A deliberate, collaborative approach to building complex teams reaps rewards.

Building teams is of course inherent in the process of designing and constructing landscapes; we routinely partner with engineers along with experts in ecology, soils, irrigation and lighting. But as the scale, the complexity, and the ambition (climate change, social and racial equity, environmental justice) of the projects we are asked to address grows, our teams have amplified, especially when you include stakeholders and clients in the mix. Elaborate and tangled, large teams can become unwieldy quickly, seriously undermining a project’s success. But, collaboration is critical, the underlying goal (and reward) is the ability to draw on team member’s professional and life experiences, to allow for a mix of ideas and perspectives that will inform a project in interesting ways.

Moakley Park Team

A quick glance at the project team graphic above underscores how incredibly important it is to be deliberate about the collaborative process. After leading two very large teams in the past few years, Moakley Park and the Brickline Greenway, we have learned (sometimes the hard way) the fundamentals critical in the process of building and managing teams. And, while we often talk about this internally, sharing our learnings helps us all be better partners. When we approach collaboration we believe there are four components to consider; behavior, structure, process, and communication.

Behavior

Underpinning all great collaboration is trust. Of course trust is built-in (hopefully) when you team with people/firms with whom you have a positive shared history. To that end, cultivating good relationships pays dividends; you get a head start when adding ‘heritage relationships’ to your team and we do this 50-60% of the time. But building new relationships is the lifeblood to any practice, providing opportunities for learning and growth. Here, there are a couple of essentials that must be practiced, fostered and institutionalized… respect, adaptability, and organization. Conflict is inevitable on large projects and without these three ingredients successful collaboration is impossible. 

Structure

When we speak of structure, we think about setting a solid foundation. Firstly, we look for diversity within our teams to ensure that many voices and perspectives are represented. We think this difference makes for better collaboration. But at the same time, we look for common ground, partners and even clients with shared values, goals and expectations for the project as well as alignment on levels of commitment and motivation. 

Process

As important as developing a process for collaboration, is articulating it to the entire team. Processes for collaboration, communication, and conflict resolution are essential and must be clearly established at the outset of any multi-partner project. In addition, we work hard to eliminate ambiguity and ensure that everyone has clear roles and lines of responsibility and that members' strengths and capabilities are clearly defined and complimentary. Organizational charts and diagrammatic maps provide visibility and clarity to the team as do clear and precise protocols and detailed schedules and expectations for collaboration. The upfront work of providing detailed governance for a project team pays off over the course of a complex project.

Communication

Orchestrating the flow of knowledge is imperative. While transparency and keeping everyone ‘in the loop’ is essential, it’s also important to make sure that communication is efficient and productive. When we think of communication we look at how it is organized, integrated, filtered and condensed–an overload of unorganized communication is as detrimental as too little communication. Meeting notes that are precise, easy to digest, and actionable are essential along with investing in tools for real-time collaboration like Slack, Miro or even Google Docs. Mindful communication facilitates flow, eliminates barriers, and is action oriented. Lastly, there must be a culture of knowledge integration where everyone is willing, able and encouraged to share knowledge – this goes full circle back to trust.

These are the tenets we employ when building teams at Stoss but there is one last component that we try to incorporate whenever possible… a social component. A happy hour or lunch before or after a meeting, a dinner to celebrate a project milestone, this helps bind us on a more personal level and helps bring down those invisible walls that can sometimes build up. 

The process, especially in the case of complex projects,  can be messy at times, taking unforeseen turns as new information is uncovered and new perspectives are brought to the table. But a structured approach to building teams, alongside a willingness to respectfully critique, reflect and iterate, allows for continuing, authentic and constructive input, all of which make any collaboration richer and more productive.

A pragmatic plan for tree equity in Los Angeles.

Until recently, green space was considered an ‘amenity’. But thankfully that perspective has shifted, accelerated by a global pandemic that exposed how essential access to quality urban green space is to human health. Today, we are reckoning with decades (and decades) of systemic lack of urban canopy in low income neighborhoods, finally confronting this poignant social and environmental injustice. Anyone living, working, and playing in these communities disproportionately bears the brunt of exposure to toxic, polluted air, water and the effects of extreme heat. Imagine sitting for a moment, at an exposed bus stop, on a sweltering 90 degree day surrounded by nothing but white-hot concrete. With no shade or shelter, and the constant bombardment of choking fumes from exhaust and dust, it takes but a few moments to realize that green infrastructure is absolutely not an ‘amenity’, but a necessity and right of every human being.

Los Angeles is a prime example of the scale of the problem. Tree-lined streets and backyards and public open space can generally be found in whiter, wealthier areas; meanwhile, low-income Angelenos of color are far more likely to be exposed to the high temperatures and air pollution that are associated with lower tree canopy. When compounded with disparities in access to healthcare and transportation, the existing inequity in tree cover across the city has major implications for the health, wellbeing, and quality of life of millions of L.A. residents. According to TreePeople the average existing canopy in the county is 20%, as opposed to the national average of 27%. Yet, in the majority of low income communities, we see averages of 5-8% tree canopy.

In 2019, the L.A. Green New Deal plan was proposed by the Mayor’s office. Amongst many other benchmarks, it strives to plant 90,000 trees by 2021, with the focus on increasing the tree canopy in low income communities by 50%. A tall order that can feel insurmountable when faced with real on the ground challenges. When analyzing typical streetscapes and urban intersections, the obstacles stack up with issues arising from the simplest of interventions. Large concrete driveway aprons, underground utilities and overhead power lines impinge even on simple tree planting efforts. Minimal soil volume, watering, and visibility issues, coupled with aesthetic and shared maintenance conflicts, derail more ambitious efforts and of course, removing any parking is a hot button issue. Yet, we have to navigate these barriers and find solutions to this intractable problem.

Recently, our team worked with a multidisciplinary team including City Plants, CAPA Strategies, TreePeople, the City's Chief Forestry Officer, as well as representatives from Streets and other city departments to help produce an Urban Forest Equity Streets Guidebook for the City of Los Angeles. The team’s research delves into the history of redlining and links disparities in tree cover with the long-term impacts of disinvestment and racial segregation. Working from case studies on ten streets (selected from across the city, and within some of the most socially vulnerable and those facing intense heat challenges, with a focus on South LA, East LA and the Northeast SF Valley to demonstrate varying conditions) the guidebook identifies challenges to implementation, potential trade-offs, and proposed improvements at multiple tiers of investment.

The plan breaks down improvements into 3 tiers. At tier 1, the team identifies opportunities that can be implemented with minimal cost and infrastructural change. For example, in Los Angeles available open parkways and private property were identified and solutions for easy low-cost planting presented. Yet, the reality is that even if all tier 1 sites were planted, the city would not achieve its 50% goal. Thus, the team proposed tier 2 interventions requiring more change and associated costs, and ultimately tier 3 solutions which involved new infrastructure like curb extensions and creating bike lanes and medians that would also help to calm traffic and filter stormwater run-off.

Before

Before

After

After

This framework offers a pragmatic, actionable plan to dramatically expand L.A.’s urban forest in the areas where trees are most urgently needed. It acknowledges the constraints and trade-offs while also providing solutions that can serve as a benchmark for other cities.

Learning resilience during Covid-19.

Image: © Mike Belleme

The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored and compounded systemic issues within nearly every sector of society, from healthcare to transportation to supply chains. It has forced disruption in previously inflexible systems and exposed the deeply rooted inequities and systemic racism that place people of color, immigrants, and lower-income individuals at significantly greater risk of economic and health impacts from disruptive events.

Climate change—an ongoing, yet slower-to-arrive threat—will have similar effects. Increased storms, coastal flooding, excess heat, drought, and other impacts will further expose and exacerbate the vulnerability and inequity created by our historic actions unless we begin now to dismantle these systemic patterns and realign our values to include and prioritize the most vulnerable members of our community. What we learn now through our failures and successes in response to COVID should serve as a lesson in adaptation and flexibility—in other words, a lesson in resilience

Our collective COVID response has shown that we can be flexible, that we can adapt and shift systems to new conditions and set aside regulatory and other limits in order to create new systems in a time of crisis. We have seen these adaptations across scales. Cities have made way for outdoor dining, redirected traffic to expand dining capacity, and created pedestrian-focused “shared streets” for community access and exercise. Restaurants have adapted in numerous ways, from shifting to outdoor dining and partial service to changing their menu entirely, depending on community need and the resources on hand. Others have gone so far as “burning it all down” and moving away from the cook-and-serve restaurant model entirely, as Irene Li of Mei Mei in Boston chose as the most appropriate “pivot” to make. Hospitals and health care facilities built critical-care centers in parking lots and manufacturing companies rapidly shifted operations to produce critically needed PPE. And textile-based companies added masks to their repertoire, often donating masks to critical communities for each mask purchased.

These shifts showed us that we have greater range than we have previously allowed for. Regulatory change is generally slow. Emergency-response projects undertaken due to COVID offer insight into moving such projects more rapidly through pilots and ongoing adaptation. Crucial to the future relevance of these projects is the scale at which they operate. Altering an entire block as an experimental response allows us to envision a new normal in a way that a single property or business making change does not. Similar to a pop-up store going online before opening a brick-and-mortar shop, these efforts can be a temporary means to gather data, experience new modes of interaction, and troubleshoot failures before we make wholesale regulatory transformation or spend decades planning to get all the pieces into place.

It would be short-sighted of us not to learn from these temporary measures and imagine how our cities could be structured to favor pedestrians over cars, to focus resources on the neighborhoods that are most in need, and implement systems that prioritize flexibility and community wellbeing over individual gain.

IT WOULD BE SHORT-SIGHTED NOT TO LEARN FROM COVID AS A TEST FOR THE UNSTABLE FUTURE THAT CLIMATE PREDICTIONS FORCE US TO ANTICIPATE.

It would similarly be short-sighted not to learn from COVID as a test for the unstable future that climate predictions force us to anticipate. Climate change will intensify the social and environmental challenges of communities that are already struggling with drought, food insecurity, housing insecurity, poor air quality, and high unemployment.

When COVID made it painfully clear that our health and our lives depended upon creating flexibility in healthcare and food-distribution systems, many communities responded creatively to test ideas and prioritize livelihoods and connection. We should approach creative solutions for the ongoing issues and climate-based risks, particularly those faced by low-income, historically disenfranchised populations and the farms and farmers that produce our food supply, with the same urgency, as though our health and our lives depend upon them. They do.

This essay was originally published in Designing the City we Want. Calls to action from the Van Alen Council in response to Covid-19.

Amy Whitesides expands role, focusing on Resiliency & Research.

As with any organization, Stoss is all about the people whose passion, focus and expertise drives the work. Meet Amy Whitesides. Amy has been an integral leader at Stoss for over 10 years, helping to shape both the firm’s portfolio and the studio’s culture. She has directed numerous award-winning projects that focus on environmental sustainability and resilience, including the Trinity River Waterfront in Dallas, Vision Galveston on Galveston Island, North Shore Promenades in Edmonton, and various Climate Ready Boston district planning studies including East Boston & Charlestown and Downtown.

In 2021, we are pleased to announce that she will build on her expertise as Director of Resiliency and Research. In this capacity, Amy will continue to build the practice’s climate related knowledge, bringing new insight and solutions to both the internal team and externally through her involvement with the Van Alen Climate Council, Stone Living Lab, ASLA, as well as teaching climate-related studios at Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Amy’s background in landscape, ecology and biology informs all aspects of her work and sparks a keen interest in the role of landscape in food production and in mitigating climate change. In addition, her life-long passion for open water swimming and surfing literally keeps her in touch with the effects of sea-level rise on the ocean and most critically along the shore. Currently, she is overseeing multiple waterfront design and redevelopment efforts in Boston, at the L Street Power Station, as well as a major renovation to Moakley Park–Boston’s most significant open space investment since Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace. She is also collaborating with our frequent partners in design, Weston & Sampson on coastal resilience engineering and design projects at Ryan Playground in Charlestown and along the waterfront in East Boston. And with Arcadis on Coastal Resiliency Planning on Nantucket Island. Amy’s work is sensitive to context and larger ecological systems while advocating for greater diversity and equity in the types of social spaces and open space experiences available in the City. 

Currently serving as a Design Critic at the GSD, Amy previously taught landscape history and studio courses at Northeastern University and University of Toronto. She is a graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Design where she obtained a Master of Landscape Architecture. As we head into the new year and Amy dives into her new role, we asked her a couple of questions.

How does your love for the water, as a swimmer and surfer, play into your focus on climate resiliency? What changes have you personally witnessed in the water or along the edge in your lifetime?

It is central to my interest in design and resilience specifically.  I have seen first-hand how dramatic the experience of being at the water and physically immersing yourself into it can be in people’s lives, my own and others. I used to volunteer with an organization that took kids with various physical and mental challenges out to surf. Watching kids who lived inland get out on a surfboard and into the water for the first time ever is incredible and solidifies the need for us to keep this resource public–and be the best stewards we can be. One way we do that is to ensure that protecting ourselves from coastal storms doesn’t cut us off from the water. In Boston in particular, a lot of work has gone into making the harbor safe and turning the City’s attention to the harbor as a public resource. Planning for coastal resilience needs to build on this work, not set us back to a time in which we ignore it and worse, make it uninhabitable for us and the marine life we rely on and admire. 

Living in coastal California for many years, I saw a lot of erosion and shifting beaches. The response to this has largely been development of hard infrastructure such as seawalls and fabricated cliff faces. It’s nice to hear more discussion today of nature-based solutions and opportunities for living shorelines and ongoing management tactics that allow for changing conditions that seek to improve ecological value while protecting human resources. 

You have an ecology background, how have you been able to incorporate this into your resiliency planning work for both coastal and inland projects?

My background in ecology drives my interest in resiliency planning. It doesn’t come into play per se, but informs how I think about resiliency and the values I put forward as we make decisions on what to prioritize. I want the city to thrive, but I want it to do so alongside a thriving ecology, in the water and out. Planning for stormwater management, improved canopy and coastal parklands helps to promote that. 

The City of Boston has been very proactive in planning for climate change and you have worked on a number of projects for them that have set the bar. Is the city shifting into implementation mode? Are you starting to see them act on the plans?

Yes! We are currently working on 3 projects that have emerged from the district scale planning and are moving into site-specific vision and design development in the coming years. Two of those were direct outcomes of our work on the East Boston and Charlestown Coastal Resilience Solutions project in 2017. 

Moakley Park is not well known in Boston but plays a huge role in protecting the city from storm surge, how might your work on this project inform how other coastal cities can adapt to a changing climate?

Moakley Park is a great opportunity to showcase many innovative design principles and solutions to very difficult challenges.  The Vision Plan itself is a good model for how city planning can lead to site-specific implementation and continue to coordinate with state and local entities to ensure construction aligns with adjacent efforts to complete a stretch of coastal flood protection. As we move through the design, we know that we will encounter many sub-grade challenges from varied urban soil conditions that tend toward subsidence to high groundwater and the presence of critical utilities. Stay -tuned for more as we collaborate with our engineering team to develop creative design solutions to these challenges. 

You are leading research initiatives at Stoss. What issues are you exploring, what areas of the practice are you looking forward to expanding in 2021?

Right now I am focusing on two efforts, one in Boston and one in Los Angeles. In Boston I’m coordinating with researchers at UMass through the Stone Living Lab. We’re working on ways to expand their research on seawall materials into the urban environment and hope to further expand this in the future. In Los Angeles, Stoss Associate, Davi Schoen, and I are working with City Plants and Tree People on a visualization of their efforts to establish principles and planning for tree equity in LA County. This means really looking at the current conditions of the tree canopy and evaluating how and where to increase canopy while focusing on the neighborhoods and communities that have historically suffered health and excess heat conditions that result from low canopy levels. 

The resurgence and resilience of urban forestry.

Rendering of the proposed urban forest at Triangle Park, Cambridge, MA.

Increasingly, a spotlight is trained on the layered benefits of the urban forest, highlighting the significant impact they can have on everything from climate adaptation to human wellness and mental health. Notwithstanding that trees can improve property values by as much as 15 percent, more critically they are instrumental in the mitigation of urban heat island effect, in improving air quality by absorbing pollutants such as nitrogen oxides, ammonia, sulfur dioxide and ozone, and urban forests are a key green infrastructure tool in the management of stormwater. And, it is critical to note that disadvantaged communities, particularly black, Indigenous and people of color are more impacted by the absence of trees further exacerbating the negative effects of climate change.

We are becoming a more urbanized nation. The U.S. Forest Service identifies urban forests as, “dynamic ecosystems that provide critical benefits to people and wildlife. By reducing noise and providing places to recreate, urban forests strengthen social cohesion, spur community revitalization, and add economic value to our communities.” According to the Los Angeles Urban Forestry division, “a properly selected and maintained tree can reduce summer cooling cost by 10 to 50 percent.” In addition, “trees produce oxygen, and a mature tree can produce enough oxygen annually to meet the needs of a family of four for an entire year.” 

It’s no surprise then that municipalities are increasingly developing urban forestry programs to evaluate, maintain and expand the urban forest canopy. The City of Cambridge is no exception and is developing a master plan to provide guidelines, goals, objectives, targets and best practices for the city's urban forests. As a demonstration, our team is currently working with the city on a naturalized forest habitat in a tough urban context. Triangle Park is one of three small urban parks designed as part of a new open space initiative. As a small ‘leftover’ space within a quickly developing area of Cambridge, this park is surrounded on three sides by highly trafficked roads and dense architecture. 

Current conditions 2020.

The goal for this 1 acre park was to create a buffer zone from the busy street, but also address urban heat island effect, stormwater management, and biodiversity. The design concept was to bring a naturalized forest habitat into this frenetic urban environment but also provide both passive and active recreation opportunities for those who live and work in the neighborhood. To that end, the natural forest succession and gentle topography are punctuated with a custom concrete bench system with varying profiles that encourage both socialization and the ability to sit quietly and enjoy the lush surroundings.

Moakley Park, a case study in Inclusive community engagement.

Image ©Mike Belleme

Moakley Park is the kind of multi-functional, complex project that we love to tackle: it’s both a neighborhood amenity for South Boston and a waterfront destination for the entire city. It has room for active recreation—tennis, running, basketball, and baseball, among others—as well as enjoyment of the waterfront, family barbecues or picnics, kids’ activities and play, or community gatherings. When renovated, it can play a critical role in Boston’s ecology and resiliency on many fronts, mitigating impacts from urban heat island effect, coastal flooding, and major rain events. It’s a park that holds many different meanings for the cross-section of Bostonians who come to Moakley to play, walk, sit, run, and hang out each day. 

When a single space performs so many functions for so many people, how do we craft an effective engagement strategy? Continuous and sustained communication, through a variety of programs and formats, has so far proven to be the key to success. Prior to COVID-19 and the need for social distancing, the foundation of our engagement strategy was Community Open Houses and on-site events, including ‘Discover Moakley!’—a daylong community event organized to bring fun and energy to the park with local vendors, an activated street, and booths for community input and resiliency education. We amplified these efforts with digital and physical surveys, one-on-one interviews, and mapping activities; these allowed us to initiate conversations with community members about how the park is used, and to better understand their hopes and dreams for the future of the park. 

Throughout the process, we tested a number of new tools. For ‘Discover Moakley!’, we facilitated an interactive activity in which participants poured water over different surfaces to see the rate of water infiltration, creating a demonstration of green infrastructure principles and porous pavement in action. In partnership with Boston Parks and Recreation, we developed a Moakley Park coloring book which we disseminated through social media, creating an opportunity for younger park users to participate.

This spring and summer, the COVID-19 pandemic has demanded a rapid transformation of existing engagement and outreach. This challenge has pushed us to generate ideas for engagement that overcome both existing and new barriers to participation and from which we can build better outreach practices, especially for those traditionally left out of typical processes, using strategies such as online surveys, virtual tours, and interactive video meetings. 

A previously recorded public forum during the Covid-19 pandemic on the Moakley Park project.

As we move into the next phase of work on the project, we are striving to engage even more voices to weigh in on the future of Moakley Park. It’s a process that requires commitment, time, honesty, and a willingness to gather input; self-critical assessment of our successes and failures; and tailoring our process to meet ever-evolving needs. We believe that meaningful engagement plants seeds that bear fruit far beyond the design process—and we hope that Moakley Park will continue to be loved by many generations to come. Learn more about Moakley Park!

Do you live in Boston? Would you like to to take the Moakley Park survey…. click here!

Digital platforms provide new tools for public engagement during pandemic.

Image: 2019 Mike Belleme

In 2020, many of us have been forced to fully embrace digital life. The Covid-19 pandemic has forced us to rethink how we work and how we engage with one another. When it comes to moving urban planning/design projects forward during these uncertain times, teams are increasingly turning to digital tools to interface with the public out of necessity. Yet, even prior to the normalization of social distancing, public engagement in its traditional sense had its fraught moments. Large public meetings, often held at days and times inconvenient to many working people, also tended to be dominated by groups with specific agendas who, more often than not, hijacked the conversation. With poor attendance and lack of diversity in the feedback, engagement tactics were ripe for new strategies and technology.

Today, there are a plethora of new software platforms on the market, and in most cases these tools are not designed to supplant in-person meetings but complement a suite of traditional efforts. Engagement tools include things like project websites, social media, virtual meeting platforms, and web platforms designed for information sharing, gathering feedback, and facilitating interaction with community members. This virtual interaction can be static or interactive and according to the APA, “include virtual meetings and events, online surveys and polls, project visualizations, interactive maps, and crowdsourcing”.

However, these tools have their own caveats. According to the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, 15% of households do not use the internet at all, and 9% use it outside the home but do not have a home connection. This highlights why teams cannot rely on digital tools alone, especially when striving to seek input from all generations and a diverse socio-economic and cultural constituency. Several best practices have emerged in the engagement arena, and more specifically in the use of digital tools for public engagement including;

• Map networks of people with whom you wish to engage, critically looking for under-represented communities.

• Assemble a diverse sample of the community-at-large, as a critical mass for your efforts.

• Involve people in one-on-one or small-group discussions, then mix in larger forums for amplifying bigger ideas and moving the discussions forward.

• Give participants the opportunity to share values and stories by creating shared work and ideation spaces.

• Allow citizens to mutually consider a range of options, to understand priorities, trade-offs and choices inherent in the process.

• Determine project metrics, measure often to gauge the success or failure of campaigns. Learn from your findings.

• Create conversations that appeal directly to people’s core interests and find ways to propel that dialogue.

• Add tools like Wikis, polls, surveys, mapping and crowdsourcing functions that promote direct involvement.

• Gamify the engagement process in ways that produce hard data.

Our team has shifted rapidly into virtual online formats, in some cases partnering with organizations who have robust digital outlets. On our Moakley Park project in Boston, we are working with with Boston Harbor Now for virtual community forums as a way to update the community and seek additional feedback. For a project in Downtown St. Louis, our collective team lead by Interface Studio, has launched a robust and interactive community open house that is achieving some press coverage!

In the past few years, new software tools have continually come on the market and are evolving quickly into easy-to-use graphic platforms that have a wide array of tools and functionality. We’ve compiled 9 platforms (none of which we endorse) as a quick snapshot of what is available right now.

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Digital Platforms

METROQUEST

-multi-platform online surveys
-micro-learning and mini-games embedded

MINDMIXER

-community collaboration platform
-surveys, idea submission, idea refinement, idea voting, interactive budgeting, and community challenges

BANGTHETABLE

-Listen. Use a combination of forums, polls, and other tools to better understand your community’s perspectives and needs.
-Inform. Communicate initiatives through newsletters, blogs and social media to keep your residents informed.
-Measure. Advanced analytics and reporting deliver actionable insights and data-driven evidence for better decisions.
-Build community. Capture participant information, develop resident profiles and target communications

COURBANIZE

-provides communication and reporting tools for developers and planners
-project background & updates
-forum moderated by coUrbanize
-timelines and schedules
-share files, presentations, and images

SOCIALPINPOINT

-surveys, forums, interactive mapping, ideation tools, participatory budgeting, pages, stakeholder management

76ENGAGE

-customizable discussion forums, comments, surveys & polls, alerts, voting

THEHIVE

-customizable social mapping, gather input, discussion forums, surveys & polls, Q&A, participatory budgeting

INSIGHTS

-civic engagement facilitation
-digital advisory boards

SPIGIT

-innovation or idea management
-crowdsource and track ideas

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Digital engagement tools can certainly foster a faster, easier and less intimidating way for the public to participate in helping to shape their civic life. Project teams can reach a more diverse group of people and these tools have a longer shelf-life than traditional outreach, collecting data continuously through the life-cycle of a project. That being said, the overall community engagement strategy for any project should include a robust mix of online and in-person channels which in tandem will reach a diverse and representative sample of the community.

Other Resources:

Interesting interactive lab: https://elab.emerson.edu/
Good resource for best practices: http://www.futurewise.org/assets/reports/CET.pdf

Engaging artists to help choreograph open space design can transform project outcomes.

image ©2019 Mike Belleme

While site specific art has always played a role in landscape architecture, the parameters of public art are expanding; ephemeral, temporal and performance-based art is now regularly integrated into sites. Until recently, art has largely served to cultivate a sense of identity within a public space or to highlight the unique stories, histories and culture of a place. Communal and accessible outdoor art is generally embraced by the profession and revered by the community, but the reality is, public space is not always welcoming for all.

In many ways, acknowledging the emotional potency of public art, and it’s ability to create transformational change within communities, has opened our eyes to the potential for artists to collaborate on landscape projects—not just as creators but as innovators, communicators, instigators and liaisons. Early on in the Chouteau Greenway Competition (2016), the project team realized the power that artists could play in thinking creatively, pushing the boundaries if you will, but also in engaging and facilitating sensitive dialogue with communities.

Early on, the competition team worked with renowned artist and architect, Amanda Williams, to help shape the submission. Her project, Color(ed) Theory, was acclaimed for its confrontational look at race and space in the South Side of Chicago. As an artist, she is not just interested in art for arts’ sake, but as means to shift the narrative and explore ways that art can impact the landscape as a whole, transforming it, educating people, bringing them together and starting a dialog. Ms. Williams describes her intent as a way to, “spark conversations, that lead to ideas, that lead to solutions… to set the table, or the canvas if you will… for what the future could be.”

At the inception of the Chouteau Greenway project (now the Brickline Greenway), the team advocated for the inclusion of local St. Louis artists of color to actively inform, craft, and participate in the planning and design process. Artists; Mallory Nezam, an entrepreneurial civic artist, cultural producer, writer, and communications strategist; De Nichols, a social activist focused on addressing civic and social challenges within communities; and Damon Davis, who uses his art to empower the disenfranchised and powerless, became integral members of the 13 member project team helping to shape both the process and outcome. Their unique perspectives and insight helped to frame the explicit goals for the project—a 22 mile greenway through 17 St. Louis neighborhoods—which ultimately became unearth, connect, heal, provoke, cultivate and envision. 

The Brickline Greenway framework plan, released in late 2019, crucially addressed how to equitably reinvest in the city, to increase walkability and vibrancy through neighborhoods, to bridge geographical and cultural divides, to incentivize greater social and economic equity, and to deeply engage, reflect and connect the diversity of cultures that exist in the city. Art became embedded in every aspect of the project, solidified by the formation of the ‘Artists of Color Council’. Embedding art in catalyst sites such as the Griot Museum of Black History and the historic Mill Creek Valley, a vibrant African American community erased in the creation of a freeway overpass, as well as under the 601 freeway, became explicit opportunities to bring public art into marginalized communities. 

Under trestle art park.

Kings highway art park.

Ideas like the “stoop”, an architectural element that celebrates the residential stoop where generations have gathered to share stories, and temporary art installations on vacant lots, became grounding elements that emerged from community dialogue facilitated by the artists. And, when the Council described the dire need for a welcoming, large-scale, public sculpture park accessible for all within the inner city, the idea for the Kings highway overpass was born—a cloverleaf design that winds through a new art park, then launches across the roadway to connect with Forest Park. 

Griot Museum vacant lot activation.

The boundary pushing, creative thinking, community dialogue, and social activism that the art community brought to the vision, was key to the vibrant and inclusive plan that emerged. This project is a prime example of how the role of art and the artist can be expanded, by embedding people like Ms. Nezam in the discovery and design process. She highlights the team’s contribution as, “forefronting the experiential components of the greenway (how do we want people to feel when they are on it?), integrating cultural nuance into the framework plan, and leaning into the storytelling of forgotten histories.” Their understanding that, “the greenway is more than a linear path, that has to be built from the history of a place, react to and reflect its inhabitants' lived experiences, and nod towards a better shared future,” provided a strong foundation from which to build.

St. Louis Improv Anywhere pop-up performance, 2011, St. Louis, MO - Mallory Nezam

With that being said, different artists will have different ways that they approach working in the public realm. Nezam suggests, “artists with a community or collaborative practice can be incredibly integral to helping forefront community culture, needs & wants. Yet, there are other artists who bring the strength of creative problem solving, dreaming outside of the traditional ways of operating and pushing teams to take risks. I'm also personally really interested in how artists can collaborate to reimagine the systems themselves of design, construction, implementation and governance of public projects. How we, as inherently creative and imaginative practitioners, re-conjure and build new systems in which the folks we are designing for can become the folks we are designing with.”