IDEAS | landscape architecture / planning / urban design

SWA summer school is in session; hosted by the Dallas studio this year, the seven student participants were asked to predict a radical advancement in their home city by the 22nd century and also to comment on what change they would most like to see. Johanna Cairns Harvard Graduate School of Design Hometown: Portland, Maine… Read more »

Johanna Cairns
Harvard Graduate School of Design
Hometown: Portland, Maine

Portland has been gaining attention for its growing restaurant culture, affordable housing, artistic character, and coastal location. I see its population increasing tenfold and predict the need for an advanced public transportation system. In addition to serving locals, it should connect Portland to major cities within the U.S. and Canada. I would love to see the strong pedestrian network that is currently in place downtown expand throughout the entire city, making it much less dependent on vehicles.

Lorenzo Maria Centioni
University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland
Hometown: Rome, Italy

Rome is a palimpsest, composed of different layers of history throughout the centuries that make it unique as well as messy. I see a total reorganization of public/ private transportation, which should be more oriented to a multimodal system in which cars are not the main means of transportation. The requalification of disused areas and the possibility to make developers interested in the existing urban voids could be an interesting point for changing the current trend of unchained expansion of the city. Revitalizing the interest of the public about rethinking and maintaining the city’s public spaces is probably the first step toward achieving important changes Rome truly deserves.

Heena Gajjar
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
Hometown: Ahmedabad, India

Ahmedabad grew up as I did. That is how cities are! They evolve along with their inhabitants. Ahmedabad has always been a business-oriented place. I wish for Ahmedabad a realization of its cultural values. I also look forward to its growth and prosperity along with nature. The traditional way of life allowed people to interact with nature. The future will be about learning to balance modern demands and traditional values. With increasing demands and stress on resources, Ahmedabad will have to awaken an awareness of its core DNA.

Autumn (Siyang) Jing
University of Pennsylvania
Hometown: Taiyuan, China

The old identities of each neighborhood seem to be wiped out totally after the freeway systems were constructed on the city’s arterials. Pedestrian lanes and retail spaces were sacrificed in the process of widening the road for the freeway system. Now all of the neighborhoods seem similar, which is totally different from the past. I would like to see neighborhood renovations happen in order to restore the unique sense of place that was lost.

Ruichao Li
Harvard Graduate School of Design
Hometown: Kunming, China

Compared to the city Chongqing, China, home of my undergraduate school, Kunming is famous for the mild Southern China climate and is called “Spring City.” The flower industry gains great opportunities to develop in suburban areas thanks to the weather. I predict that flowers will be planted within the urban context as both an industry band also a city attraction. What’s more, flowers can be transported in a more efficient way to be kept fresh and sent to the world based on newly developed means of transportation. I’d like to see more environmentally friendly energy for transportation. Since fossil fuel is less available and has caused serious environmental problems, I’m looking forward to witnessing cleaner energy replace it on a large scale.

John Wischmeyer
Ohio State University
Hometown: Columbus, Ohio

Design for cities that can help mitigate extreme weather changes would be especially welcome in Columbus, where weather can change dramatically from one day to the next. Toward that end, perhaps building materials could be self-heating and cooling to prevent build up of snow or ice. Buildings might shift their orientation throughout the day and year to collect optimal sunlight and turn it in to energy. Future city infrastructure will need to be higher performing and data driven. Thus, the blending of technology and design for daily life will surely be an exciting intersection.

I would like to see Columbus become a place where you can live and work without needing to own a car. I predict high-speed transit connections to other large cities in Ohio as well as elsewhere. The development of a transit hub would be a major advancement. I imagine that people will want to spend less time traveling from one place to the next and will want to multi-task en route. Public transit will allow them to stay connected with people and their digital lives while traveling instead of being focused on driving.

Tian Wu
Ohio State University
Hometown: Tianjin, China

In the 22nd century, each home has its own storm water collection system. People plant vegetables and food in their homes on vertical walls that also adjust the indoor temperature, eliminating fears about food safety and access to air- conditioning. Reduced air pollution would mean that people would experience blue sky in the daytime and see stars in the evening. They would not be afraid to have meals outdoors and would never need to wear masks for outdoor activities.

Photo of Rome courtesy of Daryl Mitchell via Flickr Creative Commons.

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One Response to “Student Predictions for 22nd-century Cities”

Jordan

Interesting predictions here! It’ll be fun to compare these to what will actually happen in the future. Thanks for sharing!
July 24th, 2015 Reply

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Posted by Summer Students
in Urbanism & Planning
on 20 July, 2015

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Everything we do as landscape architects is site specific—we enter the life of a place for but a few long moments, investigate its culture and history, and work to add an appropriate contemporary layer. The San Francisco office recently joined Gelfand Partners Architects to look at refurbishing the Ping Yuen public housing development in Chinatown, San Francisco. Composed of four buildings with 500 units and two acres of Chinatown property, this project has opened up a whole world of ideas that are not typically encountered in our office, and yet it also hits close to home for our team (principal Jim Lee was raised and married there, and went to Chinese School within a few blocks of the site).

We realized early on that we needed to educate ourselves about the history of Chinatown as well as the turbulent record of public housing. As it turns out, we entered this project in the midst of a quiet revolution for the San Francisco Housing Authority—the City is divesting itself of the responsibility of maintaining public housing to nonprofit groups. This transition is the result of mismanagement and corruption over a half century, including millions in graft each year, bribery schemes, drug cartel payoffs, and, most infamously, the Reverend Jim Jones, who used his role of the head of the SFHA for a variety of abuses. The task of governing the future of the Pings, as they’re called, is being handed over to the Chinatown Community Development Center (CCDC), an organization that manages a variety of affordable housing developments and also advocates for the Chinatown and San Francisco Chinese diaspora community.

This turnover is not simply a matter of handing over the keys, as there are around 1700 residents in the Ping Yuens, many of whom are elderly and extremely impoverished. The buildings themselves were built between 1953 and 1964, and have received sporadic maintenance since then.

At the same time, the Pings are widely considered “successful” as a SF public housing project. They are comparatively low-crime and the tenants are well-organized. Part of this success is a direct result of ties with the wider Chinatown community. Amy Howard’s book, More Than Shelter, compiled years of research to explain the history and trends in SF public housing. One of the clear conclusions she made regarding the Pings is that its success is not owing to the “model minority” myth, but rather to a strong community infrastructure. Across the street from the Pings is cheap fresh produce; within a few blocks are over a dozen nonprofits dedicated to public health, integrating first-generation immigrants, and Chinese and English language schools. Chinatown began as a ghetto, a place where Chinese were forced to reside when in San Francisco. A history of institutionalized racism there begat a well-connected, ethnocentric community that supports its residents.

All of this information reveals an even bigger, positive trend: urban poverty (as opposed to rural poverty) in the United States registers higher rates of social mobility, especially with recent immigrant populations. The Pings are a part of a complex web of social, cultural, and historical constructs, and we are trying to envision how they can be improved while navigating the significant management and demographic changes they face in the future.

The more we learn, the more questions we have. Landscape architecture is more than specifying new playground equipment; to be diligent, considerate, and effective we must strive to understand the places we design as thoroughly as possible over the time we encounter them.

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Posted by ChrisHardy and Yu-ChungLi
in Community
on 10 July, 2015

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When I began working at SWA in Houston back in September of 2011, I also started a challenge unrelated to work, one addressed to myself and to the city of Houston. The goal was simple: surviving without a car. How long could I successfully move around the country’s fourth largest city exclusively by bike and,… Read more »

I biked to work every day; I was living close to the office so that was okay. I attached a basket to my bike and regularly rode to grocery stores like HEB and WalMart. I took longer rides to IKEA, Best Buy, and Buffalo Bayou during weekends. The longest distance I traveled was to the Johnson Space Center, 31 miles southeast. My second farthest journey was to tour the Battleship Texas State Historic Site, 28 miles to the east. I enjoyed biking from day one to the 428th day, my last, when I finally quit the challenge. Here is why:

1. I might be hit by an F-150 truck.
I was so close to having several accidents during the 428 days, including almost getting hit by an F-150, that I bought a Honda Civic the next day. That’s how I quickly determined to become a car owner. I was lucky enough to survive on the dangerous Houston roads, unlike the 13 far less fortunate bikers, whose cycles were painted white and tagged as “ghost bikes.” Dedicated bike lanes in Houston are mostly an afterthought applied to existing roads. The very narrow demarcation lines provide no safety for bikers.

2. There’s no place to lock a bike.
Few plazas have dedicated bike parking racks, with IKEA, Edwards Houston Marq’E Stadium movie theater, and a very few others being exceptions. In most cases, I had to lock my bike to signage poles or even trees. Even our Houston office does not have a bike rack. I locked my bike to the pole with handicap parking signage every day at work.

3. I was questioned by an FBI agent.
Several days after my trip to the Battleship Texas, I found a business card at my door. It belonged to an FBI agent from the Joint Terrorism Task Force and the back read, “Mr. Sui, please call me when you get this card.” I called the guy immediately and was interviewed the next day. A security guard had observed me “biking along the oil refinery with a cellphone taking pictures, looking suspicious.” In fact, I took a photo of my bike with the oil refinery as background on a public road. You could easily go to Google Streetview and get a higher resolution image of that particular site. Apparently I was the only person crazy enough to bike on that road, and must have appeared to be a well-prepared terrorist.

4. Biking in Houston is not for the commuter.
SWA designed the amazing bike path along Buffalo Bayou and many other trails. However, here, biking is a “thing.” You are supposed to attach your bike to your car, drive to the start of a trail, bike, then drive back home. This is biking for pleasure, not an alternative means of transportation. How will we design a sustainable, Houston-scaled infrastructure that truly protects cyclists? How will we establish a society and culture that respects cyclists? How can we get people out of their bigger and bigger SUVs and trucks and join the cyclists instead of pushing unprotected bikers into traffic? How can biking become a “norm” and not a “thing”?

The result of the challenge after 428 days is that I lost. Or, rather, Houston lost. I enjoyed the 428 days but as soon as I bought my Honda Civic, I almost stop biking completely, and got fatter and fatter. Finally, I will be Texas-sized, just like our mega-popular F-150.

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2 Responses to “My 428 Days Without a Car in Houston”

lauren

Thanks for your post… I have found a pretty similar problem in Los Angeles!! After walking and biking for a while, I also felt like it was just safer to drive. Super unfortunate, but good for you for going the whole 428 days!!! impressive!!!!
August 19th, 2015 Reply
Jonnu

Great post Xin! Let’s hope you don’t become Texas sized!
July 1st, 2015 Reply

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Posted by Xin Sui
in Urbanism & Planning
on 1 July, 2015

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Located about 50 miles northeast of San Francisco, Solano State Prison is home to 3,800 incarcerated men. Sandwiched between an oak-studded hillside to the west and a sea of suburban cul-de-sacs to the east, the medium-security facility stands out in its surroundings. From above, the basic structure of the 146-acre prison becomes clear: A long north-south oriented building forms the administrative spine and houses the cafeteria, kitchen, gymnasium, commissary, and meeting rooms. Four housing quads branch out from this spine, with a total of 24 self-contained units intentionally arranged to form a decentralized prison campus. In the center of each of these clusters are the “yards,” where inmates have access to shared open space during certain times of the day. While these spaces have primarily been used for exercise—each yard has a large gravel track, concrete pads for games, pull-up bars, and a few patches of turf—their role within the prison is expanding.

Beth Waitkus, director of the Insight Garden Program (IGP), founded in 2002, has introduced the value of rehabilitation and reconciliation in the justice system through environmental literacy, landscape design, and sustainability. The program got its roots at San Quentin, California’s oldest and most infamous prison, where over 1,000 inmates have explored (some for years) the relationship between “inner” and “outer” gardening. Today, the program boasts a 1,200-square-foot garden comprised of mature ornamental grasses and wildflowers as well as a number of raised beds full of vegetables and herbs. Most importantly, though, it boasts an incredibly low recidivism rate, with less than 10 percent of the program’s participants returning to prison or jail once released; this figure is especially impressive when compared with the national figure of 67 percent (according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics). Through IGP, the inmates learn hands-on, employable skills, giving them the ability, confidence, and desire to earn a living after completing their sentence.

Due to IGP’s success at San Quentin, its curriculum is currently expanding to other facilities, including Solano State Prison. About six months ago, Waitkus contacted me to see if I had an interest in helping to formalize the plans for a small garden installation in the northwest yard. She invited me to the prison to meet the men, hear about their ideas for the space, and engage in the curriculum. After a minor dress code debacle (metal zippers do not pass strict security measures!), I made it in. With no outdoor space in which to gather, we sat together in the empty cafeteria, where our chairs formed a tight circle, with a small potted fern in the center. For four hours, we took turns reading about amygdala training, visualizing garden design, and reviewing the principles of permaculture. I then received all of the prisoners’ sketches for the garden, a rich mix of ideas that needed to be combined into a single inclusive design.

Back at the Sausalito office, a small group of designers was recruited to help make this garden a reality. Over the past few months we’ve analyzed the inmates’ diagrams and drawings, toured a community garden for ideas, sketched over lunch, and compiled a preliminary budget for the project. I recently returned to the prison to present our design—a sensorial habitat garden featuring a variety of colorful and fragrant plants such as Asclepias fascicularis, Penstemon spectabilis, and Salvia spathacea. If all goes well, we will install the 2,150-square-foot garden in the fall. And while this small effort represents just three percent of the overall prison grounds, it is a much-needed patch of green among grey.

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Posted by Emily Schlickman
in Community, Ecology
on 22 June, 2015

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Your favorite memories of playtime as a child likely recall experiences of adventure and exploration. Discovering the world around you by climbing trees, building forts, chasing lizards, making mud pies, and creating forts from the household furnishings is part of being a child; it’s also the premise for a type of play environment known as… Read more »

Prevalent in Europe and Japan since the early 1940s, these so-called “junk playgrounds” were places where children could build, explore, and experiment with their own recreational environment. The process did not often result in a traditionally beautiful space and, in fact, critics labeled them community eyesores. Nonetheless, the concept became popular in those countries (the U.S. has yet to catch on in any significant way), and while each adventure playground is different, they all have a few things in common: Adults from the community (known as play workers or leaders) are present, and they assist and supervise the children. The physical elements vary depending on available resources and the imagination of the children and staff but often include tree houses or playhouses (typically built by the kids), logs, rope, recycled tires, campfires, and ponds. Sometimes even farm animals are looked after by the children and staff. In these places, young people can realize their own ideas by originating activities, games, and structures.

As children use their imaginations to create play environments under supervision, they also develop physically and intellectually. Making decisions about how to play strengthens their problem-solving skills and social development as they learn how to negotiate relationships. Children also feel invested, and learn to care for the things they create. These kinds of spaces encourage growth because the focus is on the process, not the result. A good adventure playground constantly changes and evolves according to the new ideas and uses the children design and implement.

Some view the environments as dangerous because they do not conform to the building requirements of a conventional playground. In the U.S. especially, liability and safety are concerns and it’s true that there is potential for danger. In reality, though, the accident rates at adventure playgrounds tend to be lower than conventional ones. They all have trained staff, set hours of operation, and age requirements (most do not allow kids younger than five or six), and some even require that the parents be present. It’s hard to compare them to conventional stand-alone playgrounds because they operate so differently, perhaps more like a staffed community center. Despite the liability concerns, adventure playgrounds can often be covered under the same insurance as any other part of a city park, so this is a hurdle that can be overcome. Larger concerns are funding and land availability, which are often the causes for their closure.

It’s widely accepted that play is important to a child’s development. Adventure playgrounds can be a valuable addition to any community and I hope to see more places create their own unique play environments as the word spreads.

Image of adventure playground in Berkeley, California, courtesy of Hitchster via Flickr Creative Commons.

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Posted by Briana Hirth
in Arts and Culture, Community
on 16 June, 2015

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“Get a bicycle. You will not regret it if you live.” Mark Twain’s words came to mind as I did my best to survive a bike ride through downtown Los Angeles. Cars came within inches of me as they darted around, swerving from lane to lane. Buses lumbered along and pushed me further into the… Read more »

“Get a bicycle. You will not regret it if you live.”

Mark Twain’s words came to mind as I did my best to survive a bike ride through downtown Los Angeles. Cars came within inches of me as they darted around, swerving from lane to lane. Buses lumbered along and pushed me further into the mix of traffic while I dodged potholes and road construction. Why did I ever agree to make a video about the hazards of urban biking?

As part of a proposal to a client for an urban bike plan, my wife, a former corporate video producer, and I were asked to create a short public outreach video that would juxtapose the benefits of sound bicycle planning with the dangers of poor bicycle planning. Rather than create a typical public service announcement, we were tasked with making a story-based video that would be easily relatable.

We storyboarded potential biking scenarios, discussed the overall message and the best way to reach the audience. During the weekend, we set out to film with our bicycles, DSLR camera, tripod, GoPro, and chest harness.

Chaos happens naturally in downtown LA. We spent several hours planning different scenarios that would communicate the hazards and chaos of urban biking. However, after strapping on the GoPro, we were able to capture all of the various scenarios within just 15 minutes of biking. Car doors flew open right in front of me; trucks cut me off; someone ran a red light. A small piece of gravel even hit me in the eye. How fortunate!

That was the easy part. We then had to find examples of good bicycle planning in downtown LA. While it was a much bigger challenge, we encountered a few examples. I filmed my wife riding on the same green bike lane from different angles to make it look like she was riding through different parts of downtown. For other shots, she rode through a pedestrian plaza because we couldn’t find any other examples of good bicycle design.

Following a few days of creative editing, the video came together just in time for the interview. After seeing the video, several members of the client team said that it captured the experience of urban biking well and highlighted many of the reasons why the bike plan project was necessary. As bicycle planning continues to improve, Mark Twain’s quote will hopefully evoke more belly laughs than nervous chuckles.

Watch Kyle’s video here.

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Posted by Kyle Trulen
in Urbanism & Planning
on 5 June, 2015

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Student Predictions for 22nd-century Cities

One Response to “Student Predictions for 22nd-century Cities”

Jordan

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Context is Everything: Discovering Public Housing in Chinatown

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My 428 Days Without a Car in Houston

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lauren

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A Patch of Green

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At Adventure Playgrounds, Making a Mess is Encouraged

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The Pleasures and Perils of Bicycling in Downtown Los Angeles

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