Every week, we bring you the latest news in placemaking, landscape architecture, the nature-mental health link, and much more. This week with a decidedly international focus! Check back each week for new roundups and items.
In Mexico, A City’s Scar Becomes its Most Prized Park
“Jessica Lopez, a four-year old with a shy smile, has suffered severe chronic asthma attacks since she was born. Her condition always worsened in the fall, when dust rose up from the abandoned fields that bordered her family’s modest one-room house. Last year, city officials here turned those dusty fields near Jessica’s house into a gleaming park with trails, playgrounds and shaded pavilions. Then in the fall, something remarkable happened in the Lopez home: Jessica’s asthma attacks did not come.”
This Enormous Moscow Park Used to be a Four-Lane Highway
“Moscow doesn’t have a reputation as a walkable city; the main street leading away from the Kremlin and Red Square is a sprawling eight lane road, and if pedestrians want to cross, they have to walk underground. But the city is starting to change. Last year, another large highway–this one four lanes wide, running along a river near the city center–was turned into a park.”
Vertical Gardens Grow Up
“Botanist and garden designer Patrick Blanc, who usually stays just a few stories off the ground with his densely-planted vertical gardens, is now moving higher and higher. Working with starchitect Jean Nouvel, Blanc has been sheathing two 380-feet-tall buildings in green. What once looked like a fanciful graduate school student’s thesis has now become reality: vertical gardens are now climbing up [Australian] skyscrapers, too. The building…will be an architectural work floating in the air, with plants growing on the walls – it will create a very special result that will be very new to Sydney. The greenery is meant to extend the nearby park onto the buildings, creating a verdant district. According to The Architect’s Newspaper, “the lush green tapestry of the structure’s facade will be entwined with the foliage of the adjacent park in order to replicate the natural cliffs of the Blue Mountains, which are located in the Western part of Sydney.”
One Man’s Crusade to Sprout Urban Trees all Over Calcutta
“Kolkata has less than one percent open space, unlike in other global cities with at least five to ten percent open areas,” says Subhas Dutta. The population pressure is much higher in Kolkata too, and the cutting of trees over decades dealt a body blow to the severely polluted city. Dutta’s initial one-man crusade has grown into a full-fledged movement. “When I started raising the slogan, everyone said I am into a ragtag activism,” he says. But people’s participation followed eventually. It is activism which stopped or at least lessened arbitrary or wanton felling of trees. Academic discussions by experts do not have any desired effect unless it is backed up by some street activism.”
