Open Voices News Roundup: April 7

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.

Featured Scientist:  Lynne Westphal on Our Long and Complicated Relationship with Forests
“Even 20 years after writing her thesis on the motivations of TreeKeepers in Chicago, Lynne Westphal can quote some of the people she talked to about why they chose to dedicate time to planting and tending trees.  One TreeKeeper said: ‘trees soften the incessantly stark lines of human endeavor,’ Westphal said. Now the Project Leader for the Northern Research Station’s People and their Environments unit, Westphal continues to do research aimed at understanding the bonds between people and nature.  ‘That is part of what fascinates me,’ she said. ‘Finding out how people care for and react to the natural world.’”

Bringing Nature to Humans: How to Evaluate the Next Generation of Urban Parks and Green Spaces
“With the rise of designer habitats and citizen scientists, ecologists and the general public will play a broader role in evaluating and managing urban parks and green spaces in America. This revised decision making process would benefit from the inclusion of concepts from environmental ethics like ecological citizenship, as well as a re-evaluation of traditional conservation priorities. A reduced emphasis on large protected areas, native biodiversity, static park designs, and hard boundaries between nature and the city would allow for a new generation of ethical urban environments, which can provide a wider array of current benefits while remaining adaptable to the needs and values of future generations.”

Habitats for humanity: Why Our Cities Need to be Ecosystems, too
“The whole better-greener-more-awesome-cities movement has a problem: We haven’t found a good name for it. Sustainable cities! The term brings to mind such mundanity as energy audits and transit routes. Resilient cities! The notion requires us to consider, first, what horrible shit is coming down the pike. Carbon-neutral cities! Ugh. Don’t get me started on that one. Enter University of Virginia urban and environmental planning professor Tim Beatley with the solution, FINALLY. Here he comes, with the delivery. Wait for it…Biophilic cities.

Biophilic Cities for Health
“Few modern challenges are as vexing as health, and as costly it seems.  And the modern dimensions are many, from obesity and sedentary lifestyles, to the rise in depression, to the continuing toll of cancer. In the US we spend an astounding $2.8 Trillion on health care, nearly 18% of our GDP, and yet we are comparatively unhealthy, when contrasted to other countries and cultures that spend much less. Giving nature a more prominent role in our lives, and actively promoting the design and planning of biophilic cities, we feel is one of the important steps in the direction of enhancing health.”