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.
Designing Natural Vistas Into Urban Cancer Center Environments
“Controlled studies confirm that contact with the natural environment can alleviate stress, relax blood pressure, and even reduce the need for pain medication. So it isn’t surprising that many designers strive to organize outpatient cancer centers around natural vistas. In suburban and rural areas, a cancer center can easily be surrounded by a garden or a grove of trees. But in urban areas—or on densely developed hospital campuses—the available vistas may be the side of a building, the air handling units on a rooftop, or a sea of parked cars. With the healing effects of nature in mind, four cancer centers in densely developed settings were developed with a focus on making patients and staff feel as if they’re close to the natural world. Approaches included creating miniature gardens, discreetly screening unattractive views, taking advantage of roofscapes, engaging distant glimpses of the landscape, and making connections with nature.”
What It Takes to Turn a Massive Staten Island Landfill Into a Park
“For generations, Staten Island’s Fresh Kills Landfill was a dump, the receptacle for solid waste from all over New York City. From the time it opened in 1947 until closing in 2001, Fresh Kills was synonymous with its stench, a sad reminder of how our society is drowning in its own refuse…Today, Freshkills Park — the reengineered 2,200-acre site on the western shore of Staten Island — is well on its way to becoming one of the most innovative urban parks in the nation. “It’s the largest landfill-to-park transformation in the world at the moment,” says Eloise Hirsh of the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation…The vision for the park’s future is a grand one. It includes a wide variety of uses — a partial list includes structured play spaces, open lawns, event venues, wildlife habitats, kayak launches, mountain bike trails and floating gardens.”
Women in Lower Green Space Areas Show Higher Overall Levels of Stress, New Research Shows
“Women in lower green space areas show higher overall levels of stress, according to the research, led by OPENspace research centre at the Universities of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt, working in collaboration with the Universities of Glasgow and Westminster, Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland and the James Hutton Institute. The same does not appear to be true of men living in the same areas; an anomaly which the study suggests requires further investigation…They measured the relationship between gender and percentage of green space on mean cortisol concentrations and found that there was a positive effect of higher green space on women, but not in men.”
In Defiant Flower, a Host of Plucky Plots
“THE official New York color is gray. The materials are concrete and stone. That is the image. In fact, New York is surprisingly green. Nearly 20 percent of the city is public park land, a figure that earned it second place this summer, behind San Diego, when the Trust for Public Land conducted its annual Park Score survey of the 50 largest cities in the United States…The superstars hog the headlines: Central Park, Madison Square, the botanical gardens in Brooklyn and the Bronx…However, the city teems with unsung small parks and gardens midway on the scale between flower pot and Great Lawn. Some are squeezed in discreet niches between buildings. Others are new and await discovery. Still others have undergone a metamorphosis.”
