Universities are involved in the development of their immediate neighborhoods for a variety of reasons. For some, it is a matter of self-preservation and marketing, as neighborhood deterioration and disinvestment can negatively affect student enrollments. Other institutions are driven primarily by the need for new or updated facilities, such as laboratories, classrooms, student housing or athletic fields, which require expansion beyond existing campus boundaries, or by a long-standing commitment to neighborhood redevelopment. However, in tight urban real estate markets, where renters and low-income households already feel the threat of displacement, university expansion plans can serve to intensify residents’ apprehensions and lead to complicated land use disputes.

Universities have responded to disinvestment and dilapidation in their neighborhoods by using a variety of strategies. These include the acquisition and rehabilitation of abandoned buildings or vacant properties; support of faculty and staff home ownership in the area; improvement of local public services, including public schools and public safety programs; redevelopment of key nonresidential and commercial properties; and, at times, the encouragement of community involvement in the redevelopment process. New development often requires a fresh approach to architecture and urban design, since historically many institutions deliberately cut themselves off from their neighbors. Steve Cottingham, of Marquette University in Milwaukee, refers to this new approach as “weaving in, rather than walling out.”

Even when universities succeed in securing new development sites, they have to balance many competing demands. For example, donors favor signature buildings; the city requires regulatory compliance; neighborhood activists call for input into the school’s expansion plans, as well as benefits from that expansion; parents want a safe environment for their children; and students desire retail and entertainment options, as well as housing and security. Meeting all of these demands is difficult and none of the possible responses speaks directly to furthering the core educational mission of a university.

Roles and Responsibilities of Urban Universities

Last February, the Lincoln Institute, the Great Cities Institute of the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Urban Land Institute convened a group of executive-level university administrators involved in real estate decision making to address these issues. The seminar participants discussed specific real estate development cases as well as general concerns, such as finance and taxation, internal organizational structures, working with developers, and community involvement. Participants were interested in the technical aspects of urban development, but also in the expectations and accompanying responsibilities placed on universities in an urban context.

Universities remain one of the few examples of long-established, place-based institutions in urban areas, and they typically have a significant physical presence in their communities. While their faculty, staff and students place many demands on local public and private services, from increased traffic and police protection to escalating housing costs, universities also provide considerable cultural, social, intellectual and economic benefits. The well-known identity of most universities contrasts with that of private-sector corporations that frequently merge and relocate to suit their changing needs and to respond to the highly competitive, globalized economy. Universities typically do not have this option, so they depend on (and contribute to) the health and vitality of their local communities to protect their vested interests. The quality of the surrounding environment directly affects the competitive advantage of a university, which is crucial to attracting and retaining the best students and faculty. In turn, communities increasingly look to universities to fill the gaps left by departed corporate leadership.

Broad Street Development in Columbus, Ohio, exemplifies this kind of university-community interdependence. Campus Partners, a nonprofit redevelopment corporation started by Ohio State University, has secured the purchase option for this 1,400-unit, scattered-site public housing project. Broad Street’s Section 8 contracts from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) have expired or are about to expire. Typically, when the federal government restructures or extends these contracts there is a significant reduction in the rent subsidy available to low-income households and little or no money available for rehabilitation of the properties. Campus Partners is working with local organizations to implement a better level of management and structural rehabilitation than is typical for Section 8 projects. Although this housing redevelopment is unrelated to Ohio State’s mission, and the university was initially reluctant to take on the responsibility, when faced with the likelihood of continued physical decline near the campus, the university decided there was no other option than to pursue the project.

As universities expend resources on local revitalization projects, they often set other forces in motion that may alter or threaten the cultural and demographic identity of the neighborhood. Real estate development can contribute to increases in the value of the land and community amenities, but it can also displace existing residents and businesses that cannot compete in tighter and more expensive land and housing markets. Seminar participants debated the responsibility of universities to address neighborhood gentrification and housing shortages due to rising land markets in the same way they previously responded to neighborhood decline. The University of Chicago, for example, has long invested in making its neighborhood an attractive residential community. Now, that strategy is being challenged because many long-term residents, both university employees and other urban dwellers, can no longer afford to live there.

Universities also face challenges from falling land markets. For example, some universities are surrounded by privately owned housing that caters to students, and those landlords often engage in short-term management practices to maximize their profits. Substandard property maintenance, coupled with high turnover of rental units, can lead to rapid deterioration in the housing stock. This behavior can either start or reinforce the process of declining property values and neighborhood deterioration-a process that fails to benefit either the university community or the neighborhood. Such a situation recently motivated the University of Pennsylvania to enter into a partnership with the Fannie Mae Corporation, First Union Bank and Trammell Crow Company to preserve and develop moderate-cost rental housing options for the broader community, and to provide high-quality management of the units.

Employer-assisted housing (EAH) strategies have also been used by the University of Pennsylvania and other universities to promote home ownership for their faculty and staff. Jim Gimpel, of the University of Illinois at Chicago, underscored the value of developing housing for staff, including the custodial, clerical and food service workers who are crucial to a university’s operation yet are among the lowest paid employees. With EAH, a university provides financial incentives, such as down-payment assistance, forgivable loans or a mortgage guarantee, to help employees purchase existing local homes. In some cases, a university may even develop the housing, but will rarely manage it. Sandra Lier, now at the University of Washington, drew on her experiences at the University of California at Irvine, which developed a faculty housing complex. After it was completed, an intermediary took over the management of the housing so that applications and complaints would be handled by the management firm rather than the university itself.

Town-Gown Tensions

Increasingly, communities are holding universities accountable for their development actions that affect the surrounding neighborhood. Historical town-gown antagonisms, coupled with the high expectations that communities hold for universities, mean that good will is more easily eroded than earned. For example, in the mid-1990s, without public input or consultation, Marquette University decided to close a major thoroughfare to traffic and create new green space for the campus. Although the plan was never carried out, the university lost much of the good will it had gained through earlier, highly successful development projects.

Openly discussing university plans with the community can help keep a project on track and avoid compromising situations when unforeseen obstacles arise, according to Terry Foegler of Campus Partners in Ohio. For example, the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities recently implemented a mandatory Neighborhood Impact Assessment that makes the university’s planning vision accessible to the public and requires the university to consider alternatives to its master plan, including the option to stop building in certain locations.. However, while community groups want universities to make their plans known, university real estate developers are generally averse to publicizing their acquisition plans, and they commonly establish a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation when purchasing land or properties. By buying “blind” (i.e., blind to the seller), the university is protected from the likely premium that sellers would demand were the buyer (and its presumed deep pockets) known. This is an example of how universities are often held to higher standards of development, and it is one area where the university and the community will likely continue to disagree, according to seminar participants.

The contentious issue of tax-exempt status for nonprofit educational institutions was addressed at the seminar by Joan Youngman, senior fellow and director of the Lincoln Institute’s taxation program, and Bill Stafford, finance director for the City of Evanston, Illinois, the home of Northwestern University. After churches, universities are in the strongest legal position with respect to their tax-exempt status. Still, the issue is confusing because vested interests are clear, yet are clearly in opposition. In practice, the property tax is a hybrid consisting of a user charge for services and a wealth charge based on the property’s value. Many municipalities favor user charges or fees-for-services, as opposed to property taxes, to obtain revenue from a university, and the race for revenue can lead municipalities to creative ideas. For example, one California city wanted to charge a university for its scenic view. Universities, on the other hand, feel there is some ambiguity with respect to what benefits they actually receive from municipalities, since universities provide many of their own services, such as street plowing and campus police protection.

Despite the controversial negotiations between universities and municipalities around property taxes and payments in lieu of taxes (PILOT), the actual payments may be relatively small, according to Youngman. Depending on the size of the city and the diversity of its local economy, the university payment may not be a meaningful share of local revenues, and several seminar participants confirmed this observation. Smaller cities tend to look to their universities as a more important source of revenue than do large cities, and controversy over tax-exempt status tends to escalate when universities expand their activities beyond their traditional and clearly academic roles. For example, when a university owns property that contains not only research offices and laboratories but also a bookstore, a Starbucks and a Kinko’s, should it be tax-exempt? Frank Mares, of DePaul University in Chicago, described a mixed-use project in which specific university uses are tax-exempt while the parking garage and retail spaces are taxed, essentially creating separate taxing districts.

Stafford of Evanston pointed out that there are legitimate public policy questions regarding the uses and abuses of nonprofit organizations. The nonprofit status of universities stems from the long-held belief that they contribute to the public good. However, this privileged status was based on an implicit understanding that the university did not make a profit on its activities. There are currently numerous examples of ways universities challenge this assumption. For example, when professors market themselves as consultants, working from their university-provided offices and capitalizing on the university’s “brand name,” are they acting in the public interest? Furthermore, the endowments of many universities exceed the operating budgets of the cities and towns in which they reside. Stafford concludes, “the university, at best, is a subsidized citizen.”

Yet, from the perspective of the university, increasing competition has forced universities to walk a fine line between remaining faithful to their missions and vying with other institutions to recruit and retain students and faculty, and to meet ever-growing demands for newer athletic and academic facilities, bigger and better dorm rooms, or more sophisticated telecommunications resources. The role played by universities in their communities has altered considerably over the past few decades and, at a minimum, further clarification of public policy intent and tax law regarding tax-exempt status needs to be revisited.

While the university must address the concerns of its local community, it also faces pressures to respond to broader regional goals. Local governments increasingly view universities as engines of economic development-both programmatically and physically-and as “economic anchors” in the city. Norma Grace, of the University of New Orleans, remarked on a common expectation that universities will create jobs and help local entrepreneurs, yet due to increasing budget demands universities have few resources to support this community goal. As one participant put it, the university cannot be only a real estate developer, because there are consequences to its actions; it needs to be a community developer as well. Hank Webber, of the University of Chicago, stated, “We’re not malevolent, we’re just wrong a lot of the time.”

Best Practices for the Future

Because most universities will remain in their current locations indefinitely, their futures will continue to be intertwined with their surrounding neighborhoods. However, the inevitability of future change and persistent development pressure highlights the differences between universities and the private real estate sector. Profit and speed motivate private developers-two qualities not usually associated with universities, particularly public institutions. Furthermore, given the broader mission of a university, short-term, market-oriented thinking is not always suitable. It is clear that future prospects for university expansion remain a complex challenge, especially in urban areas where land available for development is limited and expensive.

This seminar was intended to begin a dialogue among university officials responsible for campus development, and it will reconvene next year in an effort to add to our knowledge of the ways urban universities’ real estate development activities contribute to the revitalization of their cities. Many seminar participants expressed an interest in institutionalizing community and real estate development practices, and they stated a preference for examining cases in depth, with input from city officials, community leaders and university administrators, to uncover the complexities of an individual project. Seminar cochairs David Perry and Wim Wiewel, of the University of Illinois at Chicago, have begun collecting such cases to use in future seminars and to broaden the ongoing debate on this topic.

Allegra Calder is a research assistant and Rosalind Greenstein is a senior fellow and cochairman of the Planning and Development Department at the Lincoln Institute.

For most of its history the American university has been treated as an enclave—a scientific and reflective ivory tower removed from the subjective turmoil of the city. More recently the university has come to be viewed by many public officials and analysts as a driver of overall urban development.

Back in the Bronze Age, when I was a graduate student, the American Economics Association invited me to present a paper at their annual meeting. At the time, being a nonconformist, I was struggling over whether or not to appear in a suit and tie. My Ph.D. adviser provided some excellent guidance. “I’m not going to tell you whether to wear a suit or not, but consider whether you want the audience to remember what you say or what you wear.” It was a helpful reminder that if one has a message to deliver, it is best to package it in a way that improves the chances that it will be received and understood. In the end, I wore the suit and tie, and I recorded a useful lesson in the sometimes subtle, sometimes not-so-subtle interplay of form and content.

From time to time, think tanks like the Lincoln Institute need to consider whether they are packaging content in a way that draws people to read and use it. Over the last year, we have taken a careful look at how we present and disseminate our research and policy analysis. We started in January 2015 with a newly reimagined Land Lines, designed to make the magazine more compelling to a broader audience. Our first redesigned issue featured a dramatic aerial photograph of the Colorado River Delta, where a “pulse flow” released from upstream dams in 2014 allowed water to flow down its dry old path to the Sea of Cortez for the first time in decades, stimulating efforts to restore the native ecosystem that had existed under different land use patterns in the river’s watershed. We also started hiring journalists to write compelling narratives that connected our research and policy analysis to the people whose lives would be improved by better land use practices.

The redesign of Land Lines and our Policy Focus Reports are a small part of a larger effort the Lincoln Institute is making to disseminate our formidable arsenal of research and ideas more widely. An ongoing public outreach effort, clear and crisp, will facilitate the impact we want our work to have on policy and on people. In August, we launched a multiyear campaign to promote municipal fiscal health as the foundation from which local governments can deliver the goods and services that define a high quality of life for residents. Our researchers, staff, and partners are working across disciplines to elevate this important issue, while building new, cross-cutting efforts to address climate change and resilience; developing state-of-the-art scenario planning tools; and probing the nexus of land policy and water, or of land use and transportation.

This month, we are taking another step to disseminate our ideas more effectively by introducing a new Lincoln Institute logo, tagline, and mission statement:

Finding answers in land: helping to solve global economic, social, and environmental challenges to improve the quality of life through creative approaches to the use, taxation, and stewardship of land.

The logo retains the Lincoln “L” within a symbolic outline of a land section, with a more modern, open design that invites new audiences to discover our work. The tagline and mission statement make explicit what has always been true: that good land policy can help address some of the most vexing global challenges, such as climate change or poverty and financial stress in the world’s cities.

We are not reinventing the Lincoln Institute, but aiming to introduce our work to broader audiences and to clarify the threads that connect seemingly disparate topics, such as the link between land conservation and climate change mitigation. Our “refresh” will culminate later this year, when we launch our redesigned website, with a format that allows us to convey new narratives about how land policy can shape a better future for billions of people.

This issue previews two important new books that upgrade our presentation of subjects we have been probing for decades. In A Good Tax, Joan Youngman makes a clear, strong case for the property tax—the most important and least understood source of revenue for local governments. This magisterial treatment of a difficult topic is rendered in lucid prose by the Lincoln Institute’s chair of Valuation and Taxation. The chapter on school finance, featured in this issue, defends the tax that people love to hate in service of a public good that defines the fortunes of future generations.

Nature and Cities—edited by George F. Thompson, Frederick R. Steiner, and Armando Carbonell, the Lincoln Institute’s chair of Planning and Urban Form—explores the economic, environmental, and public health benefits of ecological urban design and planning. With essays by New York City’s High Line designer James Corner and other leading landscape architects, planners, and architects around the world, Nature and Cities offers an erudite and visually captivating treatment of a topic that is urgent in the face of climate change and urban population growth.

As you will see, we will continue to serve our long-time partners and friends with rigorously researched and well-written content. But we also will expand the network of researchers, policy makers, and practitioners who will apply our research findings in ways that we can only imagine. Because in the end, our collective endeavor is to improve the lives of all who call this planet home. And we know that it all starts on land.

This feature is adapted from the introduction to Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planning, a compilation of essays and images by leading international landscape architects, architects, and planners, some of whose work is showcased here. The book is scheduled for publication in November 2016 by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, in association with the School of Architecture, The University of Texas at Austin, and George F. Thompson Publishing.

Everything seems so clear from the air, where details do not get in the way. At an elevation of 33,000 feet (10,058 meters), we see the handiwork of our actions all over the ground below, as if the landscape were our reflecting mirror. As we know, landscapes do not lie; they are the embodiment of all that we do on Earth.

Some roads parallel rivers and valleys—no ingenuity there. Other roads converge into settlements like cattle paths leading to a water tank, or they may follow deer paths and other animal trails or topographic contours and soon resemble the organic majesty of a spider’s web. Picture El Greco’s (1541–1614) home town, Toledo, Spain, from the air: a kind of perfection in organic urban form.

Old North American prairie, largely untouched until two centuries ago, now bears rectangular grids of large-scale farms with no room for any vegetation besides the crops and a thin line of trees alongside riverine and creekside banks, looking like a token tithe to nature and wildlife. And 40-acre (16.1-hectare) center-pivot circles of  corn, soybeans, or alfalfa (the trifecta of corporate agriculture) look as if someone had tossed, in perfect symmetry, large half-dollars on the land. Resembling pavements of crops stretching as far as the eye can see, even from one state to another, all this handiwork is the result of a federal farm policy insanely out of balance with nature. No wonder the butterflies and countless other creatures and plants are struggling so mightily against such unnatural odds.

New sites of natural gas extraction have popped up so suddenly and pervasively that they now permeate much of the Great Plains and interior West of North America, as if enormous prairie dogs on steroids had  burrowed through these large swaths of land. It is Gulliver’s travels all over again. Meanwhile, open-pit mines generate impressive depressions in the ground, as if meteors had crashed from outer space. The pits’ glorious russet and red and golden and sand-colored hues contrast hard against surrounding terrain, as if the mines, too, were inscribed works of art, poor attempts at recreating a subterranean Roman coliseum or a mini-Grand Canyon. Meanwhile, the new and starkly white wind-powered turbines—some spanning 413 feet (126 meters) and towering 312 feet (85–95 meters) in the sky—appear as if a giant surgeon had administered stitches of varying lengths and shapes on the land and in the sea, even as untold numbers of birds die upon impact.

Towns and cities along the coasts cram hard against the adjacent sea, with few buffers to protect communities against a rising tide that likely will be at least three feet (.9 meter) higher a century from now. And the same condition holds true for those towns and cities that reside along rivers, large and small, that naturally want to ebb and flow like the tide, overrunning banks and streets alike from time to time. Even world-class cities such as Chicago, Sydney, Tokyo, and Toronto look like LEGO sets from above and bar graphs at eye-level, in which cars and trucks move about like busy ants, and trains slide like snakes along the concrete.

Deserts, long the forlorn outposts of biblical wilderness, are now bespeckled oases of new towns, cities, and resorts, each with homes nestled against aquamarine-blue swimming pools, as if pools are required for entrance into a neighborhood. Shimmering lakes are impounded by large-scale dams, the water evaporating into the dry, cloudless sky. A jigsaw puzzle of improbably green lawns is highlighted by extensive, even more preposterously verdant golf courses. One might believe that a new school of art called Landscape Cubism had gone awry on the land.

Yet there are the exceptional expanses of undeveloped land as well. Trails such as the Appalachian, Continental, Ice Age, Grande Randonnée, Greater Patagonian, Natchez, Pacific Crest, Te Araroa, and Tokai saunter along for great distances deep into the heart and soul of their respective countries. Forests stretch for thousands and thousands of square miles and kilometers, relieving a planet in dire need of new lungs in order to process the increasing levels of carbon dioxide (CO₂). Still-intact watersheds and wetlands retain their natural place between land and water, providing incalculable value as a water supply for towns and cities downstream and as habitat for fisheries, insects, birds, and other wildlife. Contour farming thrives in harmony with the terrain and the life-giving principles of the Soil Conservation Act of 27 April 1935. And more cities boast integrated systems of parks, open spaces, and greenways, providing evidence that nature can return to the urban scene and enhance communities in biological and socioeconomic ways.[1]

The land tells us so much. And it is the role of landscape architecture, urban planning and design, and architecture to continue their pioneering ways, offering an ecological approach to the design, planning, and management of our varied landscapes—urban, suburban, rural, regional, social, and wild. It all begins on the ground, in nature and our communities, in the multiple ecologies and economies and cultures that encapsulate our home turf, wherever that may be. 

But, as we know, much of that ground is already urban, and that pervasive and expansive pattern of settlement by every account has no end in sight. So how can we do better? That scene and question are the focus of Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planning. 

Even as land use may seem relatively clear and simple from the air, on the ground the picture grows more complicated, because of the unavoidable details. All aspects of life—human and natural intertwined, to varying degrees of success—appear before our very eyes, are heard by our ears, are felt by our skin and clothes by way of dew point, humidity, dry air, sunlight, evening breezes, and cool or warm temperatures. That is a lot of ground to comprehend, even within the limited scope of our senses.

Perhaps this view encompasses your backyard or city street; the one well from which you and your community draw water; a favorite gathering place; a beloved vacation spot; a scene ravaged by drought, flood, or fire; a place recovering from earthquake, cave-in, crime, or war. The imagination can transport us to any place we wish, but there is a bottom line to such inquiry. As you imagine or walk or ride or drive through that landscape around you, take it all in: every blade of grass that adorns your lawn or survives in the seam of a sidewalk; every field, common, or pasture that may be part of your everyday life; every hovel, condo, or mansion that gives you shelter; every tree, greenway, or park that embellishes your space; every economic entity and activity before you; every smell emanating from a bakery or foundry; every breath you take that, inevitably, is a respiratory cocktail of Earth’s natural elements (sand, pollen, and dust) and of all the human-induced chemicals too numerous to name.

Now that you have seen, heard, and felt that landscape, imagine that you are suddenly in charge of the scene. Your family, neighborhood, village, city,  region, and country are depending on you. First, to explain every aspect of what you perceive and to make some sense of it all—whether in a public setting or classroom or even corporate boardroom. And second, to envision, communicate, plan, and design improvements to what you see. Where would you begin? What would you do? Under what circumstances would or could you implement change? And how? Bottom-up or top-down? Diplomatically, democratically, or dictatorially? How will your vision, and its associated array of actions, be maintained, nurtured, and, perhaps, changed over time? And by whom and under what circumstances or authority?

This is the terrain that the landscape architect, architect, and planner inherit. So return to your “vision” of what your place wants to be, and consider a process by which change is sought and made through attention to three primary and overarching themes: the human need for clean water, ample and safe food, and humane shelter; the human need for economic well-being; and the natural need to take care of and heal the land, nature itself. How does one work with structure, purpose, and meaning to provide fulfillment, value, and public good? How does one add value to place, communities, cities, and regions by way of designs and plans that offer reprieve from single-purpose thinking and direct us to a sense of stewardship in its many manifestations? Importantly, how do we citizens, as part of increasingly large urban populations, reconnect with the natural world on which we are still dependent and become engaged in the benefits of ecology to biological and socioeconomic life?

Although nature is at the core of our being and every other life-form, plant, tree, soil, water, and rock on Earth, too often our human connections to nature take a backseat to all-too-prevalent interests of every kind that compete for social good and economic gain without the benefit of a land ethic, as espoused by Aldo Leopold.[2] When we look at the varied landscapes on the ground, questions arise as to how well we are actually doing as human beings in our care of this bountiful planet. 

If one travels far enough, long enough, one can still find longstanding human communities and cultures living intimately with the natural systems that surround them. Homes in the Amazon are still built on stilts to allow for the annual and seasonal fluctuations of the world’s second-longest river and world’s largest river basin. Homes in the American South have traditionally used the front and wraparound porch to offer shade and some relief from the noteworthy heat and humidity of the summer season, even as it allows for socialization from one neighbor’s house to another, as can be seen any day of the week in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where streets are lined by shotgun houses with shady front porches animated by conversation. Many Scandinavians still artfully use wood and the fine-art craft of notching to create some of the most energy-efficient cabin-homes anywhere, even as Nordic winters are among the most challenging on Earth. And, increasingly, LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) initiatives are helping transform the world’s new architecture into energy-efficient structures, from the geothermal-powered Aldo Leopold Center in Baraboo, Wisconsin, winner of a LEED Platinum Award, to the Shanghai Expo UBPA redevelopment, the first project outside North America to receive a LEED Neighborhood Development Platinum Award. 

Beyond LEED, landscape architects, planners, ecologists, and others designed the Sustainable Sites Initiative (SITES). Now administered by Green Building Certification Inc., SITES was envisioned as LEED for the outdoors. SITES was developed through pilot projects, including those undertaken by Andropogon, OLIN, and James Corner Field Operations. Pilot projects that received certifications include Andropogon’s Shoemaker Green on the University of Pennsylvania campus and the Phipps’ Center for Sustainable Landscapes in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, OLIN’s Washington Canal Park in the District of Columbia, and James Corner Field Operations’ Woodland Discovery Playground at Shelby Farms in Memphis, Tennessee.

Yet with every passing generation that becomes ever more urban, the direct connections to nature and its bounties are reduced in spades. In too many cities around the world, nature is an afterthought. The following story is all too common:

Not very long ago, perhaps it was ten years or so, I read a piece in the newspaper that caught my attention: A boy from Harlem in New York City was being interviewed about his views on nature. He was quoted as saying that the blade of grass at his feet, the blade of grass that was emerging from a seam in the concrete sidewalk, was, to him, the embodiment of nature. It was all he needed from the natural world. Here was a sign of wildness along his city street, his home place. The blade of green grass, somehow managing to survive a half-mile away from Central Park to the south, provided that elementary presence of nature in the urban world that was his comfort zone.[3] 

Even in cities graced by larger representations of nature, these green spaces too often feel like isolated pockets for daily use or the occasional visitor, like small museums or zoos. This need not be the case; this need not be an unintended aspiration or consequence of ignorance of the multiple benefits that nature bestows when it is more fully integrated into the urban fabric of any town or city, whether in Jerusalem or Medellín or Stuttgart, Arkansas. We know how to do better. Landscape architects, architects, and planners have often led the way.

So how is it possible that towns, cities, and counties continue to ignore floodplains and sea level and willingly allow homeowners, developers, and resorts to build and rebuild in areas that contend regularly with chronic flooding and storm surges? How is it possible that a utility company can disobey the basics of common-sense planning and be permitted to construct a 564-mile (908-kilometers) natural gas pipeline on a route that will not only penetrate and divide critical habitat for rare and endangered species within existing national forests, but also overlay an area known for its extreme karst landscape and major sinkholes—thereby endangering the aquifer that lies beneath that path, a font of the greatest significance for the supply of fresh water for cities, towns, and farms throughout that region? How is it possible that mining companies are not required to close the loop and provide for the ecological restoration and reclamation of project areas as part of the economic deal? How is it possible that Rio de Janeiro was awarded the Games of the XXXI (Summer 2016) Olympiad with full knowledge that water events will be conducted in Guanabara Bay, in conditions at times equated with raw sewage? Obviously, those landscape players do not include the principles and practices of ecological design and planning as part of their respective worldview, and behold the consequences of their chosen ignorance and greed. 

The promise of ecological design and planning as it pertains to the health and welfare of our communities and cities everywhere is there for the taking, there for action, there for implementation, there for ongoing care. But too often we dismiss the obvious in how we citizens conceive of urban design and planning: we humans, by our very presence in nearly every sphere on Earth, are the essential players not only in the eternal dance with nature that is part of life and the human condition, but also the overall health and welfare of our home ground.

The essayists in Nature and Cities reveal that monumental work has been done and is ongoing in the ecological design and planning of our cities and communities at large. Because landscape architects, architects, and planners have done so repeatedly and throughout the world, we, as a society, can say with certainty that we know how to work collaboratively with all players to provide safe water, food, and shelter; reduce runoff into city streets; accommodate areas prone to flooding and storm surges; safely locate a utility corridor and design it in such a way that it becomes more than a single-purpose pathway for natural gas obtained by the unruly practice of fracking; design parking lots in commercial developments; provide citizens of the world’s cities with more than a sliver of grass in the seam of a sidewalk; restore and heal worn and contaminated sites; and provide joy and economic vitality through green design and infrastructure.

But even more progress needs to be achieved, no matter where we live, because the world is becoming more urban, and the consequences of climate change and of poverty, disease, conflict, and war are real. Once again, landscape architects, architects, and planners have been engaged historically in the process of understanding the natural world before us and its multiple manifestations on the ground, where details and interconnections matter. And, by way of their designs and plans, some of them centuries old, we have examples of finished work that has made this a better world. Landscape architects, architects, and planners have historically offered alternative visions to the failed practice of serendipity and single-purpose thinking that have, for too long, dominated the public and private view.

The contributing authors in Nature and Cities share real-life experiences and perspectives about where we can go in the future. They discuss and reveal their respective perspectives on the historical and contemporary practice of ecological design and planning in their own work and in the work of others. In many cases, this work involves award-winning and path-breaking designs and plans known throughout the world. And so reading their essays is an eye-opening experience, as we share and explore their thoughts about nature and cities, even as they offer reflective worldviews for design and planning. Collectively, the essays convey the great hope and promise of an ecological imperative in planning and urban design, of a tried-and-true approach by which nature and culture, science and art, come together in a united but creative and fluid way to make life better for all.

As is often the case, big projects, designs, and plans tend to dominate the professional view and the ability of design and planning to contribute toward this greater good. Historically, this has included a wide range of undertakings, as large as the design and construction of national parks and new cities, and as small as the private garden and urban mall. But, to most people, ecological design and planning remains an idea and approach not yet in the vernacular. That is where additional work needs to be done. And so here is another story of how far we can travel in but one generation, if landscape architects, architects, and planners are willing to seek work in new ways:

A woman from South Africa, a naturalized American citizen, was inspired by the healing powers of nature. She was well known and highly respected in the community where she lived. She was a quiet but steadfast leader in peeling back the built environment and integrating nature more fully into areas of everyday city life. Even after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, she served the community and fellow cancer patients as if there would always be a tomorrow. When she died, she was remembered by a new serenity garden, adjacent to an existing park along a popular river. When the city organized a public dedication of the new park in her memory, an overflowing crowd of hundreds showed up on a hot, summer day.

The city manager was among the first to speak. Soon after welcoming everyone and conveying the purpose for the gathering, he began to share this message:

There is something called a “sense of place.” It is a term often hard to describe, but we certainly know a special place when we see it, be it a memorial garden such as this, an historic neighborhood or building or landscape, a community at large, or even a region. As public officials, we strive to cultivate a sense of place in many ways: by providing obvious services and an infrastructure intended to serve all, but also by making connections to the natural world. Even as we may live near one of the most popular and most visited national parks, we need nature to return to the city so that it becomes a daily experience, fully integrated into our fabric of being. Just as Anne-Marie would have wanted.[4]

We dare say that, 30 years ago, the phrase “sense of place” seemed like a pipe dream or even an illusion that had no place in our everyday lives, much less public policy. Yet today, as expressed by this 30-something city manager, the term has been fully realized and embraced. We even hear of teachers at every institutional level, proclaiming the need for and success of “place-based” education—place, of course, referring to the natural and human processes intertwined.

As the world becomes more urban, and even for those who remain tied to rural land, there is the need for “ecological design and planning” to be integrated into our collective being, into our everyday lives, in fundamental ways—just as a “sense of place” has so quickly taken hold during the preceding generation. Even as landscape architecture, urban planning and design, and architecture can continue to advance a “green” vision of a better world through specific projects, both great and small, public and private, it will require a move toward the vernacular, toward the common person, toward the common place, for that vision to be expressed, appreciated, accepted, and embraced more fully: to the point where ecological design and planning becomes an afterthought and, thus, an essential player in providing a healthy and healthful life for human beings and our compatriot life-forms. To heal Earth, our home ground, is to heal ourselves.

In many professional fields and human endeavors, a green vision for an ecological infrastructure has already been achieved. In places where this vision has been allowed to take hold, we see how an ecological approach fosters the necessary interplay between the biotic and abiotic. Establishing a watershed, for instance, as a primary unit of analysis, conservation, and concern has led to instructive work relating to combined sewer overflows (CSOs) within a hydrological system, offering citizens a safe and secure source of water. And it is easy to be impressed by the advances of rain gardens and reduced runoff and other creative solutions that mimic natural processes in biotic enrichment. The further integration of ecological, socioeconomic, and political capacities within specific communities and urban environments at large provides a tried-and-true pathway for landscape architects, architects, and planners to envision improvements at every scale and to implement them through community-based interaction and design.

Each author in Nature and Cities offers a sense of direction, purpose, and model for how landscape architecture, architecture, and planning can continue to move forward and be taken more seriously, to be engaged in community life at every scale and in every city and town in the world. This may well mean that a new generation of practitioners will need to explore pathways other than the traditional design and planning office and become instruments of enlightenment and change in occupations still very much in need of such care: notably, engineering, transportation, utilities, agriculture, resource industries, and commercial development—which, with too few exceptions, remain behind the times.

Imagine engineers embracing the tenets of ecological design and planning as they create roads, parking lots, interstates, impoundments, and other basic infrastructure. Imagine those engaged with municipal management as well as agricultural, industrial, transportation, and utility sectors abandoning single-purpose thinking and embracing something grander and more impactful in providing benefits than does a single endeavor. Imagine a young adult being able to swim in clean waters in Rio’s Guanabara Bay, a utility company finding a safe and not just the shortest path for the transfer of power and natural gas, a corporation building parking lots that percolate and repurpose runoff, a citizenry knowing that all human life begins and ends with nature, the source of all life. Imagine that.

George F. Thompson is the founder of George F. Thompson Publishing and the author and editor of seven books, including Ecological Design and Planning, with Frederick R. Steiner (John Wiley, 1997; 2007), and Landscape in America (Texas, 1995). Frederick R. Steiner is dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin and holds the Henry M. Rockwell Chair in Architecture. Armando Carbonell is chair of the department of Planning and Urban Form and a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Photograph by Iwan Baan, courtesy of James Corner Field Operations​

Nature and Cities Contributors

José M. Almiñana, Andropogon Associates, Philadelphia

Timothy Beatley, University of Virginia

James Corner, James Corner Field Operations, New York City, and the University of Pennsylvania

Susannah Drake, dland studio, Brooklyn

Carol Franklin, Andropogon Associates, Philadelphia

Kristina Hill, University of California-Berkeley

Nina-Marie Lister, Ryerson University

Elizabeth K. Meyer, University of Virginia

Forster Ndubisi, Texas A & M University

Laurie Olin, Olin, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and the University of Pennsylvania

Kate Orff, SCAPE, New York City

Danilo Palazzo, University of Cincinnati (formerly Milan Polytechnic University)

Chris Reed, Stoss Landscape Urbanism, Boston, and Harvard University

Anne W. Spirn, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Charles Waldheim, Harvard University

Richard Weller, University of Pennsylvania

Kongjian Yu, Peking University and Turenscape, Beijing

References

[1] To which Yi-Fu Tuan, the world-renowned geographer responded, “Is it Andy Warhol who said that he is biased in favor of the city? Why? Well, one can find nature in the city, but one cannot find the city—not even a small token of it—in the midst of nature.” Personal email to George F. Thompson. October 23, 2015.

[2] Leopold, Aldo. 1949. A Sand County Almanac. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

[3] Thompson, George F. 2010. “Our Place in the World: From Butte to Your Neck of the Woods.” Vernacular Architecture Forum. No. 123 (Spring 2010): 1 and 3–6; quoted 1.

[4] Thompson, George F. 2014. Notes at the official dedication of the Serenity Garden, Waynesboro, Virginia. June 2014. 

It’s a Thursday afternoon in Cincinnati, and people at the downtown public library are making stuff. In the corner, a $14,410 Full Spectrum laser cutter and engraver hums away, used to create anything from artworks to humble coasters out of paper, wood, and acrylic. Over by the windows, a MakerBot replicator is buzzing; it’s one of the library’s four 3-D printers, used to fabricate a range of objects, from toys to a custom bike pedal compatible with shoes designed for a patron with a physical disability. Nearby, a young designer is producing a full-color vinyl sign with a professional-grade Roland VersaCAMM VS-300i large-format printer and cutter. “This is our workhouse,” my tour guide Ella Mulford, the library’s TechCenter/MakerSpace team leader, says of the $17,769 machine. Most of us couldn’t afford such a pricey piece of equipment, but apparently plenty of Cincinnatians can think of useful things to do with it: it runs practically nonstop during library hours, Mulford explains, and is usually booked out for two weeks in advance. 

The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County still offers plenty of books and other media for borrowing and browsing. But its roomy MakerSpace section, opened at the start of 2015 and packed with free-to-use tech tools, is an impressive example of how the library idea is adjusting to a digital era that has not always been kind to books. More to the point, it hints at an evolving role for libraries in cities large and small—contributing in new ways to the municipal fabric they have long been a part of. 

In Cincinnati, the process that led to the MakerSpace started a couple of years ago, says Kimber L. Fender, the library’s director. A smattering of libraries across the country were experimenting with technology as a new component of what they might offer the public. “And part of our strategic plan,” Fender continues, “was to introduce new technologies to our community. So we were actively exploring: What does that mean when we say that? What does it look like?” Adding a 3-D printer to the library’s existing computer center served as a low-risk experiment—and attracted the attention of every TV station in town. “There was just all this conversation,” Fender recalls. “So we thought, ‘Hm, this is getting us toward our goal.’” 

Enrique R. Silva, research fellow and senior research associate at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, points out that there’s no real reason to yoke the fate of the library as civic infrastructure to the fate of the physical book. “It’s a community space for learning,” he suggests. A 2015 Pew Research Center study indicates that the public agrees: While it found signs that Americans have visited libraries somewhat less frequently in recent years, it also concludes that many embrace the idea of new educational offerings in this specific context—tech included. “It’s not a difficult leap to make,” Silva says.  

Indeed, making that leap both extends and updates the role that libraries have long played in many U.S. city and town plans. One of the breakthrough developments in that history was the explosion of such institutions funded by Andrew Carnegie in the decades before and after the turn of the 20th century. Fanning out from Pennsylvania, nearly 1,700 so-called Carnegie Libraries were built in Beaux-Arts, Italian Renaissance, or other classic styles—an effort that both played into and fueled an even wider library-building movement that placed significant landmarks in municipal centers from coast to coast. While remarkable, this ubiquitous element of civic infrastructure often goes overlooked today. 

“In modern-day planning,” Silva observes, “I think libraries are largely seen as: You’re lucky if you have it as an asset, part of the bones of a city that you work around.” In the United States, at least, architecturally significant new library construction is rare (the Seattle Public Library Central Library, opened in 2004 and designed by Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus, is a notable exception). So libraries tend to be planned around, as an “inherited” element of “social-civic infrastructure,” as Silva puts it. A 2013 report from the Center for an Urban Future, focused on New York City, argued that libraries have been “undervalued” in most “policy and planning discussions about the future of the city.”

But maybe this oversight implies an opportunity: These existing structures can take on fresh roles that make them newly relevant to ever-evolving municipal plans. The Cincinnati library’s rethink of what it means to be a community center of learning and information-sharing is one example. As with the Carnegie Libraries, smart use of philanthropic resources played a role: Fender says the library had a $150,000 discretionary bequest that it decided to direct to the MakerSpace. To make room, it reorganized its periodicals collection. 

The library then took an adventurous view of what kind of technologies it could offer. There’s a mini recording studio with pro-quality microphones, used by aspiring podcasters and DJs; photography and video equipment; and a popular “media conversion station” for digitizing VHS tapes and the like. There are also more analog offerings such as sewing machines and a surprisingly popular set of button-making machines. During my tour, I met a charming man named Donny—well known to the library staff—making football-themed buttons. “What’s the word, ‘entrepreneur’? That’s what they tell me I am,” he explained. 

Turns out lots of entrepreneurial types, from aspiring startup-founders to Etsy sellers, make use of the library’s offerings. There are collaborative computer workstations, connected by Wi-Fi and used by everyone from designers working with clients to students teaming up on class projects. 

And there’s a broader trend here. The Chattanooga Public Library has converted what used to be the equivalent of attic space into a maker center and public tech lab called 4th Floor, regularly hosting related public events. The Sacramento Public Library’s “Library of Things” allows people to check out GoPro cameras and tablet devices, among other tech tools. Other experiments abound from Boston to St. Louis to Washington, DC, to Chicago: according to one survey, more than 100 libraries had added some variety of makerspace as of 2014; another report said more than 250 have at least a 3-D printer available.

And the progressive thinking and creativity of libraries align with the goals of many planners: maintaining and exploiting community touch-points, often embedded deep into crucially central public spaces, and expanding the range of citizens drawn to them. Interestingly, some urban thinkers have begun to explore the potential of makerspaces arising either from the private sector or the grass roots as a component of “a new civic infrastructure.” Perhaps libraries like Cincinnati’s are already building that. 

One challenge, Fender says, is the lack of widely accepted metrics for gauging the impact on a given institution—or, by extension, its civic environment. So Cincinnati has been keeping its own numbers: in September 2015, the MakerSpace took 1,592 equipment reservations, including 92 for the MakerBot, 157 for the laser engraver, and 298 for the vinyl printer. All reflect steady or growing interest. (Thus the MakerSpace collection is growing, with the addition of an Espresso Book Machine that prints volumes on demand.) 

“The MakerSpace reminds people the library is there,” Fender says, “but it also causes them to look at it in a different way and say: ‘Oh, they’re thinking about the future, about what the community needs are, and how they can provide something more than the books on the shelf.’” 

Rob Walker (robwalker.net) is a contributor to Design Observer and The New York Times.

Photograph credit: The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County