From Park to PARK

If you walked around the city of San Francisco today, you would notice some parking spaces have been converted into temporary public open spaces. Rebar, the designers and activists behind PARK(ing) Day, wanted to create an additional 24,000 square feet of public space. What better (and cheaper) way to do it then to rent on a minute-to-minute basis on a parking meter? By turning these spaces into places where people could socialize and relax, Rebar felt they can “improve the quality of urban human habitat…at least until the meters run out.”

Here’re some images of the first installations in November 2006 that have inspired PARK(ing) Days in other cities, and countries including Scotland and Italy. It doesn't have to be PARK(ing) Day for you to create your own open space. Check out Rebar's "How to" Manual on turning a parking spot into a public space.

Painting the Town...Orange?

In the June issue of Metropolis Magazine, there was an article about a group of artists known as “Object Orange”, who, being inspired by Tyree Guyton and the Heidelberg Project, began to create urban art installations in Detroit. While Guyton devoted his efforts into salvaging derelict homes and neighborhoods by painting and decorating them with bright pastels, polka dots and other junkyard fixtures, Object Orange chose to bring attention to their homes by “using [orange] paint to advocate demolition force for change.” After studying aerial maps and photographs, they were able to identify houses that have been rundown and abandoned for years, and painted them a bright, fluorescent orange that surely no one could miss. In the bigger picture, they hoped that city and government officials take notice and do something about these neglected spaces, to tear them down and maybe do something useful with the vacant lots. So far, the nine houses that they’ve painted have made people take notice, and three of them have already been knocked down.

These art installations forces the community take notice of things that they might not normally notice, even things that they might pass by everyday. Maybe sidewalk art could bring attention to poor sidewalk conditions. Or brightly colored ribbons tied around the branches of an uncared for tree could prevent it from dying. These ideas are relatively cheap and have great potential to make people more aware of what’s around them.

More on the Heidelberg Project in upcoming posts…in the meantime, check out this interactive tour of the neighborhood...

Ecological Footprints

William E. Rees and his students at the University of British Columbia developed a quantitative tool to measure sustainability, or the environmental efficiency of a population. An ecological footprint analysis measures “the total area of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems required, on an ongoing basis, to produce the resources that the population consumes, and to assimilate the wastes that the population produces, wherever on earth those ecosystems are located.” For example, the “ecological footprint” for an impoverished village town would be significantly smaller (half hectare average) than that of a larger, wealthier city such as Tokyo, which incredibly, has one the size of 142 million hectares. Large Metropolitan cities like Tokyo house millions of people, and many who live there physically are unaware that they do not live there “ecologically”. What this means is that they rely on the ecosystems of other towns, cities and countries for support and sustenance. Small towns and large cities, the world is connected in many direct and indirect ways. The pollution in a small China factory town can be a related to excessive consumption in Beijing, or even cities outside the country, such as London, New York, Vancouver, and even Baton Rouge.

Some of the statistics I found in an article Rees wrote in Briarpatch Magazine were astonishing. If the disparity between the footprints of a poor small town and a large city were not startling enough, the population growth by 2030 are. It is projected that by that time, the world will have grown by 2.2 billion people, a number greater than the world population in the 1930s! And so Rees asks, “How sustainable is city living?” Or, how sustainable will the earth be in 2030, with 2 billion more people on it? Rees’ ecological footprint analysis aims to account for sustainability in a society that is continuing to grow in number and advancing technologically, both in exponential rates. As a society, we should be aware of how we are connected, socially, culturally environmentally and economically to the rest of the world. We should be aware of our individual “footprints”, and the one we leave on the earth for future generations to follow. These "footprints" can provide people with an “ethical directive” and an understanding of Rees’ belief that “no lifestyle is sustainable if it could not safely be shared by all members of the human family.”

Post disaster disaster

The community design studio, in which I am participating, poses great challenges. We are looking to contribute progressive ideas to an area straddling St. Claude St., between St. Bernard Ave. and Press St., the neighborhoods of the Marigny and St. Roche. The emergingly relevant niche of post-disaster design will learn important and possibly painful lessons from the rebuilding New Orleans experiment.
How do you design for a community whose members are absent? How do you map a cultural landscape when the culture has changed due to a traumatic shock to its system? While much of the 'standard' literature for landscape architecture teaches the consideration of the physical, cultural, historical, ecological etc. landscapes, the new New Orleans changes the paradigm, changes the questions, and undoubtedly changes the answers.
In his article "Music-makers and the dreamers of dreams," John Hopkins refers to four disciplines, which contribute to landscape architecture: art, ecology, community, and political economy. These are the crucial elements to rebuilding New Orleans. The sense of community in rebuilding neighborhoods is abound, although vulnerable at times due to violence. The communal psyche is tired ... of seeing destruction's legacy daily. Art in New Orleans continues, and is the catalyst for the revival in many neighborhoods, including in the Marigny. The respect of ecology is something the design community to continue to push for in New Orleans. Without it, storms will continue to plague the 'city below sea level.' The most troublesome is the political economy of the area, political economy being the sum of many aspects of the government, public and political wills, resources (natural and otherwise), economy, etc. New Orleans and indeed Louisiana has an extensive, well documented history of corruptions and paying lip service to constituencies with no action benefiting the public. Inaction or incompetence will doom the process of rebuilding.
Well, with the situation in NO there is no easy answer to solving the systemic social, economic, political and infrastructural problems. Gaining an accurate perspective on NOs current situation may be impossible. Regardless of what happens in NO, lessons will be learned from the redesign process of post-disaster urban areas. Not to be a pessimist, but at some point in the future an urban area may be decimated by a terrorist attack, major earthquake, etc. Post Katrina maybe a practice run for how an American city rebuilds after large scale disaster. The answer to that question is as elusive as the ones surrounding the redesign of New Orleans.

Value of Ecological Corridor Confirmed

Results of a study lead by Ellen Damshen, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have produced 'experimental confirmation' that corridors enhance biodiversity of species (both plant and animal) when connecting ecological patches. The experiment was conducted in a pine forest in South Carolina. Apparently, some scientists had dismissed the corridor/patch system as harmful to plant and animal communities, arguing that corridors exposed wildlife to hazards such as roads. [These must be the same scientists who do not believe in evolution, global warming or renewable energy resources.]
This system of ecologic protection is in use on large scales in India and Brazil, and is being advocated for in western United States, in particular. In landscapes with agricultural land settlement patterns, such as in the South, patches and corridors exist by default in rural areas. With 'proof' now of the success of corridors and patches, perhaps legislative safegaurds should be passed to protect that aspect of rural land use from urban sprawl, as southern cities grow, and hopefully incorporate cities themselves into a large-scale web of ecologic protection from the development of man-made infrastructue.
Science and truth are fighting the good fight for those of us who consider good land sterwardship an imperitive trait for entrance into heaven... or into dust. I am pretty sure science has an opinion on that, too.