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.
“Ever since Jane Jacobs’ classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urbanists have extolled the ideal of the dense, mixed-used, walkable neighborhood, contrasting it with the dull and deadly cul-de-sacs of car-oriented suburbs. If walkability has long been an “ideal,” a recent slew of studies provide increasingly compelling evidence of the positive effects of walkable neighborhoods on everything from housing values to crime and health, to creativity and more democratic cities. A key research advance has been the development of the Walk Score metric (we have written about it here before), which provides a baseline measure for walkable communities. Walk Score uses data from Google, OpenStreetMap and the U.S. Census to assign any address a walkability ranking from zero to 100 based on a its pedestrian friendliness and distance to amenities such as grocery stores, restaurants, public transit, and the like.’”
New San Diego Park Reconnects City and Waterfront
“When San Diego laid out a vision for its waterfront in 1998, the North Embarcadero could have been any city’s under-utilized bayside space. Once a throughway for Navy and fishing traffic, it had been ‘cut off from downtown with large expanses of asphalt,’ according to one document, including roads, large parking lots and superblocks that literally isolated the city from what had once been its front door. Nearly 20 years later, parts of that original wish list are finally taking concrete form. A ribbon-cutting in mid-November revealed a waterfront very different from the one described in ’98, featuring a wide esplanade flanked by landscaped plazas and jacaranda trees that turn bright purple when they flower in spring. Contractors had removed parking spaces and even relocated a road to make room for the 1,000-foot walkway, which forms the backbone of the North Embarcadero Visionary Project’s $31 million ‘phase one.’”
West Side Leaders Land $46k for Long-Planned ‘Price Landing’ Park Along Riverfront
“River West Working Group and Price Hill Will announced last month that they have received two grants to create a park framework plan for Price Landing, an integral piece of the overall western riverfront vision. The first is a $30,000 grant from Interact for Health, and the second is a $16,000 grant from the Greater Cincinnati Foundation. The combination of the two will allow for the development of a vision and preliminary design for the park that would become the eastern bookend of the Ohio River Trail West. Cincinnati’s western riverfront spans 22 miles from downtown to Shawnee Lookout, and Price Landing is seen as a critical step in reclaiming the riverfront ecosystem as a recreational and educational experience, rather than industrial.”
The Eco Village Concept: Climate Mitigation Might Require Experimentation
“EcoVillage at Ithaca (EVI) is amongst the oldest and widely respected cohousing projects in the United States. Situated in the Town of Ithaca, New York, EVI consists of three tightly-clustered residential neighborhoods with direct access to over 100 acres of open space, two community-supported farms, and several independent businesses. The land consists of five parcels, each owned by a separate non-profit entity, and controlled by the consensus decisions of neighborhood inhabitants. A combination of energy-conserving design and cooperative, low-impact lifestyles results in measurably lower ecological footprints without sacrifice to quality of life. Indeed, residences in the project’s newest neighborhood are net-zero energy consumers, meaning they produce as much energy as they consume”
