Archive for Parks
February 12, 2010 · Filed under Beauty, Grassroots, Highways, Landscape, Nature, Parks, Public Space, Urban Actions
A few weeks ago in San Francisco, a number of urban farmers opened a gate in a chain-link fence at Laguna Street, between Oak and Fell Streets, and entered an overgrown lot that has been unused for nearly two decades. The farmers brought with them steaming piles of mulch, which they cast over the edge of the ramps formerly used by cars to enter and exit the elevated Central Freeway spur above Octavia Street, arranging the soil in rows for planting vegetables and filler crops.
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Popularity: 30% [?]
February 4, 2010 · Filed under Artificial Landscapes, Landscape, Multi-Level Urbanism, Parks, Pedestrians, Public Life, Public Space
If you’ve ever been to Cleveland, you know the downtown area is a forbidding, pedestrian desert. The main public space, Public Square, is no better–it’s a wind-scarred, 10-acre expanse flanked by skyscrapers. But that could all change, thanks to a series of brilliant redesigns proposed by James Corner Field Operations, the firm best known as the landscape designers who did much of the heavy lifting for New York’s superb High Line Park.
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Popularity: 14% [?]
November 3, 2009 · Filed under Artificial Landscapes, EcoCities, Ecosystems, Landscape, Master Planning, Nature, Parks, Public Life, Public Space, Urban Design, Water
For half a century, a dark tunnel of crumbling concrete encased more than three miles of a placid stream bisecting this bustling city.
The waterway had been a centerpiece of Seoul since a king of the Choson Dynasty selected the new capital 600 years ago, enticed by the graceful meandering of the stream and its 23 tributaries. But in the industrial era after the Korean War, the stream, by then a rank open sewer, was entombed by pavement and forgotten beneath a lacework of elevated expressways as the city’s population swelled toward 10 million.
Today, after a $384 million recovery project, the stream, called Cheonggyecheon, is liberated from its dank sheath and burbles between reedy banks. Picnickers cool their bare feet in its filtered water, and carp swim in its tranquil pools.
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Popularity: 62% [?]
November 2, 2009 · Filed under Active Transportation, Beauty, EcoCities, Happiness, Health, Landscape, Nature, Parks, Public Space
City dwellers living near parks are healthier and suffer fewer bouts of depression, a study has revealed. The study was adjusted to take into account socio-economic background and found that the effect of green surroundings was greatest for people with low levels of education and income. The study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, found that in urban zones where 90 per cent of the area was green space the incidence of anxiety disorders or depression was 18 people per thousand. In areas with only 10 per cent greenery the incidence was 26 per thousand.
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Popularity: 38% [?]
November 2, 2009 · Filed under Artificial Landscapes, Beauty, Campus Planning, Creative Cities, Economics, Landscape, Parks, Place making, Shopping Malls, Tourism
Disney has always been an easy target for urban designers and architects. Main Street USA, the main drag of its parks, can be read as a cruel joke. Its simulated urbanism and festival atmosphere may seem like a sinister, conservative knock-off of actual small-town main streets of yore, lodged deep in the American collective memory, that corporate titans like Disney helped kill with their economics of scale and squeaky-clean spectacle. Now, instead of a public realm, we have cities that are “luxury products,” meant not for the stuff of life but for endless, mindless consumer fantasy. Thanks (in part) to the influence of Disney.
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Popularity: 46% [?]
October 19, 2009 · Filed under Artificial Landscapes, Density, Ecosystems, Landscape, Multi-Level Urbanism, Parks, Pedestrians
When I was growing up in New York City, on summer weekends my family would often drive to Jones Beach, the great park that Robert Moses built on the southern shore of Long Island. It wasn’t wilderness by any stretch, but it was cool and open, more than enough to put the stifling city at a distance, if only for an afternoon. But what I remember as clearly was the drive back: Manhattan appearing out of the haze, emitting wavy lines of heat like a cartoon pie. Then being back in the thick of it, with the buzz of hundreds of thousands of air conditioners making the city itself feel like a single massive machine. The contrast was clear: the ocean air and the incredible physical presence of the water were invigorating, literally life-giving in their feeling of connectedness to broader natural processes. The city was hot, dirty, disconnected; nature was hidden.
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Popularity: 34% [?]
August 7, 2009 · Filed under Crime, Night, Parks, Safety
Harvard Park has been a no-man’s land after dark for decades. Its location, at the borders of rival gang turf, has made it more a demilitarized zone than public space since the inception of this city’s oldest and most entrenched street gangs. So there was a giddy excitement among the thousand or so South Los Angeles neighbors who came last week to celebrate the park’s inclusion in Summer Night Lights, a program designed to combat gang violence by keeping lights on until midnight in some of the city’s roughest parks.
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Popularity: 42% [?]
July 23, 2009 · Filed under Artificial Landscapes, Infrastructure, Parks, Transit
Concept: bulldoze under Central Park and replace it with a modern, international airport. The idea is so simple, so beautifully elegant, so inevitable that it’s hard to believe we didn’t think of it ourselves. Rather, credit the shadowy figures behind The Manhattan Airport Foundation, who’ve worked up an incredibly detailed plan to turn Frederick Law Olmsted’s bucolic paradise into a postmodern universe of runways, terminals, and baggage claims. Good news for purists, too: per the Manhattan Airport FAQ, “Whenever possible, vestigial architectural elements of the Park space be retained or reworked into the context of the new design.” And they mean it!
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Popularity: 26% [?]
July 2, 2009 · Filed under Landscape, Parks, Public Space, Real Estate, Recreation
By the time the first section of the High Line opened in June to wide acclaim, dozens of new buildings had already sprouted up around it, including a glass-curtained hotel that floats above the park and a series of residential towers designed by world-renowned architects. City officials have predicted that development sparked by reinventing the abandoned elevated rail line as a park will bring $4 billion in private investment and $900 million in revenues to the city over the next 30 years, the Times reported.
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Popularity: 35% [?]
June 24, 2009 · Filed under EcoCities, Ecosystems, Health, Landscape, Parks, Pollution
In the 2007 Comprehensive Plan, the City of Charlottesville set for itself the ambitious goal of creating a 40% tree canopy. At least it seemed ambitious at the time. After performing an analysis of aerial photos this year, city officials realized that 46% of the area is actually already covered by trees. In response, a new Urban Forest Management Plan has been drafted that calls for yet more trees. City Council has reviewed the plan, and everyone who spoke wholeheartedly endorsed making this a reality.
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Popularity: 39% [?]
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