What a Park’s Design Does to Your Brain

AP Photo/Julie Jacobson

 As a student in Poland, Agnieszka Anna Olszewska was fascinated by the way that some landscapes seemed to be more contemplative than others. She wanted to research the reasons behind that calming effect, but she found little encouragement. “People told me I can write a novel, I can write a poem about the contemplativeness of landscape, but not a scientific paper.” One well-respected landscape architect told her it couldn’t be done because of the diversity of human responses: Some of us might find a garden conducive to contemplation; others might prefer the bathroom.

But Olszewska, now a doctoral candidate in landscape architecture and urban ecology at the University of Porto in Portugal, persevered. With a neuroscience professor at the university, she conducted a pilot project that culminated, earlier this year, in a conference paper titled “Urban Planning, Neurosciences and Contemplation for Improving Well-being in Our Cities.” It combined questionnaire results with measurement of brain waves in an effort “to prove that there are certain characteristics of urban parks and gardens that can induce in the visitor the pattern of brain activity that is associated with contemplative or meditative states.”

We know that cities can be hectic, stressful places. We also know that green space can have a calming effect on people. But Olszewska is seeking to take our knowledge a step further — to enable designers and planners to maximize the serenity of urban green refuges.

In the study, four design experts examined 50 photographs from three urban parks in Portugal and France. The experts were also given a checklist of design features (such as long-distance views, biodiversity, “canopied,” “panoramic”). They identified which features appeared in each photograph, and also evaluated each setting’s contemplativeness. The settings deemed most contemplative had panoramic vistas with long-distance views (more than 400 meters). They tended to include large empty spaces, natural asymmetry, clearings and stimulation to look at the sky. The least contemplative settings, by contrast, usually lacked these features, and instead had characteristics such as paths and enclosed spaces (as in small pocket gardens).

In the second part of the project, subjects were asked to look at the 15 photos of landscapes ranked highest by the experts for contemplativeness. Their brain waves were recorded by electroencephalography (EEG) during this task. The brain activity, Olszewska said, was similar to patterns known to be associated with mindfulness achieved through meditation. She stresses, though, that her research is quite preliminary; subjects weren’t shown the least contemplative spaces. (She is currently working on a study that includes this kind of control group.)

The most contemplative landscapes are not necessarily the ones that people would claim to enjoy the most. More stimulating landscapes — brightly colored flowers, numerous eye-catching elements — may be more immediately attractive. “If you imagine the French baroque gardens, they are very geometrical, very organized,” said Olszewska. But this kind of environment, however beautiful, may be less relaxing to spend time in.

This is not to say that the opposite extreme — wild landscapes — are necessarily more contemplative. Olszewska thinks we tend to find those overwhelming. Instead, she hypothesizes that the ideal is a “golden middle” between too much design and too little.

The small experiment is part of a larger, nascent movement to try to connect neuroscience to architecture and design. The movement for “evidence-based design” originated in the health care field. One famous finding was that in hospitals — historically not the most pleasant places — surgical patients whose windows faced natural outdoor scenery were discharged sooner and requested fewer painkillers than patients whose windows faced a brick wall. Inspired by this movement, others began to think that there was no reason to limit such thinking to hospitals. It spread to schools, and now, increasingly, the built environment and urban green spaces. Some researchers began to incorporate neuroscience. Much of the interest is focused on contemplativeness. Perhaps, just as hospitals need healing spaces, cities need serene oases to counteract the urban chaos.

Julio Bermudez, an associate professor of architecture and planning at the Catholic University of America, studies how the built environment can induce states of relaxation and mindfulness. In one study, which he presented last week at the second annual conference of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, architects looked at photographs of buildings designed to be contemplative, including the Salk Institute in San Diego and the Pantheon in Rome, as well as ordinary buildings. The contemplative buildings reportedly elicited “markedly distinct” responses, as measured by functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Bermudez and his co-authors (including a neuroscientist at the University of Utah) concluded that contemplative buildings “allow subjects to enter into a meditative state with diminishing levels of anxiety and mind wandering.”

In an email, Bermudez speculated about some common features of contemplative design: buildings that frame nature in some way; that exhibit simplicity without being simplistic; and that offer a sense of separation from the rest of their context, among other qualities. Some “remarkable cities,” he wrote, “naturally invite contemplative states.” As examples, he cited Santiago de Compostela in Spain and Bodh Gaya in India, as well as parts of Paris, Washington D.C. and San Francisco.

It may be true that, as the landscape architect warned Olszewska, it’s hard to make blanket generalizations about what people find contemplative, and responses may vary culturally too. It’s also notoriously challenging to interpret brain waves conclusively, and this research is in its infancy. But both Olszewska and Bermudez believe there are certain common features that can broadly foster these meditative responses. And rather than write poems, they hope to prove it with the tools of fMRI and EEG.

The Science of Cities column is made possible with the support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow is a columnist for Next City. She has also written for the New York Times, Slate and Dissent, among other publications.

 http://nextcity.org/daily/entry/city-parks-design-calming-brain

Three Perspectives on Designing Resilient Cities

Hurricane Sandy has changed the national conversation on climate change. Unlike Hurricane Katrina, which much of the country was happy to pin the blame for on New Orleans itself (“they shouldn’t have built there in the first place!”), Sandy revealed climate change to be a growing threat to nearly all coastal settlements. Formerly abstract warnings of growing inundation risk, stemming from rising sea levels and increasing storm frequency, suddenly became concrete and impossible to ignore. A new found sense of vulnerability descended on coastal cities. In this light, urban design cannot be dismissed as merely a luxury or an aesthetic consideration. The discipline has taken on a new relevance and sense of urgency: cities, particularly in coastal settings, must reconsider their built form in order to adapt to radically altered environmental conditions. Three new books by Island Press approach these issues with renewed sense of the value of the urban design.

Entertaining and attractively designed, Alexandros Washburn’s The Nature of Urban Design: A New York Perspective on Resilience provides a fantastic introduction to the discipline of urban design for non-designers. Washburn, the chief urban designer for New York City, uses that city as case studies to explain what exactly urban designers do and why it matters. He broadly defines urban design as “the art of changing cities, guiding growth to follow new patterns that better meet our challenges while improving our quality of life.” Of course, perhaps the biggest challenge facing cities today is climate change, and The Nature of Urban Design uses Hurricane Sandy to illustrate the need for adaptation, and how urban design can act as an agent of change.

Washburn includes the suburbs in his definition of the city, stating that the suburbs simply represent low-density cities, thus breaking down the false city/suburb dichotomy. Washburn’s inclusion of the suburbs is important because it allows him to expand the purview of urban design beyond the city center to the entire metropolitan area. Urban design isn’t about recreating a single notion of what the city is, but instead about adaptation and improving living conditions, regardless of location within the metropolitan region. Instead of seeking a rigid urban design toolkit, Washburn asks, “Is there a form of the city that can survive new extremes of weather, that can accommodate millions more citizens in dignity and prosperity, that can avoid contributing more to climate change, and still be worth living in?”

He methodically walks us through why urban design matters, how urban designers work, how urban design can be a catalyst for transformation (using the High Line as a case study), and how it can lead to resilience in the face of climate change. He discusses two strategies for resilience: mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation means reducing greenhouse gases in order to prevent adverse climate change, while adaptation involves reducing vulnerability to projected climate change. With a certain degree of environmental change now inevitable and a dramatic, global reduction in greenhouse gas production seeming less and less likely, Washburn’s approach to resiliency is both idealistic and practical.

Like Washburn’s book, The Hidden Potential of Sustainable Neighborhoods: Lessons from Low-Carbon Communities, by Harrison Fraker, uses global climate change to frame the new importance of urban design. Unlike Washburn’s broad overview of the profession, however, Fraker’s is more narrowly focused, using four European case studies to dig into the specifics of several low-carbon urban design projects. Fraker describes how sustainability issues such as energy efficiency have historically only been considered on the building scale. The neighborhood scale, however, represents new opportunities for carbon reduction. Fraker argues that the neighborhood scale has the “potential to integrate the design of transportation, buildings, and infrastructure while engaging the design of the public realm as part of the system.” He refers to this as a “whole-systems approach,” where all urban systems are considered together, greatly expanding the potential for resiliency.

 The Hidden Potential of Sustainable Neighborhoods is about mitigation, citing examples of low-carbon urban design projects. This does not mean, however, that Fraker is merely presenting a series of utopian designs. Each of the examples in the book is actually built, and Fraker looks back at commonalities between each project’s implementation and subsequent performance. Furthermore, he applies the lessons learned from the four European examples to sprawling, patchwork American urbanism, describing the potential for infill opportunities. Fraker could have spent more time addressing how to retrofit existing development rather than concentrating on new development. Still, as he states, new models can catalyze paradigm shifts, and we should appreciate his effort to translate European lessons to messy American cities.

If The Nature of Urban Design is a layperson’s introduction to urban design, and The Hidden Potential of Sustainable Neighborhoods is a case-study resource for urban designers, The Guide to Greening Cities, by Sadhu Aufochs Johnston, Steven S. Nicholas, and Julia Parzen, is probably of most interest to urban planners. Like the other two books, The Guide to Greening Cities lays out the challenge of designing cities in the face of climate change. Johnston and his co-authors also refer to Hurricane Sandy, as well as other climactic events, to establish the new urgency of resilient city design.

 Instead of studying the design of resilient cities, however, Greening Cities explores how city leaders can implement new sustainability projects. Johnston and team state that the book is “written from the perspective of green city leaders and champions who are working inside city governments in North America and who have succeeded in pushing forward innovative green projects.” Rather than emphasizing the design of sustainability, Greening Cities walks through how city leaders can make a case for, fund, implement, and subsequently monitor green projects. In this way, The Guide to Greening Cities is a useful book for urban planners wishing to increase the resiliency of their communities.

Cities are now faced with the task of both adapting to inevitably changing environmental conditions and minimizing their contributions to future climate change. The political, economic, environmental, and technological challenges associated with this task are bewilderingly complex. However, recent events such as Hurricane Sandy have shown inaction to be an increasingly tragic prospect.

The complexity of designing for urban resilience requires a broad cultural shift across many different disciplines. These three books address the same problem of designing in the face of global climate change, but do so for different audiences – the general public, urban designers, and urban planners. With the consequences of global warming no longer abstract, hopefully the sense of urgency that inspired these books will not abate.

http://dirt.asla.org/2013/11/06/three-perspectives-on-designing-resilient-cities/

The Next Generation of Infrastructure

Shanghai, China. Image © Scott Muller

by Scott Muller

The next generation of urban infrastructure will not be built. This is to say, that a sustainable future will not come from new technologies. Urgent demand is already overwhelming adequate risk management and urban governance capacities. While indeed carbon-free light rail, driverless cars and desalination plants will be in unquenchable demand, none of it will happen successfully without a bankable environment that aggressively manages the social, political, financial and environmental risks of new infrastructure. The barriers to the next generation of infrastructure [1] are neither technical nor financial; rather they’re social and political. Effectively responding to the unprecedented need for urban infrastructure hinges on the successful process over the high-tech outcome.

New Urban Dynamics

Cities have replaced national governments as the de facto drivers of global economic growth and human development. In fact, 300 of the largest metro economies worldwide, containing just 19% of the world’s population, delivered nearly half of the global economic output in 2011 [2]. A recent analysis by the McKinsey Global Institute reveals that by 2025, more than two thirds of global GDP will be produced by just 600 cities – the majority of them in emerging countries [3].

But importantly, economic growth does not alone create stability. Spanning from the least to the most developed, the fate of cities is one of increasing vulnerability to climate change, resource scarcity and rapid population growth.

Hyper-Urbanization

By the year 2030 world urban population will increase to nearly 5 billion persons (1.35 billion more than present), increasing the planet’s urban area by an astonishing 150% in less than 20 years. Sixty percent of the area to be urban by 2030 has yet to be built [4]. Contrary to the trend of the 20th century, the majority of this urban growth (and commensurate economic growth) will occur in developing countries and mainly in second-tier and lower cities. From now to 2030, the world will need to build the equivalent of a city of one million people in developing countries every five days. Their intense demand for the rapid construction of new infrastructure threatens their already challenged risk management and urban governance capacities.

Nexus Issues

Incongruous to this rapid urbanization, is the reality that current growth is no longer supported by sustainable inputs, as we are already 50% in “overshoot.” In other words, human systems are presently using 50% more than the annual productivity and assimilating capacity of the planet’s ecosystems [5]. This unsustainable consumption of ecosystem services to subsidize the growth of cities is progressing ever farther along the urban-to-rural gradient. One result is an ominous energy-water-food nexus of demand confronting city, regional and national decision makers.

As urbanization reaches farther beyond its geopolitical borders to satisfy ever-greater metabolic demands, rural communities and families are linearly assimilated into “foreign” urban economies, with marked social and cultural impacts. Families with rural legacies can be insurmountably challenged by joining an urban economy yet remaining spatially disconnected from services. In the end, urban migration is more often not so much a quest for economic prosperity, as it is a survival strategy for the rurally displaced.

Climate Change

Continued urban development is made more complex by a third, interrelated, crosscutting element: climate change. Increasing climate disruptions are changing the fundamental rules of city planning and administration. Rapid climate change is altering both the risk (threats) and the fitness (responses) landscapes of cities. Unfamiliar risks and new statistical criteria have rendered historical “business-as-usual” strategies increasingly ineffective and detrimental with direct implications on safety, quality of life and the economic performance of cities. Uncertainty is now a fundamental core element of urban development, along with non-linear growth patterns, runaway positive feedback/ cascading failures, hidden thresholds and irrevocable tipping points. The rapidly reshaping insurance industry is but one example of shifting solutions – with increased disaster intensities and frequencies, the utility of insurance to guarantee major new infrastructure investments becomes increasingly untenable.

Manchay, Lima, Peru. Image © Scott Muller

The Managerial and Policy Challenge

As urban economies mature in developing countries, and as cities become increasingly more vulnerable, their decision-making power is rising and yet becoming more complex at the same time. The speed of urbanization and the new risk landscape present a profound managerial and policy challenge for municipalities. Cities and metropolitan governments are now obligated to deal with exponential rates of urban immigration; protect and conserve the surrounding landscapes and ecosystem services sourced outside their geopolitical boundaries; ensure sufficient energy supplies for their industry and residents; finance, construct and maintain hard infrastructure; respond to the pressing challenge of sea level rise; attract private industry and foreign investment; negotiate with multilateral development banks (MDBs) and engage with foreign government official development assistance (ODA).

Spanning from the least to the most developed, the fate of cities is one of increasing vulnerability to climate change, resource scarcity and rapid population growth. The fate of the world has become the fate of cities. There has emerged with great immediacy, a revolutionary worldwide discourse on how to best make cities more sustainable: building resilience, enabling transformation and de-risking the economy.

Addressing Vulnerabilities

The thoughtful development and management of new infrastructure is a powerful way to de-risk cities. But often overlooked in the speculative, investment driven rush to build, is the fact that infrastructure impacts the sustainability of urban systems in several ways; some of them less immediately apparent to elected officials.

Infrastructure’s impact on urban sustainability includes positive performance gains, but additionally, it can also create negative pathway dependencies and the commensurate loss of “optionality.” However, thirdly and most importantly, the demand for urban infrastructure creates a unique circumstance – when often disparate socioeconomic groups briefly share an orbit around an issue involving a public good or a common pool resource. This is a critical opportunity to generate and strengthen urban social capital – the key success attribute for the next generation of infrastructure.

Estimates suggest that US$ 53 trillion must be spent on infrastructure worldwide by 2030 to adequately manage the rapid growth of cities [6]. In 2011, the High Level Panel on Infrastructure for Recommendations to the G20 pointed out that the key constraint to infrastructure development is not a lack of funding. After all, financing can technically be created to support low-risk investments. Rather, they identify the principal barrier to rapid infrastructure development as the absence of a strong pipeline of bankable projects [7]. This is to say, infrastructure projects must be low-risk to qualify as “bankable.” Infrastructure in developing countries is an asset class highly vulnerable to political, regulatory and execution risk. Therefore, managing the social, political, financial and environmental risk of infrastructure projects should be the priority when pursuing the performance gains of new infrastructure.

The most important investment a city can make today is developing integrated, cross-disciplinary capacity within the “infrastructure development process,” and the commensurate tools and methods to mitigate the social, political, and financial risks. Building this systemic capacity allows successful urban development along a range of fronts, among them the “next generation” of infrastructure.

To create goal-seeking behavior towards sustainability and avoid the development of unsafe slums and unsupportable resource-intensive path dependencies, it becomes essential that all sectors of civil society have a seat at the table to participate in the selection, design, launch, management and perhaps ownership of infrastructure projects.

Collective Actions and Horizon Lines

Cities are Human-Environment Systems (HES), appreciably comprised of common pool resources and public goods. These interact in ever-shifting equations to one day ostensibly arrive at an equitable, circular economy.

HES are considered to be complex adaptive systems because they consist of influential, interacting smaller systems that self-organize as a whole. As they grow, the challenging issues of overuse and equity must continually be addressed. More specifically, growing cities are subject to social dilemmas and the problems of collective action and inter-temporal resource allocation. Collective action challenges in cities relate to the fact that individuals and subgroups make decisions based on particular desires without considering the impacts their decisions may have for others in society. Inter-temporal resource allocation dilemmas involve individuals and subgroups making decisions locally in time (short time horizon, or equivalently applying a high discount rate) without considering the long term/ global consequences of these choices.

As a complex adaptive system, HES can demonstrate goal-seeking behavior. So it is important to point out that the rapid expansion of cities is not impeded by the absence of adequate planning, transportation, housing, finance or attention to risks. Rapid urbanization occurs whether infrastructure is planned or not; “electricity and cable are first stolen and later gentrified” [8]. To create goal-seeking behavior towards sustainability and avoid the development of unsafe slums and unsupportable resource-intensive path dependencies, it becomes essential that all sectors of civil society have a seat at the table to participate in the selection, design, launch, management and perhaps ownership of infrastructure projects. Citizen access to and participation in public decision making, along with building coalitions and multi-sector partnerships will not only significantly increase the success of infrastructure projects, it will also unlock latent circular economies and subsequently advance the sustainability of the Human-Environment System.

The Renewable Power of Shared Learning

One method to efficiently enable integrated capacity and multi-sector collaboration along the infrastructure development process is by creating peer learning environments among municipal government officials as well as civil society. Research demonstrates that the bottom-up accumulation of knowledge by professionals via peer-to-peer learning experiences is one of the most important factors in the types of projects and policies that make their way into successful strategic planning and policy proposals [9]. Peer learning builds capacities of all stakeholders and decision-makers, promoting effective functioning beyond a single project, including the next generation of infrastructure.

Over the past four years, the Institute for Sustainable Communities (ISC) has developed a methodology for creating shared learning environments, culminating in the organization of Sustainable Community Leadership Academies (SCLA) with the explicit purpose to accelerate urban climate adaptation and sustainability [10]. These intensive three-day academies bring together 10-15 multidisciplinary teams of 5 or 6 senior level practitioners and municipal government officials from cities and metropolitan areas. To date, teams from more than 400 cities have participated in these Leadership Academies, generating a wealth of results, tools, and networks that can accessed by anyone.

Seoul, Korea. Image © Scott Muller

This past April 15-17 in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Mississippi Sea Grant Consortium [11] and ISC kicked off an 8 month “Gulf Coast Community Resilience Program.” Utilizing ISC’s peer-learning methodology, leaders from 6 Gulf Coast communities created an informal network to advance and accelerate resilience. During the workshop, the practitioners shared experiences and tools, each identifying two to three key implementation ideas to apply in their communities over the summer. Tailored technical assistance within the informal network will help the participating Gulf Coast communities apply their resilience implementation ideas. In the fall, the same six communities will come together again for a follow-up Climate Leadership Academy (CLA) to share results and lessons learned, solidifying the informal network.

One highlight during the April CLA plenary was when Dr. Pam Jenkins of the University of New Orleans’ CHART [12] Program facilitated a community mapping clinic. Using a structured process, each community team identified coastal adaptation initiatives that led to “therapeutic” or “corrosive” communities. For example, after the recent Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, factions with differing interests and opinions on financial settlement options led to a “corrosive” community atmosphere. On the other hand, after recent natural disasters, many teams sponsored “therapeutic” community celebrations that featured actionable dialogue on coastal adaptation strategies. As a result of the clinic, community leaders now have the tools to foster therapeutic approaches for the design of climate-adaptive infrastructure choices.

Internationally, another contemporary example of cities using peer learning to develop the next generation of climate-adaptive infrastructure is occurring in Southeast Asia. ASEAN [13] cities are some of the fastest growing in the world, and yet at the same time, some of the most vulnerable to climate change – forcing more adaptive approaches to urban development. As a result, city practitioners across the region are designing and building more resilient, ecologically integrated urban infrastructure, engaging their populations in inclusive decision-making, and collaborating across jurisdictions. These activities are generating innovations and investment opportunities that are shaping growth throughout the region. In a partnership between U.S. cities and ASEAN member states, ten teams of senior municipal officials from second- and third-tier cities will be participating in an SCLA on Urban Adaptation next August, [14] with a primary focus on sharing lessons of managing the social, political, financial and environmental risks of urban infrastructure. After the SCLA, a selection of cities will participate in partnerships with U.S. Cities to gain more exposure to innovative approaches, good governance tools and appropriate infrastructure technologies.

The results of ISC’s Leadership Academies across diverse cities and broad geographical range, support the research that concludes shared learning environments and exchange among practitioners can effectively overcome information overload as well as resource constraints, spawning innovation and greatly increase the likelihood of policy transfer [15]. What’s more, peer learning affords practitioners the ability to not only learn from their colleagues, but also to teach them – offering a sense of empowerment. Growing and strengthening the leadership capacity of these municipal leaders builds the overall profile of the profession – the resources generated from peer learning provides a core knowledge base for city sustainability practitioners and civil society organizations.

Going Forward

So while infrastructure is a key physical and technological asset of cities – representing critical capital investment – more important is the knowledge, shared ownership and collaboration that the next generation of urban infrastructure embeds in the Human Environment System. Successful public infrastructure is a legacy to the surmounted social dilemmas, collective action challenges and path dependencies resolved leading up to its construction.

The next punctuated equilibrium will not come from advanced or new technologies. Rather it will emerge from shared learning, multi-sector coalitions, integrated planning, public-private partnerships, the skillful advocacy of civil society and good governance. This is how to best reframe urban development and economic growth to include the capacity of the biosphere.

References

[1]  The next generation of infrastructure is defined by its service to urban sustainability.

[2]  Metropolitan Policy Program, Global Metro-Monitor 2012: Slowdown, Recovery, and Interdependence. (Report, Brookings Institution, 2012).  Accessible at http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/reports/2012/11/30 global metro monitor/30 global monitor.pdf

[3]  McKinsey Global Institute, 2012.  Urban world: Mapping the economic power of cities. (Report, McKinsey & Company, March 2011) Available at http://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/dotcom/Insights and pubs/MGI/Research/Urbanization/Urban world mapping economic power of cities/MGI_urban_world_mapping_economic_power_of_cities_full_report.ashx

[4]  Seto, Karen C., Burak Güneralp, and Lucy R. Hutyra. “Global forecasts of urban expansion to 2030 and direct impacts on biodiversity and carbon pools.”Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 40 (2012): 16083-16088.

[5]  Wackernagael, M. et. al. 2002. “Tracking the ecological overshoot of the human economcy.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. July 9, 2002 vol. 99 no. 14

[6]  OECD, Strategic Transport, Infrastructure Needs to 2030.  (Report, OECD, March 2012) ISBN 978-92-64-16862-6.

[7]  Thiam, Tidjane -Chairman. High Level Panel on Infrastructure, Recommendations to G20 (Final Report. 26 October 2011).

[8]  Brand, Stewart. Whole earth discipline; an ecopragmatist manifesto. Atlantic Books, 2010.

[9]  Marsden, Greg, Karen Trapenberg Frick, Anthony D. May, and Elizabeth Deakin. “Bounded rationality in policy learning amongst cities: lessons from the transport sector.” Environment and Planning A 44, no. 4 (2012): 905-920.

[10]  “Sustainable Communities Leadership Forum,” Institute for Sustainable Cities. Accessed 5/22/2013 at http://sustainablecommunitiesleadershipacademy.org/

 [11]  NOAA, “Home” Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium. Accessed 5/22/2013 at http://sustainablecommunitiesleadershipacademy.org/

[12]  “Center for Hazards Assessment, Response & Technology,” University of new Orleans. Accessed 5/22/2013 at http://sustainablecommunitiesleadershipacademy.org/

[13]  Association of South East Asian Nations

[14]  “A Climate Leadership Academy on Urban Adaptation: From Risk Barrier to Results,” ICMA, CityLinks and USAID. Accessed 5/22/2013 at http://icma.org/en/cl/news/events/climate_leadership_academy

[15]  McCann, Eugene. “Urban policy mobilities and global circuits of knowledge: toward a research agenda.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101, no. 1 (2011): 107-130.

http://landscapeurbanism.com/article/the-next-generation-of-infrastructure/

Daylighting Takes Off as Cities Expose Long-Buried Rivers

There's likely an underground stream in your city, but it may soon be seeing the light.

Uncovering buried streams has had huge impacts in places as diverse as Seattle, Washington, Kalamazoo, Michigan, and even Seoul, Korea—improving local water quality, providing habitat for fish and birds, and turning neglected parking lots and roads into public parks that boost neighbors' property values and can revitalize entire cities. And city planners everywhere are starting to take note.

In Yonkers, the fourth largest city in New York State, officials are a third done with a "daylighting" project—a term for the opening up of underground streams (see "11 Rivers Forced Underground"). In addition to exposing a waterway that had long been covered, the effort has already sparked plans for a new minor-league ballpark and new housing.

"I credit the city and the people who ... figured that having a nice river in a downtown was something that was, economically, really good," said Ann-Marie Mitroff, director of river programs for Groundwork Hudson Valley, an environmental justice nonprofit.

But why are all these streams covered at all? Flash back more than a hundred years. In many urban areas around the world, small streams were just getting in the way. You couldn't build on top of them, and the rapidly growing populations in many cities were throwing all their sewage into open water.

Often, engineers found that the simplest solution was to bury the streams, routing the water into pipes and paving over the top. In Yonkers, "the Army Corps of Engineers put a parking lot on top of it, which everybody thought was progress," Mitroff said. [Editor's note: A spokesperson for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says there are no records of the agency covering streams in Yonkers, and said the Corps would not have had jurisdiction to do so. They pointed to local authorities as most likely responsible; National Geographic has been unable to confirm that.]

In some cities, more than 70 percent of streams have been paved over. In many cases, city residents don't even know that there are buried waterways under their feet.

Now, new research and a desire to revitalize urban cores is leading to a host of daylighting projects. Uncovering buried streams has been proposed in San Francisco, Baltimore, and Detroit, as well as in smaller urban areas nationwide.

Uncovering streams can help reduce flooding. When it rains in a "natural" watershed, soil and plants absorb the water. When it rains onto a parking lot that drains into an underground pipe, the potential for flooding is much larger.

According to a new report from advocacy nonprofit American Rivers, released July 17, urbanization increases the likelihood of floods getting worse. One study found that paving over 25 percent of a watershed could turn a formerly rare severe flood into a twice-a-decade event. When more than 65 percent of a watershed is paved over, those so-called "hundred-year-floods" could hit every year.

Watch the Money Flow

Early daylighting projects, like Arcadia Creek in Kalamazoo, focused on the economic benefits of bringing streams back to the surface. Turning a parking lot into a 3/4-mile-long (1.2-kilometer-long) strip of Arcadia Creek in downtown Kalamazoo created a park that hosts five annual festivals and generates $12 million in annual tourism dollars.

But Arcadia Creek isn't really a creek. According to a report from the Virginia Tech Water Resources Research Center, the Arcadia Creek project and similar ones do "not resemble streams per se, but rather canals with surrounding parkland ... [the streams] are very controlled water channels [with] concrete-lined basins."

In Seoul, a $384 million project daylighted three miles (five kilometers) of stream that has most of its water pumped in from a river seven miles (11 kilometers) away. Both parks have been successful in boosting the economic value of the surrounding land and bringing locals a little closer to nature.

Digging up a stream isn't cheap. In Hutchinson, a town in rural Kansas, daylighting just three city blocks of Cow Creek cost more than $4 million, including relocating four buildings out of the new floodplain. But compared to the cost of unearthing, replacing, and reburying the city's aging pipes, building a new downtown park was an easy choice.

Not all daylighting projects need to be the centerpiece of an urban revitalization project. In Washington, D.C., the District Department of the Environment (DDOE) is undertaking small daylighting projects of a few hundred feet (around a hundred meters) in upper Northwest D.C., which is more suburban than urban, despite its location within the nation's capital.

Each project will create a small amenity for immediate neighbors, but they are mostly intended to mitigate local flooding and improve water quality. "Water in a pipe is not exposed to biological processes that break down pollution," said Steve Saari, watershed protection specialist with DDOE.

A recent EPA study found that streams exposed to sunlight are up to 23 times more efficient at processing nitrogen, which left unprocessed can cause dead zones where fish cannot survive.

Return of a "Living Stream"

In Yonkers, the uncovered stream is "a living stream," Mitroff says. The first reopened part of the stream (which opened in 2012) is already filled with fish and "fairly good-size" American eels, up to 18 inches (46 centimeters) long. "It's remarkable," Mitroff said.

In D.C., only months after daylighting a tributary to Rock Creek, "we've seen a lot more birds, and a lot more unusual birds," said Saari. And, he added, "we had frogs. It was incredible."

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/07/130730-daylighting-exposing-underground-rivers-water-urban-renewal/

Rumble in the Urban Jungle

New Urbanist Revives Battle with Landscape Urbanism.

By Michael Sorkin

The High Line in New York, designed by James Corner Field Operations with Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is criticized by Andres Duany for being too expensive and over-designed.

It's hard to keep up with the musical deck chairs in the disciplines these days. The boundaries of architecture, city planning, urban design, landscape architecture, sustainability, computation, and other fields are shifting like crazy, and one result is endless hybridization–green urbanism begets landscape urbanism, which begets ecological urbanism, which begets agrarian urbanism–each “ism” claiming to have gotten things in just the right balance. While this discussion of the possible weighting and bounding of design's expanded field does keep the juices flowing, it also maintains the fiction that there are still three fixed territories–buildings, cities, and landscapes–that must constantly negotiate their alignment.

This has several consequences. The first is that the theoretical autonomy of the individual disciplines remains fundamentally uninfringed. The second is that new forms of a much-needed transdisciplinary practice are stymied by rigid intellectual bureaucracy. And finally, the opportunities for turf warfare are multiplied. A tiny skirmish has just been unleashed by the New Urbanists in the form of a book edited by Andres Duany and Emily Talen–Landscape Urbanism and its Discontents: Dissimulating the Sustainable City–which singles out that inoffensive school of thought for withering opprobrium.

But why? And why now? In their preface, the editors wistfully suggest that this was a book that should have been compiled 15 years ago. They're right: the project is pervaded by the sense that the nag being flogged long since passed through the glue factory. Their critique is antique: Landscape Urbanism is just the continuation of CIAM and its misguided principles by other means. The collection thus winds up as another–and completely unnecessary–iteration of that beloved chestnut, New Urbanism vs. Modernism. The current screed is obsessively focused yet again on what is seen as the leadership role in urbanism of a powerful and invidious cabal at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), an effete elite that just doesn't get it. This weirdly fetishistic animus has gnawed at Duany's craw for years. What's up with that? Give it a rest!

The anti-intellectual schtick–that those academics are fey and fashionable compromisers without real values–plays repeatedly throughout the book. There's an especially puerile riff by James Howard Kunstler, which reaches the startling conclusion that Harvard is a bulwark of the status quo! Talen bemoans the Landscape Urbanists for their reversion to misconstructions of post-structuralist, Marxist, and ecological discourses as gauzy camouflage for their designs for world domination and weird, uninhabitable cities. That academics would speak in the lingua franca of their own community is hardly more surprising than the New Urbanists' adopting the language of developers. Their book is, indeed, full of hard-nosed whinging about the bottom line, which, in the end, is the only substantial riposte offered to actual “Landscape Urbanist” projects. Duany particularly reviles the High Line, which he thinks would have been better–and cheaper–with Adirondack chairs from Home Depot instead of all that “design.”

Because there's no real case, there are more straw men in this book than at a casting call for The Wizard of Oz. The most cited include GSD professor Charles Waldheim, landscape architects James Corner and the late Ian McHarg, Frederick Law Olmsted, the University of Pennsylvania, and various fellow travelers in the promotion of … what exactly? The foundational offense is clearly Waldheim's statement in his 2006 book The Landscape Urbanism Reader that “Landscape Urbanism describes a disciplinary realignment currently under way in which landscape replaces architecture as the basic building block of contemporary urbanism.” This is simply tendentious, another way of saying, “It's the environment, stupid.” But the Newbies rise to the bait. Let's get ready to rumble!

They've been preparing the battleground for years, insisting that they alone have found the one true condition of equipoise. New Urbanists defend their superior wisdom in three areas: the preferability of the “traditional” city of streets and squares to the universally discredited Corbusian model, a claim to special access to knowledge of sustainability, and a faux-populist derision of practices that are “avant-garde.” None of these arguments is interesting or particularly controversial. No designer of conscience (or consciousness) resists the idea of cities with streets built for people on foot or fails to pay at least lip service to a sustainable–even equitable–environment. Insisting otherwise is just disingenuous.

But there is something interesting going on in thinking about the design of cities, informed by questions of sea-level rise and climate change, massive pollution of air, earth, and water, and a broad realignment of public consciousness about the limited bearing capacity of the earth. Like virtually everyone in the disciplines, both Landscape Urbanists and New Urbanists recognize this and have produced projects that address it. It's the war over formulae that's a waste. The New Urbanists continue to dine out on the enervated notion of a regulating “transect,” a gradated wash of conditions from rural to urban, derived from Patrick Geddes, which they serve up with all the nuance of Creationism.

But “more or less urban” is only one of many ways in which the city can be discussed and the idealist structure of the transect has been thoroughly unpacked by many writers. One key deficit of the New Urbanists' model is that their picturesque conceit is both nonlinear on the ground and disrupted by exceptions in the form of special districts. Landscape Urbanists, though, are excited by such zones of difference, which include “traditional” parks, as well as the “dross-scape” of rail yards, industrial zones, edge-city squalor, and other areas not easily assimilated to the historic order of streets and squares. The recognition that such territories constitute a huge component of the built environment locates an urgent question for design.
 
While many of the usual New Urbanist suspects contribute to the book, there's a clear divide among them between the unabashed assailants and those with a more conciliatory position, who won't be provoked into a death match. It's entertaining to see how many of the book's essayists tiptoe away from the bluster. Duany wants the High Line and Freshkills Park in New York and Downsview Park in Toronto to be seen as pretentious, but his cohort is unconvinced. Dan Solomon wisely finds these projects not just praiseworthy as places but understands they are simply parks, not “urbanisms.”

Likewise, Jason Brody sees the valuable contribution of an evolving set of landscape practices, all of which are engaged in infusing city-making with our increased understanding of the planetary crisis.

If there's a bright spot in the schools and the professions nowadays, it rests in landscape architecture's ability to introduce the urgency of ecological analysis into design's atmosphere and to pioneer forms of representation and discourse that freshly depict territories and phenomena from microclimates to regions. While McHarg may have gotten it wrong in the end, with his overly anthropocentric schema, the ecological insights in his mappings were seminal. The beautiful work done by James Corner and others in bridging the gap between datascapes and landscapes has opened new approaches to planning and building, and been critical in establishing new forms of analysis. We all want to be the mother of the arts, but why can't we just get along?

http://archrecord.construction.com/features/critique/2013/1308-Rumble-in-the-Urban-Jungle.asp

Resilient Systems and Sustainable Qualities

How do we design a resilient socio-technical system? Let’s look to natural systems; their tolerance of breakdowns and their adaptation capacity (that is, their capability of sustaining over time) may give us direction (Fiksel, 2003; Manzini, 2012). As a matter of fact, it is easy to observe that lasting natural systems result from a multiplicity of largely independent systems and are based on a variety of living strategies. In short, they are diverse and complex. These diversities and complexities are the basis of their resilience – that is, of their adaptability to changes in their contexts.

Given that, it should be reasonable to conceive and realize something similar for man-made systems. The socio-technical systems that, integrated with natural ones, constitute our living environment should be made of a variety of interconnected, but (largely) self-standing elements. This mesh of distributed systems, similarly to natural ones, would be intrinsically capable of adapting and lasting through time because even if one of its components breaks, given its multiplicity and diversity, the whole system doesn’t collapse (Johansson, Kish, Mirata. 2005). How far are we from this complex, and therefore resilient, man-made environment?

In my view, this question has no single and simple answer; contemporary society demonstrates a contradictory dynamism that forces us, on this point as on many others, to describe what is happening as a double trend: the mainstream, unsustainable trend, enduring from the last century, and a new, emerging trend. In our case, we have the clash between the big dinosaurs of the XX Century, and the new, interconnected small creatures of the emerging new world. Forty years ago, the “small” that Schumacher referred to was really small. In fact, it was so small, it had little chance of influencing things on a large scale. The same can be said for his concept of “local” – it was truly local as it was (quasi) isolated from other locals. In contrast, at the time, technological and economic ideas were largely driven by ideas of economy of scale and “the bigger the better”. Prevailing trends discounted any possibility that the small could be beautiful if economy and effectiveness were taken in account. Today, as we have seen, the context is extremely different.

Today, the small can be influential on a large scale, as it acts as a node in a global network. The local can break its isolation by being open to the global flow of people, ideas and information. In other words, we can say that today, in the networked society, the small is no longer small and the local is no longer local. The small and the local, when they are open and connected, can therefore become a design guideline for creating resilient systems and sustainable qualities, and a positive feedback loop between these systems.

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Coding Urban Metabolism

Urban Reef. Kyle Belcher, Dylan Barlow and Geoffrey Gregory, 2009.

As we struggle to bring population density and energy consumption back into alignment, a new ecological code and framework is needed to drive design decisions and to strengthen the connection between energy consumption and renewable energy production. Yesterday’s models of zoning and planning are outmoded. Perhaps it’s time for a new ecological urban framework.

Rethinking Zoning as an Urban Ecology

A response to the conditions of contemporary urbanism must be prepared to address present cultural, economic and environmental challenges with solutions that combine tectonic and performative aspects of design. As we struggle to bring population density and energy consumption back into alignment, a new ecological code and framework may be needed to drive design decisions and to strengthen the connection between energy consumption and renewable energy production. In the fields of urban planning and design, traditional zoning restrictions and ordinances have remained rooted in limitations and regulations rather than guidelines for enhanced performance.

Traditional zoning emphasizes public rights to resources (light, air, or services and infrastructure, for example), rather than productive initiatives or other transformative strategies. Current initiatives, such as the Solar America Communities Program initiated by the U.S. Department of Energy have begun establishing foundations to build sustainable solar markets, and increase the demand for renewable energy through policies and incentives. However, these strategies are currently not linked to citywide ecological frameworks and codes that can support design strategies.

Read more:
http://landscapeurbanism.com/article/coding-urban-metabolism/