Clear Creek Stormwater Basin, Atlanta, Georgia: a functioning green infrastructure system solution to detain stormwater for Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) system. The heron is standing on a 11’ wide littoral shelf that the City of Atlanta accepted in lieu of a fence. image: Steve Carrell
It was great to meet some of you at the Annual Meeting in Chicago! As we end the year we are taking this opportunity to review 2015, highlight sustainable design topics that were raised by meeting attendees, and remind SDD members who did not attend the Annual Meeting that they can still avail themselves of valuable resources from the 2015 Annual Meeting Handouts.
But first, let’s take a few moments to summarize some highlights from the meeting. First a review of the past years SDD accomplishments:
The amphitheater at Historic Fourth Ward Park, part of the Atlanta BeltLine image: John McNicholas via Flickr
Interview with Nette Compton, ASLA
Nette Compton has served as an officer of the Sustainable Design and Development PPN for the past year, and she will be stepping up to the PPN co-chair position at this year’s ASLA Annual Meeting in Denver. Nette is actively involved in many sustainable and urban design initiatives and events through her work at the Trust for Public Land, and we wanted to highlight her upcoming session at SXSW Eco, which takes place next week, October 6-8, 2014, in Austin. Nette will be on the panel discussing “Urban Renewal and Resilient Design” on October 8. In the interview below, she shares some information about the session and why this topic is of such critical importance.
One of the reasons that we have decided to provide more exposure here in The Field about this event is to encourage other SDD PPN members to participate in outreach efforts on sustainability and resiliency aimed at groups outside of the profession. Landscape architects can raise awareness about how our profession contributes expertise and solutions for urban renewal and resilient design. We welcome contributions like this by SDD members, on talks that they will be or have been involved in on sustainability initiatives. Please share your ideas! –Lisa Cowan, ASLA, SDD PPN Co-Chair
How did this presentation come about?
In my new role at the Trust for Public Land, part of my position entails speaking about the impact of public space on cities. As Associate Director of City Park Development, I focus on how parks can improve the livability and function of cities for its residents, from providing a place to play to landscape-scale improvements in air and water quality. The presentation’s emphasis on resiliency and creative use of urban space fit right in with my past experience at the New York City Parks Department, where I was the Director of Green Infrastructure and involved in climate and resilience planning both pre- and post-Sandy. We wanted to have practitioners from around the country as part of the discussion as well, to show how these big ideas of resilience planning for cities at the landscape scale can happen anywhere, and take advantage of a range of opportunities.
Riverpark Farm, located in a New York City neighborhood that previously had very limited access to fresh food, uses portable planters made from milk crates on a stalled building project site so it can move to its final location when the building is developed. image: courtesy of Riverpark Farm – photo by Ari Nuzzo
From the research for your book, Designing Urban Agriculture, and your on-going work in designing and facilitating urban agriculture projects, have you learned anything that surprised or challenged you as a landscape architect?
Simply put, food can become a platform from which we address other important elements of community, ecology, and livability, including the physical, social, economic, cultural, and environmental health of the city. Food is the gateway to the stakeholder conversations between city, community, and project developer or funder. It is also surprising how many edible projects and ideas are out there to learn from so there is still tremendous interest in delving deeper into this complex subject.
As co-chair of the Sustainable Design and Development PPN, I work with other officers and ASLA staff to develop topics of interest and input from landscape architects and other allied professionals for this blog. Project economics are an important, but immensely challenging, topic in making the case for sustainable design. At the suggestion of Dena Kennett, ASLA, who worked on ASLA’s behalf to develop a green infrastructure workshop for the 2013 New Partners for Smart Growth Conference and worked directly with my colleague, Martha Sheils, a resource economics professional, to address this issue, we are trying something new here—adapting a PowerPoint presentation to this format to provide SDD members with access to information that resonated with conference attendees.
When our company, Studioverde, was in its formative stages, I had many fruitful discussions with Martha—a friend and colleague from when we worked together in another multidisciplinary firm—about the importance of ecosystem services and the economic case for sustainable design, implementation, and maintenance. Martha has an uncanny ability to identify, distill, and communicate heady research outside of the landscape architecture profession that applies to our work. These early discussions and Martha’s research led us to the Sustainable Sites Initiative back in 2007, and she is currently working on education and outreach to help municipalities and professional organizations understand the benefits of integrated stormwater management models. –Lisa Cowan, PLA, ASLA
Sustainable Energy Landscapes: Designing, Planning, and Development image: CRC Press
The role of design, much less landscape architecture, is rarely mentioned in discussions surrounding sustainable energy topics and projects. Fortunately, Sven Stremkem, Dr. Dipl Ing., MA (a landscape architect), and Andy van den Dobbelsteen, PhD, MSc (a building engineer) took on the monumental tasks of creating and editing a comprehensive publication on the emerging field of sustainable energy landscapes, Sustainable Energy Landscapes: Designing, Planning, and Development, published in September 2012.
Who or what has the most potential to be the drivers in implementing the SITES™ rating system and sustainable sites methodologies? The SITES Pilot Projects Phase is still underway and presently three projects have been certified. But where will this new approach get the most traction at the largest scale? While the federal government system is usually not touted in the media for innovation and cost savings, it may be the place where the most number of projects originate or are being developed using the SITES model. What does this mean to the rest of us? Can federal initiatives carry over to landscape architects who may not be working on federal projects but are looking for ways to introduce SITES to clients and other professionals?
