Ethical Design Practices May Help Slow Gentrification

Newtown Creek Nature Walk / Quennell Rothschild & Partners
Newtown Creek Nature Walk / Quennell Rothschild & Partners

Gentrification replaces diversity with homogenized people and places. This process has “rippling social and cultural effects,” said Winifred Curran, a professor at DePaul University at the ASLA 2015 Annual Meeting in Chicago. There are many reasons why gentrification has been happening across American cities — and the process may prove nearly unstoppable — but there are ways landscape architects and other designers can ensure they don’t further contribute to the problem. Instead of creating “shiny new parks” that spur on redevelopment, they can work with existing communities to design public spaces that are “just green enough” and celebrate a community’s diversity. Landscape architecture firms can create internal ethical policies to ensure they are supporting diversity rather than supplanting it through designed spaces produced in a fundamentally non-democratic way.

The most damaging effect of gentrification is displacement, which can affect cultures, industries, and people alike, said Curran. “Ethnic communities and manufacturing factories can be pushed out, and low-income communities left out of the democratic process.” Gentrification results in higher property values, eventual upgrading or homogenization of the environment, and the privatization of public spaces.

One big problem, Curran said, is that city policymakers and planners are in effect encouraging gentrification, with results that exclude existing populations. “Cities love higher property values, which means higher taxes.” In many cities, urban policies have been put in place to grow the tax base. This often involves tearing down what is there in favor of new condo towers that all look alike. And to generate appeal for these new buildings, city leaders use public private partnerships to create and manage public spaces. “These public-private partnerships create landscapes without a democratic process. They may look better, but they aren’t democratic.”

City leaders may also be pursuing a process of “environmental gentrification.” Under the rubric of becoming more sustainable, city planners and developers are investing in new parks and rails-to-trails projects to “sell upgraded neighborhoods.” Sadly, this may put many long-term residents of neighborhoods in the unfortunate position of not supporting a much-needed park because it could cause displacement. The fears are real, Curran said.

For example, the High Line in New York City has raised nearby property values by 103 percent. But Curran says “here, landscape architecture is not the problem, but the symptom” of a deeper condition. “The High Line is the physical expression of an underlying system — it couldn’t have happened without rezoning, and it was only accomplished with lots of private money.” The result is that Chelsea today has just two discrete populations — those who make less than $30,000 annually and live in the few remaining public housing blocks, or those who make well over $100,000 a year. In reality, this means the lower-income people still in Chelsea have to do their grocery shopping out in New Jersey, because they can’t afford the prices in their own neighborhood.

And in Chicago, housing along the Bloomingdale Trail, now called the 606, which cuts through multiple residential neighborhoods, including a number actively fighting gentrification, has seen “a spike in value after the trail opened.” The trail was financed by the Trust for Public Land and the Chicago city government. The Trust for Public Land, Curran argued, was “not responsive to the democratic process. And now they direct any local concerns about raising rents and property values to the Logan Square Neighborhood Association, which has no power or resources. The association pushes for property tax caps, but gets nowhere.” Between the “city and the Trust for Public Land, the community has no place to go.”

For Curran, the solution for communities may be to “just green enough.” She pointed to the Newtown Creek Nature Walk in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, designed by Quenell Rothschild & Partners, as an example of a “community-driven” improvement that improves access to the water while providing new public space. Greenpoint is gentrifying but the existing Polish community has forged partnerships with newcomers, in part by educating them about the history of the toxic creek, which is a Superfund site. While the creek is still highly poisonous, “the community can at least still get down to the waterfront, where they can see any pollution violations from nearby factories.” But it’s strictly no-frills: there are “no cafes or boat launches. It’s not so green that it’s desirable. The area is still a functioning manufacturing district that just accomplished some greening.”

Newtown Creek Nature Walk / Gowanus Lounge
Newtown Creek Nature Walk / Gowanus Lounge

Dan Pitera, University of Detroit and the Detroit Collaborative Design Center, echoed many of these ideas, but talked about what Detroit is now doing to slow gentrification, which is already happening in some areas. His Detroit Collaborative Design Center only works in communities where they have been invited. In some communities they’ve been active for more than 10 years.

He differentiated between participation and engagement, arguing that participation is project-based and episodic while engagement is systemic and long-term. He said landscape architects and designers need to take the long view and truly engage all community members when working in places dealing with gentrification, building relationships and spending the time to understand the local history and context. He opposes design charrettes, thinking there are no “single solutions,” only dialogues that are part of a broader process. And he urged designers to be careful with their language, understanding that the meaning of terms can change depend on one’s frame of reference.

At the beginning of the talk, Kathleen King, Associate ASLA, a landscape architect with Design Workshop, outlined her fears about whether she is inadvertently contributing to the process of gentrification through a park project she is working on in the Latino community of Elyria Swansea in Denver. Perhaps the most direct response to those concerns came from Jennifer Wolch, a professor of urban planning at the University of California Berkeley, who told her and other landscape architects assembled that firms “need to think through for themselves whether to come into a process cold when things have already been decided. It’s important to understand the history, context, and look upstream at the organizations that promulgate or repress discourses, and who will benefit or not from a project.”

The reality is that many landscape architecture firms “can’t actually practice in 80 places at once if they truly want to do this well. Don’t parachute in. Accumulate knowledge about a place.”

Wolch also supports the “just green enough” approach, which can go a long ways to helping a community meet its needs without making it too appealing to outsiders. She called for “appropriate design and high quality materials that resonate with the community,” but told landscape architects to avoid “‘bright shiny object’ designs that trigger adjulation.” As an example, she pointed to Augustus F. Hawkins Nature Park in Los Angeles, a well-designed park that improves quality of life but without contributing to gentrification.

Augustus F. Hawkins Nature Park / Where do the children play Los Angeles
Augustus F. Hawkins Nature Park / Where do the children play Los Angeles

Landscape architecture firms, she said, need to develop a set of ethical principles and policies, which can be helpful to both firms and clients. “Establish expectations. Find out what you are willing to do or not. Be prepared to walk away.”

Which Aspects of Nature Improve Our Health?

Landscape attributes / MaryCarol Hunter
Landscape attributes / MaryCarol Hunter

“We know that exposure to nature enhances our well-being, but we know less about the specific features that create these positive effects,” said MaryCarol Hunter, ASLA, University of Michigan, at the ASLA 2015 Annual Meeting in Chicago. A set of fascinating studies by Hunter and Marc Berman, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, are beginning to converge on what those feature are. The goal is to translate knowledge of these features into design guidelines landscape architects and other designers can apply. All of this research is happening under the rubric of the TKF Foundation, which has invested millions over the past two decades creating more than 130 small, healing parks and financing research studies on the health benefits of green spaces in dense, urban areas. The TKF Foundation wants to know: with increasingly limited space in cities for green space, how can we have the biggest impact?

Humans evolved in wild lands, but we mostly live in urban environments now. While we inherently connect with our ancestral landscapes, we are constantly exposed to cacophonous city life. Wild landscapes can’t be fully translated into urban environments, but “some elements can be transported to downtowns. We can get close to the effects of wild places,” said Hunter.

Exposure to Nature Improves Our Sense of Well-being and Ability to Focus 

First, we should look at some of the research Hunter and Berman are conducting to demonstrate the health benefits of nature. Hunter and her collaborators from many fields created a mobile-phone app that study subjects used to record their responses to nature and also photograph scenes of nature they connected with. This experiment is detailed in an earlier post, but the key finding so far is that just a 10 minute exposure to nature 2-3 times per week was “sufficient to produce restoration benefits.” Furthermore, subjects were most likely to experience the effect of this “nature pill” in a small urban park or residential yard instead of a large park. The findings from those using the app were confirmed by cortisol and saliva samples taken to measure the physiological effects of stress.

Marc Berman then described his own research at the University of Chicago. In one experiment, a set of subjects were asked to take a 2.5 mile walk, which took about 50 minutes, through a dense urban environment, and another set were asked to take another 2.5 mile walk through an arboretum. Subjects taking either path converged on a lab at the University of Chicago where they were put through the stressful “backward digit span” test of working memory, which Berman uses to measure capacity to concentrate or focus. The test involves reciting back a set of numbers in reverse. As number strings become longer, it becomes more mentally taxing to recite them backwards. Berman found that subjects who walked through the arboretum had a 20 percent improvement in working memory. A further study that showed subjects either photos of urban areas or nature scenes had a similar effect.

Elements of Nature that Boost Health Benefits 

Hunter and Berman both seek to zoom in on the specific elements of nature that create a sense of well-being and improve the ability to concentrate. But there are so many outstanding questions. Just consider the question: “why do trees have a beneficial effect?” Berman said possible answers could be: “they make places beautiful so we want to go out and exercise; they clean the air; they help us reach resting attention rates; or perhaps all of the above.” Now think of all the other elements of nature that need to be isolated and considered.

Still, Berman suspects that the effect of nature has something to do with the “soft fascination” it creates for us. “Nature captures our attention but not all of our attention. We can watch a waterfall, but our minds can wander and we can think about other things. In contrast, in Times Square, New York City, our minds can’t wander. There, we can’t daydream.”

Berman is creating a taxonomy of natural and urban image elements, coding them by brightness and color value, saturation, hue, and then calculating the standard deviation of these elements. He’s also analyzing the images’ “grey scale entropy,” removing all the color and just looking at the complexity of the content in the images. He said that “images of nature are more complex and therefore have a higher grey scale entropy.” He’s also evaluating images based on whether they have curved or straight edges. “Color, structure, and their interactions all matter.” Running all this data through an algorithm, Berman says he can predict “how natural we think a scene is. These preferences can be measured with 80-90 percent accuracy.”

Berman’s algorithm tells him that color has less of an effect on our perceptions of naturalness than whether there are straight or hard edges. This means that designers of all kinds can “mimic the edge-making of nature” and have some beneficial effect.

Hunter is doing her own taxonomy, too, because her goal is to “bring science into landscape architecture.” She is pulling the physical landscape attributes out of the photographs collected through her app study, categorizing them based on “naturalness, complexity, structural coherence, form, proportion, openness, access, safety, and engagement.”

While her analysis is ongoing and the full design guidelines aren’t ready yet, Hunter found through her research that “vibrancy” is something to maximize whenever possible. She defined vibrancy as “the interaction between the sky and the surface water or waxes of foliage, which creates a sparkle effect that engenders soft fascination.”

Maximizing vibrancy / MaryCarol Hunter
Maximizing vibrancy / MaryCarol Hunter

And framing — in which an object near the viewer partially obscures and also reveals what’s beyond — also creates a sense of safety and continuity and is a design element that should be incorporated in landscape architecture.

Example of framing / MaryCarol Hunter
Example of framing / MaryCarol Hunter

The Long View 

But these are really just starting points, as the full design guidelines are still forthcoming. And Hunter said there are many others also involved in this research, with some looking at the role sound plays in the health benefits of nature. An audience member wondered when they would look at tactile elements of nature and smell. Hunter said they were starting first with visual components but the goal is to broaden the reach to other senses.

Jay Graham, FASLA, Graham Landscape Architecture, and long-time adviser to the TKF Foundation, said their efforts will show how “scientific research can lead to more successful sanctuaries.” All the research — which also includes a study by Roger Ulrich of a healing garden created by Brian Bainnson, ASLA, at Legacy Emanuel Hospital in Portland, and another of a healing pathway by Jack Sullivan, FASLA, University of Maryland at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. — is due in 2018. Then, the TKF Foundation will promote these findings to the media, policymakers, and the broader public.

As Graham explained, the TKF Foundation seeks to educate the public about why small urban green spaces are important, because according to their internal research, “the public doesn’t comprehend the health benefits of nature.” Landscape architects then play a leading role, given they “bring nature into cities, and create spaces that show people the transformational effects.” The idea is if lots more of these evidence-based urban green spaces are created and the benefits of them are made clear through research, the public will demand even more of them.