tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-47697508234097738742024-02-20T09:32:42.607-05:00Envisioning the Queens (High) LineAn open discussion of and proposal to transform the abandoned LIRR tracks in South Queens into a public space that captures the gritty, earthy beauty of Queens and serves the community with a bike path and walking trails, native plants to attract local bees, edible trees and plants to provide sustenance, where children can play safely and elders have a place to gather, where artists and musician share their talents, where the community grows.AAPREMLALLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05695002558477537063noreply@blogger.comBlogger47125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769750823409773874.post-29609581703488874492015-07-14T08:51:00.000-04:002015-07-14T08:51:00.369-04:00The Alaskan Way Viaduct<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;"><b>The Alaskan Way Viaduct: </b></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;"><b>From a highway to a public space, Seattle plans to reclaim its waterfront.</b></span></div>
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<img alt="Image Courtesy of Friends of Waterfront Seattle" src="http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/2015/06/6._Pedestrian_Promenade_web/lead_large.png?GE2DGNJWHE4DSNBSFYYA====" /><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2015/06/how-seattle-is-reclaiming-its-waterfront-from-an-elevated-urban-highway/397325/</span><br />
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It’s been a few years since the city started to demolish the double-decker
From The Atlantic Alaskan Way Viaduct that severs downtown from Elliott Bay. And it’ll be
several more until the job is done. But Seattle is already making progress on
the multi-part, billion-dollar waterfront plan that will recapture acres of prime
area that have lived in the shadows of the road for half a century.AAPREMLALLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05695002558477537063noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769750823409773874.post-61369956085868647132015-01-27T13:09:00.003-05:002015-07-14T02:05:50.613-04:00<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: large;">With High Line type projects comes the concern about gentrification and low-income communities</span></b></div>
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“The Minhocão cuts through neighborhoods that were or still are relatively nice,” says Patricia Samora, a professor of architecture and urbanism at the Universidade São Judas Tadeu. “But when it was built, higher income people left and since then it’s served as a rental alternative for poorer families.”</div>
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For these families, Samora says, the idea of turning the highway into a park is complicated by fears that the new amenity would <a href="http://nextcity.org/daily/entry/gentrification-green-neighborhoods-just-green-enough" style="-webkit-transition: color 0.2s linear; border: 0px; color: #29567e; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.2s linear; vertical-align: baseline;">drive up real estate values</a> and eventually, make it unaffordable for them.</div>
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http://nextcity.org/daily/entry/brazil-may-be-getting-its-own-high-lineAAPREMLALLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05695002558477537063noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769750823409773874.post-68754746110884635472013-01-21T07:30:00.000-05:002013-01-21T07:30:00.119-05:00High Line-Inspired Park proposed in Queens<br />
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One cannot doubt that the famous park in the sky inspired many others to follow in rails-to-trails projects that were dormant or only dreams.</h2>
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High Line-Inspired Park proposed in Queens</h2>
</figure><figure aria-labelledby="figcaption_attachment_315816" class="wp-caption alignnone" id="attachment_315816" style="background-color: white; border-bottom-color: rgb(245, 245, 245); border-bottom-style: solid; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; float: left; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 22.734375px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; text-align: center; width: 530px;"><a href="http://www.archdaily.com/?attachment_id=315816" rel="attachment wp-att-315816" style="color: #7aa9d4; margin-right: 4px; outline: none;"><img alt="" class="size-medium wp-image-315816" height="404" src="http://ad009cdnb.archdaily.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/1357606822-ozone-park-528x404.jpg" style="border: 0px;" title="Rockaway Rail Branch of the LIRR; Photos Courtesy of Friends of the Queensway © 2012 (5)" width="528" /></a><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" id="figcaption_attachment_315816" style="border: 0px; color: #666666; float: right; font-size: 0.8em; margin: 0px; padding: 10px 0px; width: 530px;">Rockaway Rail Branch of the LIRR; Photos Courtesy of Friends of the Queensway © 2012 </figcaption><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" id="figcaption_attachment_315816" style="border: 0px; color: #666666; float: right; font-size: 0.8em; margin: 0px; padding: 10px 0px; width: 530px;"><b style="font-size: 0.8em;"><span style="color: red;">(What do you know that's MY photo!!)</span></b></figcaption></figure><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.6em; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px;">
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When plans for the <a href="http://www.archdaily.com/tag/high-line/" style="color: #2e7cb6; outline: none; text-decoration: initial;" target="_blank">High Line</a> were first revealed it made quite an impression on the design community. The converted elevated rail line, long abandoned by <a class="st_tag internal_tag" href="http://www.archdaily.com/tag/new-york/" rel="tag" style="color: #2e7cb6; outline: none; text-decoration: initial;" title="Posts tagged with New York">New York</a> City, was threatened by demolition until a group of activists fought for its revival and helped transform it into one of the most renowned public spaces in Manhattan. Now Queens, a borough with its own abandoned infrastructure is on its way to redeveloping the land for its own version of the High Line, to be known as the Queensway Cultural Gateway.</div>
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In late December, the<a href="http://www.tpl.org/what-we-do/where-we-work/new-york/queensway-project.html" style="color: #2e7cb6; outline: none; text-decoration: initial;" target="_blank"> Trust for Public Land</a> announced that <a href="http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20121227/forest-hills/queens-high-line-moves-closer-reality-with-467k-grant" style="color: #2e7cb6; outline: none; text-decoration: initial;" target="_blank">New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has awarded a $467,000 grant</a> to the organization to begin a feasibility study on the 3.5 mile Long Island rail line. Early proposals reveal a new pedestrian and bike path, public green space and a cultural gateway that will celebrate Queens’ diversity in art, sculpture and food, serving the 250,000 residents that live in the neighborhoods along the route, which include Rego Park, Forest Hills, Richmond Hill, Ozone Park and Forest Park.</div>
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<em>Join us after the break for more.</em><span id="more-315458"></span></div>
<figure aria-labelledby="figcaption_attachment_315819" class="wp-caption alignnone" id="attachment_315819" style="background-color: white; border-bottom-color: rgb(245, 245, 245); border-bottom-style: solid; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; color: #333333; float: left; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 22.734375px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; text-align: center; width: 530px;"><a href="http://www.archdaily.com/?attachment_id=315819" rel="attachment wp-att-315819" style="color: #2e7cb6; margin-right: 4px; outline: none; text-decoration: initial;"><img alt="" class="size-medium wp-image-315819" height="396" src="http://ad009cdnb.archdaily.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/1357606834-ozone-park-station-2010-528x396.jpg" style="border: 0px;" title="Rockaway Rail Branch of the LIRR; Photos Courtesy of Friends of the Queensway © 2012 (2)" width="528" /></a><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" id="figcaption_attachment_315819" style="border: 0px; color: #666666; float: right; font-size: 0.8em; margin: 0px; padding: 10px 0px; width: 530px;">Rockaway Rail Branch of the LIRR; Photos Courtesy of Friends of the Queensway © 2012</figcaption></figure><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.6em; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px;">
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Public space is vital for the health of urban communities. Queens, one of the most populous boroughs of <a class="st_tag internal_tag" href="http://www.archdaily.com/tag/new-york-city/" rel="tag" style="color: #2e7cb6; outline: none; text-decoration: initial;" title="Posts tagged with New York City">New York City</a>, has a substantial array of public parks and waterfront accessibility, as well as wildlife and nature preserves. The Rockaway Rail Line, the branch of the Long Island Rail Road that has been abandoned for over fifty years, provides the opportunity to continue this tradition and revitalize neighborhoods that are devoid of these kinds of spaces. The Queensway promises to bring an economic stimulus to the communities surrounding it. The draw of the original High Line proves just how powerful these kinds of projects can be.</div>
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<a href="http://www.thequeensway.org/" style="color: #2e7cb6; outline: none; text-decoration: initial;" target="_blank">Friends of the Queensway</a>, an organization of citizens committed to transforming these 3.5 miles into a new park, believe that it will enhance the neighborhoods’ economic viability and help attract and retain business. The grant will provide the funding to conduct a yearlong study on the environmental, economic and engineering factors that will make the project possible.</div>
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Running alongside the Queensway project is a proposal via the <a href="http://www.rrwg.org/rockaway.htm" style="color: #2e7cb6; outline: none; text-decoration: initial;" target="_blank">Regional Rail Working Group</a> to revitalize the line as part of the New York City subway system, providing a North-South connection between Rego Park and Ozone Park, and ultimately connecting Penn Station to Kennedy Airport through Queens. The proposal is costly but certainly has its advantages, particularly in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, which wreaked havoc on the train lines in Far Rockaway, making the area virtually inaccessible on public transportation in the weeks that followed the devastation As community board leaders and the Trust for Public Land debate on the best solution for this abandoned line, citizens must weigh the advantages of either scenario.</div>
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The Queensway has both elevated and grade level tracks, providing unique opportunities of interaction between the natural landscape and the abandoned infrastructure. Anyone who has walked the Highline can vouch for its thoughtful design of landscape architecture blended with the old tracks that run in seams along the elevated path. Several speculative designs are posted on <a href="http://www.thequeensway.org/" style="color: #2e7cb6; outline: none; text-decoration: initial;">TheQueensway.org</a> that ultimately call for community input to re-imagine a public space that can be used in a variety of ways.</div>
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The present Rockaway Rail Branch has a variety of natural and man-made features. Rails embedded in the ground, overrun by trees and vegetation, abandoned and cracking concrete platforms, and steel guard rails all of which inspire myriad translations into usable public space. Its features vary between secluded and forested areas to wide open and expansive swathes of land that over uninterrupted views of nearby neighborhoods. The possibilities are exciting. Stay tuned as the Trust for Public Land and Friends of the Queensway pushes this project forward.</div>
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<em>For more related news, check out Journey to the <a href="http://www.archdaily.com/219084/journey-to-the-center-of-new-york-can-design-cure-our-cities/" style="color: #2e7cb6; outline: none; text-decoration: initial;">Center of New York: Can Design “Cure” Our Cities?</a> for a comprehensive overview on New York’s most ambitious urban renewal projects: The High Line and Delancey Underground. </em></div>
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<i style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.archdaily.com/315458/high-line-inspired-park-proposed-in-queens/">http://www.archdaily.com/315458/high-line-inspired-park-proposed-in-queens/</a></i></div>
AAPREMLALLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05695002558477537063noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769750823409773874.post-1176983166270432592013-01-20T17:00:00.000-05:002013-01-20T17:00:00.827-05:00Queens Wants to Transform an Abandoned Railway into a Park!<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 17.99715805053711px;"><b>Cannot get over this beautifully written piece featured in the New York Times!</b></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 17.99715805053711px;"><b>Queens Wants to Transform an Abandoned Railway into a Park</b></span></div>
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By <span itemid="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/lisa_w_foderaro/index.html" itemprop="author" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/lisa_w_foderaro/index.html" rel="author" style="color: #666699; text-decoration: initial;" title="More Articles by LISA W. FODERARO">LISA W. FODERARO</a></span></span></h6>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Published: January 7, 2013</span></h6>
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<span style="font-size: 15.555556297302246px; line-height: 21.99652862548828px;">It has been abandoned for five decades, a railway relic that once served </span><a class="meta-loc" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/classifieds/realestate/locations/newyork/newyorkcity/queens/?inline=nyt-geo" style="color: #666699; font-size: 15.555556297302246px; line-height: 21.99652862548828px;" title="Find Real Estate listings and community news for Queens">Queens</a><span style="font-size: 15.555556297302246px; line-height: 21.99652862548828px;"> passengers on the old Rockaway Beach branch of the Long Island Rail Road. For all those years, no one paid much notice to the ghostly tracks, long overgrown with trees and vines, as they ran silently behind tidy houses in Rego Park, dipped through ravines in Forest Park and hovered above big-box stores in Glendale.</span></div>
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That is, until the <a href="http://www.thehighline.org/" style="color: #666699;" title="Organization Web site">High Line</a> expanded the possibilities of a public park.</div>
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Now, the three-and-a-half-mile stretch of rusty train track in central Queens is being reconceived as the “QueensWay,” a would-be linear park for walkers and bicyclists in an area desperate for more parkland and, with the potential for art installations, performances and adjacent restaurants, a draw for tourists interested in sampling the famously diverse borough.</div>
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“It’s Queens’s turn,” said Will Rogers, president and chief executive officer of the <a href="http://www.tpl.org/" style="color: #666699;" title="Organization Web site">Trust for Public Land</a>, a national nonprofit group that has joined local residents in promoting the idea. “The High Line led to the redefinition of the neighborhoods in Manhattan, whereas the QueensWay will be defined by the neighborhoods it passes through. Essentially, it will be a cultural trail.”</div>
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The involvement of the Trust for Public Land, which has 36 offices nationwide, including in Manhattan, has given the project new momentum, bolstering the efforts of the<a href="http://www.thequeensway.org/" style="color: #666699;" title="Group Web site">Friends of the QueensWay</a>, a group with about 2,500 supporters. It did not hurt that the trust hired <a class="meta-per" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/adrian_benepe/index.html?inline=nyt-per" style="color: #666699;" title="More articles about Adrian Benepe.">Adrian Benepe</a>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/19/nyregion/adrian-benepe-nyc-parks-chief-quits-to-join-trust-for-public-land.html?ref=adrianbenepe&_r=0" style="color: #666699;" title="The Times article.">who recently stepped down</a> as the New York City parks commissioner.</div>
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Last month, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a native of Queens, awarded the trust a $467,000 environmental protection grant through the state’s Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation. The grant will help pay for a community planning survey and a feasibility study that will include environmental, engineering and financial assessments of the project, including consideration of the condition of the railway’s trestles, bridges and embankments.</div>
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On a recent winter afternoon, the defunct rail line was obscured by a tangle of vegetation, near where it crosses over Yellowstone Boulevard. Tulip trees and Norway maples rose from the center of the tracks, competing for the brittle January sunlight, while the noisy bustle of Queens faded into the background.</div>
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Mr. Benepe, who, as parks commissioner for nearly 11 years, oversaw the creation of many miles of esplanades, greenways and bike paths, especially on Manhattan’s edges, agreed that Queens was overdue. “The borough has a lot of parkland, but what it lacks is a long recreational trail,” he said. “The QueensWay will also enable people to get to Forest Park more easily.”</div>
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But bringing the park to fruition will not be easy. The modest neighborhoods and light industrial areas through which the abandoned rail line passes cannot provide the tens of millions of dollars that were raised privately by Friends of the High Line, the nonprofit group managing the construction and maintenance of the elevated park on Manhattan’s West Side.</div>
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Nor is everyone on the same page about the Queens railway’s destiny; at least one elected official has called for a simultaneous study of reviving the rail line to provide better train service to the increasingly popular Rockaway beaches, damaged as they might be in the short term by Hurricane Sandy. (Mr. Benepe, who is well schooled in community opposition, imagined the potential horror of nearby homeowners at the prospect of the train line’s rumbling to life again.)</div>
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Still, the trust has already raised tens of thousands of dollars for the project, in addition to the state grant, and it has broad experience in fostering linear parks, having worked on four dozen such parks, mostly on ground level, around the country. The trust is currently the project manager of Bloomingdale Trail in Chicago, a 2.7-mile former elevated railway that is being converted to a park, in the mold of the High Line.</div>
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The QueensWay would have fewer obstacles than the High Line in its creation. For one thing, the land is already owned by New York City (the High Line was owned by CSX Transportation), and the city’s parks department endorsed the trust’s recent grant application to the state. In addition, while there are at least a dozen bridges and a viaduct along the route, most of the QueensWay runs atop earthen berms or through gullies, said Andy Stone, the trust’s New York City director. Rather than having to reconstruct a steel structure more than a mile long, as in the High Line, the linear park would, in some places, require nothing more than the clearing of tracks, the selective removal of trees and the pouring of asphalt.</div>
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Unlike the High Line, the QueensWay would welcome bicycles. While the trestles are relatively narrow, long stretches are wide enough — up to 25 feet — to accommodate walkers and bicyclists. New bike paths could connect the park to Flushing Meadows-Corona Park to the north, as well as an existing bikeway in Jamaica Bay to the south. About 250,000 residents live within a mile of the proposed park, and its backers see all kinds of ancillary benefits, from health to traffic. “That’s a lot of carbon footprint,” said Marc Matsil, the trust’s New York state director.</div>
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A version of this article appeared in print on January 8, 2013, on page <span itemprop="printSection">A</span><span itemprop="printPage">16</span> of the <span itemprop="printEdition">New York edition</span> with the headline: In Queens, Taking the High Line as a Model.</h6>
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AAPREMLALLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05695002558477537063noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769750823409773874.post-64802254934353751172013-01-20T10:30:00.000-05:002013-01-20T10:30:01.835-05:00 Trees Shed Bad Wrap As Accessories to Crime<div class="primary_body " style="background-color: #f1f5f5;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><b>Trees Shed Bad Wrap As Accessories to Crime</b></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 16px;"><br />By Richard Conniff</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">Driving the bleak, treeless streets of West Baltimore, through neighborhoods that inspired the NBC series “Homicide” and HBO’s “The Wire,” Morgan Grove recites the evolutionary stages of neighborhood abandonment. First, plywood goes up over the front doors of the two- and three-story brick row houses. When that’s not enough to keep out thieves and addicts, cinder block walls fill in the entryways. Then big spray-painted red “X”s start to appear, meaning the buildings are so dilapidated that even firemen will not enter.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">Grove, an urban ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service, points out a weedy lot where a house has been demolished in mid-block. It’s like a front tooth knocked out—“The hockey player phenomenon,” he remarks—and a sign that the rest of the block will soon follow.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 24px;">It’s 90 degrees at mid-afternoon, and the streets are empty of people or any other sign of life. But then Grove turns the corner onto North Carrollton Avenue and, for one small block, it’s an oasis. London plane trees line the sidewalks and lean out toward one another, forming a green archway over the street. The houses appear to be not just occupied, but loved. At mid-block, a stand sells flavored ices, and Justine Bonner, a 74-year-old school teacher, pushes a broom to tidy up in front of the house where she has spent her entire life. The trees, says Bonner, shade the houses and filter the air. “It makes it easier to breathe,” she says, and means it literally.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><i>“It’s just an association. But it’s a very strong association.” — Austin Troy ’95, University of Vermont</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">But trees may also help people on this block breathe easier in the sense that they can feel a little less worried about crime. Despite urban folklore that treats all vegetation as a hiding place for muggers, carjackers and drug dealers, new studies in three American cities—Baltimore, Portland, Ore., and Philadelphia—suggest that the right trees in the right place can play a significant role in preventing crime and make even the worst neighborhoods feel safer.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">The Baltimore study, co-authored by Grove and published in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning, covers an area of almost 700 square miles, for the most comprehensive investigation yet into the connection between trees and crime. It compares otherwise similar neighborhoods—same income level, same housing stock, same density—and shows that the ones with more trees tend to have a significantly lower crime rate. The researchers are careful not to say that trees cause lower crime rates. “It’s just an association,” says co-author Austin Troy, an associate professor at the University of Vermont. “But it’s a very strong association.” Across the entire study area, neighborhoods with 10 percent more tree canopy cover experienced 11.8 percent less crime than their comparable counterparts after adjusting for numerous socioeconomic and housing factors.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><i>“These studies are not 'research for the sake of research, but research for policy-making'.”</i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 24px;"><i>— Morgan Grove, Ph.D. ’96</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">The results in Baltimore closely match the findings of another 2012 U.S. Forest Service study, using different methodologies, in Portland, Ore. And in Philadelphia, a 2011 study found a substantial reduction in crime, including a 7 percent to 8 percent decrease in gun assaults across most of the city—as the result of a program to clean up and plant trees on 4,300 vacant lots. These studies, says Grove, are not “research for the sake of research, but research for policy-making.” They aim to build common cause with police, public works departments and city planners on the multiple benefits of developing greener cities. They also aim to show public officials “where to strategically target urban forestry investments” for the best payback.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 24px;">The Baltimore study was the product of a collaboration between Grove and Troy that began when both were at Yale in the early 1990s. (Grove earned his doctorate at F&ES in 1996, and Troy got his masters there in 1995. Both also graduated from Yale College, in 1987 and 1992, respectively.) Together with the third author, Jarlath O’Neil-Dunne, an expert in geospatial analysis at the University of Vermont, they are now principal investigators for the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, a pioneering long-term investigation of urban ecology funded by the National Science Foundation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">Justine Bonner, a 74-year-old school teacher, chats with Morgan Grove, Ph.D. ’96. Bonner said the trees shade the houses and filter the air. “It makes it easier to breathe,” she says, and means it literally.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">Their study for Landscape and Urban Planning combined tree-canopy and crime data for the entire city of Baltimore and adjacent Baltimore County, an area where the landscape ranges from crowded downtown streets to cornfields. To detect trees hidden by building shadow and to distinguish canopy trees from shrubbery, the researchers used aerial data obtained with LiDAR, sometimes loosely described as “laser radar.” Spotcrime, which uses police reports to map crimes, provided geo-coded data on robbery, burglary, thefts and shootings—all crimes that are liable to be affected by vegetation and the outdoor environment generally. The study omitted rape and other assaults, because it was too difficult to separate out the large percentage of these crimes that are domestic and happen indoors.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">he study was highly data-driven, says Grove, for reasons that go beyond the science. It’s easy for anyone to believe that a tree can hide a criminal or stop a bullet; a lifetime of movies and television shows has indoctrinated people with the idea. So how do you persuade skeptical city cops that trees can also prevent a gun from being fired in the first place? How do you show underfunded urban planners that trees can be a cost-effective tool for stopping crime? How do you persuade people in a crime-ridden neighborhood that the long-term effort of planting and maintaining trees can be a practical way to make things better here and now? In Baltimore, public agencies rely heavily on data to set priorities and make funding decisions. The only way to get trees in the game and get multiple agencies cooperating on city greening, says Grove, is with “really good data.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">The old idea that vegetation causes crime has deep roots, dating back at least 800 years, to when King Edward I required English towns to clear the trees for 200 feet on either side of main roads as a precaution against highwaymen. This line of thinking hadn’t changed all that much by the time Grove first got interested in the topic as a Yale undergraduate in the 1980s. He visited the New Haven Police Department, where someone handed him a thick folder labeled “CPTED.” What had started out in 1971 as the title of a book, Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, by Florida criminologist C. Ray Jeffery, had become an acronym. The essential idea, incorporating elements of a 1972 book, Defensible Space,by architect Oscar Newman, was to prevent crime by eliminating hiding places and maximizing opportunities for people to see and be seen.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 24px;">But that often came across as a negative message about trees: Don’t plant conifers and if you must have trees, at least keep the lower branches pruned for better sightlines. Other studies in the 1980s and 90s compounded the problem by arguing that people associate dense vegetation with fear of crime and that dense vegetation can actually encourage crime by providing hiding places and escape routes.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">What got lost in the mix was a simple reality: People like trees, and they like neighborhoods with trees even better. Moreover, recent studies have shown that this isn’t just some leafy suburban ideal. The poorest inner-city residents also prefer to live with trees, and they are far more likely to spend time outdoors in areas where trees provide shade and a comfortable space for socializing.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 24px;">The turnaround in thinking about trees and crime began with a 2001 study of public housing projects in Chicago, comparing buildings that had trees close by with others that were surrounded by pavement. Researchers Frances Kuo and William Sullivan at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign found that buildings with more vegetation had 52 percent fewer total crimes and 56 percent fewer violent crimes. The researchers proposed a straightforward logic: Dense vegetation may perhaps promote crime by facilitating concealment. But that implies the opposite is also true: Widely spaced, high-canopy trees and grassy areas may discourage crime by preserving visibility. Residents who come out to enjoy the shade provide more “eyes on the street,” a phrase Jane Jacobs popularized in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Being outdoors also builds stronger neighborhood social networks, which tend to make criminals feel unsafe. “One of the classic suspects in environmental criminology,” Kuo and Sullivan concluded, “does not always promote crime.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 24px;">All three new studies identify circumstances where vegetation can go wrong. In Baltimore, it’s often in the overgrown border zones between residential and industrial areas. In Philadelphia, weedy vacant lots provide a convenient place for criminals to stash guns and drugs, out of their actual possession when police pass by and yet close enough to be handy at all other times. In Portland, Ore., USFS researcher Geoffrey Donovan was puzzled that, for trees in yards, 42 feet in height seemed to be the critical dividing line. “It was a head scratcher,” says Donovan. There was less crime when a tree was 43 feet tall, and more at 41 feet. “Is this a view-obstruction thing? Finally I sent a student out to measure.” It turned out that when a tree gets to be 42 feet tall, the bottom of its canopy tends to just clear the tops of the first floor windows, meaning clear sight lines from both the house and the street.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">“Is it really a placebo effect? That is, is it really the greening?” asks Branas. “Or is it the fact that people show up once a month to do work?” — Pennsylvania epidemiologist Charles Branas</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">More important, all three studies also showed how trees can serve as a sort of soft policing tool. Philadelphia’s LandCare program, for instance, doesn’t just clean up vacant lots, but also seeds them and keeps them mowed, plants what are often the only trees in the neighborhood, and installs a knee-high fence as a sort of territorial marker at the perimeter. The result—when University of Pennsylvania epidemiologist Charles Branas compared vacant lots that had been greened with similar lots that hadn’t—was a marked decrease in almost all forms of crime. Moreover, says Branas, the data suggest that crime doesn’t simply move around the corner when green happens. “It's a net decrease.” He plans to follow up next spring with a full-scale experiment, randomly assigning about 200 lots each to the greening treatment, to no treatment at all, or to a treatment in which people remove the trash and then turn up at regular intervals to maintain cleanliness. The aim is to address the persistent doubts of greening skeptics: “Is it really a placebo effect? That is, is it really the greening?” asks Branas. “Or is it the fact that people show up once a month to do work?”</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 24px;">New Haven is also about to take a closer look at the connection between trees and crime, according to Colleen Murphy-Dunning of the Urban Resources Initiative. The new study will look at crime rates around 100 vacant lots that have been cleaned up over the years with help from URI and the New Haven Land Trust. Stacey Maples at Yale and Charles Anyinam at the New Haven Police Department, both specialists in data mapping, are now working together to collect information and sort out variables. “It’s a very debatable issue,” Anyinam told The New Haven Register. “There’s no consensus at all. One group believes this has an impact, another group says no.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">An ample body of research suggests that greening can make a difference. Studies have demonstrated that having trees and grass in the neighborhood reduces stress and anxiety, encourages exercise and generally makes people more civil. But the effect of well-maintained trees also fits the “broken windows theory” proposed in 1982 by social scientist James Q. Wilson. It suggests that broken windows are an invitation to criminals because they convey the message that no one cares about the neighborhood. Grove adds that empty sidewalk tree pits say the same thing.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">London plane trees line the sidewalks and lean out toward one another, forming a green archway over North Carrollton Avenue where houses appear to be not just occupied, but loved.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">Street trees send the opposite message, and in the Portland study they were always associated with lower crime rates. Both the Portland and Baltimore studies also found that properly maintained trees in public parks have a dramatic effect on crime rates.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">All three studies boil down to a few simple rules: 1. Wherever you have a tree, make it look nice, even if it’s just a maple sapling that’s sprung up on a vacant lot. 2. Plant your public parks with tall trees. 3. Plant street trees. 4. Get residents involved in the effort and have them meet their neighbors. 5. Plant yard trees far enough from the house and prune the lower branches, so they don’t block sightlines.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">Will it stop crime? “If you’ve got $200 and you want to prevent crime, buy a burglar alarm, not a tree,” says USFS researcher Geoffrey Donovan. “That’s what I always tell people.” But trees are multitaskers, especially on city streets. The list of benefits attributed to them includes moderating rainwater runoff and the attendant flood problems, reducing heating and cooling costs, increasing property values and encouraging people to relax and enjoy their lives.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">“Will a burglar alarm shade you on a summer day?” Donovan adds. “Is it going to improve your mental health or even your physical health? It’s not like you can buy a tree and then not lock your doors. But they do provide this wider range of benefits that’s worth considering.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">Over the past few years, the image of the city has begun to shimmer brightly, in both the popular and academic press, as the best hope for sustainable living in a crowded world. Cities are, of course, vastly more efficient than their exurban appendages, with their eternal commutes and zombie subdivisions. But urban enthusiasts may find cause for discouragement—or reason to work harder—in Austin Troy’s new book The Very Hungry City: Urban Energy Efficiency and the Economic Fate of Cities (Yale University Press). </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">Troy ’95, Yale College 1992, is now an associate professor at the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources. He also served for four years on the Burlington planning commission, and the practical experience seems to have given him insight into the challenges of urban living. At about the same time, the experience of reading his son to sleep with Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, about the challenges of becoming a butterfly, gave him the title and the beginnings of the idea for this book.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">The image of cities as living organisms, each with its own “urban metabolism” of daily inputs and outputs, has been around for a half-century or more. But Troyputs the focus more narrowly on energy metabolism, and he draws a worrisome picture of how cities, as well as their suburbs, over-consume energy sources that are subject, at almost any time, to crippling shortages and price hikes. Los Angeles, for instance, requires such “gigantic amounts” of energy to pump a river of water uphill over the Tehachapi Mountains that its pumping costs spiked by almost $500,000 per hour during the California energy crisis of 2000-2001. Phoenix and Tucson depend on the Central Arizona Project for their water that relies on 14 pumping stations requiring “roughly one quarter of the output of the massive coal-fired Navajo Generating Station.” New Orleans is installing the world’s largest pumping station, “a $500 million monster,” just to keep the water out. The energy costs are not yet known, but in an era of rising seas, coastal cities, like New York, Miami and Venice, should beware.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">Minimizing the energy needed to move people efficiently around the urban environment might seem like a relatively straightforward business of reducing sprawl and encouraging high-density development around transit nodes. But “not all density is necessarily good density,” Troy writes. San Diego and Philadelphia, for instance, have roughly the same average density, but people in San Diego log about 25 percent more daily car miles. “Why the big difference? Philadelphia has a real, dominant downtown, where lots of people live and work. In other words, what keeps trip lengths down in a metro area is not just cramming buildings together, but building an urban landscape that maximizes the probability that people will live near where they work, learn, play and shop.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">Stockholm has recently built such a landscape in its Hammarby Sjöstad neighborhood, where centralized and coordinated planning of shared infrastructure ekes the maximum possible benefit from inputs and outputs alike. Mandatory standards for efficient building materials also cut energy use in half, and developers who initially resisted soon discovered that building smarter did not, as one of them put it, add “a krona” to construction costs. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">The best hope for making that kind of coordinated effort happen in this country, Troy argues, is through regional cooperation, on the model of Oregon’s Portland Metro, together with changes in federal housing and transportation policy to stop subsidizing sprawl. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">Finally, Troy quotes a politician’s description of cities as “the Saudi Arabia of energy efficiency,” with reserves of “potential energy savings that dwarf most of the supply options our country possesses.” So far this potential has gone almost entirely untapped. But Troy makes it clear that we need to get serious about making cities vastly more efficient. Otherwise, the next great economic wave could leave some cities badly stranded, much as our recent economic troubles have done for their exurban counterparts.</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 24px;"><a href="http://environment.yale.edu/envy/stories/trees-shed-bad-wrap-as-accessories-to-crime">http://environment.yale.edu/envy/stories/trees-shed-bad-wrap-as-accessories-to-crime</a></span></div>
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AAPREMLALLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05695002558477537063noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769750823409773874.post-87162192269814501562013-01-19T22:17:00.001-05:002013-01-19T22:17:17.997-05:00Diggin' the Idea of a Mushroom Garden Park!<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 17.99715805053711px;"><b><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A pedestrian walkway in an old railway...underground! </span></b></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 17.99715805053711px;"><b><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Check out the “Mushroom Garden” underground park.</span></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">The “Mushroom Garden” underground park</span></span></h2>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The High Line Park in Manhattan–an old elevated railway transformed into a snaking park trail–has officially sparked a frenzy of excitement about rehabilitating old transit areas into green space, even through the idea has actually been around for a while (Paris’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promenade_plant%C3%A9e" style="color: #b85b5a; text-decoration: initial;">Promenade Plantée</a> debuted in 1993). But what happens when you’ve got an out of commission rail line–underground?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The defunct <a href="http://www.postalheritage.org.uk/page/mailrail" style="color: #b85b5a; text-decoration: initial;" target="_blank">“Mail Rail”</a> tunnel — a narrow gauge railway used for transporting mail around London–closed in 2003 and UK’s Landscape Institute, in partnership with the Mayor of London and the Garden Museum, has run a design competition to decide what to do with it. The 170 entries included some wonderfully creative ideas, from public swimming area to rehabilitated wetlands and a floating park. The winner: London-based Fletcher Priest Architects created a plan to turn the tunnels into an urban mushroom farm and pedestrian stroll. The pedestrian walkway would be lit at street level by glass-fiber, mushroom-shaped sculptures and the ‘shroom crop could supply pop-up “Funghi” cafes at the tunnel’s entrance and exit.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Check out the plans for the “Pop Down” here:<a href="http://www.fletcherpriest.com/High-Line-for-London/competitions/http://" style="color: #b85b5a; text-decoration: initial;">http://www.fletcherpriest.com/High-Line-for-London/competitions/</a>. Fungi are truly wonderful and under-appreciated organisms. In addition to providing food and visual delight for the visitors, the colony can help clean toxins from the soil. This is a wonderfully creative concept for a public park and truly unique–hopefully it will will be built!</span></div>
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<a href="http://ecocity.wordpress.com/2013/01/19/citybuzz-the-mushroom-garden-underground-park/" style="background-color: white; line-height: 17.984375px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">http://ecocity.wordpress.com/2013/01/19/citybuzz-the-mushroom-garden-underground-park/</span></a></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: #fdfdfd; color: #807f83; line-height: 16px; text-align: start;">This will be an underground oasis for mosses, lichen and funghi, where the mycelium and basidiomycete are king. </span><br style="background-color: #fdfdfd; color: #807f83; line-height: 16px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: start;" /><br style="background-color: #fdfdfd; color: #807f83; line-height: 16px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: start;" /><span style="background-color: #fdfdfd; color: #807f83; line-height: 16px; text-align: start;">“Mycelium is Earth’s natural Internet” </span><br style="background-color: #fdfdfd; color: #807f83; line-height: 16px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: start;" /><span style="background-color: #fdfdfd; color: #807f83; line-height: 16px; text-align: start;">Paul Stamets, Mycologist</span></span></b></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fdfdfd; color: #807f83; line-height: 16px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Pop Down seeks to capitalise on a forgotten network of tunnels under London, an urban experience where visitors can embark on an expedition underground, entering and exiting the tunnels from street level. The tunnels provide the ideal environment for an urban mushroom farm with the introduction of daylight through a series of sculptural glass-fibre ‘mushrooms’ at street level. These will highlight the route of the tunnel above ground and will convey daylight to the tunnels below through punctures along their length. The produce will serve new pop-up concept ‘Funghi’ restaurants and cafés at each entrance.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://www.fletcherpriest.com/High-Line-for-London/competitions">http://www.fletcherpriest.com/High-Line-for-London/competitions</a></span></span></h2>
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AAPREMLALLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05695002558477537063noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769750823409773874.post-85946431203103727192012-12-11T21:10:00.003-05:002012-12-11T21:10:35.518-05:00Making Friends Along The 'Way<b><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></b>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Making Friends Along The 'Way</b></span></center>
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<b><i>It's all about the people in your neighborhood, in your neighborhood, in your neighborhood.</i></b>
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<span style="color: #006600;">Property Owner and Tenant Concerns</span></center>
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People and institutions who own land along proposed greenway corridors are an important group. It is always a good idea to meet with property owners one-on-one. When approaching landowners, try to anticipate their concerns so that you can answer their questions and calm any fears. Ask about their concerns. Try to determine whether their concerns are real or the result of misinformation, hostility toward government, or simple territorial instincts. Always listen carefully and make sure landowners know you take these matters seriously. Landowner opposition can sink a greenway project or color public attitudes so that funding is difficult to secure. Remember, the greenway will affect them as much as anyone, so explain how the greenway will benefit them. Common landowner concerns are:</div>
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<i>* Liability. </i>Always be prepared to discuss liability issues. What happens if someone is injured on the landowner's property? Is the landowner covered by adequate insurance, either Ws or her own or as provided by the land trust or state or local government liability legislation?</div>
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<i>* Crime. </i>Even though there has been no documented increase in criminal activity on greenways, crime is almost always a concern. In <i>Greenways for America </i>(pp. 186, 187), Charles Little cites the example of Seattle's Burke-Gilman Trail. Police officers who patrolled the trail were interviewed about problems with crime and vandalism. Their response was that "there is not a greater incidence of burglaries and vandalism of homes along the trail." The police noted that problems in parks are generally confined to areas of easy motor vehicle access. Despite fears that greenways will be used by "outsiders," it's usually the local citizens who use the path. Merely opening a greenway to public use may in fact discourage unsavory activities in derelict areas. Safety issues will be different in a small, rural trailway than in a large recreational greenway in a big city. (See Fact Sheet No. 4)</div>
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<i>* Property Taxes and Property Values. </i>Some people favor developing open space to expand the tax base. Expansion of the tax base, however, does not necessarily mean increased revenue to the local government. Development almost always means an increase in infrastructure and public service requirements, and the cost of providing these services often outweighs the additional tax revenue.</div>
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The other property tax issue you will probably face is a concern that the local government will<b> </b>increase taxes to pay for the greenway. In fact, increased tax revenues are usually generated by an increase in property values on land near the greenway. The exceptions would be jurisdictions where property assessments lag behind market values and states that have passed legislation limiting real-estate tax increases. Some communities have levied additional taxes to pay for greenways, but these taxes usually take the form of special assessments. Landowners who donate easements can actually <i>reduce </i>their own property tax assessments. In addition, easements reduce the cost of full acquisition for the town.</div>
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<i>* Private Property Rights. </i>Some landowners are opposed to putting land into public ownership for any reason. You simply may not be able to change their minds, but we advocate that you stress the benefits to the community - <i>their </i>community.</div>
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<i>* Maintenance. </i>Be prepared to answer a landowner's concern that the government can't maintain what it already manages, let alone new property.</div>
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<i>* Privacy .</i> Landowners may be concerned about trespassing and privacy or about the trail interfering with agricultural or business activities on their property. To address this concern, some greenways use fences and landscaping to buffer private property; others, like the Stowe Recreation Path, literally give the landowners a blank map and let them site the path across their property. (See Fact Sheet No. 4)</div>
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<i>* Land Use. </i>Be prepared to explain the concept of conservation easements. Organizations like the Land Trust Alliance and local land trusts can offer you assistance and provide you with information about easements and how other groups have used them.</div>
AAPREMLALLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05695002558477537063noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769750823409773874.post-69268911850768968162012-10-04T07:00:00.000-04:002012-10-04T07:00:01.754-04:00What is a Greenway Worth?<br />
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<span style="color: #444444;"><b>What is a Greenway Worth?</b></span><br />
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<span style="color: #444444;"><i>While there are the obvious physical characteristics and noted health benefits of green spaces, there are many other perks of establishing more of these parks, trails and greenways in your community.</i></span><br />
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<span style="color: #006600;">Economic Benefits of Greenways: Summary of Findings</span></center>
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<span style="background-color: white;">Many studies demonstrate that parks, greenways and trails increase nearby property values, thus increasing local tax revenues. Such increased revenues often offset greenway acquisition costs.</span><br />
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A. California's Secretary for the State Resources Agency estimated that $100 million would be returned to local economies each year from an initial park bond investment of $330 million (Gilliam, 1980).</div>
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B. A greenbelt in Boulder, Colorado increased aggregate property values for one neighborhood by $5.4 million, resulting in $500,000 of additional annual property tax revenues. The tax alone could recover the initial cost of the $1-5 million greenbelt in three years (Cornell, Lillydahl, and Singel, 1978).</div>
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C. In the vicinity of Philadelphia's 1,300 acre Pennypack Park, property values correlate significantly with proximity to the park. In 1974, the park accounted for 33 percent of the value of land 40 feet away from the park, nine percent when located 1,000 feet away, and 4.2 percent at a distance of 2,500 feet (Hammer, Coughlin and Horn, 1974).</div>
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<i><b>Expenditures by Residents</b></i><br />
Spending by local residents on greenway related activities helps support recreation related business and employment, as well as businesses patronized by greenway and trail users.</div>
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A. Residents are increasingly spending vacations closer to home, thus spending increasing am ounts of vacation dollars within the boundaries of the state (NPS 1990).</div>
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B. In 1988, recreation and leisure was the third largest industry in Califoraia. More than $30 billion is spent each year by Californians on recreation and leisure in their state. This amounts to 12 percent of total personal consumption (California Department of Parks and Recreation, 1988).</div>
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<i><b>Commercial Uses</b></i><br />
Greenways often provide business opportunities, locations and resources for commercial activities such as recreation equipment rentals and sales, lessons, and other related businesses.</div>
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A. Along the lower Colorado River in Arizona, 13 concessionaires under permit to the Bureau of Land Management generate more than $7.5 million annually, with a major spinoff effect in the local economy (Bureau of Land Management, 1987).</div>
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B. Golden Gate National Recreation Area has contracts with ten primary concessionaires. Total 1988 gross revenues for these concessionaires were over $16 million, over 25 percent of which was spent on payroll (NPS, 1990).</div>
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<i><b>Tourism</b></i><br />
Greenways are often major tourist attractions which generate expenditures on lodging, food, and recreation related services. Moreover, tourism is Maryland's second largest and most stable industry, and is projected to become its largest.</div>
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A. A poll conducted by the President's Commission on Americans Outdoors found that natural beauty was the single most important criterion for tourists in selecting outdoor recreation sites (Scenic America, 1987). Maryland's Department of Economic and Employment Development estimated the annual value of tourism and commercial activities directly related to the Chesapeake Bay was $31.6 billion in 1989 (DEED 1989).</div>
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B. The San Antonio Riverwalk is considered the anchor of the $1.2 billion tourist industry in San Antonio, Texas. A user survey concluded that the Riverwalk is the second most important tourist attraction in the state of Texas (NPS 1990).</div>
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C. The Governor's Committee on the Environment reported in 1988 that the governors of five New England states officially recognized open space as a key element in the quality of life in their region. They credited that quality of life with bringing rapid economic growth and a multi-billion dollar tourism industry to the region (Governor's Committee on the Environment, 1988).</div>
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<i><b>Agency Expenditures</b></i><br />
The agency responsible for managing a river, trail or greenway can help support local businesses by purchasing supplies and services. Jobs created by the managing agency may also help increase local employment opportunities.</div>
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<i><b>Corporate Relocation</b></i><br />
Evidence shows that the quality of life of a community is an increasingly important factor in corporate relocation decisions. Greenways are often cited as important contributors to quality of life.</div>
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The quality of life in a community is an increasingly important factor in corporate relocation decisions; greenways are often cited as important contributors to quality of life and to the attractiveness of a community to which businesses are considering relocating.</div>
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A. An annual survey of chief executive officers conducted by Cushman and Wakefield in 1989 found that quality of life for employees was the third most important factor in locating a business (NPS, 1990).</div>
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B. St. Mary's County, Maryland, has found over the last ten years that businesses which move to the county because of tax incentives tended to leave as soon as the incentives expire. However, businesses that move to the county because of its quality of life remain to become long term residents and taxpayers (NPS, 1990).</div>
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C. Site location teams for businesses considering San Antonio, Texas regularly visit the San Antonio Riverwalk. A location on the river-walk is considered very'desirable; A regional grocer, the HEB Company, relocated its corporate headquarters to a historic building oriented towards the river (NPS, 1990).</div>
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D. The Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress reports that a city's quality of Life is more important than purely business- related factors when it comes to attracting new businesses, particularly in the high-tech and service industries (Scenic America, 1987).</div>
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<i><b>Public Cost Reduction</b></i><br />
The conservation of rivers, trails, and greenways can help local governments and other public agencies reduce costs resulting from flooding and other natural hazards.</div>
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While greenways have many economic benefits it is important to remember the intrinsic environmental and recreation value of preserving rivers, trails and other open space corridors. Greenways along rivers can help reduce the cost of repairing flood damage and improving water quality.</div>
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A In a study of major land uses in Culpepper County, Virginia, it was found that "for every dollar collected from farm/forest/open space, 19 cents is spent on services' "(Vance and Larson, 1988).</div>
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B. In Yarmouth, Maine, an analysis of costs of providing municipal services to a specific parcel proposed for parks showed that the annual costs of those services exceeded revenues generated by taxes by $140,000 annually. This was compared to an annual cost of $76,000 over 20 years to purchase the property (World Wildlife Fund, 1992).</div>
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C. In Boulder, Colorado, the 1988 public cost for maintaining developed areas was estimated to be over $2,500 per acre. The cost for <u>maintaining</u>open space in the city was only $75 per acre, or less than three percent the cost of non-open space (Crain, 1988)</div>
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<b>Adapted from:</b> <u>Economic Impacts of Protecting Rivers, Trails, and Greenway Corridors</u> - <i>National Park Service, 1990.</i></div>
AAPREMLALLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05695002558477537063noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769750823409773874.post-13555628945010569172012-10-02T06:30:00.000-04:002012-10-02T06:30:00.486-04:00On Greenways and Crime<br />
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<span style="color: #444444; font-size: medium;"><b>On Greenways and Crime</b></span></h2>
<span style="color: #444444; font-size: medium;"><i>So, there's a debate going on about greenways promoting crime and this being a hub for all sorts of illicit activity. More than it is right now? We're seeking to clean up this abandoned space and turn it into something beautiful and functional for the community.</i></span><br />
<span style="color: #444444; font-size: medium;"><i>What do yout think?</i></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2EWGH6j72oaMbBtENngowoFmgb1BVFq31YEY5oNPgzCc7YcjqQbtv8y31_sO7oiKdFtJ1PBSdj79-pPIyHcELXCmM_w6bp36aPWsuq6Jf2H015i0MvBLqiT35s144F_CY2OwNMFwK6-WQ/s1600/TreesAreSuperHeroes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="303" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2EWGH6j72oaMbBtENngowoFmgb1BVFq31YEY5oNPgzCc7YcjqQbtv8y31_sO7oiKdFtJ1PBSdj79-pPIyHcELXCmM_w6bp36aPWsuq6Jf2H015i0MvBLqiT35s144F_CY2OwNMFwK6-WQ/s320/TreesAreSuperHeroes.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: #006600;">Crime And Vandalism</span></center>
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Issue: Do recreational trails and other types of greenways cause crime, vandalism and other disturbances? What evidence is there to support or to alleviate the concerns of adjacent land owners?</div>
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Facts: There is little evidence to support the fear that greenway trails will produce disturbance to private landowners. In fact the evidence is to the contrary.</div>
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A 1980 study by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources compared landowners attitudes on a pair of proposed trails with landowner attitudes along a pair of similar trails already established. On the proposed trails 75% of landowners thought that if a trail was constructed it would mean more vandalism and other crimes. By contrast, virtually no landowners along the two constructed trails (0% and 6%, respectively), agreed with the statement "trail-users steal". (Minnesota Dept. of Natural Resources, 1980)</div>
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A 1987 study of Seattle's Burke-Gilman Trail found little or no crime or vandalism experienced by adjacent property owners. The study surveyed property owners, realtors, and police officers. According to the realtors, property "near" the trail is significantly easier to market and sells for an average of 6% more than similar properties located elsewhere. Nearly two-thirds of adjacent andowners believed that the trail "increased the quality of fife in the neighborhood", and not a single resident thought the trail should be closed. (Evaluation of the Burk Gilman Trail's effect on Property Values and Crime, Seattle, WA Engineering Dept., 1987)</div>
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A former opponent of the Burke-Gilman trail (whose home is on the trail) stated that the "trail is much more positive than I expected. I was involved in citizens groups opposed to the trail. I now feel that the trail is very positive; [there are] fewer problems than before the trail was built; [there was] more litter and beer cans and vagrants [before it was built]." Not a single resident surveyed said that present conditions were worse than prior to construction of the trail.</div>
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A 1992 study by the National Park Service of the impacts of rail-trails on nearby property owners found that "a majority of landowners reported no increase in problems since the trails opened. That living near trails was better than they had expected it to be, and that living near the trails was better than living near unused railroad lines before the trails were opened". (Impact of Rail-Trails, National Park Service, 1992).</div>
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Comments from adjacent landowners interviewed for the NPS study included the following:</div>
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"Vandalism, robbery and safety concerns I originally had were unfounded." - (Landowner on California's Lafayette/Moraga Trail) "I was very opposed to the idea at first, fearing that it would be used by motorcyclists, but I am very pleased with the trail - it provides a safe alternative to using the highway for joggers and bicyclists, and it gives me a safe and comfortable place for my walks." - (Adjacent landowner on Florida's St. Mark's Trail)</div>
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"We are a small town and most everyone uses the trail at one time or another. The city of Durango has no bad comments to make on the trail; they all like it very much." - (Public Official on Iowa's Heritage Trail)</div>
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A 1988 survey of greenways in several states has found that such parks typically have not experienced serious problems regarding ... vandalism, crime, trespass, [or] invasion of privacy ... Prior to developing park facilities, these concerns were strongly voiced in opposition to proposed trails. After park development, however, it was found that fears did not materialize ... concerns expressed by the neighbors opposed...have not proven to be a post-development problem in any of the parks surveyed. ("A Feasibility Study for Proposed Linear Park," Oregon Department of Transportation, Parks and Recreation Division, May 1988).</div>
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A 1990 study by the Appalachian Trail Conference of crimes on the Appalachian Trail found that despite use by 3-4 million persons per year, that there were only 0.05 per 100,000 or I in 2 million. This means you are more likely to be struck by lightning or victimized in your home than as a hiker on the Appalachian Trail. (Source: Appalachian Trail Conference, Harpers Ferry, West Virginia)</div>
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<a href="https://www.msu.edu/~jaroszjo/greenway/facts/crime.htm">https://www.msu.edu/~jaroszjo/greenway/facts/crime.htm</a></div>
AAPREMLALLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05695002558477537063noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769750823409773874.post-75397128675150695882012-09-09T09:00:00.000-04:002012-09-09T09:00:07.234-04:00The 4 Coolest “High Line” Inspired Projects<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: #363636; font-family: Garamond, Hoefler Text, Times New Roman, Times, serif; font-size: medium;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><b>Creative ways of incorporating an existing, disused railway into a cultural community greenway will bring such life along the 3.5 mile path from Central to Southern Queens.</b></span></span></div>
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<span class="post_title" style="background-color: white; color: #363636; font-family: Garamond, 'Hoefler Text', 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;"><b>The 4 Coolest “High Line” Inspired Projects</b></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2012/07/street-artist-megx-creates-giant-lego-bridge-in-germany/" rel="attachment wp-att-254470" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><img alt="" class="size-full wp-image-254470 " height="396" src="http://ad009cdnb.archdaily.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/1342219678-1341612776-bridge-5-640x480-528x396.jpeg" style="max-width: 500px;" title="1341612776-bridge-5-640x480-528x396" width="528" /></a><br />
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LEGO Bridge by MEGX</div>
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New York City’s High Line has been such a success – both as an <a class="st_tag internal_tag" href="http://www.archdaily.com/tag/urban-renewal/" rel="tag" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="Posts tagged with Urban Renewal">urban renewal</a> project and a money-making tourist attraction – that it’s spawned quite a number of Copy Cats around the world (we found 18, listed after the break, but no doubt there’s many more…). Many, however, are more yawn-inducing than awe-inspiring. The following four projects are notably awesome exceptions.</div>
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<em>Find out which projects made the cut, after the break…</em></div>
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<a href="http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2012/07/street-artist-megx-creates-giant-lego-bridge-in-germany/" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><img alt="" class="size-full wp-image-254534" height="500" src="http://ad009cdnb.archdaily.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/1342220635-1341612877-lego-new-640x960-333x500.jpeg" style="max-width: 500px;" title="1341612877-lego-new-640x960-333x500" width="333" /></a><br />
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LEGO Bridge by Megx.</div>
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<strong>4. “LEGO Bridge” – Wuppertal, Germany</strong></div>
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The colorful LEGO-inspired bridge, painted last fall, is part of an Urban renewal project to redevelop the city of Wuppertal’s old Railway into a 10-mile cycle path. City officials hope it will <a href="http://blog.archpaper.com/wordpress/archives/42221" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="A/N blog">“reinvigorate the city and increase residents’ quality of life</a>.”</div>
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Unfortunately, no actual LEGOS were used in the making of this bridge; the illusion was designed by street artist Martin Heuwold of <a href="http://www.megx.de/?p=1059" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">MEGX</a>.</div>
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<a href="http://www.doepelstrijkers.com/#/projects/79/HOFBOGEN/?lan=_uk" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><img alt="" class="size-medium wp-image-254513" height="351" src="http://ad009cdnb.archdaily.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/1342220096-hofbogen2-528x351.png" style="max-width: 500px;" title="hofbogen2" width="528" /></a><br />
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Hofbogen, designed by <strong><a href="http://www.doepelstrijkers.com/" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">DOEPEL STRIJKERS</a>.</strong></div>
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<strong>3. “Hofbogen” – Rotterdam, The Netherlands</strong></div>
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This plan of <strong><a href="http://www.doepelstrijkers.com/" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">DOEPEL STRIJKERS</a></strong> to turn an old elevated train track in downtown Rotterdam into a commercial strip and elevated park, has an ingenious twist. The plan integrates city heating into the design: industrial waste heat will be used to warm the pre-war buildings along its trajectory, radically reducing their CO2 footprint.</div>
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<a href="http://transbaycenter.org/media-gallery/image-gallery/city-park" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><img alt="" class="size-medium wp-image-254515" height="500" src="http://ad009cdnb.archdaily.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/1342220429-ttc-31-388x500.jpeg" style="max-width: 500px;" title="ttc_31" width="388" /></a><br />
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The Transbay Center Project in San Francisco hopes to transform the Transbay Terminal with an extensive rooftop park.</div>
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<strong>2. “Transbay Transit Center” – San Francisco, California</strong></div>
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Once a bustling train station, the <a href="http://transbaycenter.org/project/program-overview" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="transbay center">Transbay Transit Center</a> has been in a slow demise since WW2. Even though it’s been reconstituted as a bus terminal, the facility <a href="http://urbanfarmingowls.wordpress.com/2011/04/19/elevated-parks-case-study/" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="elevated parks case study">no longer serves much purpose in the community</a>.</div>
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The proposed idea will retrofit the old, outdated building and turn it into a new high-speed rail terminus – but above the terminal is the real show-stopper. The 5.4 acre elevated park, designed by Pelli Clark Pelli Architecture, will incorporate <a href="http://webecoist.momtastic.com/2010/06/16/the-next-level-californias-twin-elevated-park-concepts/" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="california's elevated parks">cafes, retail areas, playgrounds, public art exhibits, an amphitheater and display gardens with climate-appropriate plants</a>. It should be stroll-ready by 2017.</div>
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<a href="http://www.archdaily.com/188295/delancey-underground-a-k-a-the-low-line/" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><img alt="" class="size-full wp-image-254555" height="282" src="http://ad009cdnb.archdaily.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/1342220733-1322627563-delancey-underground-005-528x282.jpeg" style="max-width: 500px;" title="1322627563-delancey-underground-005-528x282" width="528" /></a><br />
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Courtesy of James Ramsey and Dan Barasch</div>
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<strong>1. “<a href="http://www.archdaily.com/188295/delancey-underground-a-k-a-the-low-line/" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="delancey underground">The Delancey Underground</a>” – New York City, New York</strong></div>
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As the Highline has everyone looking up, <strong><a href="http://raadstudio.com/" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">James Ramsey</a></strong> and <strong><a href="http://poptech.org/staff" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Dan Barasch</a></strong> are asking people to start looking down. Satellite engineer turned architect, James Ramsey has developed a fiber-optic technology that will naturally light and bring life to the abandoned Williamsburg Bridge Trolley Terminal below the streets of <a href="http://www.archdaily.com/tag/new-york-city/" rel="tag" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="Posts tagged with New York City">New York City</a>. The renderings are positively sci-fi, but if this <a href="http://thelowline.org/" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="low line">Kickstarter Project</a> becomes a reality, the results could be truly fantastic.</div>
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<em>More “High Line” Like Projects Around the World…</em></div>
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<li>Atlanta, GA, USA - <a href="http://beltline.org/" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="Atlanta Beltline">The Beltline</a></li>
<li>Chicago, IL, USA - <a href="http://popupcity.net/2012/05/chicagos-elevated-park-ready-to-bloom/" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="chicago bloomingdale trail">The Bloomingdale Trail</a></li>
<li>Detroit, MI, USA - <a href="http://www.livinthehighline.com/urban-greenways/dequindre-cut/" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="detroit greenway">The Dequindre Cut Greenway</a></li>
<li>Helsinki, Finland – <a href="http://www.copenhagenize.com/2012/06/helsinkis-baana-bicycle-corridor.html" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="baana bike corridor">The Baana Bicycle Corridor</a></li>
<li>Jersey City, NJ, USA - <a href="http://www.embankment.org/whitesite/main2.html" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="Harsimus Embankment Project">The Harsimus Stem Embankment</a></li>
<li>Jerusalem, Israel – <a href="http://worldlandscapearchitect.com/jerusalem-railway-park-tichnun-nof-landscape-architects/" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="railway park">Railway Park</a></li>
<li>Los Angeles, CA, USA – <a href="http://www.park101.org/" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="park 101">Park 101</a></li>
<li>Mexico City, Mexico – <a href="http://www.archdaily.com/162420/mexico-citys-high-line-park/" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="mexico city high line">Chapultepec Project</a></li>
<li>New haven, CT, USA – <a href="http://www.dsarch.net/projects/farmington.html#" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="Farmington Canal Greenway">Farmington Canal Greenway</a></li>
<li>Philadelphia, PA, USA – <a href="http://readingviaduct.org/" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="reading viaduct">The Reading Viaduct</a></li>
<li>Santiago, Chile – <a href="http://www.plataformaurbana.cl/archive/2006/06/15/santiago-desconocido-v1-tunel-de-ffcc-en-matucana/" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="tunel santiago">Túnel de FFCC</a></li>
<li>Singapore – <a href="http://www.thegreencorridor.org/about/" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="The green corridor">The Green Corridor</a></li>
<li>St. Louis, MO, USA – <a href="http://www.grgstl.org/projects/the-trestle.aspx" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="the trestle">The Trestle </a></li>
<li>Toronto, Canada – <a href="http://railpath.wordpress.com/" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s; color: #5c5b5f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="railpath">The Railpath</a></li>
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AAPREMLALLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05695002558477537063noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769750823409773874.post-27395426568764071262012-09-05T09:00:00.000-04:002012-09-05T09:00:08.841-04:00Greening Vacant Lots Reduces Overall Crime<div style="text-align: center;">
As Southern Queens becomes grittier, pieces of green that show a community cares, can make a huge difference in safety and how the area will transform in the next few years.</div>
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Study Finds Greening Vacant Lots Reduces Overall Crime</b></h1>
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August 11, 2012</div>
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<img src="http://media.treehugger.com/assets/images/2012/08/urban_gardens_photo.jpg.492x0_q85_crop-smart.jpg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(229, 229, 229); font-size: 14px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" /><br />
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Green vacant lots make neighborhood residents feel safer while reducing overall crime, according to a <a href="http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/early/2012/08/06/injuryprev-2012-040439" style="border: 0px; color: #004276; font-size: 14px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">new study</a> from the <a href="http://www.pennmedicine.org/" style="border: 0px; color: #004276; font-size: 14px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania</a>.</div>
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The study, published in the journal <em style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/early/2012/08/06/injuryprev-2012-040439" style="border: 0px; color: #004276; font-size: 14px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Injury Prevention</a></em>, found its results by using randomized trial design to examine the impact of vacant lot greening. Two clusters of lots were selected for testing. One cluster was greened with help from the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society by removing debris, planting, building fences, and performing regular lawn maintenance. The other cluster was left vacant, according to <em style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120807104734.htm" style="border: 0px; color: #004276; font-size: 14px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Science Daily</a></em>.</div>
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Vacant Versus Greened Lots</h3>
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Twenty-one of the residents living near either the vacant or the greened lots were interviewed before and after the fact.</div>
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"Vacant lot greening changes the physical environment of a neighborhood from one that may promote crime and fear to one that may reduce crime and make people feel safer," said lead author Eugenia C. Garvin, MD, a resident in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine on<em style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120807104734.htm" style="border: 0px; color: #004276; font-size: 14px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Science Daily</a></em>. "Our theory is that transforming vacant lots from a space overgrown with vegetation and filled with trash to a clean and green space may make it difficult for people to hide illegal guns and conduct other illegal activities such as drug use in or near the space. Additionally, green space may encourage community cohesion."</div>
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Crime Rates Reduced</h3>
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After greening, residents felt safer and more comfortable in their environment. And it turns out they were safer. Researchers also looked at police reports before and after the planting. Total crimes and specifically gun crimes were reduced as well.</div>
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Again, <em style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120807104734.htm" style="border: 0px; color: #004276; font-size: 14px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Science Daily</a></em>:</div>
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[T]he research team analyzed police reported crime data from three months before and three months after the greening. Total crime, as well as assaults with and without a gun, was less after the greening.</div>
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All the more reason to turn the nation's vacant lots into urban gardens.</div>
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AAPREMLALLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05695002558477537063noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769750823409773874.post-88443866837930578062012-09-02T09:00:00.000-04:002012-09-02T09:00:03.439-04:00What is the difference between a green city and a biophilic one?<div style="text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 21px;">Totally loving the vision of a biophilic city. Having nature around us is a requirement, not an option.</span></h3>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://biophiliccities.org/san-francisco-a-partner-city/" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #3f312e; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="San Francisco – A Partner City">San Francisco – A Partner City</a></strong></h3>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: grey; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Friday, August 10th, 2012</span> | <span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: grey; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Blog</span></h6>
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<em style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">by Scott Edmondson, AICP, San Francisco Planning Department</em></div>
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<a href="http://biophiliccities.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/San_Fran_1.jpg" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #d95b43; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-1122" height="150" src="http://biophiliccities.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/San_Fran_1-150x150.jpg" style="background-color: transparent; border: 3px solid rgb(219, 219, 219); float: left; margin: 10px 15px 10px 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="San_Fran_1" width="150" /></a>What is the difference between a green city and a biophilic one? After all, San Francisco, like other top green cities (Portland, Seattle, etc.) has many green features. What more could be needed? What difference would a biophilic approach make?</div>
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The short answer might be that biophilic planning and development infuse a city with an abundance of nature. As Professor Beatley more eloquently states, <b>biophilic city planning<em style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </em>“is about redefining the very essence of cities as places of wild and restorative nature, from rooftops to roadways to riverfronts. It is about understanding cities as places that already harbor much nature and places that can become, through bold vision and persistent practice, even greener and richer in the nature they contain.”</b></div>
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However, it is important to understand that this restorative abundance is not simply about adding more green to our cities and neighborhoods, although that would occur too. The benefit is more expansive. As the opening text box of this website states, research is finding that “Nature is not something optional, but absolutely essential [on a daily basis] to living a happy, healthy, and meaningful life.”</div>
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In a related arena, the path-breaking work of <a href="http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Natural++Capitalism" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #d95b43; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">natural capitalism</a>, <a href="http://biomimicry.net/" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #d95b43; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">biomimicry</a>, and <a href="http://www.mcdonough.com/cradle_to_cradle.htm" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #d95b43; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">cradle-to-cradle</a> design and production stakes out the terrain for a sustainable future as one built on biology as the foundation for the next industrial revolution and economy. Why not use a biologic foundation for city planning as well? After all, nature <em style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">IS </em>the <em style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">economy</span></em> of the planet’s regenerative life support system. Understanding and leveraging those principles would illuminate the new methods and opportunity to increase human economic productivity dramatically. Further, it would do so in ways that would have restorative effects on the regenerative life support system of the biosphere instead of systematically degrading it with every new increment of GNP. If so, biophilic city planning includes seizing that opportunity by extending the circular flows and regenerative principles and processes of nature to the city’s metabolism and economy.</div>
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<a href="http://biophiliccities.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/San_Fran_3.jpg" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #d95b43; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-1124" height="155" src="http://biophiliccities.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/San_Fran_3-300x155.jpg" style="background-color: transparent; border: 3px solid rgb(219, 219, 219); float: left; margin: 10px 15px 10px 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="San_Fran_3" width="300" /></a>A related initiative, the game-changing, net-zero <a href="https://ilbi.org/" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #d95b43; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Living Building Challenge 2.0</a> (LBC), includes biophilia as one of its core components. “It [the LBC] defines the most advanced measure of sustainability in the built environment possible today and acts to diminish the gap between current limits and ideal solutions at all scales,” from room to region. The LBC recently won the<a href="https://ilbi.org/news-documents/living-building-challenge-wins-the-2012-buckminster-fuller-challenge/?searchterm=buckminster%20fuller%20challenge" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #d95b43; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Buckminster Fuller Challenge 2012</a> as a “holistic, systems-based solution that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems.” The LBC is scalable. The LBC’s recent<a href="https://ilbi.org/action/competitions/LCDC/lcdc" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #d95b43; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Living City Design Competition</a> extends the challenge to the urban scale. As a result, the LBC provides one framework planners and designers can use now to extend biophilia to the built environment from room to region.</div>
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Producing an abundance of nature in this biophilic way will both require and extend a deep appreciation for nature into the culture of our communities. Many treatises on sustainability see such a cultural development as essential for sustainability success. Enabling these efforts with a whole systems strategic approach to sustainability, such as with the <a href="http://www.thenaturalstep.org/en/our-approach" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #d95b43; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development</a>, would create an innovation platform and on-going learning process for such an extension to our culture, built environment, and economy. The question then becomes, how can we produce biophilic abundance? This Biophilic Cities Project will generate the next step of one answer as an evolving work in progress!</div>
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<a href="http://biophiliccities.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/San_Fran_2_urbanforestbanner.jpg" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #d95b43; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-1123" height="250" src="http://biophiliccities.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/San_Fran_2_urbanforestbanner.jpg" style="background-color: transparent; border: 3px solid rgb(219, 219, 219); float: left; margin: 10px 15px 10px 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="San_Fran_2_urbanforestbanner" width="136" /></a>With this larger potential to create sustainable value in view, San Francisco begins its partnership with the Biophilic City Project. During the project, San Francisco looks forward to learning more about the principles and tools of biophilic city planning and applying them to create a higher quality and more prosperous place. In turn, the project will assess and learn from San Francisco’s current projects and best practices, and those of the other partner cities.</div>
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The City’s policy commitment to sustainability as an overarching goal is enshrined in the <a href="http://www.sustainable-city.org/Plan/Intro/BoardOfS.htm" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #d95b43; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Board of Supervisors’ 1997 Resolution</a>, “to make San Francisco sustainable.” This commitment informs the work of all City agencies. The Planning Department begins the Biophilic Cities Project with the following initiatives.</div>
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<li style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; list-style-type: circle; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.sf-planning.org/index.aspx?page=3002" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #d95b43; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Green Connections:</strong></a> will increase access to parks, open space, and the waterfront by re-envisioning City streets as ”green connectors.”</li>
<li style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; list-style-type: circle; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://sfpavementtoparks.sfplanning.org/" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #d95b43; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Pavement to Parks Program:</strong> </a> seeks to temporarily reclaim swathes of land and quickly and inexpensively turn them into new public plazas and parks.</li>
<li style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; list-style-type: circle; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.sf-planning.org/index.aspx?page=3166" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #d95b43; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Urban Forest Master Plan:</strong></a> will be the City’s long-term, comprehensive policy plan to manage the City’s public and private trees to produce open space, health, environmental, and climate change values.</li>
<li style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; list-style-type: circle; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.sfplanning.org/index.aspx?page=3051" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #d95b43; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Sustainable Development Program:</strong></a> By coordinating building development and public infrastructure, the program attempts to implement district-scale energy, water, and waste systems while balancing the needs associated with growth and land use. Related projects include the Park Merced residential development, the Transit Center District (a regional multi-modal transportation hub and TOD), the Central Subway Corridor, and future neighborhoods.</li>
<li style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; list-style-type: circle; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.sfbetterstreets.org/" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #d95b43; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Better Streets Plan/Program: </a></strong> The plan prioritizes the needs of walking, bicycling, transit use, and the use of streets as public spaces for social interaction and community life. It aims to reduce stormwater runoff, improve pedestrian safety, and increase accessibility for all street users. It includes a <a href="http://www.sf-planning.org/index.aspx?page=2719&recordid=92&returnURL=%2findex.aspx" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #d95b43; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">web portal</a> on landscaping, bicycle parking, traffic calming, and other enhancements, including needed permits, maintenance, codes, and guidelines for each type of streetscape element, and will produce safer, greener, and more inviting streets.</li>
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<a href="http://biophiliccities.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/San_Fran_4.gif" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #d95b43; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="size-full wp-image-1125 alignright" height="200" src="http://biophiliccities.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/San_Fran_4.gif" style="background-color: transparent; border: 3px solid rgb(219, 219, 219); float: right; margin: 10px 0px 10px 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="San_Fran_4" width="100" /></a>Beyond the Planning Department, the <a href="http://sfgov.org/site/frame.asp?u=http://www.sfenvironment.org" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #d95b43; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Department of Environment</a>developed the city of San Francisco’s path-breaking public and private sector Green Building ordinances, renewable and efficient energy programs, zero waste ordinance, urban agriculture, and a range of other pioneering environmental programs. These programs, and those of other city agencies, set a strong foundation for advancing a biophilic city planning agenda, and agencies can extend those programs with biophilic planning.</div>
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Through San Francisco’s partner-city participation in the Biophilic Cities Project, the Planning Department anticipates learning how to advance a biophilic city planning agenda. By doing so, the department will create the larger value that biophilic city planning has to offer for the benefit of San Francisco, San Franciscans, and the larger region.</div>
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<em style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://biophiliccities.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Scott.jpg" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #d95b43; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignleft wp-image-1126" height="105" src="http://biophiliccities.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Scott-150x150.jpg" style="background-color: transparent; border: 3px solid rgb(219, 219, 219); float: left; margin: 10px 15px 10px 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="Scott" width="105" /></a>Scott T. Edmondson, AICP, is a planner with the San Francisco Planning Department. He also pursues his interest in advancing leading edge, innovative sustainability planning grounded in a whole systems strategic approach with the Strategic Sustainability 2030 Institute (<a href="http://www.sustainability2030.com/" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #d95b43; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">www.sustainability2030.com</a>) and the <a href="http://norcalapa.org/programs/sustainability" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #d95b43; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Sustainability Committee of the APA California Chapter-Northern</a> section. </em></div>
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<a href="http://biophiliccities.org/blog/">http://biophiliccities.org/blog/</a>
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AAPREMLALLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05695002558477537063noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769750823409773874.post-53361360594657103692012-08-30T10:00:00.000-04:002012-08-30T10:00:11.683-04:00Therapeutic Design and CommunitiesI'm interested in establishing more healing spaces in our city, starting with Southern Queens.<br />
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How Does your Garden Grow? The role of Therapeutic Landscapes in Design</h3>
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What does landscaping mean to you? Most likely, not nearly enough. Too easily, we view it as decorative, a “nice to have” part of a project. However, as we learn more about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salutogenesis" style="color: #142407; text-decoration: none;">salutogenic</a>design and the effects of the environment on wellness (everything from healing to better job performance), landscape starts to become a critical element, one which should form the basis of design. With this in mind, I asked Naomi Sachs, Founder and Director of the<a href="http://www.healinglandscapes.org/" style="color: #142407; text-decoration: none;">Therapeutic Landscapes Network</a> (TLN) to share some insights on the power of nature. Naomi is a landscape architect and recognized expert in therapeutic landscape design, and part of the Center for Health Design’s<a href="http://www.healthdesign.org/chd/about-chd/volunteer-councils/environmental-standards-council" style="color: #142407; text-decoration: none;">Environmental Standards Council</a> working on expanding the Environment of Care section of the <a href="http://www.fgiguidelines.org/" style="color: #142407; text-decoration: none;">2014 Guidelines for Design and Construction of Health Care Facilities</a>. Rather that helping afflicted people to feel less bad, her goal is to use landscape to make them feel good:<br />
<i>Usually, when architects think about landscaping, we think about outdoor rooms or ways to enhance areas like building entries or parking lots. What are your suggestions for getting more landscaping inside of buildings?</i><br />
Nature needs to be viewed as a part of the built environment. While being out in nature is best, bringing it indoors with interior gardens, atria, or even potted plants is the next best thing. A great recent example of nature incorporated within the building is the Stoneman Healing Garden at <a href="http://www.crja.com/healthcare/stoneman.htm" style="color: #142407; text-decoration: none;">Dana Farber’s Yawkey Center for Cancer Care</a>. Providing windows is an excellent way to allow visual access to nature, which is especially important when people can’t go outside. Allowing for views out also lets natural light in (one study found that patients in east facing rooms who were exposed to morning sunlight did better than other patients), and “advertises” the garden, which then encourages use. Research has also shown that while images of nature, like artwork or videos, do help people, they are not as effective as views of nature through a window or – best yet - an experience of real nature. Using natural materials (wood, stone, etc.) is another way to “bring nature in” to an indoor space.<br />
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In terms of facilitating access to the outdoors, transitions from one to the other are critical: Architects must design to minimize barriers (providing flat thresholds, doors that are easy to open, etc.) and allow for transitional spaces, such as a paved area with an awning where people can enjoy the outdoors close to the building, even in inclement weather, and can get a sense of the space before they venture out into it.<br />
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<i>How do you explain the link between nature and wellness?</i><br />
Biophilia – our innate attraction to life and living things - is intangible, but research is working towards measurable results. The book Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being, by the neuroscientist Esther Sternberg, addresses the role of nature not only in reducing stress, but also in eliciting positive psychological and physiological responses. For example, Sternberg documents how seratonin receptors in the brain, when exposed to positive sensory stimuli, light up. She posits that being outside creates multiple positive stimuli (and therefore more seratonin) because it’s a multi-sensory environment. You can hear the birds, feel the sun on your face, smell flowers or freshly mown grass. Being outdoors also enables exercise, and tends to facilitate social connections because people are more relaxed. At the San Diego Hospice, the nurse leading my tour of the facility observed that people shared more about themselves and their situation when outside.<br />
<iframe frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=thepatrsainof-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0674057481&ref=tf_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="clear: left; float: left; height: 240px; width: 120px;"></iframe><br />
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Kuo and Taylor have published several <a href="http://lhhl.illinois.edu/%20" style="color: #142407; text-decoration: none;">studies</a> that measure the positive impact of green settings in reducing ADHD symptoms, and the correlation of trees in a neighborhood to reduced domestic violence, lower crime rates, and higher self esteem. These studies show, empirically, that people in environments with nature do better. Research by Whitney Gray presented at Greenbuild 2011 focused on sick building syndrome. Gray looked at sick days, turnover, stress, and ability to concentrate; when access to nature was provided, there was a measurable improvement in all of these factors. Debajyoti, Harvey, and Barach showed that nurses who had a view of gardens over those who just had access to natural light, or no windows at all, were better able to concentrate and had less long-term stress. When you think abut the fact that it can cost around $60,000 to train each new hire, the economic benefit of providing access to nature is huge. [Full citation is below]<br />
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<i>Maintenance is always a concern when it comes to landscaping- I’ve actually worked with healthcare clients who wanted nothing but grass in the areas they “had” to landscape for ease of maintenance. What kind of recommendations can you make to landscape skeptics about using plantings?</i><br />
Access to nature just makes good business sense. Studies by Roger Ulrich, confirmed by others, have demonstrated less need for pain medication, improved patient satisfaction, faster recovery rates, and many other examples of improved outcomes for patients and staff. When you really look at the benefits of providing access to nature, the return on investment (ROI) justifies the initial cost and lifetime maintenance. Hospitals need to see landscaping as a strategic investment in the same manner they would the purchase of a new MRI.<br />
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Sure, a lawn is better than no landscaping at all, but when you consider the benefits of gardens and more designed landscaping, you can make the argument for the cost of maintenance. A study by Matsuoka showed that students viewing just lawn vs. a more varied view that included trees and shrubs performed better. Access to a lawn is often restricted; it may be wet or uneven, and wheelchairs cannot travel on it. Lawns are best as one element in children’s play areas, since they – especially visiting children - need to run around and blow off steam. [In case you want the full citation: Matsuoka, Rodney (2010). “Student Performance and High School Landscapes: Examining Links.” Landscape and Urban Planning, Vol. 97]. Incidentally, lawns actually take a LOT of money to maintain: They need regular irrigation, fertilization, mowing, leaf-blowing, etc. Facilities that are using alternative landscapes such as native meadows and rain gardens are finding significant savings after the initial investment. And at the same time, they are sending a very positive message about their commitment environmental as well as human health. It’s all related.<br />
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That being said, the landscape architect needs to know the resources and capabilities the client is willing or able to put into the project – up front and for the future - and design around that. Your typical “mow and blow” crew is not qualified to handle anything more than routine maintenance, so there needs to be a funding strategy in place for an annual maintenance budget. It’s also a good idea to create a maintenance manual for staff or an outside landscaper to follow.<br />
Some healthcare facilities, usually those with a horticultural therapy program (http://www.healinglandscapes.org/related/hort-therapy.html), integrate gardens into physical and occupational therapy. This is a great way to provide benefit to patients while keeping the garden expertly maintained. The gardens at Legacy Health (http://www.legacyhealth.org/Gardens), in Portland, OR, are excellent examples of this strategy.<br />
Healing gardens can be easy to raise money for because they are “warm and fuzzy.” The institution can also use the space for social events and to generate PR (promotional materials, events, press releases, etc.). The likelihood of assisted living facility resident referrals has been shown to increase with the quality of the grounds.<br />
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<i>What is the difference between landscaping and a garden? Is it only about habitation?</i><br />
In general, I would say that a “landscape” is any outdoor space, wild or designed, and a “garden” is a designed space. A restorative landscape is simply an outdoor space that makes you feel good when you’re in it. To me, “landscaping” implies decorative elements like a lawn, shrubs, some trees, and is not necessarily intended for interaction. A therapeutic (or healing) garden is a space designed for a specific population (children, cancer patients, people with Alzheimer’s) and a specific intended outcome (stress reduction, positive distraction, rehabilitation). This is not to say that landscaping isn’t important. Well-designed and maintained landscapes communicate to patients and their families that they will receive a high level of care, and this can happen from the moment you cross the property line. Even areas such as parking lots can utilize landscape to provide and reinforce the overall image and mission of the facility.<br />
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<i>What is landscaping’s role in wayfinding?</i><br />
This goes back to the importance of views outside from indoors. As a wayfinding tool, a garden stands out as a strong landmark, something people notice and remember. Plantings - indoors and out - can also provide visual cues or themes for a space. Again, when well-integrated with design, views to a garden can also act as advertisement for that space. So often, gardens are underutilized because people (even staff!) don’t know they exist. Signage can help, but creating direct views to the garden is the best way to ensure that people use it.<br />
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<i>Landscape is a blanket term that includes plantings, water feature, site furniture and hardscape elements like pavers and walls. How does your ideal therapeutic garden utilize these elements?</i><br />
My ideal garden would focus on the needs of the user population (patients, visitors, staff) and would be designed based on evidence, but also with a heavy dose of empathy and inspiration. As with any good design, there are parameters, but we can never just tick off boxes on a checklist. All landscape elements – overall layout, paths, seating, hardscape, plantings, water features – should facilitate health and well-being. Two useful theoretical frameworks are Ulrich’s Theory of Supportive Design, in which a space supports the users by reducing stress; increasing a sense of control; encouraging social support; and facilitating physical movement and exercise. And Stephen and Rachel Kaplan’s theory of environmental preference, which calls for an emphasis on coherence, complexity, legibility, and mystery. I would add that especially in the healthcare environment, outdoor spaces must be safe and comfortable, and should provide a marked contrast to “the hospital,” which is often perceived as a very cold, alien, intimidating environment. Finally, all of the elements should contribute to that positive multisensory experience we talked about earlier to help people feel not just “not bad,” but instead “good.” That is true salutogenic design.<br />
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<i>How does this play into prospect/refuge theory in biophilic design?</i><br />
It is really important to design with this in mind. People like to survey the space from a protected vantage point. Creating transitional space like a covered patio at the entrance to the garden is important, especially for elderly people who may not feel safe going directly outside. Those with certain psychiatric issues, including autism, like to be “read” a space before immersing themselves in it. Good designs create transition spaces throughout including shade to sun and walking and seating areas, and “nooks” or nodes where people can feel a sense of security and even privacy. <br />
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<i>It’s not unknown for a project to get landscape elements value engineered out due to budget concerns. What’s your advice for architects regarding how to work best with landscape architects and really integrate their work into the design so that the landscape elements become less expendable to the client?</i><br />
Bring the LA in right away! Landscape architects are valuable members of the interdisciplinary project team [or A/E team] and they need to be included in the conceptual design phase. LAs have so much more to offer than simply “putting the parsley around the meatloaf.” Their site planning expertise can be a great asset to preserve open space, maximize views, create walking paths, take advantage of existing natural amenities, and to create that “healing experience” that starts at the entry drive, not just in some tucked-away “healing garden” courtyard. They can assist in design of the building to maximize visual and physical access to nature, both indoors and out. They can also best address EPA standards and maximize LEED and Green Guide For Healthcare points and help make sustainable measures like stormwater management or green roofs into design features.<br />
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It is important to use a landscape architect trained in healthcare design for healthcare projects (the TLN has a list of designers and consultants who specialize in this field). They know the research and requirements for each specific user population; they have the experience in this particular area and so they know how to do pre-occupancy evaluations and talk to the various stakeholders: Healthcare providers, facilities and maintenance staff, the C-Suite, board members and donors, patients and community members. They can be allies in your design efforts because they have the experience, examples and precedents to share with clients regarding the sustainable or evidence-based value of a design decision.<br />
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<i>Can you talk a little bit about the book you are working on with Clare Cooper Marcus? What kind of issues are you looking at?</i><br />
his book (to be published by John Wiley and Sons in 2013) will address a lot of the issues <iframe frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=thepatrsainof-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0471192031&ref=tf_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="clear: left; float: left; height: 240px; width: 120px;"></iframe>we’ve talked about in this interview. Marcus and Barnes’ Healing Gardens: Therapeutic Benefits and Design Recommendations has been considered “the bible” for evidence-based therapeutic garden design, but it is over 10 years old and has become quite expensive. More recent research, examples of built works, and issues such as sustainability and “healing-washing” (just as with “green-washing,” the “healing gardens” fad is raising some important questions) make this new book timely. Our book will be accessible, economically and aesthetically, to designers, health and human service providers, students and others interested in the role of landscape in promoting health and well-being. The heart of the book will be design guidelines that are applicable to all patient populations and settings, as well as guidelines for specific users (hospice, cancer care, people with PTSD, etc.), and we will be drawing on many examples of built works to illustrate various theories and practical applications. Other chapters will focus on history, theory, and definitions; the design process; funding; maintenance; and more. Clare and I are both very excited, and from the feedback we’re getting, others feel the same way.<br />
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I encourage all of you to explore the wonderful resource that is the TLN site. You don’t have to be a landscape architect to take advantage of the TLN as a springboard for your sustainability and evidence based design research or as a resource for finding a great landscape architect specializing in healthcare. How will you harness the power of landscape and gardens on your next project?<br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">*Citation: Debajyoti Pati, Tom Harvey Jr., Paul Barach (2008). “Relationships Between Exterior Views and Nurse Stress: An Exploratory Examination.” Health Environments Research & Design Journal, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 27-38.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Exterior views of nature decreased stress and increased alertness in pediatric nurses.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Abstract:
Objective: Examine the relationships between acute stress and alertness of nurse, and duration and content of exterior views from nurse work areas. Background: Nursing is a stressful job, and the impacts of stress on performance are well documented. Nursing stress, however, has been typically addressed through operational interventions, although the ability of the physical environment to modulate stress in humans is well known. This study explores the outcomes of exposure to exterior views from nurse work areas.
Methods: A survey-based method was used to collect data on acute stress, chronic stress, and alertness of nurses before and after 12-hour shifts. Control measures included physical environment stressors (that is, lighting, noise, thermal, and ergonomic), organizational stressors, workload, and personal characteristics (that is, age, experience, and income). Data were collected from 32 nurses on 19 different units at two hospitals (part of Children's Healthcare of Atlanta) in November 2006.
Results: Among the variables considered in the study view duration is the second most influential factor affecting alertness and acute stress. The association between view duration and alertness and stress is conditional on the exterior view content (that is, nature view, non-nature view). Of all the nurses whose alertness level remained the same or improved, almost 60% had exposure to exterior and nature view. In contrast, of all nurses whose alertness levels deteriorated, 67% were exposed to no view or to only non-nature view. Similarly, of all nurses whose acute stress condition remained the same or reduced, 64% had exposure to views (71% of that 64% were exposed to a nature view). Of nurses whose acute stress levels increased, 56% had no view or only a non-nature view.
Conclusions: Although long working hours, overtime, and sleep deprivation are problems in healthcare operations, the physical design of units is only now beginning to be considered seriously in evaluating patient outcomes. </span><br />
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</div>AAPREMLALLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05695002558477537063noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769750823409773874.post-33422170825647435592012-08-26T09:00:00.000-04:002012-08-26T09:00:00.661-04:00How sustainable neighborhoods could reshape cities<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">The next small thing: How sustainable neighborhoods could reshape cities</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">By </span><a href="http://grist.org/author/greg-hanscom/" style="border: 0px; color: #9d9d9d; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" title="Posts by Greg Hanscom">Greg Hanscom</a></div>
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<a href="http://grist.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/lodo_denver.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="LoDo district, Denver" border="0" src="http://grist.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/lodo_denver.jpg" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin-top: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="315px" /></a><span style="color: #9d9d9d; font-family: inherit; font-style: italic;">Photo: Wally Gobetz</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: xx-small; font-style: inherit; text-align: justify;">Lower Downtown Denver has become the city’s night life hub — and a laboratory for community-level sustainability.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">I once worked for a New Yorker who loved to wisecrack that the only difference between Denver and yogurt was that “yogurt’s got culture.”</span></h2>
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Looking at the Mile High City’s endless sprawl of lookalike, Anywhere, U.S.A. subdivisions, it’s easy to understand where he was coming from. But in a former warehouse district just off of downtown, an innovative experiment in neighborhood-level sustainability is underway that could show New York and the rest of the country what really rocks the house when it comes to eco-centric living.</div>
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The project, and others like it around the country, started with a simple observation: While cities have been leaders in the effort to combat climate change, much of the action within cities occurs at the neighborhood level. “The neighborhood is a geography, a scale that resonates with people,” says Rob Bennett, executive director of the nonprofit Portland Sustainability Institute. “Neighborhoods have always been a powerful and important part of how we view city-building, and how we view ourselves as citizens.”</div>
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Bennett is among a group of urban thinkers who envision neighborhoods powered by their own micro-solar or geothermal power grids. They imagine city blocks that operate as single, interconnected systems, saving gobs of energy and resources in the process, and small manufacturing districts where companies make use of each other’s waste streams. Planning geeks call them “eco-districts,” and say they’ll be the next big (or not-so-big) thing in sustainability.</div>
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The project in Denver is the brainchild of Living City Block, a nonprofit that adopted two square blocks in Lower Downtown (known by locals as LoDo). Architect Paul Todd says that 20 years ago, the place was a wasteland of boarded up, Victorian-era warehouses. He and his wife (and architectural partner), Kirstin Todd, bought a building in 1991 that was slated for demolition. “We removed the entire second floor and most of the roof,” he says. “We completely rebuilt it from the ground up.”</div>
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At about the same time, the city poured money into the area, tearing out a viaduct that once arched over a nearby rail yard and putting in walking malls, trees, and bike racks. Today, the area is the nightlife epicenter for the entire metro area, drawing crowds of shoppers, revelers, and diners even on weeknights. (Eat it, Yoplait.)</div>
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Living City Block President Llewellyn Wells says government agencies have put a lot of resources into retrofitting and weatherizing homes in recent years, and an entire industry has sprouted up to “green up” corporate and college campuses — but little attention has been paid to retrofitting smaller commercial space, he says. If Living City Block can figure out a way to retrofit LoDo, it could pave the way for other projects, tying in everything from energy generation and efficiency to storm water and waste water management.</div>
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“There are tens of thousands of other neighborhoods like this around the country,” Wells says.</div>
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After an initial round of community meetings and design charrettes, a vision of the block emerged that would include rooftop gardens, solar panels, and energy-efficient retrofits. Two buildings — the Todds’ and one owned by the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, an environmental nonprofit — will be tricked out to generate all, or close to all of their own electricity. By the end of next year, Living City Block expects to cut the area’s energy use in half. By the time the project is finished, block-wide savings should be between 75 and 80 percent.</div>
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But turning ideas like these into street-level reality has proven to be harder than anyone expected. Last year, the Department of Energy awarded Living City Block $600,000 in energy analysis and modeling work. Workers are now outfitting the buildings with fancy new meters so that the block can monitor its energy savings over time. But the project still faces some formidable obstacles: To fund the actual retrofit work, Living City Block and the owners of the LoDo buildings need to convince a bank to lend them money — a tall order when you consider that the loan will be leveraged against future energy savings, not business profits. “Easier said than done,” Wells says.</div>
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The second challenge is equally daunting: holding a group of property owners together long enough to make something like this work. The extensive legal issues that come with this kind of communal investment require some kind of formal governing body, akin to a homeowner’s association — currently, there isn’t one. And then there are simple questions of leadership and attention span.</div>
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“They started out strong, with a lot of enthusiasm,” says Paul Todd. “But getting everybody together and trying to think about the block holistically without scaring people about giving up property or development rights — that has been a big challenge. It’s been tough to get people to show up to information meetings.”</div>
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While Living City Block has a second initiative underway in Brooklyn, it stepped away from a similar project in Washington, D.C., this year. Wells will only say that local funding was an issue.</div>
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But the group’s trials and errors offer lessons for other efforts to green neighborhoods. “We’re pioneers — we’re out there taking the hits.” Wells says. “We’ve learned that there has to be an involved community on the ground for this to work. What we care about in the end are better communities, not just better buildings.”</div>
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<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Stay tuned for more stories about neighborhood-scale sustainability efforts, from Portland to Washington, D.C.</em></div>
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Greg Hanscom is a senior editor at Grist. He tweets about cities, bikes, transportation, policy, and sustainability at <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/ghanscom" style="border: 0px; color: #9d9d9d; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">@ghanscom</a>.</div>
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<a href="http://grist.org/cities/2011-11-29-the-next-small-thing-how-neighborhood-level-sustainability-effor/" style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: justify;">http://grist.org/cities/2011-11-29-the-next-small-thing-how-neighborhood-level-sustainability-effor/</a><br />
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</header>AAPREMLALLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05695002558477537063noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769750823409773874.post-1495129706913657892012-08-23T15:02:00.005-04:002012-08-23T15:03:18.276-04:00Cities See the Other Side of the Tracks<br />
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<i style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px;"> “It’s not just, ‘Build a cool park and they will come.’ </i></h1>
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<i style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px;">It’s, ‘Build a cool park and connect it to a framework.’ ”</i></h1>
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<nyt_headline type=" " version="1.0">Cities See the Other Side of the Tracks</nyt_headline></h1>
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The Reading Viaduct, an old elevated railway line in Philadelphia. One group estimates that it would cost less to redevelop the viaduct than to demolish it.</div>
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Published: August 2, 2011</h6>
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The <a href="http://www.thehighline.org/" style="color: #666699;" title="Web site of Friends of High Line">High Line park</a>, built on an elevated railway trestle in<a class="meta-loc" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/classifieds/realestate/locations/newyork/newyorkcity/manhattan/?inline=nyt-geo" style="color: #666699;" title="Find Real Estate listings and community news for New York City">Manhattan</a>, has become both a symbol and a catalyst for an explosion of growth in the meatpacking district and the Chelsea neighborhood.</div>
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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/03/realestate/commercial/smaller-gyms-scramble-for-spaces-in-new-york.html?ref=commercial" style="color: #666699; font-size: 1em; text-decoration: none;">Smaller Gyms Struggle in a Search for Spaces</a> (August 3, 2011)</h6>
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Times Topic: <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/h/high_line_nyc/index.html" style="color: #666699; font-size: 1em; text-decoration: none;">High Line (NYC)</a></h6>
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Now cities around the country, including Chicago, Philadelphia and St. Louis, are working up plans to renovate their aging railroad trestles, tracks and railways for parkland. Cities with little public space are realizing they badly need more parks, and the High Line has taught that renovating an old railway can be the spark that helps improve a neighborhood and attract development.</div>
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The High Line’s first and second sections cost $153 million, but have generated an estimated $2 billion in new developments. In the five years since construction started on the High Line, 29 new projects have been built or are under way in the neighborhood, according to the <a class="meta-loc" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/classifieds/realestate/locations/newyork/newyorkcity/manhattan/?inline=nyt-geo" style="color: #666699;" title="Find Real Estate listings and community news for New York City">New York City</a> Department of City Planning. More than 2,500 new residential units, 1,000 hotel rooms and over 500,000 square feet of office and art gallery space have gone up.</div>
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“Cities recognize parks are good for their economies. They’re no longer a nice thing to have, but a must,” said Will Rogers, president and chief executive of the <a href="http://www.tpl.org/" style="color: #666699;" title="Web site of Trust for Public Land">Trust for Public Land</a>, a national conservation group in San Francisco.</div>
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The area around the park, sprinkled with small offices under 200,000 square feet, has become a draw for start-ups and creative companies.</div>
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“I think the High Line is a big attraction. It’s created a lot more buzz to the area,” said Matthew Bergey, first vice president at the commercial brokerage firm CB Richard Ellis in New York. “Like with any destination, people will come if it’s cool and has buzz.”</div>
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Though plans in many cities have a long way to go before becoming reality, a point in favor of reuse is that it can be cheaper to renovate old rail structures than to tear them down. The <a href="http://www.readingviaduct.org/" style="color: #666699;" title="Home page of Reading Viaduct project">Reading Viaduct</a>, an old elevated railway line in Philadelphia, would cost $50 million to demolish versus $36 million to retrofit, according to the <a href="http://www.centercityphila.org/" style="color: #666699;" title="Web site of Center City District">Center City District</a>, a business improvement group.</div>
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In Chicago, where a 2.65-mile elevated rail line slices through four residential areas, tearing down the line would be prohibitively costly. With 37 bridges and large earthen embankments, the <a href="http://www.bloomingdaletrail.org/" style="color: #666699;" title="Home page of Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail">Bloomingdale Trail</a>, as it is now called, snakes east to west across Chicago and is simply too big to go.</div>
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“If you’ve driven around Chicago, you’ll have seen it,” said Beth White, director of the Chicago office of the Trust for Public Land, which is helping to build the trail.</div>
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As with other, similar rail lines around the country, passenger and freight trains have not operated on the Chicago line in at least 10 years. The only traffic most of these lines see is an occasional runner or bike rider, even though trespassing is usually forbidden.</div>
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The impetus for redevelopment has mostly come from neighbors rather than developers, because the vision is so grand and stretches across entire neighborhoods. “It’s hard for private development to be visionary unless it’s a large-scale development where you can create a community,” said Mr. Rogers, a former Chicago developer. “Instead, you’re responding to a small site and not a larger community.”</div>
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After years of grass-roots work, the Bloomingdale Trail is moving forward after Rahm Emanuel, who made completing the trail one of his campaign promises, was elected mayor in February. Over the next year, design concepts and engineering work will get under way. The Bloomingdale Trail will allow bikes and dogs, interconnect with new and existing ground-level parks and cost $40 million to $75 million.</div>
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In St. Louis, plans are in the works to renovate a 2.1-mile elevated rail trestle and turn it into a park as part of a larger waterfront revitalization project. The Iron Horse Trestle, estimated to cost $50 million, does not have a timeline. Organizers hope to have the first one-mile phase completed in five years.</div>
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“You have to be deliberate if you want this to last. It’ll reflect St. Louis and be unique to it,” said Susan Trautman, the executive director of <a href="http://www.grgstl.org/" style="color: #666699;" title="Web site.">Great Rivers Greenway District</a>, a public group developing the Iron Horse Trestle.</div>
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Despite the High Line’s visibility and help in showing donors and residents nationwide what is possible with an abandoned trestle, most cities realize they cannot mimic it. The park runs through Manhattan, the most densely populated area in the country, and attracted large sums of money from celebrities.</div>
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“The High Line is not easily replicable in other cities,” said James Corner, principal of<a href="http://www.fieldoperations.net/" style="color: #666699;" title="Home page of James Corner Field Operations">James Corner Field Operations</a>, a New York architecture firm that designed the High Line with Diller Scofidio and Renfro. “It’s not just, ‘Build a cool park and they will come.’ It’s, ‘Build a cool park and connect it to a framework.’ ”</div>
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Developers are hesitant to rely on these potential parks as they assemble new projects. In October, Mike and Matt Pestronk pounced on a 10-story office tower next to the Philadelphia viaduct when it fell into foreclosure and bought it for $5 million. The brothers, who had been watching the building for years and waiting for its price to drop, bought it because it was a good deal. The developers plan to renovate the vacant office tower for $25 million and turn it into apartments.</div>
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“The rents we project are that it doesn’t happen,” said Mike Pestronk, principal of Post Brothers Apartments in Philadelphia, referring to the viaduct project. “If it does, it’ll help us get higher rents.”</div>
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Still, the brothers are trying to improve the area and have done some “guerrilla improvements” to the viaduct, such as weeding and putting down plywood to cover holes, and installing artwork and live video projections on two sides of their building.</div>
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Plans for the viaduct are slowly moving ahead after nearly 10 years of grass-roots work. By the end of the year, the City Council is expected to approve a neighborhood improvement district that, among other things, would help oversee construction and fund-raising. As a first step, a small section of the trestle owned by a regional transportation authority would be redeveloped for $5.5 million.</div>
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“What we want to do is build the first phase, like New York, and have people say they love it and want to do the rest,” said Paul R. Levy, the president of the Center City District. “We do not need the Mercedes-Benz that they built in New York.”</div>
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The city is in talks with Reading International, a public company based in Commerce, Calif., that owns most of the viaduct.</div>
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James Corner’s firm is riding his New York success to other cities, even if their projects only marginally resemble the High Line. In Seattle, an old elevated highway that runs along the waterfront and is at risk of collapse during an earthquake will be torn down and replaced with a series of parks, open areas and new transit. Traffic will be routed away from the area. Final designs and a cost estimate will be ready by the middle of next year.</div>
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“We weren’t hiring them to come to Seattle to recreate the High Line,” said Steve Pearce, the project manager of <a href="http://waterfrontseattle.org/" style="color: #666699;" title="Home page of Waterfront Seattle">Waterfront Seattle</a>, a civic partnership. Our effort is to create a new front porch for the city, a social mixing chamber.”</div>
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Atlanta also hired Mr. Corner to help redevelop a 22-mile rail corridor encircling the city. In the next 25 years, Atlanta plans to add 1,300 acres of parks and green spaces, public transit and trails along the necklace, increasing Atlanta green space by nearly 40 percent. The project’s cost is put at $2.8 billion.</div>
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“The High Line is a park, and they made a conscious decision not to interact with private development,” said Ethan Davidson, a spokesman for the <a href="http://www.beltline.org/" style="color: #666699;" title="Web site.">Atlanta BeltLine</a>, as the rail corridor is known. “Atlanta is the kind of city where one project can transform a city. This very much knits the city together.”</div>
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<span class="italic" style="font-style: italic;">This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:</span></div>
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<strong style="font-style: italic;">Correction: August 2, 2011</strong></div>
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An earlier version of this article did not mention Diller Scofidio and Renfro, designers of the High Line project in Manhattan.</div>
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A version of this article appeared in print on August 3, 2011, on page B6 of the New York edition with the headline: After the High Line, Old Tracks Get Another Look.</h6>
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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/03/realestate/commercial/cities-see-another-side-to-old-tracks.html?_r=4&seid=auto&smid=tw-nytimes&pagewanted=all">http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/03/realestate/commercial/cities-see-another-side-to-old-tracks.html?_r=4&seid=auto&smid=tw-nytimes&pagewanted=all</a>
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AAPREMLALLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05695002558477537063noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769750823409773874.post-18344650678778652422012-08-20T09:00:00.000-04:002012-08-20T09:00:14.597-04:00Communities Learn the Good Life Can Be a Killer<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;"><i>We need to do something about this by creating more public spaces and more mass transit.</i></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;"><i>“When there is nearly nothing within walking distance to interest a young person and it is near-lethal to bicycle, he or she must relinquish autonomy — a capacity every creature must develop just as much as strength and endurance.” </i></span>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Communities Learn the Good Life Can Be a Killer</span></h1>
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By <a class="url fn" href="http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/author/jane-e-brody/" style="color: #666699; text-decoration: none; text-transform: uppercase;" title="See all posts by JANE E. BRODY">JANE E. BRODY</a></address>
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<img alt="ACTIVE ANTIDOTE Atlanta transformed an old rail corridor into a trail network that encourages walking and biking." height="320" id="100000001318097" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/01/31/science/31BROD_SPAN/31BROD-blog480.jpg" width="480" /><span class="credit" style="color: #909090; display: block; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; line-height: 1.223em; margin-bottom: 2px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 2px; text-align: right;">Christopher T. Martin</span><span class="caption" style="color: #666666; display: block; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em; line-height: 1.2727em; margin-bottom: 3px; margin-left: 2px; margin-right: 2px; margin-top: 3px;">ACTIVE ANTIDOTE Atlanta is transforming an old rail corridor into a trail network that encourages walking and biking.</span></div>
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Developers in the last half-century called it progress when they built homes and shopping malls far from city centers throughout the country, sounding the death knell for many downtowns. But now an alarmed cadre of public health experts say these expanded metropolitan areas have had a far more serious impact on the people who live there by creating vehicle-dependent environments that foster <a href="http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/symptoms/morbid-obesity/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier" style="color: #666699;" target="_blank" title="In-depth reference and news articles about Obesity.">obesity</a>, poor health, social isolation, excessive stress and depression.</div>
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As a result, these experts say, our “built environment” — where we live, work, play and shop — has become a leading cause of disability and death in the 21st century. <a href="http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/specialtopic/physical-activity/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier" style="color: #666699;" target="_blank" title="In-depth reference and news articles about Physical activity.">Physical activity</a> has been disappearing from the lives of young and old, and many communities are virtual “food deserts,” serviced only by convenience stores that stock nutrient-poor prepared foods and drinks.</div>
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According to Dr. Richard J. Jackson, professor and chairman of environmental health sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, unless changes are made soon in the way many of our neighborhoods are constructed, people in the current generation (born since 1980) will be the first in America to live shorter lives than their parents do.</div>
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Although a decade ago urban planning was all but missing from public health concerns, a sea change has occurred. At a <a href="http://apha.confex.com/apha/139am/webprogram/start.html" style="color: #666699;" target="_blank" title="The meeting’s Web site.">meeting of the American Public Health Association</a> in October, Dr. Jackson said, there were about 300 presentations on how the built environment inhibits or fosters the ability to be physically active and get healthy food.</div>
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In a healthy environment, he said, “people who are young, elderly, sick or poor can meet their life needs without getting in a car,” which means creating places where it is safe and enjoyable to walk, bike, take in nature and socialize.</div>
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“People who walk more weigh less and live longer,” Dr. Jackson said. “People who are fit live longer. People who have friends and remain socially active live longer. We don’t need to prove all of this,” despite the plethora of research reports demonstrating the ill effects of current community structures.</div>
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<strong>The Price of Progress</strong></div>
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“We’ve become the victims of our own success,” Dr. Jackson said of the public health mission that cleared cities of congested slums. “By living far from where we work, we reduced crowding and improved the quality of our air and water, which drove down rates of infectious disease.” But as people have moved farther and farther from where they work, shop and socialize, the rates of chronic diseases have soared.</div>
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Public transportation has not kept pace with the expansion of suburbs and exurbs. Nor are there enough sidewalks, nearby parks and safe places to walk, cycle or play outdoors in many, if not most, towns. Parents spend hours in cars getting to and from work; children are bused or driven to and from school; and those who can’t drive must depend on others to take them everywhere or risk becoming socially isolated.</div>
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In 1974, 66 percent of all children walked or biked to school By 2000, that number had dropped to 13 percent.</div>
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“Children who grow up in suburbia can’t meet their life needs without getting a ride somewhere,” Dr. Jackson said. “The average teen in suburbia says it’s boring.”</div>
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His new book, “Designing Healthy Communities,” a companion piece to a coming public television series, says: “When there is nearly nothing within walking distance to interest a young person and it is near-lethal to bicycle, he or she must relinquish autonomy — a capacity every creature must develop just as much as strength and endurance.” The book was written with Stacy Sinclair, director of education at the Media Policy Center in Santa Monica, Calif.</div>
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“We’ve engineered physical activity out of children’s lives,” Dr. Jackson said in an interview. “Only a quarter of the children in California can pass a basic fitness test, and two in seven volunteers for the military can’t get in because they’re not in good enough physical condition.”</div>
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The health consequences, he said, are terrifying. Not only are Americans of all ages fatter than ever, but also growing numbers of children are developing diseases once seen only in adults: <a href="http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/type-2-diabetes/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier" style="color: #666699;" target="_blank" title="In-depth reference and news articles about Type 2 diabetes.">Type 2 diabetes</a>, heart disease and fatty livers.</div>
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<strong>Can Our Suburbs Be Saved?</strong></div>
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The four-part series that Dr. Jackson developed with the documentary producers Dale Bell and Harry Wiland, to be broadcast in the spring, highlights changes being made in forward-thinking communities — changes that foster better physical and <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/mentalhealthanddisorders/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier" style="color: #666699;" target="_blank" title="Recent and archival health news about mental health and disorders.">mental health</a> by redesigning the built environment.</div>
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“Health happens in neighborhoods, not doctors’ offices,” Dr. Jackson states in one of the programs.</div>
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Metropolitan Atlanta, which is 8,000 square miles and growing and where workers drive an average of 66 miles a day, has suffered the ill effects of high ozone levels, few sidewalks and bike lanes, and crosswalks as much as a mile apart. In what may be the crown jewel in environmental restructuring for better health, the city plans to create an urban paradise from an abandoned railroad corridor over the next two decades, with light rail and 22 miles of walking and biking trails.</div>
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In Lakewood, Colo., an abandoned shopping mall (a blight now rampant in suburbia) was converted into housing, businesses and play areas.</div>
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Syracuse is converting an old saltworks district into a mixed-income, energy-smart housing and business area, giving residents easy access to work and recreation. The local supermarket, Nojaim’s, offers health and <a href="http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/specialtopic/food-guide-pyramid/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier" style="color: #666699;" target="_blank" title="In-depth reference and news articles about Diet and Nutrition.">nutrition</a>classes and weekly health checks, and a mobile farmers’ market serves an area that lacks grocery stores.</div>
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Another jewel in environmental restructuring is Elgin, Ill., where an island park was created in the middle of the rejuvenated Fox River and a former<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/superfund/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier" style="color: #666699;" target="_blank" title="More articles about the Superfund program.">Superfund</a> site known as auto dealers’ row is now Festival Park, giving families a place to gather for water play, picnics and musical performances. A Bikeway Master Plan will eventually connect all the neighborhoods, and easy access to the river has spurred investment.</div>
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“For every dollar the city has spent, we have leveraged that into two or three dollars of private investment through new kinds of buildings, row houses and businesses that have opened because the river has a magnetic quality,” said a former mayor of Elgin, Ed Schock. He might have added another economic benefit: the prospect of lower health care costs.</div>
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Further information on healthier communities can be found at<a href="http://www.designinghealthycommunities.org/" style="color: #666699;" target="_blank" title=""Designing Healthy Communities" Web site.">designinghealthycommunities.org</a>.</div>
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<a href="http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/communities-learn-the-good-life-can-be-a-killer/?scp=4&sq=Atlanta&st=cse">http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/communities-learn-the-good-life-can-be-a-killer/?scp=4&sq=Atlanta&st=cse</a>
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</div>AAPREMLALLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05695002558477537063noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769750823409773874.post-30885092029345776982012-08-10T13:38:00.001-04:002012-08-10T13:38:03.445-04:00Our Potential Park Somewhat in the SkyWe have a ways to go, but we're making progress!<br />
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<a href="http://newyork.untappedcities.com/category/architecture/" rel="category tag" style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline-style: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" title="View all posts in Architecture">Architecture</a><span style="color: #555555; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">,</span><span style="color: #555555; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;"> </span><a href="http://newyork.untappedcities.com/category/newyork/" rel="category tag" style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline-style: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" title="View all posts in NEW YORK">NEW YORK</a><span style="color: #555555; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">,</span><span style="color: #555555; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;"> </span><a href="http://newyork.untappedcities.com/category/architecture/transit/" rel="category tag" style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline-style: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" title="View all posts in Transit">Transit</a><span style="color: #555555; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">,</span><span style="color: #555555; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;"> </span><a href="http://newyork.untappedcities.com/category/architecture/urban-exploration/" rel="category tag" style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline-style: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" title="View all posts in Urban Exploration">Urban Exploration</a><span style="color: #555555; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;"> </span><span style="color: #555555; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">— July 25, 2012 10:29 am</span><br />
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<a href="http://newyork.untappedcities.com/2012/07/25/exploring-queensway-an-abandoned-high-line-in-queens/" rel="bookmark" style="clear: both; color: #292929; float: left; font-size: 28px; margin: 6px 0px 10px; outline-style: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; width: 676px;" title="Permanent Link to Exploring QueensWay, An Abandoned High Line in Queens">Exploring QueensWay, An Abandoned High Line in Queens</a></h1>
<span class="author" style="clear: both; color: #8b8a8a; float: left; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: italic; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; width: 676px;">by <a href="http://newyork.untappedcities.com/author/judychang/" rel="author" style="color: black; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline-style: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" title="Posts by judy chang">judy chang</a></span><div class="entry" style="clear: left; color: #211f1f; float: left; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.7; margin: 0px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; width: 676px;">
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What may become the city’s next elevated, 3.5-mile long pedestrian and bike path, now named the QueensWay, is still very much just another ghost of the New York’s past. Yet a short walk down a portion of it in its current, rawest state reveals that it can be just as enchanting as even the city’s most delicately planned parks. Until QueensWay, the surroundings of these tracks are at once history, nature, vandalism, and working- and middle-class single-family homes. Told you New York had it all.</div>
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<a href="http://newyork.untappedcities.com/files/2012/07/Queens-High-Line_QueensWay_Untapped-Cities_Judy-Chang-002.jpg" style="color: #166e96; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline-style: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-18911" height="480" src="http://newyork.untappedcities.com/files/2012/07/Queens-High-Line_QueensWay_Untapped-Cities_Judy-Chang-002.jpg" style="border: 0px none; display: block; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 960px; padding: 0px;" title="Queens High Line_QueensWay_Untapped Cities_Judy Chang-002" width="640" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://newyork.untappedcities.com/files/2012/07/Queens-High-Line_QueensWay_Untapped-Cities_Judy-Chang-003.jpg" style="color: #166e96; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline-style: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-18912" height="480" src="http://newyork.untappedcities.com/files/2012/07/Queens-High-Line_QueensWay_Untapped-Cities_Judy-Chang-003.jpg" style="border: 0px none; display: block; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 960px; padding: 0px;" title="Queens High Line_QueensWay_Untapped Cities_Judy Chang-003" width="640" /></a></div>
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The tracks of the former Rockaway Beach branch of the LIRR (or, less formally, the White Pot Junction line) tear down the center of Queens—starting at Rego Park going toward Howard Beach—and then hang east on trestles toward the Rockaways. It was possible, then, for some residents of Queens to get to Penn Station in half an hour, give or take. As nice (an currently unimaginable) as it was, the point was not convenience to Midtown Manhattan, but the beach, another half hour going the other direction. In a recent <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Queens Gazette </em>column, <a href="http://www.qgazette.com/news/2012-06-27/Features/The_Trains_Stopped_Running_Here_50_Years_Ago.html" style="color: #166e96; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline-style: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Gregory Bresiger breaks down what was apparently quite a scenic route</a>:</div>
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By 1881, it linked up with the LIRR’s Atlantic Avenue branch at Woodhaven. Those going on to the Rockaways transferred at Ozone Park. Just a half mile or so beyond Ozone Park, the service continued to Rockaway Park or on to the LIRR’s other branch on the peninsula, which terminated at Far Rockaway.</div>
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<a href="http://newyork.untappedcities.com/files/2012/07/Queens-High-Line_QueensWay_Untapped-Cities_Judy-Chang-004.jpg" style="color: #166e96; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline-style: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-18913" height="480" src="http://newyork.untappedcities.com/files/2012/07/Queens-High-Line_QueensWay_Untapped-Cities_Judy-Chang-004.jpg" style="border: 0px none; display: block; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 960px; padding: 0px;" title="Queens High Line_QueensWay_Untapped Cities_Judy Chang-004" width="640" /></a></div>
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Until the line fell to infrastructural and financial burden about fifty years ago, the independently operated line carried passengers from central and southern Queens to and from Ozone Park. Part of the line was absorbed as part of the A train in 1956 and is now the southern terminus of the potential QueensWay. (Apparently, the <a href="http://www.qgazette.com/news/2012-06-27/Features/The_Trains_Stopped_Running_Here_50_Years_Ago.html" style="color: #166e96; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline-style: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Ozone Park stop can still be seen</a> from Lefferts Boulevard just past the 102nd Street stop.) Another section lives on as a part of the LIRR’s Rockaway Beach branch, originally going from Glendale to Rockaway Park.</div>
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<a href="http://newyork.untappedcities.com/files/2012/07/Queens-High-Line_QueensWay_Untapped-Cities_Judy-Chang-006.jpg" style="color: #166e96; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline-style: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-18914" height="480" src="http://newyork.untappedcities.com/files/2012/07/Queens-High-Line_QueensWay_Untapped-Cities_Judy-Chang-006.jpg" style="border: 0px none; display: block; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 960px; padding: 0px;" title="Queens High Line_QueensWay_Untapped Cities_Judy Chang-006" width="640" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://newyork.untappedcities.com/files/2012/07/Queens-High-Line_QueensWay_Untapped-Cities_Judy-Chang-005.jpg" style="color: #166e96; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline-style: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-18915" height="480" src="http://newyork.untappedcities.com/files/2012/07/Queens-High-Line_QueensWay_Untapped-Cities_Judy-Chang-005.jpg" style="border: 0px none; display: block; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 960px; padding: 0px;" title="Queens High Line_QueensWay_Untapped Cities_Judy Chang-005" width="640" /></a></div>
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The tracks, mostly quite visible, never quite left the radar of those who either grew up or around them, or in homes that were constructed right next to them after the line was abandoned. And now it’s slated to be <a href="http://www.urbanrelations.info/post/27936191326/the-4-coolest-high-line-inspired-projects" style="color: #166e96; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline-style: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">one of innumerable projects around the world</a> whose hopes of turning old infrastructure into functional, well-designed public space had been realized thanks in part to the completion of the High Line. The Trust for Public Land<a href="http://cloud.tpl.org/pubs/local-ny-queensway-infosheet.pdf" style="color: #166e96; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline-style: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">has announced a partnership</a> with <a href="http://www.facebook.com/FriendsofTheQueensWay" style="color: #166e96; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline-style: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Friends of the QueensWay</a> and the City of New York—who now own the trestles and land underneath the—to produce a feasibility study, cost estimates, and programming to solicit community input. Until then, this abandoned New York City asset can still be viewed in its most exciting state—one that reflects the city’s unrelenting eye for unbridled, trash-into-treasure potential.</div>
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<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">If you haven’t seen the <a href="http://newyork.untappedcities.com/2011/05/26/section-3-the-end-of-the-high-line/" style="color: #166e96; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline-style: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">third section of the High Line</a> in its raw state, check it out before it’s turned into a park.</em></div>
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<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://newyork.untappedcities.com/2012/07/25/exploring-queensway-an-abandoned-high-line-in-queens/">http://newyork.untappedcities.com/2012/07/25/exploring-queensway-an-abandoned-high-line-in-queens/</a>
</em></div>
</div>AAPREMLALLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05695002558477537063noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769750823409773874.post-89127052238145277762012-08-10T13:35:00.002-04:002012-08-10T13:35:34.642-04:00It's Officially an Epidemic!<br />
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<b>What Can We Say? It's The Hottest Trend In Public Spaces!</b></div>
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Everybody Wants a High Line</h1>
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Posted July 27, 2012</div>
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<strong>Keywords</strong>: <a href="http://sustainablecitiescollective.com/all/1898" style="color: #2f6e7f; text-decoration: none;">new york's high line</a>, <a href="http://sustainablecitiescollective.com/all/5699" style="color: #2f6e7f; text-decoration: none;">Redevelopment & Infill</a>, <a href="http://sustainablecitiescollective.com/all/4" style="color: #2f6e7f; text-decoration: none;">Design & Architecture</a>,<a href="http://sustainablecitiescollective.com/all/13" style="color: #2f6e7f; text-decoration: none;">Gardens & Landscapes</a></div>
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<a href="http://aslathedirt.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/highline.jpg" style="color: #2f6e7f;"><img alt="" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-11362" src="http://aslathedirt.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/highline.jpg?w=500" style="border: 1px solid rgb(197, 206, 210); display: block; margin: 15px; max-width: 640px; padding: 2px;" title="highline" /></a><br />With the success of the High Line park in New York City, it seems almost every city now wants one. Toronto has long been batting around <a href="http://dirt.asla.org/2009/07/13/a-high-line-park-for-toronto/" style="color: #2f6e7f; text-decoration: none;">ideas for its Gardiner expressway</a>, while Los Angeles is trying to dream up the money for <a href="http://dirt.asla.org/2010/03/23/in-los-angeles-freeway-cap-park-plans-move-forward/" style="color: #2f6e7f; text-decoration: none;">new parks to cap old freeways</a>. Philadelphia is moving forward with reusing parts of its old rail infrastructure at the <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/17/nyc-high-line-inspires-ph_0_n_1015794.html" style="color: #2f6e7f; text-decoration: none;">Reading Viaduct</a>, while Chicago has already created plans for its own High Line: the <a href="http://www.bloomingdaletrail.org/" style="color: #2f6e7f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Bloomingdale Trail</a>. Now, London wants to get in on the game, with the launch of a new international design competition to create some ideas for an British High Line.</div>
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Sponsored by the The Landscape Institute, Garden Museum, and the Mayor of London, <a href="http://www.landscapeinstitute.org/ideas/" style="color: #2f6e7f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">A High Line for London: Green Infrastructure ideas competition for a new London landscape</a> is clearly inspired by NYC’s recent success story, which they argue “transcended the commonly-accepted role of urban parks to become one of the world’s most popular landmark.”</div>
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Still, they say they don’t want to copy the High Line exactly: “The judges are looking for proposals which similarly engage communities with green infrastructure. Green infrastructure is the network of open and green spaces, including features like green roofs, designed and managed to provide benefits such as flood management, urban cooling, green transport links and ecological connectivity – an approach which can have a huge and exciting impact on the way in which we live in the capital.”</div>
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Judges include High Line founders Joshua David and Robert Hammond; landscape architects Kim Wilkie and Johanna Gibbons; Matthew Pencharz, Environment Advisor to the Mayor of London; and Dr Penelope Curtis, Director of Tate Britain.</div>
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The winning team will get £2,500 and the runner-up £500 as prize money. The finalists will also be displayed in the Garden Museum.</div>
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<a href="http://www.landscapeinstitute.org/ideas/" style="color: #2f6e7f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Submit your ideas by September 14, 2012</a>.</div>
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Also, read more about the “real” High Line effect in a <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-a-birnbaum/the-real-high-line-effect_b_1604217.html" style="color: #2f6e7f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">recent op-ed in <em>The Huffington Post</em></a> by The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) president, Charles Birnbaum, FASLA. Birnbaum says that instead of trying to copy the High Line in an effort to spur economic development and boost tourism, cities should understand that a unique set of circumstances led to the High Line in Chelsea. “In fact, the ‘High Line effect’ should be viewed more broadly as a holistic approach to urban design that suggests how to transform existing urban landscapes to meet contemporary needs. The High Line was almost magically reawakened by a team of landscape architects, architects, horticulturalists, engineers and others, led by James Corner Field Operations. What really happened there is, first and foremost, a triumph of historic preservation and design.”</div>
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<em>Image credit: High Line. 2010 ASLA Professional General Design Award / copyright Iwan Baan.</em></div>
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<a href="http://sustainablecitiescollective.com/dirt/52396/everybody-wants-high-line">http://sustainablecitiescollective.com/dirt/52396/everybody-wants-high-line</a>
</div>AAPREMLALLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05695002558477537063noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769750823409773874.post-22794768851658930222012-06-12T07:00:00.000-04:002012-06-12T07:00:07.212-04:00<br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; line-height: 1.2em;"><span style="font-size: large;">More Reason to Visit Jersey!</span></span></div>
<br /><span style="font-size: large;">Using the High Line as a Model, Jersey City Bets on the Embankment</span></h2>
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Friday, June 08, 2012</h3>
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By <a href="http://www.wnyc.org/people/sharyn-jackson/" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #333333; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; text-transform: uppercase; vertical-align: baseline; word-wrap: break-word;">SHARYN JACKSON</a></div>
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<a href="http://www.wnyc.org/articles/new-jersey-news/2012/jun/08/embankment/#" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #195999; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; word-wrap: break-word;"><img id="imghttp___media_wnyc_org_media_photologue_photos_Embankment_12_rendering_jpg" src="http://media.wnyc.org/media/photologue/photos/cache/Embankment%2012%20rendering_medium_image.jpg" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: bottom;" title="A rendering of what the Embankment could look like." /></a><a class="enlarge_link" href="http://www.wnyc.org/articles/new-jersey-news/2012/jun/08/embankment/#" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: url(http://media.wnyc.org/media/img/wnyc/enlarge-icon.png); background-position: 0px 0px; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border: 0px; bottom: 4px; color: #195999; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 19px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; position: absolute; right: 0px; text-decoration: none; text-indent: -9999px; vertical-align: baseline; width: 19px; word-wrap: break-word;">Enlarge</a></div>
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<span class="caption" style="background-color: transparent; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border: 0px; color: #666666; font-size: 8pt; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">A rendering of what the Embankment could look like.</span> <span class="credit" style="background-color: transparent; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border: 0px; color: #666666; font-size: 8pt; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(Rendering image by RomanP.com)</span></div>
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“It feels more natural in some ways because of these stone walls. And then what’s growing up there is so much more robust and stronger than anything that was ever growing up on the High Line. In the Embankment, you really feel like you have a forest in the middle of Jersey City.”<div class="attribution" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 2px 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
— Robert Hammond, the co-founder and executive director of Friends of the High Line</div>
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At the intersection of Jersey Avenue and 6th Street, in downtown Jersey City, stands an imposing structure of stone and granite that towers over a Brownstone-lined street. Ivy cascades down the sides, while 20- and 30-foot-tall trees grow on top. Huge reddish brown boulders pile up for two stories, with tiny fern-like plants breaking out of the crevices. It’s Stephen Gucciardo’s favorite section of the Embankment, a six-block, half mile-long spur of the Pennsylvania Railroad.</div>
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“Without any of us having touched the Embankment, it’s already a park,” Gucciardo said.</div>
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He is the president of the Embankment Preservation Coalition, a group that has fought to preserve the rail spur that slices through the historic Harsimus Cove neighborhood. The tracks haven’t been used since the early 1990s.</div>
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“The stones are beautiful, the color is delicious. They beautifully fit together, and the top is perfectly level,” Gucciardo said. “You’re looking at master craftsmanship here that was hard to come by and expensive at the turn of the century when this was built.”</div>
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Jersey City residents and government officials are closer than ever to concluding a 13-year<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </strong>battle to acquire the Embankment and turn it into an open space at the center of this urban neighborhood. The process has been saddled by a series of lawsuits involving the city, private developer Steve Hyman and railroad company Conrail, over who has the right to own the property. The issue hinges on arcane federal railroad law over whether Conrail’s sale of the property to Hyman in 2003 for $3 million was legal. So far, the city has spent $500,000 in legal fees, according to corporation counsel Bill Matsikoudis.</div>
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But a settlement authorized by the City Council in February may finally move the process forward — if Conrail and Hyman sign on. Under the terms of the settlement, Hyman would get $20 million, Conrail would get development rights on one block of the Embankment, and the city would pay $7 million for the remaining five blocks to build a park and mass transit corridor. The Council voted unanimously to authorize the settlement in February.</div>
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(<em style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Photo: Stephen Gucciardo and others hope the Embankment, left, can be preserved like the High Line, right.</em>)</div>
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The city wasn’t always so supportive of the project. The price tag for the acquisition, legal fees, clean up, planning and building could cost upwards of $50 million dollars, Mayor Jerramiah Healy explained. He admits it took some convincing to get him on board, but was ultimately won over by the possibility of extending the New Jersey Transit Light Rail along the Embankment, from the Hudson River waterfront all the way to Secaucus.</div>
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“You know, we’re always concerned about the bottom line here in Jersey City and you can’t hit the tax payers over the head all the time, so that was a concern,” Healy stressed.</div>
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But the success of the High Line across the Hudson has also shown officials what could be possible in Jersey City.</div>
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“I would say we get a call almost every week from somebody doing a similar kind of project,” said Robert Hammond, the co-founder and executive director of Friends of the High Line. “They’re not all elevated rail lines, but they’re just community-initiated projects of reclaiming industrial space and trying use them in different ways.”</div>
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Hammond serves on the advisory council for the Embankment, and one piece of advice he passed on is remembering that the High Line wasn’t always what it is today.</div>
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<img alt="" height="246" src="https://media.wnyc.org/media/photologue/photos/highline_highline_path_grass.jpg" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; float: right; margin: 5px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: bottom;" width="326" />“In the beginning almost all the main groups were opposed to it,” Hammond recalled. <strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">“</strong>To some people they just thought it was a relic and wasn’t attractive, and would look better torn down. To others, there was a lot of people that [said], ‘Oh it’s a great idea but it’s never going to happen.’”</div>
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(<em style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Photo: The High Line before its transformation.</em>/<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Courtesy of The Friends of the High Line</strong>)</div>
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Now the High Line is one of New York City’s most popular attractions, drawing more than 7 million visitors since the first section opened in 2009. That was the same year, Hammond toured Jersey City’s Embankment, and was impressed by what he saw.</div>
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Hammond thinks the “Embankment has a whole other feel to it” than the High Line.</div>
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“It feels more natural in some ways because of these stone walls. And then what’s growing up there is so much more robust and stronger than anything that was ever growing up on the High Line. In the Embankment, you really feel like you have a forest in the middle of Jersey City,” he explained.</div>
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Jersey City Councilman Steven Fulop, whose district encompasses the Embankment, is optimistic that the project will follow in the High Line’s footsteps. “We think we have an opportunity here to create something at least as powerful, if not better,” Fulop said.</div>
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If all three parties agree on the legal settlement, the city could acquire the land in as few as six months. But if the other litigants don’t agree to the terms, another court battle could set the project back five or six more years. With the neighborhood around New York’s High Line booming, city officials are more motivated than ever to see the project through to the finish.</div>
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And that excites residents in the neighborhood. Dolores Rennar has lived on 6th Street facing the Embankment for all of her 68 years, and fondly remembers the railroad where her grandfather worked. </div>
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“I loved it,” Rennar said. “The kids used to write their names on the wall, and climb it to get coal.”</div>
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“I don’t care what they turn it into,” Rennar added, referring to the plans for the Embankment, “as long as they don’t take it down.”</div>
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<a href="http://www.wnyc.org/articles/new-jersey-news/2012/jun/08/embankment/">http://www.wnyc.org/articles/new-jersey-news/2012/jun/08/embankment/</a>
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</div>AAPREMLALLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05695002558477537063noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769750823409773874.post-10588318591552927702012-05-09T00:46:00.000-04:002012-06-12T02:34:26.964-04:00<br />
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<tr><td style="padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 10px; padding-right: 5px; padding-top: 0px;" valign="top" width="100%"><span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;"><i>September 12, 2011</i></span> <span class="bdyTitle" style="color: #990000; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 14px;"><br /><br />High Hopes for the Harsimus Embankment: </span><br />
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<span class="bdySubTitle" style="font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold; line-height: 14px;">The Fight to Create an Elevated Rail-Trail in New Jersey</span><span class="bdySubHead" style="font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 14px;">By <a class="bdySubHead" href="mailto:jake@railstotrails.org" style="color: black;" target="_blank">Jake Lynch</a></span><br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4769750823409773874" name="start"></a><span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">Standing next to the towering walls of century-old brownstone, looking up at the mist of sunlight pouring through wild foliage above, the vision for what the Harsimus Embankment could one day become forms easily.</span><br />
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<img alt="© Rails-to-Trails Conservancy" border="0" height="300" hspace="5" src="http://www.railstotrails.org/resources/images/wherewework/northeast/harsimus_wall.jpg" vspace="5" width="199" /><br />
<span class="photoCaption" style="color: #666666; font-size: 9px; line-height: 12px; text-align: right;">The Harsimus Embankment runs six<br />blocks through downtown Jersey City.</span></div>
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">The passage of time has already begun the work of transforming this unused elevated railway embankment in the heart of Jersey City, N.J., into an urban oasis. From the moment the trains stopped running in the early 1990s, Mother Nature took over. Today, the embankment supports a two-story-high, 100-foot wide, six-block wilderness of Cherry trees, wildflowers and grasses. Monarch butterflies stop for milkweed on their annual migrations south to Mexico. Attracted by the nectar, pollen and insects, mockingbirds and chickadees have moved in, their chirps and whistles replacing the industrial sounds of a bygone era.</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">The Harsimus Stem Embankment, or Sixth Street Embankment, as it is sometimes known, was built in the early 1900s as the residents of Jersey City demanded some relief from the constant rail traffic bringing produce and cattle to Harsimus Cove and the shores of the Hudson River. Local lore has it that every now and then a condemned cow or sheep would make a last-ditch attempt at freedom, leaping from the cars and charging wild-eyed through the streets of Jersey City.</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">Built from quarry-cut brown sandstone ashlar, the six block-long segments of the embankment carried seven rail lines 27 feet above street level, connected by steel bridges between each block. The bridges were removed in the mid-1990s. What remains now is not only an edifice imbued with an irreplaceable local history, but also a structure uniquely suited to becoming an urban corridor of greenspace in a time and place where such opportunities are increasingly rare. New Jersey currently ranks first in the nation among states in terms of population density and is projected to be the first fully built-out state by 2050.</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">In 1999, the entire site was listed in the New Jersey State Register of Historic Places and declared eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. It is also an official Municipal Landmark.</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">So when a booming real estate economy in the late 1990s began to raise questions as to the future of the embankment, a group of local preservationists, businesspeople and families came together to ensure that development of the site was appropriate to the character of this historical neighborhood. Then, in 2005 a development company purchased the embankment site, and the owners stated their intention to demolish the structure.</span><br />
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<img alt="© Rails-to-Trails Conservancy" border="0" height="199" hspace="5" src="http://www.railstotrails.org/resources/images/wherewework/northeast/harsimus_street.jpg" vspace="5" width="300" /><br />
<span class="photoCaption" style="color: #666666; font-size: 9px; line-height: 12px; text-align: right;">Mother Nature currently reigns on the top of the embankment.</span></div>
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">"The community initially came together in response to news that the embankment might be demolished to make way for townhomes," says Stephen Gucciardo, president of the<a class="drkBlue12Bold" href="http://www.embankment.org/" style="color: #003399; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Harsimus Embankment Preservation Coalition</a>. "Neighbors recalled childhood memories, and the friends and relatives that worked on the railroad. A local historian described the defining role of the railroads in shaping Jersey City and the region. What evolved was an appreciation for the historical significance of the structure."</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">What also emerged was a remarkable vision: an elevated park along the top of the embankment, a linear escape running six blocks to the shores of the Hudson River, west to east, connected by walkways above the cross streets.</span><br />
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<span class="bdySubTitle" style="font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold; line-height: 14px;">The Project</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">The park would not only be a spectacular place for people to relax and play, but a central pathway running through the embankment park would also provide a vital connection for pedestrians and cyclists, safely above the traffic below.</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">Though efforts to bring the embankment vision to fruition are currently embroiled in complex legal proceedings between supporters, the city and developers, the Harsimus Embankment Preservation Coalition continues to generate support and energy throughout the region for a New Jersey cousin to the now-famous </span><a class="drkBlue12Bold" href="http://www.thehighline.org/" style="color: #003399; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">High Line</a><span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;"> in New York City.</span><br />
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<img alt="© Rails-to-Trails Conservancy" border="0" height="199" hspace="5" src="http://www.railstotrails.org/resources/images/wherewework/northeast/harsimus_houses.jpg" vspace="5" width="300" /><br />
<span class="sidebarBody" style="font-size: 10px; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="color: grey;">The Harsimus, if preserved as a linear park, would<br />provide a true community pathway and neighborhood<br />space in the heart of New Jersey.</span></span></div>
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">While the embankment is considerably wider and lower to the ground than the High Line, the opportunities for smart development are the same. After visiting the embankment in 2009, Friends of the High Line co-founder Robert Hammond wrote on his blog, "I was blown away immediately... The Embankment holds an untouched beauty, and really reminded me of the feelings I had years ago in the early days of the High Line. It's another amazing opportunity for a great linear public space."</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">Just as the High Line would likely still be an out-of-service rail line if not for the persevering effort and lobbying of a dedicated group of citizens, a team of astute, passionate Jersey City residents has mobilized behind the embankment project, inspired by its tremendous potential for the city. According to Gucciardo, a community park and pathway is a natural fit for the structure, given the requirements of repurposing rail corridors and preserving structures. "Our city's historic preservation ordinance provided the guiding principles," he says. "It states that the structure [must] support an original or compatible use, and that there be minimal alterations. A pedestrian and bicycle greenway was the logical direction—there would be little or no impact to the landmark, and it would remain a transportation corridor."</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">Also, beyond the benefits of a public space for recreation and transportation, the embankment has attracted numerous supporters who envision its connection to a broader network.</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">The <a class="drkBlue12Bold" href="http://greenway.org/index.shtml" style="color: #003399; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">East Coast Greenway Alliance (ECGA)</a>, an influential group of planners and trails advocates, has had enormous success during the last 20 years in creating a continuous route from Maine down to Florida. They have identified the embankment as a key off-road connection from Newark east to the Hudson River waterfront. ECGA and the <a class="drkBlue12Bold" href="http://www.jclandmarks.org/" style="color: #003399; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy</a> are looking at developing a connecting trail through the historical Erie Cut and Bergen Arches, a rail cut driven deep through the rock of the Palisades in the early 1900s.</span><br />
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<img alt="© Rails-to-Trails Conservancy" border="0" height="300" hspace="5" src="http://www.railstotrails.org/resources/images/wherewework/northeast/harsimus_sign.jpg" vspace="5" width="199" /><br />
<span class="sidebarBody" style="font-size: 10px; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="color: grey;">Like the High Line, a trail along the<br />Harsimus Embankment would create<br />a safe corridor above city traffic.</span></span></div>
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">Jersey City elected officials and planning staff, too, have thrown their support behind the project. The current city administration has put an emphasis on addressing density concerns with urban greenspace to boost not only quality of life indices but also property values and tax receipts.</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">The embankment has also been talked about in city hall as a connection to a possible future light-rail station, the perfect connection to a recreational hub, a vibrant downtown area and non-motorized pathways throughout the region.</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">The <a class="drkBlue12Bold" href="http://www.waterfrontalliance.org/" style="color: #003399; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance</a> is one of a number of groups in the Tri-State area to endorse the idea of an embankment greenway.</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">"Together, the Embankment, the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway and the creation of the East Coast Greenway linking to New York to the cast and Kearney and Newark to the west could transform the nationwide perception of Jersey City from just another toll plaza to one of the most livable cities in the region and possibly nation," wrote Alliance co-founder Carter Craft in the<i>New York Times</i>. Others stress that park space would be preferable to housing developments in helping reduce the effects of stormwater runoff on an already pollution-stressed Hudson River.</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">The recreational, social economic and environmental benefits of an embankment greenway seem obvious to everyone involved. Except, that is, the current owners of the site.</span><br />
<a class="drkBlue12Bold" href="http://www.railstotrails.org/ourWork/whereWeWork/northeast/harsimus.html#start" style="color: #003399; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Back to top</a><br />
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<span class="bdySubTitle" style="font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold; line-height: 14px;">In the Courtroom</span><br />
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<img alt="© Rails-to-Trails Conservancy" border="0" height="199" hspace="5" src="http://www.railstotrails.org/resources/images/wherewework/northeast/harsimus_corner.jpg" vspace="5" width="300" /><br />
<span class="sidebarBody" style="font-size: 10px; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="color: grey;">Pending a case in the U.S. Court of Appeals, the<br />embankment could be torn down to make way for<br />townhomes.</span></span></div>
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">Though it is always exciting to be there for the ribbon cutting, the opening day celebration or the community dedication, these happy events are often only the epilogue of a long and challenging process to bring a great trail idea to fruition. The Harsimus Embankment is a good example of how Rails-to-Trails Conservancy's (RTC) involvement in this process goes beyond fundraising, building and promotion.</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">At this very moment, the plan to transform the Harsimus Embankment into a recreational space and greenway for the whole community is under consideration in the United States Court of Appeals. Though the legal intricacies make for a lengthy and convoluted story, the short version goes something like this: The six-block site of the embankment, plus two at-grade parcels of the rail right-of-way, is currently owned by New Jersey developers Steve and Victoria Hyman, who bought the site from the rail company Conrail in 2005 for about $3 million. Their stated intention was to tear down the embankment and build townhouses.</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">That sale, however, ignored long-established <a class="drkBlue12Bold" href="http://www.railstotrails.org/ourwork/advocacy/policyandfunding/railbanking.html" style="color: #003399; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">federal rail abandonment legislation</a> that affords significant opportunities to protect and preserve rail corridors for continued and future public use as a transportation corridor—an effort to mitigate the loss of the rail line as a public asset.</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">RTC was one of three groups, along with Jersey City and the Embankment Coalition, to challenge the legality of the sale of the embankment to developers. The suit successfully argued to the Surface Transportation Board (STB), the regulatory agency charged with resolving rail-related disputes, that the embankment was a federally regulated rail line that could not be sold to the developers without the STB's permission.</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">With many millions of dollars at stake, lawyers for the developer responded with a complex series of appeals and motions, including a SLAPP suit (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation), filed against RTC, RTC's lawyers and the other opponents of the sale.</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">A SLAPP suit is a tactic often used by developers and other private interests with substantial financial and legal resources to tie up public advocates and nonprofit groups in expensive legal proceedings. In this instance, the developer, represented in court as eight Limited Liability Companies (LLCs), alleged a range of minor violations against RTC and the other opponents.</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">The purpose of a SLAPP suit is to force nonprofit organizations and citizens groups to back down, unable to make fundraising keep pace with growing legal bills. And it often works. But not this time.</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">In July 2011, the Superior Court of New Jersey dismissed the SLAPP suit and ruled in favor of RTC, the Embankment Coalition and the city.</span><br />
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<img alt="© Roman Pohorecki" border="0" height="199" hspace="5" src="http://www.railstotrails.org/resources/images/wherewework/northeast/harsimus_rendering.jpg" vspace="5" width="300" /><br />
<span class="photoCaption" style="color: #666666; font-size: 9px; line-height: 12px; text-align: right;">Design rendering of a bridge connector between two of the six<br />block-long segments of the embankment.</span></div>
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">In his ruling, Judge Maurice J. Gallipoli wrote, "The federal rail abandonment legislation has been in place since 1976, giving ample notice to the LLCs of the potential risk associated with their purchase that could prove, and apparently has proven, quite troublesome."</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">Not surprisingly, the developers have appealed Judge Gallipoli's decision. However, the provisional dismissal of the SLAPP suit allowed RTC, Jersey City and the Embankment Coalition to continue their legal fight to preserve the embankment. The case is set to be heard by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on October 18, 2011.</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">That the developer and Conrail have been called out on their deal, which was meant to circumvent a legislated process established to protect the public good in cases exactly like this one, is credit not only to the energy and vigilance of the Embankment Coalition and the people of Jersey City, but also to the legal expertise of RTC and the support of our members.</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">Since 1986, RTC's lawyers have argued the case for preserving rail corridors as public recreation and transportation assets at the local, national and federal levels in more than 50 cases, as well as before Congress and administrative agencies. RTC is the foremost, and often the only, legal advocate for rail-trails in the United States.</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">In 1990, RTC's <i>pro bono</i> attorneys were involved in the landmark <i>Preseault v. the Interstate Commerce Commission</i> case, in which the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the constitutionality of railbanking (the preservation of rail corridors for interim public use as a trail), paving the way for thousands of miles of rail-trails nationwide.</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">Since then, <a class="drkBlue12Bold" href="http://www.railstotrails.org/ourWork/advocacy/litigation/index.html" style="color: #003399; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Andrea Ferster</a>, RTC's general counsel since 1992, aided by a dedicated group of law firms doing invaluable <i>pro bono</i> work for RTC, has fought for the preservation and public acquisition of rail lines for the common enjoyment of the American people.</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">Without RTC's legal intervention on behalf of rail-trail projects, our national trails landscape would not look how it does today.</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">Matt Cohen, an RTC board member and attorney who lives in Seattle, points out that trail projects often encounter legal challenges. "It is not enough that Congress sought to preserve inactive rail corridors through the railbanking program," he says. "Local governments and friends-of-the-trail groups often face lawsuits from developers or property owners who have their own plans for a line. Underfunded local governments often turn to RTC's legal department for expert guidance when they are named in a lawsuit. Our success in defending trails frequently stems from key judicial precedents established through the hard work of Andrea and her volunteer lawyers."</span><br />
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<img alt="© Cassandra Wilday Landscape Architects" border="0" height="179" hspace="5" src="http://www.railstotrails.org/resources/images/wherewework/northeast/harsimus_ramp.jpg" vspace="5" width="300" /><br />
<span class="sidebarBody" style="font-size: 10px; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span style="color: grey;">Rendering of a street access point up to the Harsimus<br />Embankment.</span></span></div>
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">The <a class="drkBlue12Bold" href="http://www.traillink.com/trail/paul-bunyan-state-trail.aspx" style="color: #003399; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Paul Bunyan State Trail</a> in Minnesota and the <a class="drkBlue12Bold" href="http://www.traillink.com/trail/armstrong-trail.aspx" style="color: #003399; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Armstrong Trail</a> in Pennsylvania head a list of many trails successfully defended against lawsuits with the expert legal advocacy of Ferster and RTC's partner <i>pro bono</i>attorneys. It is a service we are proud to provide, and one that is funded entirely by RTC members.</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">"Andrea's work might not be the most visible component of the many things we do, but it is certainly among the most critical," says RTC President Keith Laughlin. "While community groups and municipalities have demonstrated time and time again they have the enthusiasm and energy to make trails projects happen, it's our job to make sure the legal framework is in place to facilitate trail development whenever and wherever possible."</span><br />
<span class="bdytxt" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px;">RTC also provided legal expertise to clear the way for development of the High Line. With that project hailed as an social, economic and environmental success, RTC is now working to help the people of Jersey City have a say in the future of their community.</span><br />
<a class="drkBlue12Bold" href="http://www.railstotrails.org/ourWork/whereWeWork/northeast/harsimus.html#start" style="color: #003399; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Back to top</a></td></tr>
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<span class="black11"><span class="copyright" style="color: #666666; font-size: 10px; line-height: 16px;">Photos (left to right & top to bottom): Top image rendering of Harsimus Embankment trail concept © Cassandra Wilday Landscape Architects; images of Harsimus Embankment © Rails-to-Trails Conservancy; design rendering of trail along elevated linear park © Roman Pohorecki; artist rendering of future embankment street access © Cassandra Wilday Landscape Architects.</span></span><br />
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</tbody></table>AAPREMLALLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05695002558477537063noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769750823409773874.post-19094652655842597282012-03-06T08:00:00.000-05:002012-03-06T08:00:18.013-05:00High Line Deux<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><b>A New High Line for New York</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Similar to the struggles of the original High Line in NYC, </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">t</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">his version also aims to protect </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">a structure from destruction. </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It's going to be so beautiful. I want to visit it now! The Queens </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">(High) Line has a long ways to go before any major decisions are made. Interestingly enough, </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">the idea of turning the 3.5 mile abandoned rains doesn't get as much support from the powers</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">that be. Is it a matter of location? In any case, we'll all benefit from another touch of green.</span></div>
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<a href="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/02/23/nyregion/TAPPAN/TAPPAN-articleLarge.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="352" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/02/23/nyregion/TAPPAN/TAPPAN-articleLarge.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px; text-align: left; white-space: normal;"> The Tappan Zee Bridge will be replaced, and one proposal envisions the original as a suburban High Line.</span>
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February 22, 2012</div>
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<nyt_headline type=" " version="1.0">State to Look at Turning Tappan Zee Into Walkway</nyt_headline></h1>
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By <a class="meta-per" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/nyregion/columns/peterapplebome/?inline=nyt-per" rel="author" style="color: #666699; text-decoration: none;" title="More Articles by Peter Applebome">PETER APPLEBOME</a></h6>
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</span></nyt_byline><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;"></span><nyt_text style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;"><nyt_correction_top></nyt_correction_top><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 1em;">
It seemed quixotic at first, but maybe the idea of turning the Tappan Zee Bridge into a walkway after a new bridge is built is not so far fetched after all.</div>
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State officials said Wednesday that they were exploring the possibility of turning the three-mile-long bridge into a route for pedestrians and bicyclists along the lines of the <a class="meta-classifier" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/h/high_line_nyc/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier" style="color: #666699; text-decoration: none;" title="">High Line</a> on the West Side of Manhattan, or the equally successful Walkway Over the Hudson linking Poughkeepsie and Highland.</div>
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Gov. <a class="meta-per" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/andrew_m_cuomo/index.html?inline=nyt-per" style="color: #666699; text-decoration: none;" title="More articles about Andrew M. Cuomo.">Andrew M. Cuomo</a> and aides said at a cabinet meeting in Albany that it would cost $150 million to demolish the existing bridge, which carries the New York State Thruway, so turning it into a walkway connecting Rockland and Westchester Counties was worth exploring.</div>
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“Could you leave it up, and what are the economics and the practicalities of that?” Mr. Cuomo said at the meeting. “It’s an exciting option.”</div>
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After more than 10 years of study, building a new bridge finally seemed to reach critical mass last fall when it was one of 14 projects chosen by the Obama administration for expedited federal review and approval — possibly allowing work on a new $5 billion bridge to begin as early as spring 2013. The bridge is 56 years old — 6 years past its anticipated life span — and needs $50 million in maintenance and repairs annually.</div>
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After the project was announced, the idea of preserving the old bridge was raised by Paul Feiner, the Greenburgh town supervisor, who proposed a walkway. The idea immediately gained support from biking and pedestrian groups. In January, the newly formed Tappan Bridge Park Alliance said that a walkway “would generate economic and community development to the region by providing a world-class destination and a much needed open space in the congested Lower Hudson Valley.”</div>
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The initial reactions from public officials were cool, and some said the steep pitch of the Tappan Zee, compared, for example, with the flat Walkway Over the Hudson, could make a park plan impractical.</div>
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But on Wednesday, Mr. Cuomo and Thomas Madison, executive director of the State Thruway Authority, endorsed further study of the project. They indicated it might make more sense to create a walkway than to tear down the existing bridge.</div>
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“I’m so excited,” Mr. Feiner said Wednesday in an e-mail. “This could become a world-class destination point.”</div>
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Despite overall applause for the coming bridge replacement, there has also been criticism that the fast progress has come at the expense of the optimal project. Transit advocates are upset that the new bridge will not include rail lines or bus service.</div>
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The Tri-State Transportation Campaign, a nonprofit group advocating for alternatives to motor-vehicle use, recently began running radio and newspaper advertisements that criticized the absence of mass transit in the current design. Hearings on the project’s environmental impact statement are scheduled for Feb. 28 in West Nyack and for March 1 in Tarrytown.</div>
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Mr. Madison and Mr. Cuomo said that the new bridge would provide areas for bikers and walkers, unlike the old one, and that it was being built to support mass transit, which can be added when more money is available.</div>
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“There has been criticism that we’ll build a bridge that doesn’t support rail,” the governor said. “That’s not true. The bridge will support the rail. The question is the rest of the system that doesn’t exist. We’re actually building a bridge that is ahead of the existing system.”</div>
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<nyt_update_bottom></nyt_update_bottom></nyt_text><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;"></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />AAPREMLALLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05695002558477537063noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769750823409773874.post-78306918685349440472012-03-01T07:00:00.000-05:002012-03-01T07:00:15.957-05:00High (Line) Hopes for New Jersey<h1 style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large; line-height: 41px;">High (Line) Hopes for New Jersey</span></h1>
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<span style="color: #000099; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-weight: normal; text-align: -webkit-auto;">Similar dreams, struggles and efforts to create High Line's all around the world, this one is closer to home!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">High Line Hopes in Jersey City</span></h1>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">By <a href="http://online.wsj.com/search/term.html?KEYWORDS=HEATHER+HADDON&bylinesearch=true" style="color: #093d72; letter-spacing: 1px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; text-decoration: none; text-transform: uppercase;">HEATHER HADDON</a></span></h3>
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<span style="color: #666666; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 10px; text-align: right;"> Roman Pohorecki</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">A rendering of a potential plan for the Sixth Street Embankment in Jersey City has walkways and bike paths.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">After a seemingly endless legal battle, Jersey City is on the verge of getting its own version of Manhattan's High Line.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">An abandoned elevated railway known as the Sixth Street Embankment has been the subject of a litigious preservation effort for more than a decade. Local groups and city officials want to transform the half-a-mile long stone structure into a grassy, landscaped park with skyline views, spanning Jersey City's gentrifying neighborhoods.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The park is also envisioned as an important link in a greenway spanning the East Coast.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Now, after a federal judge ruled against a developer blocking the park, a settlement that would hand control of the railway to Jersey City has been drafted and is awaiting approval.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"This has been an epic legal struggle," said William Matsikoudis, the Jersey City municipal attorney, who estimated the city has spent more than $500,000 in legal fees on the battle. "We're one step away from a settlement that will provide a world-class amenity for the people for Jersey City."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">So far, the settlement has been tentatively approved by two of the three main litigants: Jersey City officials and Steve Hyman, a Manhattan investor who purchased the embankment from Consolidated Rail Corp. for $3 million in 2003 to knock it down and build housing. The city sued Conrail for making the sale, and Mr. Hyman, in turn, sued the city.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Under the terms of the settlement, the city would pay Mr. Hyman $7 million and Conrail would chip in $13 million to settle all the pending litigation, according to people familiar with the matter. Conrail would get development rights along the edges of the embankment, which could yield at least 300 housing units potentially valued at $10.5 million, other people familiar with the matter said.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Jersey City Council is set to vote on the settlement Wednesday, and it appears likely to pass, said Councilman Steven Fulop, a project proponent.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The last remaining obstacle is Conrail, which is still examining the deal and wants a "number of open items" addressed, said Kevin Coakley, a partner at Connell Foley, who is representing the company. He wouldn't elaborate. "Conrail is hopeful a settlement can be achieved," he said.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Mr. Hyman, who has spent millions of dollars on the court cases, has signed the settlement, said one of his attorneys, Daniel Horgan. "Everybody wants it over with," said Mr. Horgan. "We would like everybody else to sign on it."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Even with Conrail's approval, the Jersey City version of the High Line may be a long way from reality. Initial construction could begin next year, Mr. Matsikoudis said, but designs haven't been finalized for the 110-year-old structure, formally known as the Harsimus Stem Embankment. The city would likely hold a design competition.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Still, hopes are high. It is "equal to or better than New York's High Line," said city Mayor Jerramiah Healy in a statement.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The sandstone-and-granite structure rises to 27 feet at its highest point and once carried Pennsylvania Railroad freight trains along seven tracks to the Hudson River waterfront. Conrail took over the embankment in the 1970s, but rail traffic ceased and nature took over. Ivy covers the walls and the structure is now a regular way station for monarch butterflies migrating from Canada to Mexico.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Early ideas to transform it into a park include landscaping the trees and plants already growing on top. A meandering walking trail and a bike path are possibilities along the 100-foot wide embankment, which is wider than the High Line, said Stephen Gucciardo, president of the Embankment Preservation Coalition, a volunteer group formed to save the historic relic.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Advocates want a "grand entrance" to the park's eastern section, while the western section would return to ground level and connect to the Bergen Arches, a railroad tunnel that runs through the Palisades.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The abandoned tunnel feels remote despite the highways and development around it, said Mr. Gucciardo. "It's like coming upon some kind of Mayan temple that has been overgrown. It's lost in time," he said.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The dream for advocates is to connect the embankment to the 2,600-mile East Coast Greenway, a trail that is under development from Maine to Florida. In New Jersey, 20% of the 93-mile trail is complete, said Rails to Trails, an advocacy group that promotes trails along railways.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The saga over the Sixth Street Embankment began in 1998, when former Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler decided to knock it down for housing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">There was an outcry from residents, who in 1999 succeeded in getting the embankment added to the State Register of Historic Places. The City Council voted in 2004 to take it over for a 6.5-acre park by eminent domain.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The city sued Conrail in 2005 for selling the land to Mr. Hyman, who then filed a dozen separate suits over myriad issues involving the land.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Settlement negotiations got a shot in the arm Friday when the U.S. Court of Appeals rejected Mr. Hyman's case and backed the city.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><strong style="font-weight: bold;">Write to </strong>Heather Haddon at <a class="" href="mailto:heather.haddon@wsj.com" style="color: #093d72; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial;">heather.haddon@wsj.com</a></span></div>
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<a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204136404577207602302461274.html"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204136404577207602302461274.html</span></a>
</div>AAPREMLALLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05695002558477537063noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769750823409773874.post-84392479179677433192012-02-03T16:48:00.001-05:002012-02-03T16:48:23.439-05:00Anandi Hearts Queens!<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: large;">Gratitude and Love for Queens!</span></b></div>
<b><br /></b><br />
<i>Honored and Humbled to be featured in the Queens Ledger / Brooklyn Star's "On the Record" as community & environmental activist." Thanks for the great recognition for the work that I do and for highlighting the passion I have for creating community and beautiful spaces in Queens. </i><br />
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<i>Thank you all for the love! </i></div>
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<i>~Anandi</i></div>
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<b>Anandi Premlall, Community activist</b></div>
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by <span class="author vcard"><span class="fn">Lisa A. Fraser</span></span></div>
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<span class="story_item_date updated" title="2012-01-27T08:49:36Z">Jan 27, 2012</span><span class="signature_email_message" id="email_content_message_17311412" style="color: black; font-size: larger; font-weight: bold;"></span></div>
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If anyone is paying attention to the news in South Queens, one hot button issue is the prospect of a Queens Greenway at the abandoned LIRR tracks running along Woodhaven Boulevard, much like Manhattan's Highline Park. And one voice in the mix, which dominantly stands out among all others, is Anandi Premlall's, the South Ozone Park resident who has taken it upon herself to advocate for more green space in this part of Queens.<br /><br />“We don't have a lot of Green space in Ozone Park, South Ozone Park and Jamaica, unlike a lot of other places in Queens,” she said. “I feel this would really develop the community in a really good way and preserve the history for generations.”<br /><br />Premlall, who has lived in South Queens for over 20 years, has seen how the communities have become more familial in nature, and feels that the Greenway will provide a safer feeling for those living in the areas near to the abandoned track.<br /><br />The issue is not a first for Premlall. She has always been involved in advocating for a better environment. The Guyanese-born Queensite has planted trees around the South Queens area, done tree stewarding in Forest Park, and is also part of Grow Richmond Hill, an active social, cultural and civic organization.<br /><br />“It's all about creating beautiful space and creating community,” she said. “One of the best ways to do that is to have great spaces where people could meet and relax, hold events.”<br /><br />Her main vision is to see a “sustainable community space in the area to hold multigenerational, multiethnic, safe and fun events that are also, what she calls, “edutaining” - mixing education with entertainment.<br /><br />“We have such busy lives, sometimes we don't even know who our next door neighbor is but 20 years ago we knew all our neighbors; this could make us be more connected,” she said.<br /><br />Premlall's love of the natural world doesn't stop there. Also a lover of poetry since she was a child, she recently published a Haiku entitled “One” in an anthology, “The Poetry of Yoga”. The poem, she says, is about connecting with nature, something she always strives for in her daily life.<br /><br />In addition to voicing her opinion about a Queens Highline, Premlall is also involved in ayurvedic nutrition classes, master composting in Queens and social media consulting. Her day job involves helping people create beautiful indoor spaces.</div>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; text-align: left;"><br /><br />Read more: <a href="http://queensledger.com/view/full_story/17311412/article-Anandi-Premlall--Community-activist#ixzz1lM5MBV6w" style="color: #003399; text-decoration: none;">Queens Ledger - Anandi Premlall Community activist</a> </span>AAPREMLALLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05695002558477537063noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769750823409773874.post-66625419149566391702012-01-31T07:00:00.000-05:002012-01-31T07:00:00.088-05:00Spaces that Heal<div style="text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Doesn't it feel refreshing to take a walk among lush greenery? I don't know about you, but I still feel in awe when I look up at trees and their majestic stature, or enter a garden with insects buzzing, colorful buds and petals and smells of pure earthy goodness, nectar, or the scent of herbs crushed under my foot. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">There is definitely something magical about being in a space that offers so much solace and is unlike where we spend most of our time, especially those of us living in urban areas. How many of us have access to parks or public spaces that have more than asphalt, more than a few potted plants or shrubs? It may seem like a luxury to some, but it's something that could very well heal much that ails us. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Who's up to cultivate healthier, more sustainable lifestyles and communities that promote wellness?</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">How Does your Garden Grow? The role of Therapeutic Landscapes in Design</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">What does landscaping mean to you? Most likely, not nearly enough. Too easily, we view it as decorative, a “nice to have” part of a project. However, as we learn more about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salutogenesis">salutogenic</a>design and the effects of the environment on wellness (everything from healing to better job performance), landscape starts to become a critical element, one which should form the basis of design. With this in mind, I asked Naomi Sachs, Founder and Director of the<a href="http://www.healinglandscapes.org/">Therapeutic Landscapes Network</a> (TLN) to share some insights on the power of nature. Naomi is a landscape architect and recognized expert in therapeutic landscape design, and part of the Center for Health Design’s<a href="http://www.healthdesign.org/chd/about-chd/volunteer-councils/environmental-standards-council">Environmental Standards Council</a> working on expanding the Environment of Care section of the <a href="http://www.fgiguidelines.org/">2014 Guidelines for Design and Construction of Health Care Facilities</a>. Rather that helping afflicted people to feel less bad, her goal is to use landscape to make them feel good:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Usually, when architects think about landscaping, we think about outdoor rooms or ways to enhance areas like building entries or parking lots. What are your suggestions for getting more landscaping inside of buildings?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Nature needs to be viewed as a part of the built environment. While being out in nature is best, bringing it indoors with interior gardens, atria, or even potted plants is the next best thing. A great recent example of nature incorporated within the building is the Stoneman Healing Garden at <a href="http://www.crja.com/healthcare/stoneman.htm">Dana Farber’s Yawkey Center for Cancer Care</a>. Providing windows is an excellent way to allow visual access to nature, which is especially important when people can’t go outside. Allowing for views out also lets natural light in (one study found that patients in east facing rooms who were exposed to morning sunlight did better than other patients), and “advertises” the garden, which then encourages use. Research has also shown that while images of nature, like artwork or videos, do help people, they are not as effective as views of nature through a window or – best yet - an experience of real nature. Using natural materials (wood, stone, etc.) is another way to “bring nature in” to an indoor space.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In terms of facilitating access to the outdoors, transitions from one to the other are critical: Architects must design to minimize barriers (providing flat thresholds, doors that are easy to open, etc.) and allow for transitional spaces, such as a paved area with an awning where people can enjoy the outdoors close to the building, even in inclement weather, and can get a sense of the space before they venture out into it. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">How do you explain the link between nature and wellness?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Biophilia – our innate attraction to life and living things - is intangible, but research is working towards measurable results. The book Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being, by the neuroscientist Esther Sternberg, addresses the role of nature not only in reducing stress, but also in eliciting positive psychological and physiological responses. For example, Sternberg documents how seratonin receptors in the brain, when exposed to positive sensory stimuli, light up. She posits that being outside creates multiple positive stimuli (and therefore more seratonin) because it’s a multi-sensory environment. You can hear the birds, feel the sun on your face, smell flowers or freshly mown grass. Being outdoors also enables exercise, and tends to facilitate social connections because people are more relaxed. At the San Diego Hospice, the nurse leading my tour of the facility observed that people shared more about themselves and their situation when outside. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="background-color: #f9cb9c;">Kuo and Taylor have published several <a href="http://lhhl.illinois.edu/%20">studies</a> that measure the positive impact of green settings in reducing ADHD symptoms, and the correlation of trees in a neighborhood to reduced domestic violence, lower crime rates, and higher self esteem</span>. These studies show, empirically, that people in environments with nature do better. Research by Whitney Gray presented at Greenbuild 2011 focused on sick building syndrome. Gray looked at sick days, turnover, stress, and ability to concentrate; when access to nature was provided, there was a measurable improvement in all of these factors. Debajyoti, Harvey, and Barach showed that nurses who had a view of gardens over those who just had access to natural light, or no windows at all, were better able to concentrate and had less long-term stress. When you think abut the fact that it can cost around $60,000 to train each new hire, the economic benefit of providing access to nature is huge. [Full citation is below]</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i style="background-color: #f9cb9c;">Maintenance is always a concern when it comes to landscaping- I’ve actually worked with healthcare clients who wanted nothing but grass in the areas they “had” to landscape for ease of maintenance. What kind of recommendations can you make to landscape skeptics about using plantings?</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Access to nature just makes good business sense. Studies by Roger Ulrich, confirmed by others, have demonstrated less need for pain medication, improved patient satisfaction, faster recovery rates, and many other examples of improved outcomes for patients and staff. When you really look at the benefits of providing access to nature, the return on investment (ROI) justifies the initial cost and lifetime maintenance. Hospitals need to see landscaping as a strategic investment in the same manner they would the purchase of a new MRI.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Sure, a lawn is better than no landscaping at all, but when you consider the benefits of gardens and more designed landscaping, you can make the argument for the cost of maintenance. A study by Matsuoka showed that students viewing just lawn vs. a more varied view that included trees and shrubs performed better. Access to a lawn is often restricted; it may be wet or uneven, and wheelchairs cannot travel on it. Lawns are best as one element in children’s play areas, since they – especially visiting children - need to run around and blow off steam. [In case you want the full citation: Matsuoka, Rodney (2010). “Student Performance and High School Landscapes: Examining Links.” Landscape and Urban Planning, Vol. 97]. Incidentally, lawns actually take a LOT of money to maintain: They need regular irrigation, fertilization, mowing, leaf-blowing, etc. Facilities that are using alternative landscapes such as native meadows and rain gardens are finding significant savings after the initial investment. And at the same time, they are sending a very positive message about their commitment environmental as well as human health. It’s all related.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">That being said, the landscape architect needs to know the resources and capabilities the client is willing or able to put into the project – up front and for the future - and design around that. Your typical “mow and blow” crew is not qualified to handle anything more than routine maintenance, so there needs to be a funding strategy in place for an annual maintenance budget. It’s also a good idea to create a maintenance manual for staff or an outside landscaper to follow.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Some healthcare facilities, usually those with a horticultural therapy program (http://www.healinglandscapes.org/related/hort-therapy.html), integrate gardens into physical and occupational therapy. This is a great way to provide benefit to patients while keeping the garden expertly maintained. The gardens at Legacy Health (http://www.legacyhealth.org/Gardens), in Portland, OR, are excellent examples of this strategy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Healing gardens can be easy to raise money for because they are “warm and fuzzy.” The institution can also use the space for social events and to generate PR (promotional materials, events, press releases, etc.). The likelihood of assisted living facility resident referrals has been shown to increase with the quality of the grounds. </span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">What is the difference between landscaping and a garden? Is it only about habitation?</span></i><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In general, I would say that a “landscape” is any outdoor space, wild or designed, and a “garden” is a designed space. A restorative landscape is simply an outdoor space that makes you feel good when you’re in it. To me, “landscaping” implies decorative elements like a lawn, shrubs, some trees, and is not necessarily intended for interaction. A therapeutic (or healing) garden is a space designed for a specific population (children, cancer patients, people with Alzheimer’s) and a specific intended outcome (stress reduction, positive distraction, rehabilitation). This is not to say that landscaping isn’t important. Well-designed and maintained landscapes communicate to patients and their families that they will receive a high level of care, and this can happen from the moment you cross the property line. Even areas such as parking lots can utilize landscape to provide and reinforce the overall image and mission of the facility. </span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">What is landscaping’s role in wayfinding?</span></i><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This goes back to the importance of views outside from indoors. As a wayfinding tool, a garden stands out as a strong landmark, something people notice and remember. Plantings - indoors and out - can also provide visual cues or themes for a space. Again, when well-integrated with design, views to a garden can also act as advertisement for that space. So often, gardens are underutilized because people (even staff!) don’t know they exist. Signage can help, but creating direct views to the garden is the best way to ensure that people use it. </span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Landscape is a blanket term that includes plantings, water feature, site furniture and hardscape elements like pavers and walls. How does your ideal therapeutic garden utilize these elements?</span></i><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">My ideal garden would focus on the needs of the user population (patients, visitors, staff) and would be designed based on evidence, but also with a heavy dose of empathy and inspiration. As with any good design, there are parameters, but we can never just tick off boxes on a checklist. <span style="background-color: #f9cb9c;">All landscape elements – overall layout, paths, seating, hardscape, plantings, water features – should facilitate health and well-being. Two useful theoretical frameworks are Ulrich’s Theory of Supportive Design, in which a space supports the users by reducing stress; increasing a sense of control; encouraging social support; and facilitating physical movement and exercise. And Stephen and Rachel Kaplan’s theory of environmental preference, which calls for an emphasis on coherence, complexity, legibility, and mystery. </span>I would add that especially in the healthcare environment, outdoor spaces must be safe and comfortable, and should provide a marked contrast to “the hospital,” which is often perceived as a very cold, alien, intimidating environment. Finally, all of the elements should contribute to that positive multisensory experience we talked about earlier to help people feel not just “not bad,” but instead “good.” That is true salutogenic design. </span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">How does this play into prospect/refuge theory in biophilic design?</span></i><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It is really important to design with this in mind. People like to survey the space from a protected vantage point. Creating transitional space like a covered patio at the entrance to the garden is important, especially for elderly people who may not feel safe going directly outside. Those with certain psychiatric issues, including autism, like to be “read” a space before immersing themselves in it. Good designs create transition spaces throughout including shade to sun and walking and seating areas, and “nooks” or nodes where people can feel a sense of security and even privacy. </span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It’s not unknown for a project to get landscape elements value engineered out due to budget concerns. What’s your advice for architects regarding how to work best with landscape architects and really integrate their work into the design so that the landscape elements become less expendable to the client?</span></i><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Bring the LA in right away! Landscape architects are valuable members of the interdisciplinary project team [or A/E team] and they need to be included in the conceptual design phase. LAs have so much more to offer than simply “putting the parsley around the meatloaf.” Their site planning expertise can be a great asset to preserve open space, maximize views, create walking paths, take advantage of existing natural amenities, and to create that “healing experience” that starts at the entry drive, not just in some tucked-away “healing garden” courtyard. They can assist in design of the building to maximize visual and physical access to nature, both indoors and out. They can also best address EPA standards and maximize LEED and Green Guide For Healthcare points and help make sustainable measures like stormwater management or green roofs into design features.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It is important to use a landscape architect trained in healthcare design for healthcare projects (the TLN has a list of designers and consultants who specialize in this field). They know the research and requirements for each specific user population; they have the experience in this particular area and so they know how to do pre-occupancy evaluations and talk to the various stakeholders: Healthcare providers, facilities and maintenance staff, the C-Suite, board members and donors, patients and community members. They can be allies in your design efforts because they have the experience, examples and precedents to share with clients regarding the sustainable or evidence-based value of a design decision. </span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Can you talk a little bit about the book you are working on with Clare Cooper Marcus? What kind of issues are you looking at?</span></i><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">His book (to be published by John Wiley and Sons in 2013) will address a lot of the issues we’ve talked about in this interview. Marcus and Barnes’ Healing Gardens: Therapeutic Benefits and Design Recommendations has been considered “the bible” for evidence-based therapeutic garden design, but it is over 10 years old and has become quite expensive. More recent research, examples of built works, and issues such as sustainability and “healing-washing” (just as with “green-washing,” the “healing gardens” fad is raising some important questions) make this new book timely. Our book will be accessible, economically and aesthetically, to designers, health and human service providers, students and others interested in the role of landscape in promoting health and well-being. The heart of the book will be design guidelines that are applicable to all patient populations and settings, as well as guidelines for specific users (hospice, cancer care, people with PTSD, etc.), and we will be drawing on many examples of built works to illustrate various theories and practical applications. Other chapters will focus on history, theory, and definitions; the design process; funding; maintenance; and more. Clare and I are both very excited, and from the feedback we’re getting, others feel the same way. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I encourage all of you to explore the wonderful resource that is the TLN site. You don’t have to be a landscape architect to take advantage of the TLN as a springboard for your sustainability and evidence based design research or as a resource for finding a great landscape architect specializing in healthcare. How will you harness the power of landscape and gardens on your next project?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;">*Citation: Debajyoti Pati, Tom Harvey Jr., Paul Barach (2008). “Relationships Between Exterior Views and Nurse Stress: An Exploratory Examination.” Health Environments Research & Design Journal, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 27-38.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;">Exterior views of nature decreased stress and increased alertness in pediatric nurses.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;">Abstract:
Objective: Examine the relationships between acute stress and alertness of nurse, and duration and content of exterior views from nurse work areas. Background: Nursing is a stressful job, and the impacts of stress on performance are well documented. Nursing stress, however, has been typically addressed through operational interventions, although the ability of the physical environment to modulate stress in humans is well known. This study explores the outcomes of exposure to exterior views from nurse work areas.
Methods: A survey-based method was used to collect data on acute stress, chronic stress, and alertness of nurses before and after 12-hour shifts. Control measures included physical environment stressors (that is, lighting, noise, thermal, and ergonomic), organizational stressors, workload, and personal characteristics (that is, age, experience, and income). Data were collected from 32 nurses on 19 different units at two hospitals (part of Children's Healthcare of Atlanta) in November 2006.
Results: Among the variables considered in the study view duration is the second most influential factor affecting alertness and acute stress. The association between view duration and alertness and stress is conditional on the exterior view content (that is, nature view, non-nature view). Of all the nurses whose alertness level remained the same or improved, almost 60% had exposure to exterior and nature view. In contrast, of all nurses whose alertness levels deteriorated, 67% were exposed to no view or to only non-nature view. Similarly, of all nurses whose acute stress condition remained the same or reduced, 64% had exposure to views (71% of that 64% were exposed to a nature view). Of nurses whose acute stress levels increased, 56% had no view or only a non-nature view.
Conclusions: Although long working hours, overtime, and sleep deprivation are problems in healthcare operations, the physical design of units is only now beginning to be considered seriously in evaluating patient outcomes. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Posted by Angela Mazz</span><br />
<a href="http://thepatronsaintofarchitecture.blogspot.com/2012/01/how-does-your-garden-grow-role-of.html"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">http://thepatronsaintofarchitecture.blogspot.com/2012/01/how-does-your-garden-grow-role-of.html</span></a><br />
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</div>AAPREMLALLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05695002558477537063noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769750823409773874.post-39379634538645544452012-01-29T10:00:00.000-05:002012-01-30T00:42:56.002-05:00More Service, Not Tracks<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">We Need More Existing Service, Not Tracks!</span></b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>South Queens would be better served with increased rail service on the existing A lines (which wouldn't cost millions or even billions and would take effect more immediately than years down the line) and express or even regular buses that ran frequently and in sync with rush hour (versus questionably) and especially when schools let out around 2:30-3:00PM.<br /><br />I've seen great service in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and have yet to see it in Queens. It would be incredibly helpful if our buses and trains had some sort of dialogue on what their schedules are like and a dream come true if they actually cooperated with each other, and thus made our commutes much easier, much faster and less frustrating. Waiting for 15-20 minutes between trains at the end of the A line is something that we can more easily upgrade. Toronto does this and I was able to maneuver their rails and buses on my first trip there. </b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b><br />Even residents of the North side of the defunct LIRR Rockaway Beach Branch have an hour and 15 minute commute; it's not a "privilege" for anyone in Queens to get to the Manhattan, regardless of where they live along the aforementioned tracks.<br /><br />I think people need to get real and ride the rails and buses to find the truth about not only traveling by mass transit in Queens, but what would really benefit the community who actually live there and not just for the benefit of tourists, who are only here for short time. </b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>I would love to get on a bike and ride around my neighborhood and the rest Queens, but the streets of South Queens aren't safe for a cyclist: we have very little access to bike lanes, drivers and pedestrians have very little understanding of the road rules and how to react to cyclists, and safe places to park bikes or make tit easier to take our bikes on buses and trains on our way around this great city.</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"></span>AAPREMLALLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05695002558477537063noreply@blogger.com2