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A Robust, Sustainable Reference

05/07/2012 by asladirt


The Sustainable Sites Handbook: A Complete Guide to the Principles, Strategies, and Best Practices for Sustainable Landscapes by Meg Calkins, ASLA, elucidates strategic design approaches, measures for site performance, and provides an intelligent framework to discuss sustainability and understand technical issues. The handbook is extremely clear and well-structured, synthesizing a wealth of specific information into a useable form. The book embodies the very significant achievement of the Sustainable Sites initiative (SITES), in its broad-based collaborative approach to the subject.

The book begins by discussing the conceptual underpinnings of sustainable design and then moves through a comprehensive project development framework; from planning and site selection, through water, vegetation, soils and materials, to a discussion of human health and well-being and the issues of management and stewardship.

The broad disciplinary base of the SITES program, with its numerous expert contributors and reviewers, has allowed a surprisingly detailed and nuanced approach to the subject areas covered. The value of the book is as a guide to practitioners who are finding their way through the SITES system but also as a general reference to issues of sustainable site development more generally.

Perhaps even more than its professional use, I believe the book will be an invaluable resource for educators and students as a guide to sustainable design practice. Its comprehensiveness and synthetic approach to issues of site development and management provide a framework that can be broadly applied. The book brings together sound technical and procedural information placed within a well-reasoned intellectual context.

The book’s layout is clear and legible but the book design and production exhibit the limitations of quality in both materials and images so ubiquitous in contemporary textbooks. Given the density of the material, significantly more attention to a more dynamic graphic design and layout would have made a profound difference to the reader experience. The photographic images, which are vital in the elaboration of the text, suffer from being uniformly low contrast black and white images as a result of paper quality, and a more varied and lively design approach to typography, illustrations, and color would enhance both the ability to absorb the information and relay how much fun it is. Given the quality of the content and its broad market appeal, this would have been an opportunity for the publisher to invest in what should be a classic text and reference work, and one can only hope that will happen for subsequent editions.

Given the scope of this book, Meg Calkins has done a superb job in providing intellectual direction and expert content and guiding her excellent collaborators in the creation of what is destined to become a key reference work for the profession.

Read the book.

This guest review is by Elizabeth Mossop, FASLA, Professor, Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture, Louisiana State University

Image credit: Wiley & Sons

Posted in Climate Change, Ecosystem Restoration, Ecosystem Services, Landscape Architecture, Sustainable Design, Sustainable Materials, Waste, Water Management, Wildlife | Leave a Comment »

The National Mall Wins with These Designs

05/03/2012 by asladirt


The Trust for the National Mall announced the winners of the national design competition for three distinct sites on the National Mall today. While the competition was stiff, the jury went with Rogers Marvel Architects & landscape architecture firm Peter Walker and Partners for Constitution Gardens, landscape architecture firm Gustafson Guthrie Nichol and architecture firm Davis Brody Bond for Union Square, and landscape architecture firm OLIN and architecture firm Weiss/Manfredi for the Sylvan Theatre at the Washington Monument Grounds. Each team is a collaboration between a landscape architecture and architecture firm, a joint 50-50 effort.

A number of winners have already done beautiful work in D.C. OLIN redesigned the Washington Monument grounds, a project defined by its subtle and elegant approach to security, and the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden, one of D.C.’s most beloved spaces. Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, which won the National Design Award for landscape design last year, recently broke ground on the new landscape design for the National Museum of African American History and Culture, expected to open on the Mall in 2015. They also created one of the most unique public spaces in the city: the Kogod Courtyard at the National Portrait Gallery.

Former First Lady Laura Bush, Honor Chair of the Campaign for the National Mall (and lead fundraiser for the new landscapes and buildings, which are expected to cost hundreds of millions), said: “The design competition produced beautiful, thoughtful solutions to improve this iconic space.” Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, Hon. ASLA, added: “The National Mall Design Competition concepts are grand, respectful, sustainable, and beautiful; in short, they are worthy to be a part of this important and iconic space.” Caroline Cunningham, President of the Trust for the National Mall, sees these projects as not only best practices in urban park design but also “models of sustainability.”


Indeed, the mall needs some models of sustainability. It has taken a long time for sustainable landscape design to come to the nation’s capital, but the National Park Service, which runs these sites, now seems committed to using Sustainable Sites Initiative (SITES) best practices to revitalize the landscapes in the federal zone. In fact, right now, much of the National Mall is being dug up and restructured with highly sustainable soils, grasses, and water management systems that will not only better cope with the 25 million visitors and thousands of events that occur there each year, but also provide the foundation for a more ecological system. We hope the three winning design teams will also use SITES best practices in these high-profile projects.


The next step: raise the money. Half of the $700 million will need to come from the private sector. For this big job, the Trust for the National Mall will continue to host fundraisers, which all philanthropists interested in the built environment and the shape of the capital should attend. The Trust will then starting working with the designers and the National Park Service to implement the designs for Constitution Gardens and the Sylvan Theatre at the Washington Monument Grounds. We can only assume that the Architect of the Capitol is also moving forward with the Union Square redesign as there have been no public announcements taking that piece out of contention.  

Explore the winning designs by OLIN + Weiss/Manfredi, Gustafson Guthrie Nichol + David Brody Bond, and Rogers Marvel Architects + PWP Landscape Architecture

Other news for landscape architects: Boston-based Stoss Landscape Urbanism, led by Chris Reed, ASLA, won the National Design Award in landscape design this year. The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum said: “Stoss has distinguished itself for a hybridized approach rooted in infrastructure, functionality, and ecology.” Stoss’ projects include the CityDeck in Green Bay, WI; Erie Street Plaza in Milwaukee, WI; The Plaza at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA; and Bass River Park on Cape Cod. Also worth noting: Janine Benyus, author of Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, and co-founder of the Biomimicry Guild, won the “design mind” award.  

Image credits: (1) OLIN + Weiss / Manfredi, (2) Gustafson Guthrie Nichol + Davis Brody Bond, (3) Rogers Marvel Architects + Peter Walker and Partners

Posted in Landscape Architecture, National Mall, Public Spaces, Sustainable Design | Leave a Comment »

The New Era of Urban Agriculture

05/02/2012 by asladirt


Carrot City: Creating Places for Urban Agriculture, written by Ryerson University professors Mark Gorgolewski, June Komisar, and Joe Nasr explores the new era of urban agriculture. A flux of design proposals has emerged over the last few years that respond to the increasing interest in food security and sustainability. While cities have historically provided productive spaces for growing food out of necessity, the proposals in Carrot City represent an effort to think more coherently and strategically about food production. They show how urban agriculture can become infrastructure for re-integrating food production into the urban fabric in meaningful ways, eventually becoming, as the authors argue, as imperative to a city’s functioning as public sanitation systems.

The book presents nearly fifty case studies that examine food production, processing, distribution, and marketing. These proposals, some visionary and others built or underway, explore how food production works — from the small components for growing, like raised beds and greenhouses, to city-scale systems of urban agriculture. The book came out of a symposium held at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, in May 2008 that was followed by a traveling exhibition begun in Toronto in early 2009. The three authors of the book are all on the design school faculty at Ryerson, each interested in food systems and the impact of urban agriculture on building design and the built environment.

Many of the case studies presented are based in Canada and the U.S., as well as a few in the Netherlands, the U.K., and Argentina. They demonstrate the success of a growing movement of smaller, community-based initiatives generating productive food spaces throughout cities such as Toronto and New York where local governments are increasing support for these efforts.

Concern over how to feed a growing urban population in cities where many neighborhoods are becoming food deserts has put urban agriculture on the political agenda. There is also increasing recognition that dependence on agribusiness and commercial food systems has caused extensive damage to the environment while producing food with low nutritional quality that requires high energy consumption to transport long distances. Urban agriculture is consequently now part of the larger conversation about climate change, pollution, food, energy security, and health issues such as obesity. 

A majority of the case studies show how urban agriculture can help alleviate environmental impact and provide food security while bolstering communities with venues for social interaction and education. Small city farms, community gardens, and edible schoolyards and campuses provide healthy food for residents as well as opportunities for them to interact in meaningful ways. These gardens can “activate” a variety of urban spaces, making productive use of otherwise abandoned lots, former industrial sites, and empty rooftops. They can even be mobile, as the Science Barge in Yonkers, NY, demonstrates. The 400-square-foot barge on the Hudson River relies entirely on renewable energy for food production. Solar panels, wind turbines, and biofuels generate the energy needed to power the barge. Food is produced without chemicals in hydroponic systems and greenhouses irrigated with collected rainwater and purified river water, reducing land and water use.

Other case studies demonstrate that outlying areas in suburban and peri-urban neighborhoods can also provide spaces for food production. Advocates for rethinking the residential landscape, like Los Angeles-based designer Fritz Haeg, want to increase awareness about the viability of producing food in residential spaces. Over the past several years through his Edible Estates project, Haeg has developed regional prototypes for productive gardens and installing them on suburban lawns in U.S. cites like Baltimore, Austin, and Kansas City, as well as in London, Rome, and Istanbul. The gardens are living examples of how suburban lawns can be transformed into attractive and productive spaces that improve the residents’ quality of life and help combat issues related to commercial food production.

As innovative and inspiring as these small-scale case studies are, the book’s larger message is that there is potential to fold these smaller initiatives into a broader design agenda focused on developing higher density, multi-functional, and well-integrated communities that address food security issues as well as broader issues of sustainability. Evidence has shown that spaces for food production can eventually be connected to form larger networks of integrated systems. With a coordinated strategy rooted in analyses of the urban patterns that influence how and where urban residents produce, acquire, and consume food, designers can work with communities and city governments to establish new networks. Based on closed-loop, zero waste, and energy-efficient systems that support food production, designers can connect communities across the urban fabric, using otherwise vacant spaces in meaningful ways to combat social and environmental problems.

These Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes (CPULs) take advantage of waste spaces: gaps in the urban fabric that isolate communities, such as abandoned, underused, or overlooked land parcels like riverbanks, rail corridors, former industrial zones, and even residential plots sitting idle. Consider, for example, Ravine City, a city-scale proposal to use Toronto’s natural ravine system to connect the sprawling city to the natural infrastructure of its continuous watersheds. By daylighting certain ravines and connecting them to existing ravines, a series of green corridors could run through the heart of the city supporting a system of collective housing and productive gardens. An infrastructure of energy, water, and waste systems would support this structure. All of the buildings would have overlapping functions, generating solar power and wind energy, producing food on roofs and terraces, treating wastewater, and collecting stormwater. They would also provide recreational space. Additional food production and recreational activity would occur on open land.

Ravine City and similar proposals may sound idyllic to the point of seeming impossible to actually achieve, but the authors of Carrot City have reason to believe that the climate is right for making such dreams a reality. Pressing environmental concerns will continue to push cities to adopt more sustainable patterns of living to address issues like food security. The case studies demonstrate that urban agriculture can be used to establish such patterns, and that there is already considerable energy behind efforts to do so.

For the authors, the challenge now is to continue spreading the message to the broader public by generating inspirational ideas for how to use urban agriculture more effectively: “the challenge for designers today is to develop exciting and innovative proposals for a future Productive City that will capture the imagination of the public. Designers are uniquely positioned to make a difference in how urban agriculture is perceived in this regard, and this book features designs that are visually striking and artistically engaging by way of example.”

Read the book.

This guest post is by Shannon Leahy, Masters of Landscape Architecture candidate, University of Pennsylvania.

Image credit: Monacelli Press

Posted in Agriculture, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization, Water Management | 1 Comment »

D.C. Offers a Bold Vision for a More Sustainable Future

05/02/2012 by asladirt


At a historic church in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington, D.C., Mayor Vincent Gray said there are either two future directions for the city: “The gaps between us could further divide our city,” or the city could become “greener, more equitable, and more prosperous” for all. Outlining a bold vision for a Sustainable D.C., Gray said he wanted the city to not only be the greenest in the U.S. but among all world cities. D.C. is currently ranked 8th in a recent ranking of North American cities by the Economist Intelligence Unit so the city has quite a ways to go to get to number one in this continent, let alone the world. In the near term, can D.C. beat New York City, Vancouver, or San Francisco? That’s a stretch and only possible with deep collaboration with the non-profit and private sectors.

Gray is giving the city one generation — 20 years — to accomplish his ambitious objectives, which weave in health, economic, employment, and environmental goals. The idea is that D.C. will not only become greenest but healthiest, with the most number of green jobs. On top of this, Gray wants to continue to grow the city’s population in a big way. Gray said “sustainability will need to be a continual process.”

In terms of carbon dioxide, the city wants to cut emissions by 50 percent by 2032. In presenting the goals, Christopher Tuluo, head of D.C.’s Environment Department, said “climate change is happening. If someone says it isn’t, they are flat out wrong.” A key part of achieving this goal will be reaching objectives on energy use and efficiency. The city seeks to cut district-wide energy use by 50 percent while increasing renewable energy use to 50 percent. Given some 75 percent of emissions come from buildings, the District will push for adaptive re-use of old buildings so they can become greener. The idea is to maintain and improve the current building stock and increase the number of LEED buildings (the city is already number one for that metric). Another way to fight the effect of climate change: strengthening D.C.’s already considerable urban forest, which stores much of the city’s carbon, reaching a 40 percent tree canopy by 2032. Here Tuluo added that “trees are important when it’s 100 degrees out because of climate change.”

Investing in more sustainable transportation systems is also key to both reducing transportation-related emissions and adapting to a carbon-constrained world. The district seeks to make 75 percent of all trips walking, biking, or transit in 20 years. Harriet Tregoning, D.C.’s planning director, said “this is a stretch goal but these trips already make up 50 percent of all trips right now.” She discussed how more young people may be moving to D.C. because the city’s transportation system is so affordable. This younger generation is so in debt with college loans they can’t afford cars. In fact, just 60 percent of D.C. residents own cars and that number is falling.

Sustainability means improving D.C.’s waterways, which are amongst the most polluted in the country. Gray wants 100 percent of District waterways to be fishable and swimmable, and 75 percent of D.C.’s green space to be used as green infrastructure that captures and filters rainwater for reuse. Tuluo wants the city to become much “spongier.” He wants the city to become “a much more natural place – not just for the environmental benefits. We want return on investment” in terms of stormwater management benefits.

The process for dealing with waste, which the Economist Intelligence Unit report said was among D.C. weak points, will need to be totally transformed if the city is going to reach zero waste in 20 years. Tuluo asked, “is zero waste a pipe dream?” Perhaps not. Organic waste is already turned into compost as a matter of practice in San Francisco, one of the best cities at dealing with waste. He sees D.C. residents “becoming urban farmers,” using their compost daily, and other waste consumed by digesters that turn other garbage into energy.

The front end of the reuse chain is local food production, which will also need to ramped up if the 75 percent of all food is to be grown within a quarter-mile of the population eating it. Tregoning argued that “it used to be really difficult to find a supermarket in the District.” While that has changed, improving the availability of local produce will be sped along by a network of food-productive roofs. She wants one million square feet of these vegetated roofs in place funneling produce to local shops and co-ops. (According to Gray, the city is already number-one in terms of green roofs so this may be possible). Getting local produce to D.C. residents seems to be a key focus. Health must be at the top of a sustainability agenda in a city where 22 percent of the population is obese. Gray wants to cut that rate in half in 20 years. 

D.C.’s plan won’t work without more equitable economic and employment growth. Right now, the unemployment rates in the city differ dramatically from ward to ward. In Ward 3, it’s as low as 2 percent, while in poorer parts of the city, like Ward 8, it’s 24 percent, among the highest in the country. Gray wants to boost the number of green jobs by five times — providing opportunities at all levels, from the PhDs experimenting with biofuels to the landscape architects designing parks, from the green roof installers to the maintenance crews keeping green infrastructure and waste reuse systems working.

Explore the plan. There are a few short, medium, and long-term actions listed. As Tregoning said, “the vision is a painting of what’s possible in the District.” A design and implementation strategy with hundreds of actions comes next. To see some actions that should be considered, explore ASLA’s 30-page set of recommendations: Becoming Greenest. One big focus of ASLA’s report was the need for a climate adaptation plan. If local species in D.C.’s great urban forest were to die off due to higher temperatures, none of the other goals related to water, air quality, or health will be possible.

Image credit: City Center, Washington, D.C. / SWF Institute

Posted in Climate Change, Forests, Green Buildings, Green Roofs, Policy and Regulation, Public Spaces, Real Estate Development, Renewable Energy, Sustainable Transportation, Urban Revitalization, Waste, Water Management, Wildlife | Leave a Comment »

The Edible City

04/30/2012 by asladirt

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)

Posted in Active Design, Agriculture, Desertification, Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization, Water Management | 4 Comments »

Help Restore One of Farrand’s Masterpieces

04/30/2012 by asladirt


“A precious area of the city has been neglected for too long,” said Italian Ambassador Claudio Bisogniero, about Dumbarton Oaks Park, a 1920′s style “naturalistic” landscape designed by one of the foremost American woman landscape architects, Beatrix Farrand. Bisogniero said all embassies that line the 27-acre park, the northwest D.C. communities that ring it, and even greater Washington, D.C. must play a part in restoring this “jewel.”

Restoration work is already underway, in partnership with the National Park Service, which has jurisdiction over this site and the surrounding Rock Creek Park. Over a year, said Tara Morrison, Superintendent, Rock Creek Park, “weed warriors have been at work.” They are working hard towards removing all invasive species (and there are a lot). Neighboring embassies are also being brought into the conversation about how to use green infrastructure to manage more stormwater outside the park so it doesn’t just flow in.

Rebecca Trafton, President, Dumbarton Oaks Park Conservancy, has been amazing at getting volunteers involved. Larry Weaner, a landscape ecologist, and Biohabitats, a landscape restoration firm, have volunteered their expertise to come up with an ecological restoration plan. The Conservancy team is also getting support from the National Park Foundation in “strategic planning, capacity building,” which can “provide a foundation of support for our restoration work.”

An initial step is to clear the invasive plants. Next, a 2-acre piece of the park will be “restored to ecological health and historic design intent” at a cost of around $75,000. New interpretive signs will be added. Future restoration work will then be done in a piece-meal fashion. We have to have a ”sustainable, maintainable process for restoration,” said Trafton.

Ann Aldrich, Executive Director of the Conservancy, asked the audience of local officials, landscape architects, and residents to imagine “5 years from now, when there’s a restored beech grove, terrace, wildflower meadows, gardens free of weeds, and repaired dams and waterfalls with stable stream banks, and a reconstructed arbor with stone benches.”

The Conservancy team is clearly inspired by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, who started the Central Park Conservancy in New York City and is now the president of the Foundation for Landscape Studies. Rogers, who’s written many books on landscape architecture, explained how the Central Park team spent three years developing a comprehensive plan for restoring Central Park, which was critical to ensuring that “we avoided a scatter-shot approach.”

She said Central Park is the “quintessence of romantic landscape design,” and like a symphonic work has motifs but they take the form of woods, soils, and streams. Central Park also shows how landscape architects can “fuse nature and engineering into a great work of landscape art.” The great feat of engineering was separating traffic so that pedestrians could flow over carriages and now cars and trucks.

Before her conservancy got started in the early 80s, Central Park was in pretty bad shape, with 50,000 square feet of graffiti, eroded slopes, trashed ponds, shattered lights, and bombed-out buildings. The systematic survey led to an action plan with lots of different pieces that could be financed separately. She said her group made sure “not to restore anything unless we had the funds to maintain it.” So fundraising was really the other critical piece beyond having a comprehensive restoration plan and solid team.

Regardless of how well-loved the restored Central Park is now, “place is still tenuous,” meaning that if a new mayor came in who no longer valued Central Park and wanted to discontinue the public-private partnership, the park could once again fall to pieces. With a warning for all communities and their parks, Rogers said “we live in troubling times.” The beauty of a park today is no guarantee of the future.

For those in the D.C. area, learn more about how you can volunteer or help finance the restoration of Dumbarton Oaks Park.

Image credit: Dumbarton Oaks Park / The Georgetown Metropolitan

Posted in Ecosystem Restoration, Historic Preservation, Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces | Leave a Comment »

In a Harsh Economic Climate, New Opportunities for Designers

04/26/2012 by asladirt


The three presidents of the major design organizations shaping the built environment – the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), American Institute of Architects (AIA), and American Planning Association (APA) – discussed the challenges facing the design professions as well as the opportunities at the American Planning Association (APA) conference in Los Angeles. They also outlined paths for the future direction of their organizations.

ASLA: “Adversity can make us fearless.”

Susan Hatchell, FASLA, president of ASLA, who said she often works with planners, designs parks, sustainable transportation infrastructure, and recreation areas in North Carolina. She believes that while the professions are facing severe economic conditions, there’s “opportunity in adversity.” She presented numbers showing how “really long periods of economic growth often come after periods of recession.” In this climate, “adversity can make us fearless” for when the next round of growth comes.  

There are a number of key opportunities for landscape architects. Population growth, expected to be 9 percent in the U.S., will lead to new work for landscape architects. Hatchell said: ”These people will need to live somewhere. Many more communities will be looking for ‘live, work, play’ experiences.” The rise of the millennial generation, which is more “collaborative, technologically-advanced and socially-engaged,” along with the aging of the baby boomers, will mean new types of public spaces and housing development will be in demand. “Baby boomers will redefine old age and will need new types of housing, transportation, and recreation. They aren’t going to go lying down.”

Urbanization, which is a trend not only in the U.S. but around the world, will create opportunities for new public spaces and urban design work. “Cities are an emerging market for landscape architects.” Transportation currently sucks up 19 percent of people’s incomes on average. This expense is increasingly a burden for low-income residents who, like many other groups, are demanding public transportation systems. The demand for more sustainable transportation system will only grow as gas prices rise.

Landscape architects also have a major role to play in transforming the built environment into an enabler of good health. “Currently 66 percent of the population is overweight or obese, and by 2015, 75 percent will be.” Hatchell added that this health crisis is not only very damaging to our collective health, but also very expensive, with $117 billion being spent on diabetes and obesity-related conditions annually.

Turning redfields, underperforming real estate, into greenfields is another growth area. Hatchell said $700 billion in loans still have to “go negative” before 2014. These unproductive assets can be bought cheap and redeveloped as green space. As an example, she said some 40 “dead malls” are now revitalization projects.

Lastly, green infrastructure offers great opportunities. NYC is investing $1.5 billion in green infrastructure systems over the next 20 years, which is still much cheaper than the $2.9 billion they would needed to have spend on old grey infrastructure, sewage and stormwater conveyance pipes and other things made of concrete. Philadelphia also has a $2 billion 20 year plan in the works.

On unemployment among landscape architects, which Hatchell said was a serious issue, she said ASLA is seeing some positive trends. However, too few landscape firms, even the ones that are doing well, are hiring. She encouraged young out of work LAs to “stay in the game” by volunteering on projects and networking.

She discussed how ASLA, with 16,000 members in the U.S. and abroad, has launched a public awareness campaign to highlight the value of landscape architects. “It’s important that people understand what we do.”

In addition, there was a common theme running through all presentations: the need to improve collaboration among landscape architects, planners, and architects. Hatchell said: “It takes a village to make a good design. We all need to be at the table. When we come together, with our greater collective numbers, we can succeed.” In her mind, landscape architects play a central role in making this collaboration work and ”weave together engineering and architecture using the foundation and guidelines provided by planners.”

AIA: “We need to better tell our story, how architecture improves our lives.”

AIA President Jeffrey Potter, FAIA, said he’s “passionate about communicating the value of design to the public,” while also improving the perception of architects among the public. With 75,000 members, AIA is more than “just a pin, an accreditation you can wear.” The organization has 18 regional components and 284 local chapters, with 23 “communities of knowledge.” An office with 200 staff is led by Robert Ivy, former editor of Architectural Record.

“Architects are under siege by competitors,” said Potter. And “the economic unpleasantness hit us hard.” On top of this, the “transition to the digital world has been costly for firms.” The BIM approach requires heavy up-front investment by architects. But for Potter the major challenge is the “deterioration of our culture. Beauty seems to no longer matter.”

Potter said architects may be to blame for some of their predicament, in part, because “of our jargon and tendency to look inward.” The membership, overall, seems to be of two minds on how to move forward. “About one half want to become the prominent master builder of the past. But the master builder model went out in the 14th century. The other half of the membership wants to the master collaborator.” Potter sees greater collaboration with planners and landscape architects as the only real way forward.

A major focus is getting emerging professionals jobs. Young architects starting out are being bludgeoned by the recession, which “may never have left the design fields,” but it’s important that “young people stay in our community.” Other key programs focus on disaster-resilient designs and rolling out green building codes worldwide.

AIA is also now working on a ”repositioning initiative” because “we are unhappy” about how the public perceives us. “The public doesn’t understand what we do. We need to better tell our stories and demonstrate how architecture improves our lives.”

APA: “Multidisciplinary teams lead to better, richer designs.”

For Mitchell Silver, AICP, it’s a shame that landscape architecture and planning went in different directions back in 1909; they used to be the same thing. Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., the son of the designer of Central Park and the father of landscape architecture, wanted “cities to be more efficient, attractive, livable, and less chaotic.” So landscape architects began to focus on the physical form of cities while planners moved towards spatial form and the policy and regulatory side of things. Still, he said, “our professions have a common DNA,” rooted in “scientific efficiency, civic beauty, and social equity.”

The APA, with its 40,000 members worldwide, is now very focused on sustainability and climate change. Another major focus is on “sustaining places.” Taskforces were set up in this area, yielding 8 new principles. APA wants to enhance the “value of comprehensive plans,” (possibly by looking into certification for them), and creating quality spaces for the long-term. A new “rebuilding America” initiative created recommendations to strengthen the ” place-making” focus of the organization.

Pointing to the successful Mayor’s Institute of City Design (MICD), a group Silver is involved in, he said “multidisciplinary teams” now need to be the way to go with projects of all scales. They are necessary because they ”lead to better, richer designs.” Silver, who is the director of planning for the City of Raleigh, now forces his planning department to work in multidisciplinary teams and issues RFPs that demand those teams. He said, while planners can offer the vision and “plan for experiences that we want people to have,” it’s landscape architects and architects “who are critical to creating that experience.”

Still, Silver sees planners as providing broad leadership among the design professions. APA’s key goals are to “lead America to a more just and sustainable future, while growing the next generation of leaders.” On collaboration, Silver reiterated the points made by Hatchell, arguing that “we need to reforge our partnerships.”

All presidents said their organizations “don’t have jobs to hand out,” but are working hard (in unison) on Capitol Hill to save programs that create work for design professionals, while also creating opportunities at the state and local levels. Silver liked the idea of moving past the state-level bottle-necks and getting the federal government to provide funds directly to cities, who have many “shovel-ready projects.”

Depending on who you talk to, it’s the worst time to get a design degree, or, perhaps, the best given the growing number of problems that will require a design professional to fix. Plus, all the heads of the organizations seemed to believe the economy will come back.

Image credit: ASLA 2011 General Design Honor Award. Citygarden, St. Louis / Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects

Posted in Landscape Architecture, Policy and Regulation, Sustainable Design | 1 Comment »

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