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.
Would You Send Your Child to Daycare in the Forest?
“While ensuring children’s safety and wellbeing at all times is absolutely necessary, I think it’s unfortunate that we North Americans are so bound to indoor spaces and the countless costs associated with them. Imagine if we took a lesson from the popular “forest kindergartens” of Scandinavia and northern Europe, where toddlers and preschool-aged kids spend all day outdoors, learning that “there’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing.” If daycares shifted their focus to parks and playgrounds in urban settings, and forests in rural areas, there would no longer be such a pressing need to pay for an indoor space; childcare workers could be paid better wages; and kids wouldn’t suffer from what Richard Louv has termed “nature deficit disorder” in his fascinating book “Last Child in the Woods.””
Are More Downtown Parks in Ann Arbor’s future?
“The Ann Arbor City Council has adopted a 22-page report intended to guide the future development of downtown parks and open space. The report from the city’s Downtown Parks Subcommittee suggests the downtown could benefit from more small “pocket parks” and “flexible spaces.” It recommends the city work with potential developers of city-owned properties to create privately funded but publicly accessible open spaces on parking lots such as the Y Lot at Fifth and William and the Kline Lot at Ashley and William. An even larger park or open space is recommended on the Library Lot, the parking lot above the city’s underground parking garage on Fifth Avenue.”
Detroit Is Planting The World’s Largest Urban Farm
“Imagine driving down a typical suburban grid of streets, but to the left and right, the houses have been replaced with a giant tree farm. Farther down the road, families are still living in homes, but every few lots the urban forest pops up again. Welcome to the lower east side of Detroit, 2014. After five years of navigating through municipal red tape–not an easy process with a rapidly shifting succession of city officials who all needed to agree simultaneously–a company called Hantz Farms finally has the green light to plant what they say is the world’s largest urban farm. The project is funded by John Hantz, a Detroit businessman who wanted to reverse the trend of foreclosures, putting property in the hands of a city that can’t afford to maintain it. With the surplus of city-owned properties flooding the market, entrepreneurs didn’t have a good incentive to invest in land. Hantz, on the other hand, felt that investing in land would pay for itself in time, transforming neighborhoods and making them livable again, says Michael Score, who is CEO of Hantz Farms.”
What Boston Can Teach Us About Linked City Parks
“Since the annual meeting of the American Society of Landscape Architects is being held in Boston, this gives me a great opportunity to highlight ASLA’s superb Landscape Architect’s Guide to Boston, published online and similar in concept and format to the organization’s guide to Washington, which I highlighted here. The guide begins, as it must, with Boston’s “Emerald Necklace,” described as a 1,100-acre chain of green spaces connecting the Boston Common—in the heart of the city and dating from the colonial period—and the adjacent 1837 Boston Public Garden to five additional parks and an arboretum designed by legendary landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted: The Arnold Arboretum, Back Bay Fens, Franklin Park, The Riverway, Olmsted Park, and Jamaica Pond. All are linked by parkways and waterways; all the Olmsted projects were developed in the late 1880s.”
