Integrative Landscapes Heal the Urban Fabric
The combination of elements that comprise a cityscape often signal to us a sense of boundaries—of the edges between where we belong, and, sometimes, where we don’t. These edges may be stark, subtle, or anywhere in between. The edge delineating public space from private is often demarcated by an especially clear element—such as a wall or a fence—while the edges that one finds between a city’s neighborhoods or districts are of a softer variety, something more subtle but nonetheless palpable and apparent. The qualities of these edges directly affect the identity of a city’s neighborhoods and its residents.
Designing a new space within the public realm of the city is an opportunity to integrate a new fluidity into the warp and weft of the urban fabric; easing the transition between places that previously felt disparate or perhaps inaccessible. In this way, design plays an essential role in creating cities where the abstract concepts of health, happiness, and prosperity are encouraged by the very real environment. Recent examples of innovative urban landscape projects demonstrate that when ecological concerns are pushed to the forefront, social benefits quickly—and almost inevitably—follow. Stewardship and care for a city’s landscape carries the far-reaching benefit of reconnecting that city’s population with nature, strengthening the ecology of place, and thereby its identity. In this century, new landscapes are becoming the driver for city formation, green spaces that serve as ecological and social corridors.
A Unique Opportunity; A Crucial Responsibility
Designing healthy, resilient and equitable urban environments necessitates thinking about natural landscapes more broadly. Yes, parks and green spaces serve as designated places where we protect natural resources. But they also play critical roles as natural infrastructure, a part of a larger ecological system that is integrated within the workings of the city. In concert with urban designers and planners, landscape architects are particularly well-suited to creatively organizing large urban areas in terms of ecosystems, networks, and infrastructure.
The Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF)’s “A Declaration of Concern” from 1966 offered one perspective of the role of the landscape architect, “The landscape architect is uniquely rooted in the natural sciences... essential in maintaining the vital connection between man and nature.” This October, LAF is published a new declaration, which opens with a renewed promise on behalf of the profession, “As landscape architects we vow to create places that serve the higher purpose of social and ecological justice for all peoples and all species. We vow to create places that nourish our deepest needs for communion with the natural world and with one another.”
In her speech during the LAF summit on Landscape Architecture and the Future in 2016 in Philadelphia, Sasaki principal Gina Ford, ASLA, emphasized the importance of weighing the imperative to create ecological benefit along with humanistic and social concerns—maintaining that these two realms of concerns and motivations were never truly separable. “Designers and planners who focus on resilience have come to realize that addressing significant environmental change demands tackling issues of social equity,” she affirmed. “We need landscape architects who understand social networks and cultural fabrics to both inspire participation in this critical dialogue and build governance toward lasting, meaningful, and sustainable change.”
Sasaki Principal Gina Ford presents "Into an Era of Landscape Humanism"
In her presentation, Ford pointed to statistics from a report in the journal Urban Geography, titled “Parks and Park Funding in Los Angeles: An Equity-Mapping Analysis,” which reveals the extreme disparity and unequal access to open, green spaces in urban environments--which many cities and planners are now working hard to address. The report demonstrates that in predominantly white neighborhoods in Los Angeles there is an average 32 acres of park space per 1,000 residents, while predominantly black or Latino neighborhoods average less than one acre.
There is an urgent call to address new expanded ideals of resiliency that embody both ecological and humanistic concerns, and to address the issues around equity and access that are central to design.
Mitchell Silver, who worked previously as the Planning Director for the City of Raleigh, North Carolina, is now commissioner of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. In this new role, he has begun work on a project that directly addresses issues of equity in park access in New York City called Parks Without Borders. He examines how parks interact with their surrounding neighborhoods and critically address the way borders and edges impinge upon access to green, open spaces in the city.
In National Parks and Recreation Magazine this last March he wrote, “It’s no surprise that parks reflect different notions about what public space means. Some of them were designed not to integrate with the surrounding community but, instead, to be sealed off from them through tall fences, big walls or lack of visual and physical connections. It’s even possible to walk by a park without realizing that it is there… Our goal is to promote freedom of movement, and to make all parts of public space as seamless as possible in order to make the most out of this limited but important resource. To do this, we are focusing on redesigning parts of parks that interact directly with the surrounding neighborhood: entrances, edges and park-adjacent spaces.”
There is an urgent call to address new expanded ideals of resiliency that embody both ecological and humanistic concerns, and to address the issues around equity and access that are central to design. Sasaki’s recent work on urban landscapes in Cleveland and in Los Angeles attempt to make seamless the connections between natural resources and their neighborhoods, to make sensible the connection between human and nature.
Stitching the City Together in Cleveland
Cleveland’s Hough neighborhood has a long and important history for the city on the lake. The area never really recovered from notorious race riots in the 1960s, and remains physically sequestered by its location to the east of downtown. While the socio-economic status for much of the Cleveland metro area has ebbed and flowed over time, Hough has remained one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
Hough’s closest neighboring district to the east, University Circle, stands in stark contrast. Home to many of the city’s most vital anchor institutions—including Case Western Reserve University, and the world-class Cleveland Museum of Art—University Circle stands tall as a defining feature for the city. Many of these institutions date back to Cleveland’s heyday at the beginning of last century. The initial creation and continual stewardship of these cultural juggernauts has enabled them to withstand the city's downturns and have helped secure a recent renaissance, which has earned Cleveland the new moniker: "The Comeback City."
The Nord Family Greenway stitches together the Cleveland Museum of Art to the north, Case Western Reserve University to the south and west, and the Hough neghborhood to the west.
A joint project between Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Museum of Art is taking a transformative approach to healing the city’s physical and historical divisions. A nearly half-mile long greenway, currently under construction, is stitching together Hough and University Circle—opening circulation routes and recreational amenities to a large swath of the area’s population, and promoting the Arts in the process.
“We had been thinking 'bridge' all along. But what Sasaki proposed was so much more than a bridge could ever be."
The Doan Brook, which sits in a valley between the Hough and University Circle districts, creates a nearly 60’ deep, densely vegetated barrier that made it nearly impossible to sense the adjacency of Hough to many of the City’s recreational and cultural assets. The project began as an invited design competition, and Sasaki’s entry to the competition presented a vision of utilizing a culverted segment of Doan Brook to make a bold and accessible connection—a greenway—that would create a clear visual and intuitive physical connection across the valley. This connection is created through stitching together underutilized and neglected edges of Wade Park, an expansive open space parcel donated to the City of Cleveland in 1882.
This view, looking northwest, shows the grand scale of the greenway
This concept of a greenway connection presented a new way of thinking about the project for stakeholders, who found the idea of stretching common ground to connect these neighborhoods along a clearly defined axis instantaneously captivating. “When we saw the Sasaki presentation, it is not an exaggeration to say we were blown away,” the President of Case Western Reserve University remarked. “We had been thinking 'bridge' all along. But what Sasaki proposed was so much more than a bridge could ever be."
Simultaneous to addressing these connections, the project pushes forward-thinking resiliency strategies. In addition to creating of a vast and durable greenway framed by trees and gardens, Sasaki also shed light on the Doan Brook—the subject of decades of political, recreational, and infrastructural tug-of-war. Working with the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District, the un-culverted segment of Doan Brook is now in the planning stages of being realigned to improve the quality and hydraulic function of the stream and allowing for the installation of buttressed streambanks that will provide access to a rich and expansive riparian corridor. This “found space” will be designed with expanded flood storage capacity, and the new park spaces will be crafted in the spirit of the significant historic gardens of Wade Park designed by the Olmsted Brothers.
The Cleveland Museum of Art's new Maintenance Facility, which emerges from the hillside with a sculptural poeticism.
To enable the full restoration of the Doan Brook Valley, Sasaki first had to work with the Cleveland Museum of Art to design and implement a new maintenance facility so that the existing maintenance building, which sat right in the middle of the floodplain, could be demolished. The new maintenance facility was conceived as an invisible structure, where the building program was tucked completely into the hillside of a prominent knoll adjacent to the Museum, it’s undulating concrete form concealed by a green roof planted with a native Oak savanna that will blend seamlessly into the surrounding landscape.
The Nord Family Greenway, and the chain-reaction of other enabling projects that have been catalyzed by the vision of the Greenway, is truly stitching together disparate pieces of Cleveland’s urban fabric, addressing decades' old economic and cultural divisions while mitigating ecological issues.
A Return to the Sea in Los Angeles
In a way, one single parcel of land can be seen as an allegory of a whole city’s history. Los Angeles’ Wilmington neighborhood, for instance, shows the complex systems that crisscross to form a city’s social and economic context. Once well-connected to the natural beauty of the Pacific Ocean, Wilmington had slowly been separated from the coast by the expansion of the Port of Los Angeles—a major maritime industry powerhouse.
The Port of Los Angeles is the busiest container port in North America, and a major source of economic vitality for the neighborhood and region. Over time, it became vital for the port to create a plan to enhance public access to the waterfront for the local harbor community, in order to expand it’s role as both key attraction and economic driver for the area. The value of an interdisciplinary design intervention in meeting this commitment was unmistakable. We collaborated with the Port of Los Angeles and its staff, members of the community and all affected agencies to craft a master plan that both created a natural buffer between Wilmington and the Port’s operations, and identified ways in which equal access to natural resources for Wilmington’s primarily Hispanic residents could co-exist with industry.
The Wilmington Waterfront Park is a two-phase project borne of the larger waterfront master plan. The first phase [pictured above] transformed a brownfield site into a 30-acre park that runs parallel to the coast. Completed in 2011, these 30 acres double Wilmington’s public open spaces. In order to buffer the community park from the port's operations, Sasaki created a strong sculptural landform which elevates the existing planar grade of the neighborhood to 16 feet. This land integrates a series of multipurpose playfields with shade-dappled, gentle grass slopes. A long, linear stretch of pedestrian path traverses the park on an axis, connecting pavilions that offer a variety of informal seating, shade structures, and three flexible performance venues.
What had previously been inaccessible—a place for machines, less for people—is transformed through design intervention into a place where a community can meet the water’s edge.
The second phase, currently under development, is connecting the park to the ocean. The new L-shaped ribbon of green development will connect the Industrial District and Avalon Corridor with the new Waterfront Promenade. A future land-bridge connection will carry Angelinos and visitors over the industrial port sites to arrive in the space of the promenade—a grand entrance, opening to a sweeping view of LA harbor from the top of a sculpted landform, which cleverly nests the restrooms and services underneath the dome of earth.
To the right, native California sycamore and oak trees create a shaded woodland path towards a play area for children. To the left, a sweeping promenade—with custom-built seating that slides on tracks like the railcars of the former industrial port, is the front porch of the existing Banning’s Landing community center. The visitor can traverse the open plane of lawn ahead, spill out onto the promenade that doubles as a stage, and arrive at a place to sit on the terraced sculpture of rough-hewn stones cut from sparkling onyx that step down to meet the water, offering unobstructed views out over the harbor.
What had previously been inaccessible—a place for machines, less for people—is transformed through design intervention into a place where a community can meet the water’s edge.
Contributors to this article include Sasaki principals and landscape architects Isabel Zempel, ASLA, design principal in charge of Sasaki’s work on the Nord Family Greenway in Cleveland, and Gina Ford, FASLA, who is leading our work with the Port of Los Angeles. Last month, these design leaders joined the larger conversations happening throughout the landscape architecture profession by presenting at the annual meeting of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA). This year, Ford was also elevated to ASLA’s Council of Fellows—one of the highest honors the ASLA bestows on members, in recognition of her contribution to the profession and to society at large.