Sessions By Track

Bees and other native pollinators, both wild and managed, are vital to sustaining diverse ecosystems and maintaining our food supply, but their populations states of health are dwindling. Landscape architects, planners, other design professionals and policymakers, are at the front lines of the pollinator health battle and are actively developing creative new ways to promote pollinator health and habitat in the public and private realms. This session explores plans and practices aimed at integrating pollinator habitats into existing urban and rural frameworks across the United States. The panelists will discuss reasons for pollinator population declines and the consequences, how design professionals and communities design and incorporate pollinator habitats and best practices, as well as case studies from Houston and Washington, DC. Participants will also receive an update on how the American Society of Landscape Architects is working with the federal government to create pollinator friendly policies.

Take Aways

Participants will learn about pollination issues and proposed treatments to the problem as it relates to planning, urban design and policy.

Participants will identify tangible local perspective examples of how pollinator health and habitat issues are being solved in different sized communities.

Learn about advancements and partnerships addressing within the urban and rural design community and how landscape architects and design professionals can play an active role in local and national policy-making.

This session will focus on community efforts from across the country to address lack of access to parks, recreation and green space and programming in underserved communities featuring case studies from the Portland Parks and Recreation Department, the Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Department, and NYC Parks. Participants will discuss the opportunities and the pitfalls of planning, technology and community-engagement/capacity-building strategies used to help address inequitable open space development and how to best engage communities in locating, programming and improving critical park and recreation infrastructure.

Take Aways

Participants will learn how to measure the equitable provision of public goods, in this case, park-and-recreation infrastructure and programs.

Tools and strategies to improve access to park-and-recreation infrastructure and programming.

Discuss tools and techniques to help your community better engage the public.

Every urban community has at least one: an area of town that used to be a vibrant hub of industrial or commercial activity but now sits vacant, attracting crime and depressing property values. The challenges associated with returning such neglected properties to productive reuse can be daunting, but the potential benefits are equally numerous. This session will use case studies to explore specific innovative strategies and tools employed by urban and rural communities in the Pacific Northwest to turn community eyesores into community assets. What sort of policy reforms can your city institute to encourage such a site’s redevelopment? How can you ensure that the end use benefits the surrounding community and matches their vision for the site? What tools are available to help you work through these issues? These questions, and yours, will be answered by seasoned land-recycling practitioners in this informative and interactive session.

Take Aways

Participants will acquire tools and strategies for addressing land recycling challenges in a sustainable and equitable fashion in their communities.

Participants will learn what land recycling strategies and tools worked and which didn’t for other communities similar to their own.

Participants will gain inspiration and confidence to take on the challenge of land recycling in their own communities.

As more people live in urban areas, the importance of the quality of the urban environment is ever increasing: clean water, clean air and access to healthy food, all the while making the connection between the health of the environment to economic resiliency, social justice, civic engagement and access to nature in parks and green space. But what are the measures of a healthy urban environment, and how can communities achieve the multiple benefits (both ecological and social) from implementing green infrastructure as part of urban design and meeting regulatory requirements such as stormwater management? Through an integrated social-ecological research program called the Green Cities Research Alliance, researchers in the Puget Sound region of Washington are working with practitioners and local decision-makers to co-design and implement green infrastructure projects that address the most pressing problems facing urban social, ecological and economic conditions.

Take Aways

An understanding of the vital role of green infrastructure, the services it provides in an urban context and the growing connection to human health, stormwater management, social equity and climate resiliency. This will include the specific connection between nature, public health and well-being using data-linking trees to human health.

How green infrastructure is being used to address social and environmental justice issues in two communities (one in WA, one in OR) impacted by poor environmental and human health conditions.

The possibilities/benefits of innovative collaborations and the collective impact approach to achieving better results for communities, seen through the Urban Waters Partnership program as being demonstrated in the Green-Duwamish watershed in greater Seattle.