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.
How Trees Can Make City People Happier (and Vice Versa)
“There’s plenty of evidence that hints of nature help us humans live in the urban spaces we’ve built. About five years ago, one major study showed that, across the world, living in cities is associated with higher levels of depression and other mental health problems; a rash of studies since have shown that people feel like green spaces — parks and community gardens, usually — help them deal with the stresses of urban life. Mark Taylor, a public health researcher at the University of Trnava in Slovakia, wondered, though, if there might be a way to establish that connection between nature and mental health without relying on people’s own accounts of their well-being. “There’s been a fair bit of research that looks at different ways in which people say they feel some kind of benefit of being around natural spaces,” he says. “But nearly all of that was subjective.” You can ask people if they feel better, he says, and plenty might say they do. But how to know for sure?”
In the ‘Workplace of the Future,’ We Hang Like Monkeys from Vertical Gardens
“Sean Cassidy and Joe Wilson’s architectural dream, “Organic Grid+,” is the winner of Metropolis Magazine’s recent competition to design the “Workplace of the Future.” Installing green walls probably would soothe office workers with computer-monitor fatigue. And it might be a nifty in-house method of providing healthy lunch to the workforce (as long as said workforce doesn’t mind the occasional caterpillar on the keyboard). The visionary office, which Wilson and Cassidy have imagined for their hometown of London, would latch onto an existing building like a chlorophyll-filled leach, injecting it with light, hope, and vegetables. It would incorporate a host of supposedly freedom-granting features, such as walls that could be moved around at an employee’s whim. (Or more likely, a boss’s directive.) The goal is to “change the negative associations of working in open-plan offices,” write its creators.”
America’s Billionaires Are Turning Public Parks Into Playgrounds for the Wealthy
“It’s no picnic to run a public park these days. Look at Manhattan’s Pier 54. Once the launching point for ocean liners, the pier was incorporated into Hudson River Park in the late ’80s and turned into an event space. But its underwater pilings were rotting, and four years ago it had to be shut down. The Hudson River Park Trust, the public agency that oversees a four-mile stretch of waterfront, had no money for repairs; it receives no public funding for its operations, even though its collection of ballfields, athletic facilities, and footpaths are the go-to recreation space for residents of Manhattan’s West Side. Madelyn Wils, the Trust’s president and CEO, had kept the park’s assortment of piers open largely with private contributions, but she knew Pier 54’s pilings would require a big donation. “I couldn’t get any interest from the state or city,” she lamented. “And there are not a lot of philanthropists out there willing to repair the pilings.” Wils approached the billionaire Barry Diller, the chairman of IAC. He was an obvious choice: His company’s Frank Gehry-designed headquarters in Chelsea overlooked Hudson River Park, and he and his wife, the fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, were the largest private benefactors of New York’s much-celebrated High Line, just a couple blocks away. But instead of handing Wils a check, Diller counteroffered: Let him build a completely new park. “
Elevation Q&A: Tommy Wells on Urban Agriculture, Playgrounds, and A Tree Summit
“In early January, Tommy Wells was appointed Acting Director of the District Department of the Environment (DDOE). Much of Wells’ work in the city has focused on cleaning up the Anacostia River; as a councilmember for Ward 6 he had pushed for clean-up efforts along its banks and successfully championed a bag bill which raised money for environmental projects through a five cent per bag fee. As the head of DDOE, Wells will oversee some 300 employees working on huge variety of issues, including lead paint remediation and intervention, toxic material clean-ups, fisheries and wildlife management, and energy planning. A few weeks after he took over at DDOE, Elevation DC sat down to talk with him about his vision for his department and his priorities for the coming years.”
