Every week, we bring you the latest news in placemaking, landscape architecture, the nature-mental health link, and much more. Check back each week for new roundups and items.
A City Center Becomes a Garden
Aberdeen, a city in Scotland, is not only transforming its urban center into a garden and cultural center, but also making sure the proposed designs suit the needs of the public. An upcoming referendum will gauge public support for the designs created by landscape architects OLIN. OLIN writes that the new City Garden will be a “reinvigorated green heart of the city,†doubling the urban core’s current size. A key concept is to reconnect the dramatic landscape of Aberdeen with the city via a “web of paths.†This web will provide opportunities for visitors to explore a diverse set of gardens harking back to Aberdeen’s rich natural and cultural history.
Stronger Citizens, Stronger Cities: Changing Governance Through a Focus on Place
A great place is something that everybody can create. If vibrancy is people, as we argued two weeks ago, the only way to make a city vibrant again is to make room for more of them. Today, in the first of a two-part follow up, we will explore how Placemaking, by positioning public spaces at the heart of action-oriented community dialog, makes room both physically and philosophically by re-framing citizenship as an on-going, creative collaboration between neighbors. The result is not merely vibrancy, but equity.
Putting the Pieces Together
Since January I’ve spoken with leaders at city parks and their partners from Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston all the way to Caras Park in Missoula, Montana, studying park conservancies, BIDs and downtown associations in partnership with city and state agencies to manage, maintain, program and fund public parks – mostly downtown parks. I’ve been thinking about those interviews and the research that I’ve done and trying to pull out the lessons and commonalities about these partnerships. So far, I think lessons fall into three groups: governance and the art of partnering; programs and usership; Community engagement, access and transparency.
Urban Wasteland Areas Can Be Re-developed as Rich Ecological Sites
Researchers in Berlin have demonstrated that urban wasteland areas can be used as suitable habitats for a range of grassland species. Using simple and cost-effective measures to sow grassland seed mixtures, they found that such areas flourished despite poor soil conditions and high levels of impact from people. Restoration is a technique often used to counteract the loss of plant species caused by intensive agriculture and abandoned sites. Whilst this approach is frequently applied in rural areas, this new study investigates its potential to be used in urban wastelands. De-industrialization and population changes are causing wasteland areas to increase in many cities, especially in Europe, and so restoration could provide a useful way of conserving native species in an unlikely setting.
