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.
Land Trust Secures Vacant Lots for Urban Agriculture, Recreation in LA’s Underserved Neighborhoods
“Founded in 2002, the LA Neighborhood Land Trust is a nonprofit organization that identifies underutilized space in a 475-square miles area in and around Los Angeles, and transforms it into green space for urban agriculture and community recreation projects. Real estate costs are high in Los Angeles, so the work of the Trust moves forward one small lot at a time…Since its inception, the Trust has fostered the development of 18 inner-city urban agriculture projects, with 11 projects in development. A recent projects include a food forest and community garden combination with child-centered programming in the unincorporated area of West Athens. The Trust hopes to build ten new urban green spaces in 2015.”
As Evidence Mounts, Drumbeat for Walkable Streets Grows
“The evidence keeps piling up to support reform in street design and traffic engineering. Recent research adds to volumes of studies that say walkable streets will make us safer, healthier, and improve the economy and communities. As BCT reported last month, research by Chester Harvey at the University of Vermont examined the spatial characteristics of more than 7,400 miles of streetscapes in Boston, Baltimore, and New York City. Computer modeling determined the width of the streetscape, the street width to building height ratio, and tree canopy. Enclosed streets designed like “outdoor rooms” are more visually appealing and safer. “Crashes on smaller, more enclosed streetscapes were less likely to result in injury and death compared with larger, more open streetscapes,” Harvey reports in a paper to be presented to the Transportation Research Board in January of 2015.”
Magical Thinking in the Age of Green
“We are not in the Age of Aquarius that had brought—to some of us—radical hope about societal change and a turn toward ecology, steady state growth, and different GDP metrics, including happiness. The age was about love, unity, integrity, sympathy, harmony, understanding and trust. The Age of Aquarius was about doing things differently, building the ‘share economy’, where cooperation and frugality were goals that would reduce our heavy human footprint on the planet. Community gardens, composting toilets, making clothes, raising chickens and making preserves, riding bikes and walking, job sharing and creating worker owned cooperatives that shared profit equitably was the stuff of change.”
Toward an Architecture of Place: Moving Beyond Iconic to Extraordinary
“We all realize that a “sense of place” is of fundamental value to people everywhere — in every city, every town, every neighborhood, and every culture, for all ages. At least, that is what the average person recognizes instinctively. It is a fundamental reality that all too often is missing from the discussion when it comes to architecture and design. Take the breathlessly positive reaction garnered by the Cooper Union Building designed by Thom Mayne of the architecture firm Morphosis. When it opened in 2009 in New York’s East Village, it won several architectural awards.”
