Nord Family Greenway Takes Shape in Cleveland

JBC is pleased to have been a part of the Sasaki team for this project. (from Cleveland Magazine)

The University Circle Inc. president tells us how the space connects the Hough neighborhood and University Circle.

Colorful colonials, white picket fences and wraparound porches line the Hough neighborhood’s Newton Avenue. The quaint road between East 101st Street and East 97th Street is one of Chris Ronayne’s favorites, but something about streets like Newton, Logan Court, Woodward Avenue and Lamont Avenue bothers him.

“It’s a very curious thing that our street infrastructure in an urban grid is chock-full of cul-de-sacs in the Hough neighborhood,” says the president of University Circle Inc. “Something was designed by intent, which seemed to create an insular mobility pattern. It doesn’t square with me.”

To Hough residents, those dead-end streets — along with a steep, unruly landscape and a wall of back-of-the-house architecture along Martin Luther King Jr. Drive on Case Western Reserve University’s southern campus — was a message: “Keep out.” But a few dozen steps away, Ronayne sees the Nord Family Greenway as “a physical statement about our intentionality to connect.”

Completed in June, the 15-acre green space links CWRU’s Tinkham Veale University Center and the reformed 1920s-era temple that now houses the Maltz Performing Arts Center. Running through the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Fine Arts Garden, the 2,200-foot-long stretch of grass, trees, tiered walkways and picnic areas expands a traditionally north-south campus to the east and west. Designed by Sasaki, the $15 million landscape project is the result of collaboration between the university, the art museum, the Cleveland Foundation and principal donors Eric and Jane Nord. 

But beyond a campus pathway and event space, the Greenway, which replaces that inward-facing design, is an overdue welcoming of the Hough neighborhood into University Circle’s cultural mecca. 

“Right now places feel a world away that are only five blocks away,” says Ronayne. “It’s on all of us if a kid within a mile of the Circle has never experienced a Circle institution.”

Yet, truly embracing Hough means matching brick-and-mortar efforts with social infrastructure. As examples, Ronayne mentions UCI’s Circle Scholars, an after-school program where seventh- and eighth-graders visit the museums and learn about local history from curators, or Future Connections, an eight-week course that teaches career skills to local high school seniors.

“We’ve got open jobs in the field of nursing and too few applicants,” he says. “We’d be remiss if we’re not locally teaching kids about the job opportunities of tomorrow.”

Strolling past the Chinese Cultural Garden, which may soon welcome more ethnic monuments as neighbors, the former Cleveland planning director points back to the space between East 105th Street and those dead-end Hough streets. 

Ronayne hopes the Greenway eventually reaches past Maltz to those streets. He also hopes to see the health care industry create hubs of economic innovation — things like the forthcoming Cleveland Clinic and CWRU dental clinic — in spaces like Mount Sinai.

“Now the next step is, ‘OK, I can get there, but now give me a reason to go,’ ” Ronayne says. “Obviously culture is a reason, but how about a job?”

https://clevelandmagazine.com/in-the-cle/articles/we-walk-the-nord-family-greenway

Estimating the Environmental Effects of Green Roofs

Green Roofs are making a difference in Kansas City. JBC is pleased to have contributed to this new report. 

The EPA is excited to introduce a new case study demonstrating the environmental and health benefits of green roofs in Kansas City, Missouri, Estimating the Environmental Effects of Green Roofs. The case study lays out a replicable analytical framework that state and local decision makers can use to assess the multiple benefits of green roofs, including stormwater runoff reductions and public health improvements. 

Estimating the Environmental Effects of Green Roofs: A Case Study in Kansas City, Missouri (PDF)

Guerrilla Grafters Secretly Graft Fruit-Bearing Branches onto San Francisco Trees

Mark Boyer

We’ve heard of guerrilla gardening, and we’ve heard of grafting plants — but guerrilla grafting? That’s new to us. For the past two years, a group that calls themselves Guerrilla Grafters have been secretly grafting fruit-bearing scions onto ornamental, non-fruiting trees in San Francisco. City officials contend that Guerrilla Grafters are breaking the law, but their actions have been celebrated by proponents of urban agriculture. And they have been included in the US pavilion’s Spontaneous Interventions exhibit at the Venice Biennale.

The streets of San Francisco are lined with pear, plum and apple trees, but out of fear that the fruit would make a mess and attract rodents, the city intentionally planted sterile trees that don’t bear fruit. By grafting fruit-bearing branches on those trees, Guerrilla Grafters make fruit free and accessible to anyone who picks it. The group was started by Tara Hui, who started grafting fruit-bearing branches onto city trees a few years ago.

To graft a branch onto a fruit tree, all you have to do is make a slit with a knife in a branch on the host tree; insert a branch from a fruit-bearing tree, and secure it with tape. “Once it heals, it connects,” Hui told the LA Times. “Basically the branch becomes part of the tree.” Guerrilla Grafters use color-coded electrical tape to mark their handiwork, but they won’t disclose the location of their interventions to the press out of fear that the city will remove them.

With “undoing civilization one branch at a time” as their motto, Guerrilla Grafters consider what they do to be a radical act — and it is. Although it doesn’t solve problems of food scarcity, it’s a symbolic move towards making fresh food free and accessible to all. As the group explains, it’s one step closer to creating “a habitat that sustains us.”

http://inhabitat.com/guerrilla-grafters-secretly-graft-fruit-bearing-branches-onto-san-francisco-trees/

Condition of Vegetative Roofs Years After They're Exposed to the Real World.

In KieranTimberlake's extensive survey of roof gardens, it identified species that were planned, had thrived, or were rogue (l to r, respectively): prairie dropseed (Sporobulis heterolepsis); two-row stonecrop (Sedum spurium fuldaglut); moss pink, pink phlox (Phlox subulata) Credit: Bruce Peterson

It’s one thing to Photoshop a green roof into a rendering; it’s another thing to plant and sustain one. And it’s all but unheard of to go back and analyze the state of these living roofs years after their completion, as Philadelphia-based Kieran Timberlake did for its groundbreaking Green Roof Vegetation Study. The study responds to “a lack of long-term data on real buildings with diverse and dynamic plant communities,” according to the firm. Instead of concentrating on one engineering or horticultural aspect of green roofs, the firm looked at “how green roofs function as ecosystems and how they change over time.”

The jury highlighted two innovative aspects of the study: its comparative method and its ecological thesis. In 2011 and 2012, Kieran Timberlake surveyed six of its completed green roofs, ranging in area from 1,744 to 10,000 square feet, and designed between 2003 and 2011. Using the Relevé vegetation survey method and the Braun-Blanquet abundance scale to quantify its findings, Kieran Timberlake assessed the roofs’ vegetative cover, species richness, and species diversity in 2-meter-square sections. The researchers also interviewed facilities and grounds maintenance personnel at each site. Juror Bill Zahner praised the study’s “way of collecting the data needed rather than saying, ‘Well, let’s just put seeds down and keep our fingers crossed.’ ” Juror Jing Liu agreed: “What they’re doing is different. The research is to study the long-term dynamics of green roofs.”

The resulting report confirms that roof ecologies are indeed dynamic and that changes will occur spatially and over time from the original planting design. More importantly, it details the nature of those changes, and raises questions about what the changes might indicate for long-term resiliency. In many of the case studies, the prevalent species observed on the roofs in 2012 that were part of the initial planting design were accompanied by dozens of new or “emergent” species. Artemisia (commonly known as mugwort) at the Yale Sculpture Building and Melilotus (or sweet clover) at Cornell University’s Alice H. Cook House independently found their way to roof tops, took root, and eventually made themselves at home in the roofscape design. Roof biodiversity often increased, although the report cautions that the results of any single survey could be deceptive: “What appears to be major shifts in species composition may in fact be short-term fluctuations or cycles caused by unpredictable changes in experienced climate and environmental conditions.”

While the report rigorously maps the distance between design intent and material outcomes, it also sets the stage for even more radical research to be conducted on the interplay between landscape and architecture. Kieran Timberlake envisions deploying sensors on the roof to measure thermal and moisture conditions in relation to the building’s internal climate and energy consumption. The report also suggests that architecture “is responsible for the … vegetative dynamics and ultimate performance of the roof.” On the roof of a dining hall at Middlebury College, for example, the otherwise feeble grasses and forbs become lush and verdant around the skylight cones, whose shade presumably helps the soil retain moisture. “Architectural design creates microclimates across a roof, determining availability of sunlight, water, and nutrients,” the report states.

Kieran Timberlake is already putting its newfound knowledge to use on the forthcoming Penn State Center for Building Energy Education and Innovation at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, which itself will serve as an ongoing laboratory and teaching center for scientists, students, and professionals interested in eco-effective architecture. The firm has developed a proposal to create a green roof test bed on this building; currently, it is in the process of raising funds.

But documenting the consequences of a designed green roof subjected to unforeseeable or uncontrollable environmental forces has wider implications for architecture in general, juror Jing Liu said. “If you think of the green roof as an ecological system, you can have architecture as an ecological system,” she said.

In the messiness of the real world, architecture depends on dynamic variables. Buildings are never really complete. Rather, they are subject to the vicissitudes of client maintenance regimes, the inconsistencies of occupant behavior, and the unpredictability of weather. That is why post-occupancy studies—of both indoor and outdoor environments—must be as meticulous as they are fearless.

Project Credits 
Project Green Roof Vegetation Study 
Design Firm KieranTimberlake, Philadelphia 
Project Team Roderick Bates, Stephanie Carlisle, Billie Faircloth, AIA, Stephen Kieran, FAIA, Taylor Medlin, Assoc. AIA, Max Piana, James Timberlake, FAIA, Ryan Welch

 

 In 2005, when Kieran Timberlake planned the green roof of Cornell University’s Carl L. Becker House, in Ithaca, N.Y., the rigorous planting plan comprised three types of succulents (two-row stonecrop, tasteless stonecrop, and houseleeks), combined with strips of prairie dropseed. When Kieran Timberlake surveyed the roof in 2012, the vegetation was healthy and full, but there were a few surprises—54 of them, in fact. That is the number of new plant species that had taken root over the years.

An aerial view of Cornell campus dormitories shows Kieran Timberlake's green roofs outlined in white; the Carl L. Becker House is at the right side of this image. Credit: Kieran Timberlake

According to KieranTimberlake's study, the most biodiversity was found in the Becker House's southernmost bay, where shading along the adjacent building edge minimized the effects of record droughts.

 

Various poplar species were found on the Becker House roof, despite not appearing in the original roof planting plan.

Credit: Kieran Timberlake

http://www.architectmagazine.com/green-building/green-roof-vegetation-study.aspx



U.S. Urban Trees Store Carbon, Provide Billions in Economic Value

From New York City's Central Park to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, America's urban forests store an estimated 708 million tons of carbon, an environmental service with an estimated value of $50 billion, according to a recent U.S. Forest Service study.

 

Annual net carbon uptake by these trees is estimated at 21 million tons and $1.5 billion in economic benefit.
In the study published recently in the journal Environmental Pollution, Dave Nowak, a research forester with the U.S. Forest Service's Northern Research Station, and his colleagues used urban tree field data from 28 cities and six states and national tree cover data to estimate total carbon storage in the nation's urban areas.
"With expanding urbanization, city trees and forests are becoming increasingly important to sustain the health and well-being of our environment and our communities," said U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell.

"Carbon storage is just one of the many benefits provided by the hardest working trees in America. I hope this study will encourage people to look at their neighborhood trees a little differently, and start thinking about ways they can help care for their own urban forests."

Tens of thousands of people volunteered to plant and care for trees for Earth Day and Arbor Day this year, but there are opportunities all year long. To learn about volunteer opportunities near your home, visit the Arbor Day Foundation. The Forest Service partners with organizations like the Arbor Day Foundation and participates in programs like Tree City USA to recognize and inspire cities in their efforts to improve their urban forests. Additionally the Forest Service is active in more than 7,000 communities across the U.S., helping them to better plan and manage their urban forests.

Nationally, carbon storage by trees in forestlands was estimated at 22.3 billion tons in a 2008 Forest Service study; additional carbon storage by urban trees bumps that to an estimated 22.7 billion tons. Carbon storage and sequestration rates vary among states based on the amount of urban tree cover and growing conditions. States in forested regions typically have the highest percentage of urban tree cover. States with the greatest amount of carbon stored by trees in urban areas are Texas (49.8 million tons), Florida (47.3 million tons), Georgia (42.4 million tons), Massachusetts (39.6 million tons) and North Carolina (37.5 million tons).

The total amount of carbon stored and sequestered in urban areas could increase in the future as urban land expands. Urban areas in the continental U.S. increased from 2.5 percent of land area in 1990 to 3.1 percent in 2000, an increase equivalent to the area of Vermont and New Hampshire combined. If that growth pattern continues, U.S. urban land could expand by an area greater than the state of Montana by 2050.
The study is not the first to estimate carbon storage and sequestration by U.S. urban forests, however it provides more refined statistical analyses for national carbon estimates that can be used to assess the actual and potential role of urban forests in reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide.

More urbanization does not necessarily translate to more urban trees. Last year, Nowak and Eric Greenfield, a forester with the Northern Research Station and another study co-author, found that urban tree cover is declining nationwide at a rate of about 20,000 acres per year, or 4 million trees per year.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130507195815.htm

Green Roof Industry Grows by 24 Percent in 2012

 

NOAA La Jolla - Southwest Fisheries Laboratory Green Roof designed by Jeffrey L. Bruce & Company

 

Washington DC Is #1 - Installing Over 1.3 Million Square Feet in 2012

Toronto, May 1, 2013 – Green Roofs for Healthy Cities (GRHC) is pleased to announce a 24 percent growth rate in installed green roofs in 2012 as part of the results of the Annual Green Roof Industry Survey.

 “On the heels of a huge 115 per cent growth rate in 2011, the green roof industry still grew by 24 per cent in 2012,” said GRHC founder & president Steven W. Peck. “Green roofs are being embraced around North America, by policy makers, designers, building owners and developers because they deliver multiple proven public and private benefits,” he added.

In 2012, the Washington DC Metropolitan Region installed the most green roofs in North America with 1,326,872 square feet. Washington DC adopted a number of public policies that support green roof investment.

 “The District is proud to lead the nation in installation of green roofs," said Mayor Vincent C. Gray. "Green infrastructure is an investment that is showing real benefits in the District and green roofs play a major part in turning the vision of a Sustainable DC into reality. Green roofs support green jobs, reduce and reuse stormwater, and create beautiful amenities that improve the quality of life and health of our residents."

“There are many factors that are leading to this remarkable growth,” said Jeffrey L. Bruce, GRP, Chair, GRHC, “but undoubtedly the almost 600 accredited Green Roof Professionals (GRPs) in the market are using their expertise to drive market growth.”

 

To obtain a copy of the Annual Green Roof Industry Survey for 2012, go to www.greenroofs.org.

Phyto-remediation: Healing Urban Landscapes

Aspects of Phytoremediation

by Marti Gil 

There is no doubt that we, as humans, contaminate our environment by activities related to our lifestyle. For instance, the production of energy, food, clothes, infrastructure, and industries produce a concentration of substances that enter the Earth, affecting the conditions of the air, water, and soil ecosystems.

There are many procedures to eliminate these contaminants from the environment. One especially interesting method is the use of living organisms or bioremediation such as bacteria, mushrooms, algae, protozoa, and plants. Through this procedure the concentrations of the pollutants are decreased, taking advantage of their capacity to degrade these elements.

In a Landscape Architects Network article titled “Phytoremediation: Healing Urban Landscapes”  Yuliya approached the subject by using a great theoretical example from the Netherlands and this article begins by explaining how the healing of an environment with plants functions and the types of plants that we should use in order to eliminate specific contaminants.

Active Modular Phytoremediation Wall System, CASE

Phytoremediation is a set of methods, performed by plants that degrade, detoxify, assimilate, or metabolize contaminants deposited in the soil, water, or in the atmosphere. These contaminants are: pesticides, metals, organic compounds, herbicides, explosives, and other compounds that in many cases, cannot be degraded, but can be assimilated by the harvestable part of a plant.

The advantages are that this process is cost-effective because it is a natural process that uses solar energy and it is in situ. Furthermore, it can be an excellent method to implement in large areas, and it has been widely accepted by society and can be performed in an aesthetic manner. Some of the limitations are that it requires lengthy periods of time. Additionally, the contaminants cannot exceed the maximum level that the plants can assimilate. Phytoremediation does not work on profound soils or water due to the size of the plant’s roots and lack of research on a particular topic.

Living Machine

In order to select plants we need to investigate the concentration of the pollutants, the cost of the irrigation, the related maintenance, the length of time, the risk of pests, and the planting scheme. Plants that can be used to heal an ecosystem may vary depending on the characteristics of the environment, but we can generally expect healing from plants with deep roots (due to their scope), pastures (due to soil retention), legumes (due to the fixation of Nitrogen), and aquatic plants, which can be found worldwide.

According to Alejandro Mentaberry, Ph.D. from the Universidad de Buenos Aires in Argentina, there are six basic mechanisms in which plants do their work with the help of chemical and physical processes:

• Phyto-extraction: Mainly for the concentration of metals and other inorganic toxic compounds in the harvestable parts. It is important to consider plants with an important biomass, principally on the aerial part such as sunflowers, dandelions, and mustard.
• Rhizo-filtration: The roots are used to absorb, precipitate and concentrate heavy metals and organic compounds in liquid effluents. The plants should have roots that grow fast and abundant ramification like different algae and Thypha latifolia.
• Phyto-stimulation: Uses the roots exudates to promote the growth of degradation organisms like mushrooms and bacteria, efficient with organic hydrophobic compounds like oil sub products. Phreatophyte plants (with the roots in the water), trees from the genus Populus, pastures like Rye, phenol compounds producers like apple, and aquatic plants are great performers.
• Phyto-stabilization: Plants resistant to metals are used to avoid and reduce the movement both in air and to underground layers. The use of phreatophyte trees and pastures are recommended.
• In both Phyto-degradation and phyto-volatilization a transformation of the contaminants are present so the use of phreatophyte trees (Populous sp.), pastures and legumes are recommended. The plants are used to capture and metabolize organic compounds to produce less or non-toxic sub products in the degradations, and to collect heavy metals and organic compounds releasing them into the atmosphere through transpiration on the volatilization.

All these techniques and technologies are improving daily and becoming more efficient.  It is important to consider that collectively they can be part of a system that combines different kinds of mechanisms to heal our ecosystems improving the results.

Shanghai Houtan Park, Turenscape

Of course, it does not mean that we can continue polluting without remorse just because we have found a way to clean the world naturally. It means that we can change what we, as humans, have done and begin to produce more environmentally friendly methods of eliminating contaminants not only in big, gray facilities, but in projects such as the Shanghai Houtan Park, which maintains a beautiful landscape with a practical use.

http://landarchs.com/aspects-phytoremediation/