Every week, we bring you the latest news in placemaking, landscape architecture and urban planning, the nature-mental health link, and much more. Check back each week for new roundups and items.
Water and Wellness: Green Infrastructure for Health Co-Benefits
“With careful design, green spaces can manage runoff and provide a range of co-benefits. Integrated planning of green infrastructure and parks systems helps to cost-effectively provide multiple benefits and contributes to more livable communities…Designing green infrastructure for stormwater management as well as co-benefits, particularly human health, offers several opportunities. The cost-benefit analysis of green infrastructure installations can include a broader set of economic returns. Design and project messaging that incorporates the co-benefits of health and well-being may engage additional community partners and be more compelling to the general public.”
Green beats blues: Nature prevents stress, anxiety
“If you find yourself in a good mood among spring’s green grass, budding trees and sprouting flowers, you’re not alone. A recent study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found the more green space a neighborhood has, the happier people feel. Kirsten Beyer, lead author of the study and assistant professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin’s Institute for Health and Society, says the study examined the amount of ground vegetation and tree canopy present in neighborhoods defined by the census block throughout the state of Wisconsin. Results from the approximately 2,500-person assessment show areas with more green space had a positive impact on the residents’ state of mental health, specifically in regard to stress, anxiety and depression.”
Cutting the Super Block Down to Size
“Urbanization in China is the single biggest human migration in history. To accomodate the millions coming in from the countryside each year, China’s cities are tearing down their old human-scale, socially-rich neighborhoods, with their meandering, bicycle-friendly streets, and putting in highways and incredibly isolating towers set amid vacant-feeling “super blocks.” These are places only Le Corbusier could have loved. Or at least that’s the image some see in the West. At the World Urban Forum in Medellin, Colombia, a group of innovative Chinese urban planners explain how some of the latest “eco-cities” as well as design interventions in existing cities may help some Chinese mayors see the wisdom of sustainable urban development and taking those super-blocks down to size.”
