Annotated Table of Contents for Vacant to Vibrant

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Vacant to Vibrant: Creating Successful Green Infrastructure Networks Sandra L. Albro Island Press, 2019 https://islandpress.org/books/vacant-vibrant Annotated Table of Contents

Introduction The question of how to repurpose urban vacant land in ways that simultaneously address environmental challenges and urban decline is of key interest to many U.S. Great Lakes cities. While urban farming has enabled communities to generate environmental, economic, and educational benefits from formerly vacant land, this type of urban greening requires extensive manual labor for low profit margins. In 2010, negotiations between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District established that green stormwater infrastructure would count towards sewer improvements to comply with the Clean Water Act, creating the potential for novel, low-maintenance use of urban vacant land. This chapter introduces the origins of Vacant to Vibrant, a pilot project initiated by staff at Holden Forests & Gardens to convert vacant lots to “stormwater parks,� and provides brief overviews of the later chapters.

Chapter 1: Green Stormwater Infrastructure on Vacant Lots During 2009 and 2010, a series of meetings bringing together professionals from 11 cities in the Great Lakes region established three emerging challenges in urban planning: an excess of urban vacant land, a need for improved stormwater management, and impacts of industrial decline. This chapter describes the interplay among these challenges and describes opportunities for transformative change. Land vacancy rates had increased due to industrial and population decline since the 1970s as well as recent state and federal investment in demolitions. With population declines, smaller local tax bases had made the updates to existing infrastructure for managing stormwater runoff cost prohibitive, leading to enforcement actions by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The chapter closes with discussion of potential benefits and challenges of using urban vacant lots for the dual purposes of stormwater management and neighborhood stabilization.

Chapter 2: City Dynamics that Shape Vacant Land Use Prior to beginning formal project planning, the Vacant to Vibrant team engaged in a deep exploration of the historical context of the three target cities: Cleveland, Ohio; Gary, Indiana; and Buffalo, New York. This chapter describes both historical patterns common among U.S. industrial cities and the unique features of each of the three target cities. During the 20th century, immigration, class dynamics, and racial dynamics shaped many industrial cities, and these patterns themselves were influenced by changing federal laws and macroeconomic conditions. Exploring the cultural history, physical form, and local context of the Buckeye-Woodland Hills neighborhood of Cleveland, the Aetna neighborhood of


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Annotated Table of Contents for Vacant to Vibrant by Island Press - Issuu