”

The fields and courts are now embedded within the landscape. Additionally, the park features a rolling terrain with high points, sloping lawns, wildflower meadows, and grassy berms. For many who live in the area, this is the only available place for play.

Shoelace Park Master Plan

In Shoelace Park, the natural line of the river was straightened due to a now inactive roadway, leaving the Bronx River more susceptible to flooding. Also, nearly 40 percent of the park flows through a 100-year flood plain. In this new master plan, the Bronx River, with both soft and armored edges, will now meander through a revitalized Shoelace Park.

Through a public design workshop, the firm and the Bronx River Alliance were able to identify what features were necessary to turn this park into a community landmark. The features desired by the community would then be combined with water management systems. Key components would include a play area, vegetated swales, and a large, 17-foot promenade with a shared pedestrian lane and two bike and skating lanes.

These case studies show how to renew communities with sustainable strategies. “These are urban edges that have come a bit unraveled, but through smart design and perseverance, they have been stitched back together.”

Listen to the full recording and see more images from Mathews’ presentation.

This guest post is by Phil Stamper, ASLA Public Relations and Communications Coordinator

Image credits: (1) Hunts Point Landing / Mathews Nielsen, (2) Weehawken Waterfront Park / Mathews Nielsen, (3) Shoelace Park / Mathews Nielsen

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Interview with Kevin Shanley on Protecting Our Coasts

Posted in Climate Change, Environment, Landscape Architecture, Policy and Regulation, Water Management on 05/01/2013 | 2 Comments »

Kevin Shanley, FASLA, is CEO of SWA Group and a long-time resident of Houston.

You were recently in Washington, D.C. speaking at the Renewable Natural Resources Foundation on improving the resiliency of our coasts in an effort to protect them from increasingly damaging storms and sea-level rise brought on by climate change. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, this is an issue on the minds of just about everybody who lives on the coast. What were the lessons of this disaster?

There are several lessons. There are real-world lessons and then “should-be” lessons. The real-world lesson is that everybody is at risk. These storms don’t just happen to Florida or Bangladesh. They can hit New York City. The storm could have hit Washington, D.C., with disastrous results. We’re not ready.

The other lesson we need to learn is quite important: we forget really quickly. Katrina happened, now eight years ago. Some structural changes were made to the levee system, but all of the really great plans to re-build New Orleans as a more sustainable community, a better community, a more integrated community came to nothing. In Houston in 2008, Hurricane Ike was a near miss. The SSPEED Center at Rice University is involved with this and has been working to make sure we don’t forget what happened with Ike. If Ike had come in, it would have been a disaster ten-fold Katrina. It didn’t, so we were lucky. It swerved about sixty miles to the east and it literally wiped the Bolivar Peninsula clean, virtually every structure on the peninsula was gone. It went up Chambers County, an agricultural community, and created huge damage, but relatively light because there’s nobody there, which is a lesson to learn.

The challenge after Sandy is to ask ourselves what’s the next thing that’s going to distract everybody? In 2001, Houston was hit not with a hurricane but with a really amazing tropical storm called Allison. It dumped thirty inches of rain in twenty-four hours. It flooded seventy-five thousand homes and ninety five thousand cars. It was an amazing flood. It actually tracked all the way up to Canada. Post-Allison, many good things started to happen and a number actually did happen. There were bigger policy changes and changes that many of us were working on, but then in September 2001, guess what happened? The national attention, the local attention, everybody’s attention totally changed and a lot of policy-changing momentum was lost.

So will there be a diversion from Sandy? Yes. North Korea is percolating, and, now we’re focused on whether or not something terrible will happen there?” As is the case with media and big events, each successive one diverts energy and intellectual focus from the present problem—in this case, Hurricane Sandy. Sandy will be forgotten in the national attention, and unfortunately at the local level, attention might diminish as well. While there will be some good policy people working at it, and the number of people personally affected won’t forget, our national focus on Sandy will fade. In some respects, the recovery is amazing. The human species is amazingly resilient. The Bolivar Peninsula was wiped clean. Today, you wouldn’t know it. People have rebuilt right there in exactly the same place. It’s phenomenal. The key is finding a way to rebuild strategically and learn lessons from these disasters to shape our future plans. We also need to find a way to take a long-term view on many of these problems.

The New York Times reported that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo wants to spend $400 million to buy up homes in New York City, demolish them, and then preserve the flood-prone land as undeveloped coastline. The idea is to spend some big bucks to turn some coastal areas into wetland or parkland. Does this approach make sense? Can this model be realistically scaled-up elsewhere in the U.S.? What are the alternatives?

It’s a potentially very powerful tool. Speaking globally, the British and Dutch have been at it for decades. It’s called “managed retreat.” It’s about getting out of harm’s way. FEMA has been funding buyouts like that for a while now. It’s a really good program to remove the most at-risk structures, particularly federally-insured structures that time after time are repeat sinks for federal flood insurance claims.

What needs to be thought about, however, if you’re talking about scaling it up, is how to replace the economic value of the development that’s being removed from harm’s way. It’s about the loss of tax revenue. There are sales taxes based on the occupants, all kinds of revenue to the community. This revenue pays for schools, sewer systems, security, and all of the other things that we take for granted in government. Coastal real estate is expensive because it’s attractive. If you take that out of the equation, you’ve got to be ready to think how to replace that. That’s the challenge facing all of us. Great ecological strategies need to be considered economically, and vice versa.

New York City seems to be seriously considering using “soft” green infrastructure instead of “hard” infrastructure, like hugely expensive seawalls, to protect against another disaster. In a recent Metropolis magazine piece, Susannah Drake, ASLA, ASLA NY Chapter president, described soft infrastructure as “transforming the waterfront from a definitive boundary into a subtly graded band.” The Dutch are already moving ahead with this kind of infrastructure, having seen the ecological damage caused by hard infrastructure. Will American policymakers ever buy into this?

Soft green infrastructure along coastal fringe areas can play a really important role in restoring ecological functions to our coastlines. Our coastlines have been severely degraded from an ecological performance standpoint. Green infrastructure as protection for urban areas needs really serious science and engineering studies to figure out the effectiveness of the interventions across different scenarios. Just how effective is a coastal marsh of several hundred yards wide? We’re not talking about miles wide. We’re talking probably several hundred yards or hundreds of feet. What is the benefit to, say, Manhattan? How does that compare to other strategies? Can we take a blended approach to soften our edges and create redundant and resilient strategies?

I’ve seen some beautiful renderings of the edge of Manhattan as it could be. There would be dramatic changes in ecological performance and a transformation in public perception about the city as a green place. There are a lot of wonderful aspects to this. But from a surge and hurricane risk-protection standpoint, we need to be careful not to set up false expectations. To what extent do coastal marshes protect us when a surge comes in that is 15 or 20 feet above those marshes? The green infrastructure could impede the wave action and the movement of the water or even exacerbate the run-up of a surge in shallow waters. The Gulf Coast of the North American continent has a long, shallow coastal run-up, which tends to exacerbate wind-driven surge.

We need to ask specific questions about where the benefits are. We need to ask our scientists, engineers, policymakers, and economists if we are looking at increased sea-level rise rates that are projected to be about a meter every 100 years (three feet every 100 years). Also, rising water levels drown coastal marshes. That’s what has happened in the Galveston Bay complex. Because of subsidence caused by groundwater withdrawal, we lost square miles of emergent coastal marsh. The bottom dropped out and it drowned the marshes. How does this progression work? One can say, “Well, the marsh will just march inland.” Well, will it? Does the actual geography allow it to just march inward? Will there be a period where there’s nothing and then it has to get above a small bluff elevation? Those are important questions to ask if we’re talking about putting really significant resources into this green infrastructure approach to improving coastal resiliency.

Respected scientists argue that sea levels could rise four feet by 2100. If any of the recent hurricanes to hit the U.S. had occurred at higher sea levels, the damages would have been that much more extensive and costly to repair. What are you hearing about seal level rise? How does this change the timeline for action on improving coastal resiliency?

Sea level rise is like watching the hour hand move. We are like grammar school students: the hour hand doesn’t seem to move during class. Our time horizons are measured in just a few years at best. If we’re forward-thinking, we might think out 10 years. The meaningful impacts of sea level rise, the really serious impacts are happening right now, but this is a process that’s been going on for thousands of years, millennia, actually millions of years.

Are anthropomorphic forces going to increase the rate of change? It’s a really good question and there are certainly many scientists who think that the burning of all this fossil fuel is increasing carbon dioxide, which is increasing the temperature of the globe, which is melting the icecap and raising sea levels. Will public policymakers be able to think out beyond a year or even 10 years to 100-year thresholds? The dialogue is there, but I don’t see it coming down to meet real public policy changes yet.

There are outliers in the predictive scientific community who suggest the possibility that if the Greenland icecap, which is the big gorilla in the room, increased its rate of melt or disintegrated due to some threshold that we’re not sure about, sea levels could rise very rapidly within an individual’s lifetime. It could be a disaster. Would we be prepared for that? Absolutely not. As somebody who thinks about public policy, I think we should be running scenarios. We are uncertain as to the disposition of our climate and sea levels. When you’re not sure of something you should be thinking about different scenarios. You should be thinking “Well, what if it’s only three feet in 100 years? What do I need to do? But what if it’s six feet? What if it’s 10 meters, 30 feet, in 100 years? What should I do?” This dialogue should be occurring so that if the natural world presents us with an existential challenge at least some part of the community has been grappling with it and may have some appropriate paths to take.

You’ve been a long-time advocate for using natural systems to deal with water. In a recent article in The Huffington Post you write that Houston and other cities along the Galveston Bay rely on “antiquated storm-protection techniques and land practices doomed to repeated failures.” What’s needed are “policy shifts rooted in a natural systems-approach that work with nature’s tremendous forces.” What’s holding back these policy shifts? Where are the biggest obstacles at the federal and local levels?

The biggest obstacle is the lack of public awareness. FEMA creates flood-risk maps or flood insurance rate maps. In the coastal areas of North America they are woefully inadequate. FEMA realizes that and they’re in the process of updating them. In our region we haven’t seen the updates. We’re waiting with bated breath. We’re not sure we’ll entirely agree with their characterization of risk. Large swaths of the community rely on this public information to advise them about the level of risk. They look at the maps and say “I’m not at risk,” whereas actual surge models being prepared show huge areas are at risk. So, first there has to be clear science that determines what defines the level of risk.

Second, there needs to be clear communication about the risks. That can be through things like flood insurance rate maps, but it also needs to be through public education and policy. There needs to be clear disclosure on every real estate transaction. There was an effort in the Clear Lake City area, which is in the Houston metro region where NASA’s Johnson Space Center is located. They actually put up signs, little colored pylons, that indicated “This is the water level for a category four storm. This is the water level for a category five storm.” These little pylons were 10 feet tall and very clear. You see it there and you would wonder, “Gee, should I buy a house here?” or certainly “Gee, should I make sure I renew my flood insurance?” A local politician, at the behest of the real estate community, insisted they be taken down.

Beyond research you’ve also made these natural systems work in real-world landscapes. The Buffalo Bayou Promenade in Houston really set the example for how to turn a trash-soaked eyesore into a beautiful piece of parkland that also supports flood control. Houston seems to really understand the value of this kind of multi-use infrastructure. What led to the changes in Houston’s approach to its waterways and green space?

Houston is just beginning to learn the value of its waterfront real estate and for Houston it’s the value of our rivers and streams (we call them bayous).

A lot of cities around the country are actually way ahead of Houston in having recognized that value, whether it’s a coastal waterfront or a river waterfront. In Houston, the new riverfront has been the result of years of work by lots of individuals, non-profit organizations, and government agencies. Each main bayou in the city has its own citizen advocacy organizations. Some of them are fairly significant and have permanent staff, whereas others are purely volunteer citizen groups. There have been willing ears in the public agencies. More recently, there has been support at an elected official-level, including a very supportive mayor right now. That’s very encouraging. But we have a long ways to go. We’re just starting on this effort. We have 2,000 miles of open stream channels in Harris County alone, so we’re just beginning.

You’ve done a lot of work in China. What is your impression about how they are approaching coastal resiliency? Is there a uniquely Chinese approach to these issues that we can learn from in the West?

The universe of what’s going on in China is amazing. You might think “Ah, Beijing controls everything. They can tell everyone what to do.” Well, it actually doesn’t work like that. The local government officials can have a surprising amount of independence and resistance to federal or provincial policies. There’s that normal political friction that happens between different units of government. Good policies are being generated at the federal level, at the Beijing level; good policies are being generated at provincial levels. Good policies and projects are being implemented at local municipal levels. That’s exciting news.

The country is doing great wetlands restoration projects. Wetland parks are all the rage across China. Kongjian Yu, FASLA, principal at Turenscape and professor at Beijing University, probably has a dozen wetland parks on his desk in his office at any given time. We’re working on a number of them. It puts to shame anything we’re doing here. On the other hand, one has to balance that against the unbelievable rate of urbanization and its impact on the environment in China. It’s maybe only a drop in the bucket toward mitigating the impacts of urbanization that are going on right now.

The good thing is they’re very interested in the topic. The people that we work with, which is a very self-selected group who are willing to pay a foreign consultant to come and advise them, are already interested. I have a biased view… I could paint this rosy picture of China because we go over there and we are talking to people that share our environmental values. But there are many who don’t share those values and that are in business just like in any country anywhere in the world. They’re just trying to add value and sell that value and profit and move on to the next project.

You take the whole climate issue in China. China’s doing some of the most progressive carbon-capture energy production in the world. For a while, they were the largest producer of solar cells. They’re the largest producer of wind generating equipment. There are all these sort of extremes of what they are doing. Yet in the global sense, they’re producing more carbon dioxide than anybody on a more rapid basis. They’re increasing their carbon and energy footprints. They’re still below us on a per-capita basis, but they’re working very hard to catch up to our own huge footprints. So you will find a really mixed bag in China.

What can we learn from China? We ought to be studying what they are doing right and trying to learn from their successes. To the extent they’re interested in partnering so they can learn from us, we ought to be sharing those solutions with them. It’s a wild ride, like a rollercoaster, and one who’s end we can’t see from our vantage point.

Image credits: (1) Kevin Shanley, FASLA / SWA Group, (2) Hurricane Ike damage at the Bolivar Peninsula / Bryan Carlile, Beck Geodetix, (3) Galveston Texas Galveston Island State Park near the gulf of Mexico / Chris Cornwell. Flickr, (4) ASLA 2009 General Design Award of Excellence. Buffalo Bayou Promenade. SWA Group / Bill Tatham, (5) Fuyang Waterfront Park / SWA Group

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ASLA Event: Learn about Green Infrastructure

Posted in Landscape Architecture, Opportunities, Policy and Regulation, Water Management on 04/26/2013 | Leave a Comment »

To celebrate High Performance Building Week, the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) is hosting a Congressional green roof reception and tour. Policymakers, design professionals, local media, and interested members of the public are encouraged attend.

In a presentation, ASLA CEO / Executive VP Nancy Somerville, Hon. ASLA, will be covering the economic and environmental benefits of green roofs and green infrastructure. Somerville will explain how green infrastructure is a less expensive solution for controlling stormwater runoff, conserves water and improves water quality, reduces the urban heat island effect, lowers building energy use, improves air quality, stores carbon, and creates biohabitat.

The event is part of an annual set of discussions and tours organized by the High-Performance Buildings Caucus Coalition, a private sector group that works with the High-Performance Buildings Caucus of the U.S. Congress to showcase best practices in building and site design. The Congressional Caucus is focused on increasing awareness among policymakers about the “major impact buildings have on our health, safety and welfare and the opportunities to design, construct and operate high-performance buildings.”

When: Thursday, May 16, 2013, 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Where: ASLA Headquarters’ Rooftop, 636 Eye Street, NW, Washington, D.C. 20001

RSVP at governmentaffairs@asla.org by Friday, May 10th.

For questions or more information, please contact Roxanne Blackwell, Director, Federal Goverment Affairs, ASLA, at rblackwell@asla.org or 202-216-2334

This is a widely-attended event so attendance is permissible under both the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate rules.

Image credit: ASLA Green Roof / ASLA

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Green Infrastructure: A Landscape Approach

Posted in Ecosystem Services, Landscape Architecture, Policy and Regulation, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization, Water Management on 04/25/2013 | Leave a Comment »

Green infrastructure is starting to mean different things to different people, said David Rouse, ASLA, a landscape architect and planner at Wallace, Roberts & Todd (WRT) during a session at the American Planning Association (APA) conference in Chicago. Rouse was there with Theresa Schwarz, Kent State Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative; Karen Walz, Strategic Community Solutions; and Ignacio Bunster-Ossa, FASLA, a landscape architect with WRT, who together co-authored a new book published by APA called Green Infrastructure: A Landscape Approach.

There are really two definitions of green infrastructure. One is an inter-connected network of green open spaces that provide a range of ecosystem services — from clean air and water to wildlife habitat and carbon sinks. The other is a more limited one promoted by the E.P.A.: small-scale green systems designed to be urban stormwater management infrastructure. In either definition, green infrastructure is about bringing together “natural and built environments” and using the “landscape as infrastructure,” said Rouse.

Beyond getting the definitions right, Bunster-Ossa said the purpose of the book was to make sure these important concepts weren’t mired in the ugly debates about landscape urbanism, which has become a loaded term for many new urbanists, smart growth advocates, and others promoting increased density. He said “there’s been too much fighting over that, so here’s a way to clearly define the benefits of these systems.”

For Rouse, green infrastructure can improve our health, particularly our mental health, by making places more green and walkable. Think of green spaces and how they are much better to walk through than treeless, concrete environments. Those greener spaces are also safer. As research is proving, greener spaces have less crime, particularly domestic violence. The presence of greenery can also boost children’s education performance as well as the cognitive ability of adults.

Given the multiple benefits of green infrastructure, it should be understood using terms like “multifunctionality, connectivity, habitability, resiliency, and identity,” along with “return on investment.” Rouse said these principles can be applied at green infrastructure projects at all scales.

Here are some lessons from the experts who’ve tried to apply green infrastructure at the landscape scale (these are also case studies in the book):

Put the Green Before Grey

Schwarz said “cities in transition” sounds better than a “shrinking” city, which is what Cleveland is. Cleveland has lost half of its population so it has surplus real estate. Vacancies are everywhere “but not aggregated.” In total, Cleveland has about 20,000 vacant homes over 3,000 acres of land.

So the city has created a new plan to redevelop in strategic places, keeping density in key areas while using cleared areas for green infrastructure to handle stormwater. The city is now demolishing huge chunks of the vacant homes, adding about 120 acres of cleared land every year.

Much of these cleared surfaces can be used for infiltration, but a plan was first needed first target existing watersheds and understand the soils. Schwarz said soil surveys of Cleveland found there many types of soils, but really only the sandiest ones allow for infiltration. Other soils may appear fine but were actually heavily contaminated from industrial use.

In many cases, finding the original watershed was also tricky: So many indigenous waterways were buried underground to make way for some earlier development. Schwarz’s team worked on identifying the “headways” of rivers and culverted streams, seeing them as the best places to bring back vegetation to deal with stormwater. At the neighborhood scale, riparian corridors are planned as well.

While all of this sounds great, the E.P.A. was really forcing Cleveland to do all this work. The aging combined stormwater and sewer system in the city means there are 126 combined sewer overflows (CSOs) into Lake Erie each year, dumping some 4.5 billion gallons of runoff and waste. The E.P.A. is forcing the city to spend $3 billion as part of a “consent decree” to address the issue. While her group is pushing forward with green infrastructure mapping, Schwarz said, unfortunately, much of this money is going towards hard grey infrastructure — “seven really big deep tunnels” — with only some $42 million available for green infrastructure. “This is expected to handle around 44 million gallons of runoff, not much out of 4.5 billion gallons.”

Schwarz said the green infrastructure would have been more effective if “the green was designed first, before the grey.” Still, her group and others are pushing the city to make the best of it and add green infrastructure along the strategic reinvestment zones, the highly-trafficked corridors, making those “sustainable patterns of development” even more attractive. She’s also making sure the city applies a “green infrastructure decision making framework,” so that when land becomes vacant it can quickly be evaluated by the city to determine if it’s best used for redevelopment or green infrastructure.

Look for the Long-term and Large-scale

According to Walz, the North Texas region, which encompasses Dallas and a number of other cities, is the 4th largest metropolitan region in the U.S. The area has a “strong economy” so there’s been rapid population growth. In 2000, the area had 5.3 million. Double that is expected by 2050. Within the region, efforts are underway to let the Trinity River meander through Dallas, taking it out of its levees, and preserve and expand green infrastructure. Broader visions, including Vision North Texas, Trinity River Common Vision, and others, aim to “create regional thinking, but local implementation” on green infrastructure.

To make the local implementation part happen, Walz worked with the local community using “green printing” and integrated stormwater management (ISWM) approaches, a kind of mapping process to gauge what the local values are, where green infrastructure opportunities are, and find the places where the values and opportunities co-join to create “triple bottom line benefits.”

For Walz, the lessons learned were that “landscape shapes development. This is a concept we used to understand.” She said her public process has helped people understand how to “combine a landscape analysis with local residents’ values, so that in the future the landscape can actually shape development patterns.” Through public input, the community could find out which areas it values the most and preserve. She said those watersheds and natural areas that the community deemed to have the highest value were also “the same assets that will them create a more sustainable and distinctive community.”

She added that planning at the regional scale creates more benefits for communities. “Green landscapes, natural systems don’t end at the city limits.” Forming those partnerships that cross city lines helps create the broader regional vision.

To craft that vision, multiple disciplines should be be involved. “While that brings challenges, there are also great rewards.”

Lastly, Walz said “look for the long-term and large-scale” opportunities. (It’s also clear that the lingo or terminology around green infrastructure may get in the way when trying to reach a community. Walz said “these green infrastructure approaches are valuable regardless of what they’re called.”)

Create Local Connections to Green Infrastructure

WRT is working on a massive project in Louisville, Kentucky — the Parklands of Floyd’s Fork. At the edge of the city, four parks, each named for a tributary to the waterway, will protect some 3,700 acres along a prime watershed, helping to create a green edge around a city sprawling out.

Bunster-Ossa said he approached the green infrastructure aspects of the project using the “principle of connectivity.” Also important were creating a real local identity for the green infrastructure systems. While the proposed designs offer lots of ecosystem service benefits (approximately $18 million worth, said Bunster-Ossa), it’s really about creating a place people that people can connect to.

Bunster-Ossa introduced another example WRT worked on with Margie Ruddick, ASLA, this time in a highly urban environment: the new 1.5-acre, $45 million Queens Plaza park, which uses plants while also protecting pedestrians in a dangerous intersection, “making green infrastructure visible.” Sidewalks were dug up to form barriers that prevent pedestrians from jaywalking, while rain gardens provide a respite from the urban jungle. The park is viewed as such a useful amenity that Jet Blue recently put its new headquarters a few blocks away.

Bunster-Ossa said nearby buildings weren’t excluded from discussion about the new park. With green infrastructure, you can “flow from the interior of buildings to parks to wateryways, all the way to the region.” Now there’s landscape-scale thinking.

Read the book.

Image credit: (1) APA Books, (2) Demolishing vacant buildings in East Cleveland / Cuyahoga Land Bank, (3) Vacant land in Cleveland / Urban Current, (4) Trinity River / Trinity River Project, (5-6) Floyd’s Fork / WRT, (7) Queens Plaza / Margie Ruddick, WRT.

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What Is the Most Critical Issue Designers Don’t Even Know Exists?

Posted in Landscape Architecture, Policy and Regulation, Water Management on 04/24/2013 | 1 Comment »

According to the heads of the major built-environment design organizations, the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), the American Institute of Architects (AIA), and the American Planning Association (APA), it’s water. Water is going to become increasingly scarce. It’s particularly a problem in the United States as many of the highest growth areas are in parts of the country that are already stressed with water shortages. Worldwide, countries are struggling with diminishing ground water resources and some are even worried about water wars. Mitchell Silver, the outstanding (and unfortunately outgoing) president of APA, said “water is going to make oil look minor league.” This insight and a slew of others were offered up in a session among the three presidents at the American Planning Association (APA) conference in Chicago. Each talked about the big issues for designers.

ASLA

Up first to speak was Mark Focht, FASLA, upcoming president, who was filling in for Tom Tavella, FASLA, the current president. Focht said ASLA, which was founded in 1899 and now has more than 15,000 members, has always made advocacy on Capitol Hill a priority. The focus of the next few years will be pushing for land and water conservation, community parks, a national complete streets program, more federal support for green infrastructure, and benefits for small businesses. He noted that most landscape architecture firms are small businesses.

ASLA is active in all of these areas, but been especially focused on green infrastructure. Banking on Green, a report ASLA recently co-authored with a set of environment and water organizations, seeks to boost the case for using green infrastructure approaches — green roofs and streets, bioswales, tree pits, and parks — to manage stormwater. Focht said this was near and dear to his heart, too. He is first deputy commissioner of Philadelphia’s Parks and Recreation, and worked on the “first E.P.A.-approved plan for managing stormwater with green infrastructure.” Philadelphia is a true innovator in this approach.

Focht said landscape architects are also focused on protecting licensure. Currently, all 50 states require landscape architects to be licensed to practice but there are some states that are threatening to roll back these licensure requirements with “sunset reviews.” ASLA in D.C. and local chapters are doing state-level advocacy to prevent this.

For many years in a row, the ASLA Board of Trustees has also made public awareness a priority, given that there is still a lack of understanding out there about what landscape architects actually do. So, a public awareness campaign was launched, resulting in more than 600 local events organized by landscape architects. During these events, landscape architects reached out to the public, explaining their value. Focht laughed, adding that this proves that “landscape architects aren’t the shade loving species” many think they are. Additional events will be held this year, along with projects conducted as part of the Year of Public Service. “Right now, 49 chapters have committed to leading and documenting events.”

Lastly, launching the Sustainable Sites Initiative (SITES) rating system, the first rating system for landscapes, is a major focus. ASLA, the U.S. Botanic Garden, and the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center at the University of Texas at Austin are the three key partners behind SITES. In total, some 1,500 comments have been received about the rating system during its public comment phase, with only 50 percent of those coming from landscape architects. Focht said ideas came in from all types of designers, planners, and policymakers, which ultimately makes SITES more usable for more of the world. Now that the pilot testing phase is complete and the first projects are becoming certified, discussions are underway with the Green Building Certification Institute (GBCI) to handle certification of SITES projects from here on.

AIA

Jeffrey Potter, former AIA president, said AIA, which was founded in 1857, has largely bounced back from the recession and now has 80,000 members. Some 55 percent of licensed architects in the U.S. are members. The average age of members is 52, which may increasingly be a problem, he noted. AIA is trying to become the “global institute of architects,” with a growing focus on the big issues facing the world. But there are some who dispute the move in this direction. Potter said a big chunk of the membership is “issues-based and progressive like ASLA and APA members, but another set says ‘your job is to advocate for my business and make me successful.’” Potter said the challenge was to be both “a big tent across the world for all the issues we need to focus on” and an organization that can “maintain a narrow focus” on job growth.

Potter said the architecture practice was in a state of transformation. He said the world is struggling with how to create “place-based knowledge in a digital era.” In the past, “knowledge was linear. You read a book from start to finish. Now, we are in the networked age, with bits of knowledge here and there across the Web.” Potter believes this networked age will be a “great advantage for designers” because they already think and work in a networked manner. In this new world, architects are increasingly focused on “high performance places, public health, and disaster mitigation.”

To spur the growth of high-performance places, AIA has supported the launch of the International Green Construction Code (IGCC). The goal there is to create a “regulatory framework for new and existing buildings, establishing minimum green requirements for buildings and complementing voluntary rating systems.” The idea is to offer up a model code that localities can plug in encourage more rapid growth in green buildings. Beyond IGCC, AIA has also officially signed on to Ed Mazria’s Architecture 2030 initiative, with its AIA 2030. To better use the built environment to improve public health, AIA has started the American Design for Public Health Initiative with Dr. Richard Jackson, the pioneer in this field. Working with M.I.T. and other universities, AIA will ramp up efforts on how to design more healthy communities. To strengthen communities’ capacity to handle disasters, which seem to be happening more frequently, local AIA chapters and regional groups are forging new partnerships with local governments.

APA

With 40,000 members in 90 countries, APA is concerned about global issues like climate change, population growth, urbanization, and suburbanization but also focusing on U.S. communities. In the 21st century, Mitchell Silver, APA president, said, America is “greying and browning and single-family households are rising.” In the U.S., “people are getting older, living longer, increasingly diverse and multicultural, and one in five are disabled.” By 2050, a majority of households will be single people. By 2043, there will be no majority race. All of these demographic changes mean huge changes for the built environment. As such, the market will change and so will demand.

APA, following its code of ethics, is interested in making sure the next wave of communities that spring up to meet this new demand will be “sustaining places,” that “protect public health, safety, and welfare” of the people living there. APA was formed in 1909 to combat the negative public health impacts that came with living in cities. “People were dying because they lived in cities.” New York City was filled with slums not much different from the ones in New Delhi today. “More than 100,000 people lived in one square mile in lower Manhattan.” Back then, water-borne illnesses were the preventable diseases that had to be tackled. But today, Silver said, it’s cancer and heart disease, the diseases that come from eating too much and not getting enough exercise, the diseases of suburbia. Silver said at our current rates, “half of the country will be obese in 20 years.” So APA is increasingly focused on healthy planning.

To improve safety of the built environment, APA wants to ensure “people don’t die from unsafe buildings.” So planners are focused on ensuring building codes protect people. Silver said buildings built before World War II (pre-war) were “basically sound,” but post-war buildings are “lower quality.” In 50 years, then, what will happen to these less-safe buildings, particularly with the rise of extreme weather? This challenge is only compounded by the twin growing threats of climate change and more natural disasters.

The future then is about “comprehensive planning” to ensure communities are more “adaptable and resilient” to changes, whether they are due to population growth, water shortages, economic change, climate shifts, or natural disasters. Unfortunately, not every community agrees this is needed. APA is increasingly fighting “Agenda 21 myths,” and those who believe that planning is a form of UN-driven top-down control. A movement that seems like an off-shoot of the rabid Tea Partiers, the anti-Agenda 21 crowd has actually succeeded in rolling-back planning efforts in some states. One community actually just recently threw out all its building codes. “There are now no architectural standards there.” Silver said “80 percent of the public actually supports planning. The subset of people who oppose it are driven by ideology.”

To combat this “anti-planning backlash,” Silver said APA has to get out front and convince the public about “the value of planning and how its in the public interest.” Silver and APA CEO Paul Farmer both complimented ASLA on its public awareness campaign (Farmer called it “brilliant”), arguing that planners also need to take to the streets to boost awareness of the value of planners.

One audience member asked all three heads of the organizations what they would tell President Obama if they had the chance to sit down and meet with him. Focht said he would “make the case for green infrastructure and clean water. I would tell President Obama that the E.P.A. is doing great work on this but to become even more flexible, broad-minded, and push their boundaries. I would tell him to continue to make those investments.” Potter said unlike designers, realtors and home builders have real “brute force” on Capitol Hill so they can “really push an issue through.” So, “I would focus on the issues, not turf. I think there should be a greater focus on our national infrastructure. Working with engineers, this should be our priority.” For Silver, a meeting with Obama would give him the opportunity to say “the U.S. needs to pay for the true cost of a gallon of gas.” Obama also needs to find a way to “get dollars straight to mayors and bypass the state-level wrangling over dollars.” Mayors “have shovel-ready projects and know how to get things done.”

There was some discussion about how ASLA, AIA, and APA could formalize their alliance and possibly add in engineers to their group, to strengthen their voice on Capitol Hill.

Another audience member said if Obama was smart he’d create a national design review panel with the heads of the design organizations, so that every federal policy and major built-environment project went thorough design review before it went forward. This is actually not a crazy idea: Denmark has just such a system. Focht said, in fact, Philadelphia just set up such a review panel after the city rewrote its comprehensive and zoning plan. Let’s hope this idea gains steam.

Image credit: Water shortages in Western U.S. / University of Texas

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Beatrix Farrand Gets a Fresh Look

Posted in Landscape Architecture, Water Management on 03/11/2013 | 4 Comments »

One conclusion came out loud and clear from a day-long conference on Beatrix Farrand at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.: Farrand was of one the most versatile landscape architects of her age and perhaps any age. A fresh review of her work by leading landscape architecture professors, graduate students, and practitioners unearthed fascinating aspects of this “perfectionist,” who was described as a scientific-minded experimenter, an early proponent of native plants, a leader in “pre-ecological design,” an expert in stormwater management, and a flexible and innovative designer who mastered numerous styles. Farrand, who designed hundreds of landscapes in her multi-decade career before her death in 1959, set the bar high for her successors, both female and male.

According to Thaisa Way, ASLA, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, University of Washington, Farrand, the only women among the 11 founders of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), is an important “transitional figure” in ecological design, occupying a central spot somewhere between the founder of landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Ian McHarg, author of Design with Nature. Way said “ecological practices have always been a part of humans’ approach to the environment” yet some still think that “anything that came before McHarg was ‘unscientific.’” The designs of Farrand and other women landscape architects at the turn of the 20th century weren’t just “focused on aesthetics” but “offered important approaches that experimented with adoption and adaptation to ecological values.”

Ecology and Landscape Architecture

Ecology was becoming a cohesive profession around the same time of landscape architecture so there was lots of cross-pollination between the two fields in the early days. (Though, at times since, landscape architects have seemed at one with ecologists, and at other times, the two fields seemed to have diverged). Some of the early roots of landscape architecture were in gardening, botany, and planting design, which included studies of native plant groups and classification systems. But from the 1930s on, when “modernism and the suburbs reduced the value of native plants in favor of lawns and exotic plants,” a real knowledge of plants and native planting design fell out of favor, being viewed as “feminizing the profession.” Indeed, Way said one of McHarg’s goals with his rational, mechanical, scientific Design with Nature was to “dis-empower the scale of plants” (and the women landscape architects who worked with them), so that ecological design could become a large-scale process that could be applied just about anywhere.

Interestingly, though, those early “pre-ecological designers” weren’t all women. Frederick Law Olmsted was one of the first, who used “naturalistic design” approaches for his Ramble in Central Park, and the Back Bay Fens, which also provided enormous stormwater management benefits to Boston. With the growth of the natural style came the “wild garden movement,” which “grouped plants and saw nature as a source of design.” Gertrude Jekyll, an English landscape designer, said “each country should use its own landscape.” Other women landscape architects in the U.S. also picked up on this concept, with Ellen Biddle Shipman planting her Tregaron with native plants, “creating a distinctly American style focusing on the visual composition of plants.”

Arnold Arboretum was one the first world-class plant science center in the U.S. There, both “the scientific and picturesque aspects of plants” were highlighted. “The design fit the land, not the other way around.” Charles Sargent, the first director of the center, was a leading botanist and later brought on Farrand as an apprentice. His approach was to “present the plant material correctly from a botanist’s point of view, but also to make the living collection pleasurable,” said Way.

This mixing of science and pleasure seemed to be a focus a generation of upper and upper-middle class “Lady Botanists” also took up. By the early 20th century, “half of all botanists in NY were women.” Way discussed a number of leading women botanists, garden designers, and landscape architects of that time, including Marian Cruger Coffin, who designed naturalistic landscapes and wrote books about horticulture. Other early leaders in presenting native plants beautifully in naturalistic designs were Martha Brooks Hutcheson, who sought to “introduce habitats in designed landscapes and expand the reach of native systems,” and Marjorie Sewell Cautley, who created “self-sustaining landscapes” in urban areas, with her Radburn development.

Farrand Applied Ecological Principles

Farrand, then, worked in an era buzzing with ideas about how to use native plants and “design with nature” — even if the terms used weren’t the same as the language in today’s sustainable or ecological design — and was a leader in applying some of these concepts. As Betsy Anderson, landscape historian and MLA candidate, University of Washington, described, Farrand “anticipated the role of science in landscape architecture” by her willingness to partner with scientists and experiment with ecological design principles.

In her early years, Farrand actually managed the riparian system at The Mount, the estate of her aunt, famed author Edith Wharton. There, she “established a high-performance landscape in stages.” She called for leaving leaves and plant waste, arguing that it was “nature’s way to create great soils.” As a consultant to her aunt, Farrand “reforested the landscape” at the Mount over the years, creating a dramatic woodland drive that featured plant ecologies designed to be viewed at different speeds. Farrand “examined ideal climatic and soil conditions for plant communities” and conducted expeditions to learn more. She would use her time there to “create a meticulous understanding of northeast New England ecology, which she would then apply elsewhere.”

At Dumbarton Oaks Park in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., the naturalistic companion to the Italianate gardens of Dumbarton Oaks, she “studied the site from the ground up.” She created dams in spots, forming a new brook, which was used to “make a movement through the landscape” but also “manage stormwater.” There, “stormwater was deployed aesthetically and effectively.” By the new brook, Farrand also extended existing native plant communities so there was simply a continuation of the plant habitat.

Anderson said while McHarg was “seeking certainty in ecological design,” Farrand was “looking for patterns in nature” and emphasizing long-term maintenance. Her approach was scientific, but based in “experiment, not observational methodologies.” While some may dismiss her approach as simply part of that naturalistic style, Way added that “this wasn’t just a visual style, but about using native plants and collections of plants to transfer habitats. Farrand used aesthetics to portray natural processes.” Clearly, sustainability or sustainable design then “wasn’t born in 1981.”

And Designed for People

Patrick Chasse, ASLA, a landscape architect who has worked with landscapes designed by Farrand, told the story of Chiltern Estate in Bar Harbor, Maine. He said Farrand’s family had been coming to the area since she was a child and eventually built an estate there. Maine provided space for young Farrand to go out and learn about native plants. Later in life, after she had spent time at the Arnold Arboretum with Charles Sargent and set up her own practice in New York City, she came back to work on many of the big natural estates, including Edgar Scott’s Chiltern Estate.

There, Farrand managed 100 laborers herself, creating new gradings and plantings. She designed a “naturalistic water garden,” set within an organic shape some 265 feet long. “This was the first great non-formal garden in Bar Harbor,” said Chasse, but perhaps more importantly, it played a central role in the lives of the family who lived there. Plays were enacted in the gardens, creating memories that stayed with the Scott children for their whole lives. The house has been pulled down and the landscape no longer exists, but old plans and plant lists still retain historic value.

Farrand may have also experimented with “kinesthetic” or ”physiological aesthetic” design, creating spaces people love to be in at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. According to Robin Veder, associate professor of humanities and art history / visual culture, Pennsylvania State University, Farrand used a “rhythmic design” approach that was rooted in the ideas she was exposed to by Wharton’s friend Vernon Lee, who wrote Lie of the Land and was an early theorist on kinesthetics.

Kinesthetics is about understanding “bodily experience” that goes beyond the 5 senses (touch, taste, sight, sound, smell). It’s about “motion through 3-D space,” said Veder, the “muscular feel of movement” that unites all senses. While physical environments “don’t determine movement,” they do offer up opportunities for how people interact with spaces. A garden then is an “assembly of affordances” in which bodily movements are choreographed. “It’s the lay of the incurable land.”

Farrand seemed to have understood these theories, so she created “terraced garden rooms,” and choreographed the movement between the terraces through steps, making sure they would be comfortable and create a feeling of safety. There are now four terraces that create a “sequence of experiences,” with a middle section acting as an intermezzo before the busy rose garden. To avoid a “wearisome continuous climb,” Farrand almost obsessively analyzed tread patterns to determine the ideal shape and set of steps and breaks. “The same starting foot was used on ascending or descending,” which, Farrand figured out, meant that sets of steps needed to be all odd or even. Farrand ended up creating a “whole set of rules for stairs” to make sure the garden “paced the walker.”

Given her considerable time spent with Wharton and Vernon Lee around this time, it seems more than plausible that she was influenced by the ideas Lee and others were promoting, said Veder. These concepts were also out there: Early Landscape Architecture Magazine articles from the 1910s and 1920s examined the best proportion for stairs (and actually found that ramps were preferable to stairs). Others examined stairs and found that it was hard to design the universal stair given how the different heights and gaits of people. Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. said that “people perform with their feet,” and if they don’t like the stairs, they will go up the side banks. In 1901, Harvard Graduate School of Design also taught its landscape architecture students about physiological aesthetics. Farrand, with her rhythmic design, may have been an early innovator in this field then, too.

Image credits: (1) Beatrix Farrand / Princeton University, (2) Dumbarton Oaks Park Brook / Dumbarton Oaks Park, (3) Dumbarton Oaks Park Brook / Flickr, (4) Dumbarton Oaks Park stairs / Flickr, (5) Dumbarton Oaks Park stairs / Elin’s Photo Blog.

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Can Cities Adapt and Renew at the Same Time?

Posted in Ecosystem Restoration, Ecosystem Services, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization, Water Management on 02/28/2013 | Leave a Comment »

Can cities with decades, hundreds, or even thousands of years of history adapt to economic, population, and climate change? Can they renew themselves in the process? At the Innovative Metropolis conference organized by the Brookings Institution and Washington University in St. Louis, a few urban experts, Valente Souza, iQh; Alexandros Washburn, urban design chief, City of New York; and Seng Kuan, Sam Fox School, Washington University in St. Louis, explained the legacies that are shaping Mexico City, New York City, and Shanghai, three of the world’s biggest megalopolises, and the approaches they are taking to adapt, with varying degrees of success.

All cities have deep geographic, hydrologic, geological contexts, said Souza. Mexico City, set within a volcanic range, is seen by geologists as sitting upon a “great bowl of jello,” meaning it’s seismically insecure. Early settlers in Mexico City thousands of years ago knew the city’s terrain and natural characteristics, but modern Mexico City residents have forgotten them. “We have forgotten the memory of the space. The drawing has faded out. It needs to be redrawn.”

Part of that redrawing is finding out what’s really there now. Souza has been looking at population in relation to landscape and found that people are living on ravines and other landscapes best left for stormwater management. Water then is a key line that needs to be redrawn, in large part because the “mental image now is of a flooded city.” Drawing a new picture, “why not use water to maintain the landscape?” To maximize Mexico City’s water resources instead of piping it out of the city, Souza’s organization has been mapping flood zones and creating forests in those places. To date, they’ve sequestered 4,000 acres for “mini-forests within the city.”

Mexico City is already working with people who live on the ravines critical to stormwater management, providing them with educational materials about where they live and asking them to participate in creating master plans on the new ecological functions for the city. Ultimately, this means some will need to move.

Souza added that with all the real estate investment in Mexico City, it’s important for the environment to have value, too. “We have to give value to forests, water.” To accomplish this, he’s creating a “geographical database” with tons of real data on ecological functions to prove to both policymakers and locals that some undeveloped or newly green places have enormous financial value in themselves. “This is a different approach to dealing with nature.”

Growing while maintaining and even strengthening ecological function should be a priority in every city. It seems to be in New York City, which has been adding great new parks within the city and along its shoreline. Washburn said urban design has proven to be a useful approach for managing this process. Urban design is defined as a “set of tools to change cities, techniques to address the form and function of cities.” Urban design tools include rules, plans, and pilot projects. In practice, urban design works at the “confluence of finance, politics, and design.”

According to Washburn, a few urban designers have shaped the history of New York City, and their legacy provides a framework for how the city may adapt in the future. They include Frederick Law Olmsted, the founder of the profession of landscape architecture, who provided an “oasis” in the city, with his world-famous Central Park. Washburn said “when the city commissioners laid out the grid in 1811, they didn’t include a park.” There were simply spaces for recreation at the water’s edge, which were quickly taken up with shipping docks. By putting a park in the middle of the grid and creating a respite in the middle of the city, “Olmsted changed everything.”

The second is Robert Moses, who, in the beginning of his career, accomplished a lot to “un-crowd” the city, adding parks and playgrounds, albeit in a dictatorial manner. The third urban designer with outsized influence: Jane Jacobs, who “organized, confronted, and then met (but didn’t defeat) Moses.” She was an “advocate for the fine grain of neighborhood.” Together, these two “established top down and bottom up planning” process represented in the land-use planning framework NYC uses for all new projects. “Over 7 months, both Moses and Jacobs’ approaches shape the review process for every project.”

Today, the legacy of these three can be found in new projects like the High Line, a project Washburn got behind early. Washburn said Jacobs would have approved because it “preserves the light and air of the neighborhood,” while Olmsted would have “been pleased because it’s like one of his Rambles in Central Park.” With $100 million in public funds, the High Line park has brought in $2 billion in private sector investment (perhaps something Moses would have appreciated).

Washburn said NYC and other cities are now struggling with how to deal with environment: “Should it be protected from us or managed by us?” The answer may be moot, particularly given nature is now part of the city, and “we must adapt cities to climate change that has already occurred.” While the city is contemplating bold ideas like adding oyster reefs in the harbor to mitigate waves, thousands of acres of new wetlands, and monster-sized sea walls, there are also practical implications. “How do we create a legal framework for oyster-tecture? How do you do an environmental impact statement for that?”

Lastly, in Shanghai, Seng said the city managers are taking the “Robert Moses approach.” The city’s “hierarchical structure” came out of European planning traditions. To adapt to an exploding population, the city is undergoing an amazing expansion under the “1966 network plan,” which calls for a “new center, nine cities, and 66 new towns,” all within Shanghai. To adapt, the metro system, already the world’s largest, is just trying to keep up. It now has 510 kilometers of track serving 8 million users a day. Some $30 billion USD has been put in to effectively double the network.

Unfortunately, “Shanghai’s subway doesn’t actually complement the actual structure of the city.” Stations are far apart and far from population densities. The one-kilometer square blocks make navigating the city a challenge to begin with. Seng said Shanghai must further adapt to a changing city and growing population by updating its metro and other transportation system plans. But if the city does this, it will be with the Moses way.

Image credits: (1) Mexico City by satellite / Maps.com, (2) Mexico City slopes / The bicycle diaries. Symaniak, (3) High Line Chelsea Thicket / Guillaume Gaudet (4) Oystertecture in New York City / SCAPE, (5) Shanghai Metro expansion / The Transport Politic.

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