GEOG 346: Day 14
Open Space, Green Space, and Green
Infrastructure
Housekeeping Items
• Have a good Reading Week and catch up on the readings.
• A reminder that the field trip assignment is due on
Thursday, March 5th.
• Any questions or concerns?
• Can There Be A Peaceful Co-Existence Between Nature and
the City?
• Some resources:
http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_pawlyn_using_nature_s_
genius_in_architecture and
http://www.ted.com/talks/janine_benyus_biomimicry_in_acti
on.
Fusing the Natural and Built
Environments
• There are a whole array of strategies:
 Greenbelts
 Greenways/ core and corridor systems in the city that serve
as habitat/ wildlife migration corridors and also as
alternative transportation pathways
 Parks of varying degrees of wildness
 Conservation subdivisions
 Botanical gardens
 Japanese gardens/ quiet oases in the city
 Community gardens
 Green buildings, green roofs, “living buildings”
 Alternative stormwater management systems (swales, etc.)
 Living walls
See “The
Urban
Garden”:
http://searc
h.alexanders
treet.com/vi
ew/work/87
3488
A Key Strategy is Preserving Remnant Natural
Environments in Cities; A Partial Victory was Recently
Achieved with Linley Valley West
• There are a number of videos about Linley Valley, including
ones showing the beavers (many since trapped out). Just
Google Linley Valley.
Linley Valley and the ‘Ecosystem Approach’
• How would you characterize the development process in
cities from an ecological point of view? It is certainly not
undertaken from an ecosystem perspective. Too often it’s a
“death by a thousand cuts” approach – i.e. “Oh, well, we’ve
got more forests and wetlands, it won’t hurt to pave over
some more.” That may have been the prevailing attitude in
the Linley Valley.
• Before large parts of Linley Valley were set aside as park, in
aYou Tube videos, Mayor John Ruttan and (former) planning
director, Andrew Tucker, are shown pointing to the forms and
checklists and saying: “The developers did everything
required by law, they jumped through all the hoops.” But just
because something is technically legal doesn’t mean that it is
socially or ecologically optimal, or even ethically right.
• To take an ecosystem approach,
one would need to look at the big
(regional) picture or, as Condon
says, to see that “the site is to the
region what the cell is to the
body… the ecological function of
the site have everything to do with
the ecological health of the
region.” You can’t make
ecologically irresponsible
decisions at the site level and
expect them to add up to greater
ecological health at a regional
scale.
• He extends his analogy to the
human body by saying that rivers
and streams are the veins of the
urban ecosystem, and that
rooftops, driveways, lanes and
streets are the capillaries.
Condon – Chapter 7
Condon – Chapter 7
• His critique of the way we do development is two-fold:
 it undermines ecological health, and it
 deprives children and others of direct nature experiences. It
has been shown by numerous psychological studies that
contact with nature greatly reduces stress and restores
attention.
Condon, Chapter 7
• In this chapter, he discusses a bit of the history of
landscape architecture, his discipline. It was founded, at
least in North America, by Frederick Law Olmsted, and was
influenced by the romantic strain of the transcendental
movement of Emerson and Thoreau.
• Olmsted’s greatest achievements were the design of
Central Park in New York and the Emerald Necklace in
Boston, but he also designed Parc Mont Royal in Montreal.
• There are many things that his parks were supposed to
accomplish: • spiritual uplift • bringing different social classes into
contact with one another • facilitating passive and active recreation
• enhancing real estate values • facilitating transportation (paths
and trails) and • enhancing ecological function.
• His thinking is many ways was more holistic and integrative than
most 20th century parks planners.
Frederick Law Olmsted
Condon, Chapter 7
• The Emerald Necklace exemplifies a critical feature of
contemporary ecologically and alternative transportationinspired parks planning: connectivity – creating linked
corridors through the urban environment that can facilitate
wildlife movement, walking and cycling and that match, in
some cases, stream networks.
• Olmsted’s son and stepson carried on his work.
• His proto-ecological thinking was revived by Ian McHarg,
author of Design With Nature. McHarg anticipated GIS by
developing sieve mapping, which involved the overlay of
different types of data to see where development would be
most advantageous (or least injurious). He mapped habitat,
areas of hydrological significance (e.g. recharge areas),
unstable soils or those with agricultural value, etc. and
steered development clear of those areas.
Condon, Chapter 7
• The largest application of McHarg’s
ideas was the new community of
Woodlands, Texas. While Condon has
some criticisms of it, it was and is a
huge advance on conventional
greenfield planning and development.
The work by Randall Arendt
represents a modest application of
some of the same principles.
• Low-impact development standards
have also been developed in cities like
Olympia, WA. These involve
significant riparian buffer zones and
emulation of natural processes in the
treatment of stormwater. In terms of
the latter, Dockside Green in Victoria
has implemented such a system into
its structure.
Ian McHarg
Condon, Chapter 7
 The work of limiting urban sprawl was
greatly facilitated by Oregon’s passage,
in 1973, of Senate Bill 100, which
mandated that all cities establish land
use goals and urban growth
boundaries. Despite numerous court
challenges, it has endured.
 In Ontario, as a result of agitation by
the Save The Oak Ridges Moraine
(STORM) Coalition and other groups,
the province was forced to set up a
large green belt to limit the sprawl of
Metro Toronto and to protect
important aquifer and habitat areas
along the Oak Ridges Moraine and
Niagara Escarpment.
How successful it’s been is open
to question
Niagara Escarpment
Oak Ridges Moraine
Condon, Chapter 7
 In the rest of the chapter, Condon offers five principles
for urban green space planning:
 put nature out front (where it is visible), not out back;
 use the seam between nature and the city for
alternative transportation;
 integrate natural systems into more formal recreation
areas and civic spaces;
 expand the green network indefinitely;
 provide an alternative movement system throughout
the city (for cyclists and pedestrians, etc.).
 Apart from the example of Pringle Creek in Salem, OR –
which Condon cites as an example of all of them – can
you think of examples of each of these principles?
Condon, Chapter 7
• Are there more innovative ways of doing development
than is the norm in Nanaimo? (One exception is
Hawthorne Corner by Insight Developments)
• An example from Boulder, Colorado is as follows:
http://www.boulderhousing.org/content/recentdevelopment-holiday-neighborhood and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSVyshBniL4.
• Another is Dockside Green.
• What are your ideas?
• I’ll do more with green infrastructure when we
come back from
Reading Week.
Randall Arendt on Conservation Design
[See http://site.ebrary.com/lib/viu/docDetail.action?docID=10196536]
• He contrasts conventional subdivision design with
conservation subdivision design. Conventional design is
“where all the land is divided into houselots and streets, with
the only open space typically being undevelopable wetlands,
steep slopes, floodplains, and stormwater management
areas” – or SLOAP, Space Left Over After Planning.
• In these subdivisions, there are usually few places to walk,
for community events, or children to play.
• The Planned Residential Developments (PRDs)
of the 1960s were somewhat more flexible in
layout, but they didn’t provide better treatment
of open space.
Randall Arendt on Conservation Design
[See http://site.ebrary.com/lib/viu/docDetail.action?docID=10196536]
• In conservation subdivision design, at least 50% of the site
is reserved for open space, and half of that in a relatively
natural state. The other half can be used as playing fields or
parkland for picnics, etc.
• The half of the land that is developed contains as many
units as would exist in a conventional subdivision – that is,
to say, the development is “density neutral.” It achieves this
either through narrow, smaller lots and narrower
houses or through duplexes, townhouses, or
other denser forms of housing.
• The key thing is to select the conservation
lands first.
• See next page for contrasting examples.
Conventional
subdivision
Conservation
subdivision