Posted on November 24, 2009 by Ben
Speaking of national capital green spaces in need of repair (as we do in our post on Brasilia below), last week the National Coalition to Save Our Mall released its “3rd Century Mall” plan to revitalize and orient the nation’s front yard.
Greater Greater Washington gives an overview of the recommendations, including better transportation options, improving restrooms, creating a visitors center and more engagement between the Mall and the museums inside it.
When the stimulus was being debated, some Congressional members mocked an allocation for repair of the Mall. The irony here is that the Mall lacks the necessary qualities that visitors from around the globe and residents expect of what is supposed to be a premier public space.
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Posted on November 24, 2009 by Ben
wikipedia
The capital of Brazil, Brasilia is a planned city with parks and open spaces designed at the height of automotive thinking in the late 1950s.
The city was laid out by Lucio Costa and the buildings by famed and still-living centenarian architect Oscar Niemeyer. Many of the buildings are iconic and beautiful in their modern form, but the highways of the city horrificly cut off key public places. Discovering Urbanism provides a great analysis of the city’s equivalence to Washington’s National Mall in showing the “desire paths” of those pedestrians who do venture into this green space.
The analysis “reveals a complex network of activity very different from the plan.” The exercise says much about how planners and designers should consider where people want to go perhaps more than where they themselves want people to go.
It also raises an interesting question about Brasilia and other planned cities: despite the historic nature of this planned city, should modifications be made, such as removing the clover leafs? Or can compromises be reached. For instance, could the integrity of the design be preserved by closing down the clover leafs and on-ramps to cars and making them into people-oriented park features?
Discovering Urbanism
Filed under: international | Tagged: Brazil, design | 11 Comments »
Posted on November 21, 2009 by Ben
There’s a sad article in the Detroit News about that city’s 250-acre Eliza Howell Park. The grandson of the benefactor who gave 138 acres of the park to the city is asking that it be given back to the family so that he can develop it into a big box grocery store and homes.
Kenneth Cheyne, the grandson, is suing the city, claiming that it is violating a 1936 deed restriction that says the land be maintained as a park. Because of Detroit’s dire financial condition, it stopped mowing Eliza Howell and 137 other parks this spring. But the park and its loop drive remain open to the public and although there are concerns of crime and disrepair, the space remains important to and used by some community members.
The irony of this situation is that Detroit is a city that has tons of land for development. In fact, according to the American Institute of Architects, 40 square miles of the 139-square-mile city are vacant. If a developer wants to build a grocery store (which the city is in dire need of) and housing there is plenty of space to do so.
This gets to the larger issue of Detroit’s development over the years. People often say the city is shrinking, but that’s only true in population numbers, not development. Metro Detroit is a classic case of sprawl without growth. The decline of the auto industry has not in itself caused the central city’s problems. Those are also due to sprawl from central city flight and the movement of migrants from rural areas to suburbs and exurbs. In 1950, Detroit had a population of 1,849,568. At that time, the metro had a population of 3,219,256. Today, the city has 912,062 people and the metro has 4,425,110. The metro population has grown about 30 percent more than the city has shrunk.
Detroit seems to be slowly turning into one huge suburb. Converting a classic urban park into a strip mall would represent one more step in that direction.
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Posted on November 20, 2009 by Ben
- Nina-Marie Lister in Places: cities “have reassessed their underused harbors and riverfronts, and committed to costly and complicated clean-up processes with the goal of stimulating redevelopment. Cities worldwide are rediscovering and reengaging with the water’s edge. Early projects like London’s Docklands and New York’s Battery Park City, which took shape in the 1980s, have been followed by a groundswell of revitalization efforts. Today the water’s edge is a front — a battlefront at the edges of the postmodern metropolis, where serious conflicts arise around brownfields and greenfields, around the health of cities and the availability of water.”
- Milwaukee’s parks running out of time, but prospect for dedicated funding is there, says legislator in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
- PPS Blog looks at some great community gardens in the Second City.
- Queen grabs shovel and plants some trees in London’s new Olympic Park.
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Posted on November 19, 2009 by Ben
On the list is Seattle's Cal Anderson Park, built over a reservoir in one of the city's most densely populated districts. Photo: City of Seattle
Forbes.com today ran a “Best City Parks” article and slide show. The list is different in that it doesn’t simply give the most well known city parks in the country. Sure, Central Park is mentioned, but also highlighted are some of the lesser publicized but loved greenspaces that define what urban parks can be.
This includes Boston’s 1.5-acre gem, Post Office Square, which has helped turn around the city’s financial district and Baltimore’s 150-acre Patterson Park, a great community park whose revitalization has itself spurred the comeback of its surrounding neighborhood.
Also included is Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta. Yes, a cemetery. The Forbes slide show gives some background and quotes TPL’s Peter Harnik:
This centrally located Atlanta green space, founded in 1850, is more a historical cemetery than an active one, says Harnik. Today it functions, in the words of the Historic Oakland Foundation, as an “island of tranquility in the heart of the city” and serves as a site for picnics, jogging and neighborhood festivals. “It’s a very creative use of space in a city that’s short on park land,” says Harnik.
This list of course is not an actual ranking of the “best” city parks, but instead is a neat smorgasbord of notable spaces from across America’s urban landscape.
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Posted on November 18, 2009 by Ben
Atlanta's Piedmont Park.
Should doctors give prescribe park use? That’s exactly what San Francisco physician Daphne Miller is doing, and she writes for the Washington Post about getting patients healthier through these public amenities. She begins:
“I have a StairMaster right in my own basement, but honestly it’s been there for years gathering dust and making me feel guilty,” said Miriam, one of my patients. “It wasn’t until I started walking the three-mile trail in the park near my house that I got serious about exercising. I do it now rain or shine. I love the fresh air. The best part is that I get a great workout and don’t even mind sweating.”
At this point, I have heard enough variations on Miriam’s story that I have started to make formal “park prescriptions.” The prescribing instructions are considerably more detailed than ones you might get with a medication; they include the location of a local green space, the name of a specific trail and, when possible, exact mileage.
It turns out I am not alone. I’ve begun hearing about doctors around the country who are medicating their patients with
The Wellnes Walkway on Little Rock's Medical Mile.
nature in order to prevent (or treat) health problems ranging from heart disease to attention deficit disorder.
One suggestion offered in the article is that of tool kits educating doctors about parks, potentially paid for by local health care providers or insurance companies. This seems like novel idea. It seems we can’t get away from pharmaceutical companies advertising different drugs on television, not to mention the number of sales representatives they employ to persuade doctors of their products. Parks need marketing, too, and connecting with the health community is a great place to do so.
Filed under: health | 3 Comments »
Posted on November 17, 2009 by Ben
There’s something about pleasant fall days in city parks filled with people. Below is a picture from Meridian Hill Park in Washington, D.C. this past Sunday, which was particularly warm.
Meridian Hill/Malcolm X Park, Washington, D.C.
Many were gathered for what may be one of the last gatherings until Spring of the drum circle that congregates in the park every Sunday (which the Washington Post covered a few years back).
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Posted on November 17, 2009 by Ben
Mellon Square is a 1.4 acre park in the heart of downtown Pittsburgh. The park has an interesting history. Completed in 1955, it was the result of the city’s corporate leaders trying to reinvent the city at a time when it was most associated with pollution and an undesirable quality of life. With threats of companies like Alcoa moving to New York City, the city’s elite moved in, building this iconic public plaza that is now on the National Register of Historic Places but in need of some renovation. That effort is now being taken up by the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy, which prepared the below video providing the history, context and today’s vision for the site.
Filed under: renewal | Tagged: downtown | 1 Comment »
Posted on November 16, 2009 by Ben
Will Rogers pens a piece for Huff Post on balancing preservation and change, citing the story of the MLK National Historic Site in Atlanta, where another piece of the civil rights leader’s childhood street has been preserved. Rogers was in Atlanta recently to celebrate the event:
As a group of us stood watching children jumping rope on a nearby sidewalk,
Christine Farris [Martin Luther King's sister] began reminiscing about her own childhood on Auburn Avenue, playing hopscotch and hide-and-seek with her brother and other children. And I was struck by the way that the avenue–location of both the King birth home and Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. King and his father were both pastors–has been preserved by the historic site, while remaining a dynamic neighborhood, one of our few lived-in national parks.
It almost wasn’t that way. Thirty years ago, as the National Park Service was gearing up to create the historic site, The Trust for Public Land was able to get ahead of the wrecking ball and buy for the site five of the mostly derelict structures along the avenue. Over the past 30 years, all but one of the remaining homes within the designated park have been purchased, renovated, and rented, creating a vibrant, historic neighborhood. Existing renters were offered the opportunity to move back into their renovated homes at no raise in rent. And the historic district has been great for the local economy, too.
Filed under: renewal | Tagged: atlanta, preservation | Leave a Comment »
Posted on November 13, 2009 by Ben
Transportation for America this last week released a report on a dire situation for pedestrians in the nation’s cities.
In the last 15 years, more than 76,000 Americans have been killed while crossing or walking along a street in their community. More than 43,000 Americans – including 3,906 children under 16 – have been killed this decade alone. This is the equivalent of a jumbo jet going down roughly every month, yet it receives nothing like the kind of attention that would surely follow such a disaster.
Children, the elderly, and ethnic minorities are disproportionately represented in this figure, but people of all ages and all walks of life have been struck down in the simple act of walking. These deaths typically are labeled “accidents,” and attributed to error on the part of motorist or pedestrian. In fact, however, an overwhelming proportion share a similar factor: They occurred along roadways that were dangerous by design, streets that were engineered for speeding cars and made little or no provision for people on foot, in wheelchairs or on a bicycle.
This can be changed, however, and the report notes of efforts to “retrofit poorly designed roads to become complete streets, adding sidewalks and bicycle lanes, reducing crossing distances and installing trees and crosswalks to make walking and biking safer and more inviting. The resulting safer streets have saved the lives of both pedestrians and motorists even as they promote health by leading many residents to become more physically active.”
Aside from saving lives, a walkable community can have a better quality of life. Residents can venture out of their homes on foot without emotional stress. As the report indicates:
Walkable communities are safe and inviting for walking and bicycling, while also featuring compact development and a variety of destinations, such as parks and public space and nearby schools, workplaces and other amenities like restaurants and retail facilities. The tools to increase community livability by improving walkability go beyond investing in pedestrian infrastructure, giving residents and visitors convenient destinations they can walk to.
The report provides a ranking of the largest 52 metro areas in the country in terms of pedestrian unfriendliness. Here are the worst ten:
1. Orlando-Kissimmee, FL
2. Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, FL
3. Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, FL
4. Jacksonville, FL
5. Memphis, TN-MS-AR
6. Raleigh-Cary, NC
7. Louisville/Jefferson County, KY-IN
8. Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, TX
9. Birmingham-Hoover, AL
10. Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta, GA
Filed under: planning, transportation | Tagged: federal policy, research, walkability | 2 Comments »
