“A Design that Celebrates the People”: Normal, IL Traffic Circle Wins Smart Growth Award as New Civic Space

Posted on December 30, 2011 by Coleen Gentles

Earlier this month, EPA announced the winners of the 2011 National Award for Smart Growth Achievement.  We are excited to report that Normal, Illinois is the recipient of the award in the Civic Places category for their traffic roundabout. We’ve written before about how the town’s new traffic circle has successfully managed traffic flow at [...]

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Santa Fe Railyard Park and Plaza: A Historic Step Toward Urban Excellence

Posted on June 30, 2011 by Coleen Gentles

The Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence has named the Santa Fe Railyard Park and Plaza as a 2011 Silver Medal recipient. The Santa Fe Railyard Park and Plaza emerged from a 15-year community effort to shape the form and content of the city’s last major redevelopment area, and is a testament to the power of civic [...]

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Design Strategies for Downtown Parks: Dallas and Tampa

Posted on November 12, 2010 by Aric Merolli

“Cities large and small are the most sustainable living models, and the viability of a sustainable city rests on the success or failure of its urban parks,” said Thomas Balsley, the landscape architect responsible for designing Main Street Garden in Dallas and Curtis Hixon Park in Tampa. But what kind of urban parks provide the best [...]

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When Parks, Transportation and Water Collide

Posted on October 22, 2010 by Coleen Gentles

Sometimes small towns are the communities pushing the envelope on innovation. What happens when you take a regular traffic circle, cover it with a lawn, add some trees for shade and then a fountain for kicks?  Well, in Normal, Illinois they did just that as a means for reducing downtown congestion in this college town. But the [...]

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Transforming the Trinity River in Dallas

Posted on October 6, 2010 by Peter Harnik

Blogging about the 2010 American Society of Landscape Architects Annual Meeting and Expo, September 10-13, held at the Convention Center in Washington, D.C. For years I’ve been hearing bits and pieces about the massive, multi-billion-dollar project to fix Dallas. No, not everything about Dallas, just one of its biggest challenges – creating parkland along its [...]

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From Design to Construction: The Making of Citygarden in St. Louis

Posted on September 21, 2010 by Coleen Gentles

Blogging about the 2010 American Society of Landscape Architects Annual Meeting and Expo, September 10-13, held at the Convention Center in Washington, D.C. “We never thought we’d get the job,” admitted Warren T. Byrd, Jr., a principal of Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects (NBWLA). “We were concerned by our lack of experience with sculptural gardens.”  But after [...]

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Dumpster Diving on New York’s Park Avenue

Posted on September 2, 2010 by Coleen Gentles

Credit: Alan Miles NYC (Flickr Feed) Of the many unique activities New York is known for, the most entertaining this summer involved closing roads and opening pools, specifically dumpster swimming pools.   For the third summer in a row, New York’s Department of Transportation presented the Summer Streets program, closing almost seven miles of posh Park [...]

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London’s A-Mazing Trafalgar Square

Posted on August 27, 2010 by Coleen Gentles

Sometimes all it takes is an unusual piece of greenery to draw visitors to a part of town not very known on tourist maps. London, England’s Trafalgar Square temporarily received a laurel and thuja hedge maze at the foot of Nelson’s Column earlier this month as part of the West End Partnership’s summer marketing program.  The program [...]

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More Evidence of Kids in Downtown Neighborhoods

Posted on June 29, 2010 by Ben Welle

More parents with children are living in downtown Minneapolis neighborhoods, says a recent article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. We’ve reported on this trend in places such as Portland, and have made the case that cities need to provide the parks and playgrounds that parents want if they are to have truly diverse neighborhoods from [...]

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Some news from around…

Posted on May 28, 2010 by Elissa Hoagland

Two different ways to design and program public space: 1) “Street Pianos” are coming to New York, and will be prominently placed in a number of parks. The pianos have been successful in London, São Paulo and other cities. (Village Voice); and 2) from Toronto, color and art comes in the form of painted “nature-inspired [...]

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