Sasaki: 21st Century Parks

21st-Century Parks and Public Space QUALIFICATIONS 2017

We believe in the transformative power of place

We believe in the transformative power of place. The places in which we live our lives are more than physical spaces; they are the context and the content of our experience. Today, simultaneous revolutions of mobility, connectivity, and identity are changing our experience of the world and, along with it, our relationship to place. Now, more than ever before, what we create will shape the way we live.

At Sasaki, we harness this power to make human hopes and dreams into proven physical realities. This has been our core tenet since day one, and now, as the world changes faster than ever, we advance our shared potential through the built environment. In every project, new possibility is translated into new action.

We think beyond the building, beyond the site, beyond the grid, to design for people and for society. We are at once realistic, holistic, and optimistic. We create places that prove human potential.

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21st-Century Parks and Public Space As our communities grow more diverse and denser, much of contemporary life happens in public parks. Parents sip coffee together at the playground’s edge while community elders hold downwardfacing dog in unison on the lawn.

A young professional meets Today, our practice is up with his running club an interdisciplinary while a busload of students collaborative of innovative begins a nature walk. More minds, comprising planning, than ever before, successful landscape architecture, public parks are the setting ecology, urban design, for a shared experience of the architecture, graphic design, great diversity of community civil engineering, and residents and visitors. software development. We are focused on improving Sasaki’s founding and the quality of life through the ongoing evolution are closely public realm, with particular tied to America’s parks and expertise in the planning, open spaces. Since our firm’s design, and implementation inception in the 1950s, Sasaki of parks projects throughout planners and designers the United States and abroad. have been reinterpreting The core tenets of our public space for ongoing work are partnerships with economic contribution, civic our clients toward shared amenity, ecological and outcomes, meaningful and environmental sustainability, memorable community and creative programming. outreach, data-driven analysis, transformation through visionary planning and design, and well-defined implementation strategies to see projects realized.

SELECT PROJECT EXPERIENCE Wilmington Waterfront Park; Los Angeles, California Schenley Plaza; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Denver Parks and Recreation Master Plan; Denver, Colorado High Line Canal; Denver, Colorado Howard County Parks, Recreation and Land Preservation Master Plan; Howard County, Maryland City of Newport Open Space Plan; Newport, Rhode Island Chicago Riverwalk; Chicago, Illinois The Lawn on D; Boston, Massachusetts John G. and Phyllis W. Smale Riverfront Park; Cincinnati, Ohio Jiading Central Park; Shanghai, China Moore Square; Raleigh, North Carolina Bridgeport Parks Master Plan; Bridgeport, Connecticut Burlington Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Plan; Burlington, Vermont Tom Hanafan River’s Edge Park; Council Bluffs, Iowa Rebuild By Design; Ocean and Monmouth Counties, New Jersey Lincoln Memorial Landscape and Reflecting Pool; Washington, DC Emerald Networks; Boston, Massachusetts Zidell Yards Master Plan; Portland, Oregon Water Works Park; Des Moines, Iowa City of Grand Rapids Parks and Recreation Master Plan; Grand Rapids, Michigan Addison Circle Park; Addison, Texas Charleston Waterfront Park; Charleston, South Carolina 5

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Heritage Landscapes, Modern Amenities INTEGRATING CONTEMPORARY COMFORTS WHILE MAINTAINING HISTORIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL SENSITIVITY Visionaries behind some of America’s greatest urban park systems imagined the squares, rings, and axes of green space for city dwellers. But they could hardly have anticipated the ensuing demographic changes, financial challenges, and environmental concerns that would impact the role these spaces play in contemporary city life. Cities and the societies that define them have evolved. Civic priorities and economic realities have changed too—such that maintaining large expanses of green space has become a burdensome expenditure for many municipalities. Today’s city dwellers seek a diversity of easilyaccessible greens for sport, social gatherings, civic functions, concerts, farmers markets, and a whole range of other uses.

The historic park network plans of the past emphasized acquisition of land to protect it from development in eras of urban growth. This resulted in beautiful pastoral escapes from the urban environment but it takes significant investment to keep them lush, beautiful, and safe. Park planners and city governments are trying to cultivate green spaces that make the most sense for new urban uses. How can we pay homage to the past and leverage the best of our heritage, while reorienting park systems to better meet our needs today and in years to come?

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EMERALD NETWORKS: REVIVING THE LEGACY OF CITY PARKS, BOSTON A research initiative launched by Sasaki in 2015, Emerald Networks: Reviving the Legacy of City Parks includes a public exhibition and companion monograph that explores the trajectory of historic park legacies from their conception to present. The project asks, given the rich history of legacy park plans developed by the likes of Daniel Burnham, William Christmas, Horace Cleveland, Pierre L’Enfant, and Frederick Law Olmsted, what are the models for honoring legacy landscapes while enabling them to meet contemporary demands?

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Long-Term Economic Health PRIVATE DOLLARS FOR PUBLIC GOOD: AN ECONOMIC MODEL FOR A NEW CIVIC SPACE During the last several years of fiscal restraint, there’s been a notable trend: the public sector is increasingly reluctant to fund operating and maintenance costs for public realm projects in perpetuity. Here, earned income from concessions and special events has played a progressively larger role in raising revenue. External value capture is the most untapped resource for helping to fund public realm projects. By concurrently considering planning, design, and economics, we can not only fund public realm projects in new ways, but also create enormous utility for end users and boost the value of surrounding properties.

Our work on public landscapes across the country over many decades gives us a plethora of experience to draw from — as well as an arsenal of successful case studies on the surprising economic return on public investment. We have seen a consistent 5:1 or better ratio: five dollars of private investment spurred by every public dollar spent on quality open space.

SCHENLEY PLAZA, PITTSBURGH Schenley Plaza, designed by Sasaki — and now a decade old — is an active and beloved space within Pittsburgh’s evolving urban renaissance. Our team is tracking the lessons learned — particularly around the park’s successful revenue generation and governance structure — in an ongoing post-occupancy assessment.

Our care for the spaces we make extends beyond the opening of the capital project to the long-term life of the place.

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Active Public Realm YEAR-ROUND PUBLIC PROGRAMMING—BOSTON’S NEW FRONT YARD Our neighborhoods are becoming more dense, our apartments more cramped, our recreation choices more varied. As cities transform, public spaces play an increasingly central role in our lives.

The public realm has always served a vital social function in communities.

Today, it faces greater pressures to perform — not only as a set of sites for respite or special celebrations, as in the past, but as an extension of our social lives. Active, deliberate programming is quickly becoming the new standard of a successful place, defined by year-round activities that engage people of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds. Though animation strategies can range in scale from massive spectacles to intimate family gatherings, they share a common goal of connecting people to place.

THE LAWN ON D, BOSTON Working closely with our partners at HR&A Advisors, we created a new kind of public open space — the Lawn on D — in an emerging Boston neighborhood.

The Lawn — at its modest 2.4 acres and $1.5M construction budget — is a testing ground for new outdoor programs, innovative art installations, and other cultural splashes of all kinds.

The project demonstrates the wisdom of “starting right by starting right now” — a lesson we can apply to both early wins and long-term activation strategies for public space in any city.

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Ecology and Sustainability URBAN GREEN SPACES CONSTITUTE THE VITAL ZONES WHERE NATURAL SYSTEMS MEET AND NEGOTIATE THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT To create an integrated ecosystem framework that will support the health and wellbeing of communities — and of other living systems — Sasaki’s approach necessarily considers multiple scales. The meso-scale looks at a site as a complex, connected ecological and hydrological system that can be enhanced to provide valuable ecological services. This approach creates value beyond the ecosystems themselves, from a private place of repose for residents and welcoming pathway for business owners, to an accessible expression of the site’s natural history.

THE AVENUE, WASHINGTON, DC The public spaces Sasaki designed in the mixed-use development called The Avenue incorporate a stormwater management system that collects all rainwater that falls within the property.

The water then drains through a stormwater filter to a 7,500 gallon cistern located in the five-story parking garage below the courtyard.

This water is continuously recirculated and treated by the water feature that includes aquatic plantings which offer supplemental filtration. The stored water is also used to provide all irrigation for the courtyard plantings throughout the growing seasons.

At a macro-scale, each site has an important role to play in its larger ecological context. For instance, a site may contribute to the regional movement of wildlife — an increasingly important role in an era of climate change. Macro improvements have the potential to enhance regional ecological dynamics, including species migration, stormwater management, and the mitigation of climate change.

In addition, both the meso and macro-scales can be used as living laboratories, where students of all ages can learn about the convergence of two distinct ecosystems in an urban setting.

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Access and Connectivity Public squares, main streets, and campus quads are vital community settings. They are the places where we convene, reinforcing our social and civic bonds. Today, even as virtual connection tempts us to substitute face time with screen time, places like waterfront parks continue to draw people together to share experiences and create local memories. Community engagement is central to the design of inclusive spaces. When we unearth and respond to the needs of a broad constituency, we can create the dynamic, mixed-use communal settings that reinforce social sustainability, vibrancy, and financial success for communities.

ITHACA COMMONS, ITHACA, NEW YORK The Ithaca Commons is a two-block pedestrian mall that serves as the social and economic heart of Ithaca.

Sasaki worked closely with city leadership and the community in a multi-year process to renovate this iconic space, including extensive utility and surface upgrades.

The realized project improves the Commons both as a retail environment and community gathering space.

The main retail corridor of State Street has a wide central walkway that provides a clear pedestrian promenade, opens up sight lines between storefronts, provides clear occasional service access. Flanking amenity zones are dynamic places replete with horticultural displays, fixed seating, moveable table and chairs, utility infrastructure, and interpretive play spaces.

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Taking Stock

CLICK ABOVE TO VIEW A VIDEO DEMONSTRATION OF THE INTERACTIVE PARKS INVENTORY SOFTWARE WE DEVELOPED FOR THE CITY OF BOSTON

Factors of Need

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Data Analysis and Visualization THE RIGHT INVESTMENT Data and technology are becoming powerful allies for telling the story of parks and public spaces: what they provide, how they create value, and how to operationalize the opportunities of new investments and strategies.

We have seen impenetrable asset inventories distilled into visualizations that staff can’t wait to explore. We have watched light bulbs go off as we look at access to parks through a demographic lens—and then prioritized investments accordingly. We have mined thousands of perspectives to build a shared understanding of how people feel about their public spaces in days rather than months.

The challenge for many organizations is not how to find data or access new technologies, but how to use it to the benefit of their work. By bringing technologists together with domain expertise around parks, landscape, and cities, Sasaki helps cities find new ways of understanding, designing for, and communicating the value of public space.

CITY OF BOSTON PARKS INVENTORY VISUALIZATION TOOL As part of the 2016 NRPA Innovation Lab in Boston, Sasaki worked with Boston Parks and Recreation to develop custom data visualization software. At the time, the Department had recently completed an exhaustive inventory the City’s park system. The inventory included the quantity, condition, and location of park amenities.

While incredibly powerful as an asset management database, the Department found the data set too cumbersome for their staff to fully utilize on a day-to-day basis.

With input from the City, Sasaki developed prototype software to visualize the complex inventory.

For this exercise, a small sample area – the neighborhoods of Allston and Brighton – was selected as the scope of the study.

The software interface used the location information in the asset inventory to display the assets in a scalable map. This information was then overlaid on recent census data, which allowed users to quickly map the spatial relationship between parks and the people they serve.

Despite its limited scope, the prototype software has shown great promise as a planning tool for the department.

The ability to rapidly analyze “levelof-service,” without sacrificing the richness of the asset inventory makes the software a potent tool for parks leadership, as well as staff planners and designers.

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Projects & Ideas

PROJECTS

Completion Date 2011 Size 30 Acres

Services Landscape Architecture Civil Engineering Architecture

Select Awards Master Plan — Honor Award, American Society of Landscape Architects Northern California Chapter Master Plan — Merit Award: Excellence in Urban Design, American Institute of Architects California Council

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Urban Land Institute, Open Space Award finalist Excellence on the Waterfront Awards, The Waterfront Center

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Wilmington Waterfront Park PORT OF LOS ANGELES | LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

Once a part of the Pacific coastline, the Wilmington community became disconnected from the waterfront by the Port of Los Angeles—a burgeoning, diverse mix of industrial maritime facilities. After completing the Wilmington Waterfront Master Plan, Sasaki identified three open spaces for implementation: the Wilmington Waterfront Park, the Avalon North Streetscape, and the Avalon South Waterfront Park.

The Wilmington Waterfront Park is the first project to be fully implemented.

Built on a 30-acre brownfield site, the new urban park revitalizes the community and visually reconnects it to the waterfront. The park integrates a variety of active and passive uses—informal play, public gathering, community events, picnicking, sitting, strolling, and observation— determined through an extensive community outreach process. The open space serves as a public amenity by doubling the current community open space while also buffering the Wilmington community from the extensive port operations to the south.

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COMMUNITY LEADERS AND THE MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES AT THE FRONT OF AN OPENING PARADE FOR THE PARK

Sustainability Strategies Sasaki integrated sustainable design practices and innovative engineering technologies into the overall project.

Stormwater management directs water to primary landscape zones to promote infiltration rather than municipal treatment, demolished paving was ground and reused for paving sub-base, and all plant materials were selected as ecologically adapted, indigenous, or salt tolerant and irrigated by reclaimed water. Building and site lighting highlights key park elements, reducing energy demands and light pollution through high optical efficacy. Along the port’s industrial edge, colorful planes forming the terrace walls are coated with titanium dioxide (TiO2), and innovative photocatalytic technology which transforms harmful air pollutants to inert organic compounds.

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Landscape as Community Amenity In order to protect the community park from the port’s impacts, Sasaki created a strong sculptural landform which elevates the existing planar grade of the neighborhood to 16 feet. This land integrates a series of multipurpose playfields with shade-dappled, gentle grass slopes. Atop the landform, the El Paseo Promenade provides a primary component of the pedestrian circuit with seating, display gardens, and a shared use pedestrian and bicycle path linked to the California Coastal Trail. Tree-lined promenades extend the park’s network of pedestrian circuits and meanders, offering a variety of seating for respite, contemplation, and viewing park activities including interactive water features, an adventure playground for children, plazas for gathering and performances, and picnicking within the tree groves. Datum Walk provides a central pedestrian axis traversing the park and connecting two park pavilions. The pavilions frame outdoor rooms that offer a variety of informal seating, shade, a dry concession, public restrooms, and three flexible, formal performance venues.

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Completion Date 2006 Size 3.4 Acres

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Services Architecture Landscape Architecture Civil Engineering Planning Urban Design

Select Awards Schenley Plaza; Pittsburgh, PA—Pinnacle Award, Downtown Achievement Awards, International Downtown Association Urban Land Institute, Schenley Plaza; Pittsburgh, PA—finalist: Amanda Burden Urban Open Space Award

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Schenley Plaza CIT Y OF PIT TSBURGH | PIT TSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

Schenley Plaza—the formal entrance to Schenley Park—was a key component of the economic and social regeneration of the Oakland district of Pittsburgh.

At the turn of the 20th century, the plaza existed as rectangular tree bosques framing an open space and the Schenley Memorial Fountain.

However, this design was unsuccessful as a public space and was eventually converted into a parking lot. Sasaki’s design for the plaza is dynamic, unifying the various land uses that surround plaza and creating a green space where people can enjoy both the pleasures of daily life and periodic special events.

The plaza stiches together the park and the Oakland urban fabric, inviting people to engage with the landscape and with each other. A pedestrian promenade runs diagonally through the plaza. Pavilions, gardens, fountains are oriented on two axes and appear to pedestrians as they walk along the path. Sasaki incorporated surviving tree plantings from the original design into the landscape. A multipurpose lawn and flower garden relates the renovated Schenley Memorial Fountain to the nearby University of Pittsburgh campus.

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Integrated into Pittsburgh’s Urban Fabric A pedestrian promenade runs diagonally through the plaza and inflects the whole space toward the large expanse of Schenley Park. Retail pavilions and a performance oval are located along this promenade and enhance the amenity of the landscape.

Finally, the plaza design makes the park a seamless part of the Oakland urban fabric.

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A Decade of Schenley Plaza: Ten Design Takeaways SUSANNAH ROSS

On a bright day in June of 2006, the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy (PPC) celebrated the opening of Schenley Plaza.The five-acre green space is now celebrating its 10-year anniversary, and during the summer of this major milestone, I was lucky to be able to revisit the project that has played a key role for the City of Pittsburgh, and for me personally. When I first came to Sasaki in July of 2003, fresh out of grad school, my very first assignment as a landscape architect was to work on the transformation of the plaza. Thirteen years later I have managed numerous other complex, transformational urban landscape projects, but as the first one I saw from concept through to construction, Schenley Plaza will always hold a special, formative place in my heart and my career.

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Situated in the heart of Oakland, between the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, Phipps Conservatory, and the Carnegie Museums and Library, the plaza project was intended to restore the space to its historical function as the gateway to the larger Schenley Park to the south. In doing so it would replace a large surface lot that provided 280 parking spaces for area businesses, institutions, and the wider community.

Naturally there were some grumbles over the loss of parking, but the City of Pittsburgh, the PPC, and the other institutions had a bold vision: “The goal...was nothing less than the transformation of this gritty, drab slab of asphalt into the green heart of Oakland.” Visiting the space 10 years later during its anniversary season, it’s clear that that mission has been accomplished. We found that many people had either forgotten or never knew that the area used to be a parking lot. My colleague Gina Ford summed it up well by saying, “before, this was just a ‘nothing’ space, nestled between these major anchor institutions. Schenley Plaza took that nothing and turned it into a bona fide place.”

I’ve been thinking about the project this year, its 10th year of operation, and the success that the plaza has enjoyed. What makes the space work so well, and what are the lessons we can share with the rest of our clients looking to build cherished community gathering spaces? How did a former parking lot embed itself into the imagination and identity of so many Pittsburgh residents and visitors? The reasons are many, for sure, but I’ve compiled a few of my observations on Schenley Plaza into a short list of 10— one for each of its years.

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In no particular order, here are 10 key observations on the plaza’s continued success: Details Matter: The plaza makes use of generously sized pavers and granite curbs throughout. And the payoff on the investment shows— they look pristine 10 years later. The pavers only require occasional power-washing to keep them in tiptop shape. Originally the lawn curbs were specified as concrete, but a last-minute donation from the Howard Heinz Foundation made the upgrade to granite possible—a great example of a donor understanding that a subtle investment in the bones of a place can be the most valuable contribution of all.

The Grass is Always Greener: The Emerald Lawn for which Schenley Plaza is known requires careful TLC, including its well-designed soil profile, regular nurturing (irrigation during dry periods and annual soil testing and amendment), and protection (it is closed off to pedestrians from November to April). It functions as more than just a carpet for concert viewers, sunbathers, and frisbee—the carefully designed soil profile has become a model for other lawns in

the PPC system. Phil Gruszka, Director of Landscape & Facility Maintenance, says “We’re holding a three-inch rain event in that lawn—it functions as a rain garden.”

A Plaza Thrives on Its Stomach: As a whole the plaza is known for—and draws people with—its multiple food offerings. The smaller kiosks in the park seem to have benefited from what is now the anchoring restaurant, The

Porch. Until that full-service restaurant launched in 2010, there was high turnover and a string of different tenants. Now, all four kiosks are doing well and no one wants to give up their lease. According to Gruszka, “Once that restaurant came online, this site just took off.”

A Space for People, Not Cars: As the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette speculated in its Munch column back in 2006, you really can reverse Joni Mitchell’s old song lyrics: at Schenley Plaza, we planted a parking lot and put up a paradise. People got over losing their parking spots; many can’t believe the space was ever not there. It was not an instant success though; according to Kenny Slaughter, Facilities Manager: “it grew on people.” And grew big—when asked to describe the plaza in three words last month, regular plaza visitor Steve Sortino said, “It is AWESOME. I hope they give you guys raises!”

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IDEAS

Staff Matter: The dedication, friendliness, and personal touch of the full-time staff—including Kenny Slaughter, the “Mayor of Schenley Plaza” (see page 7 of this article)—help make it the safe, welcoming space that it is. According to Shawn Fertitta, Senior Manager of Visitor Experience, “No other park space in the city gets this level of care. People see that. They see the same staff, they’ll see the same security guards, so that’s why I think they come back, because of the consistency there. They see that things are being tended to.”

Shade is a Magnet: Due to budget constraints, Sasaki was not able to design a permanent shade structure on the plaza. Though it was not part of Sasaki’s original design, the plaza would not succeed without the substantial amount of cover provided by the now iconic tent. It is a central gathering spot at all times of day, when the sun is hot or the rain is falling. Trees along the edges of the lawn are also like magnets for people during peak daylight hours.

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Program + Design = Success: Although the program and space allotment was precisely and deftly prescribed

by Biederman Redevelopment Ventures—based on the enormous success of another of their projects, New York’s Bryant Park—the space equally owes its success to the physical layout of these elements. The design stitches the space seamlessly to its surroundings, adding to that sense that it’s always been there.

Pedestrians can move through in a continuous axis from Bigelow Boulevard to the greater Schenley Park to the southeast, allowing the plaza to fulfill its original mission as the gateway to Schenley Park. The trees planted on the edges frame the space, tying it to the much older Carnegie Library bosque and keeping open sightlines between the iconic Cathedral of Learning and Mary Schenley Memorial Fountain.

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The design stitches the space seamlessly to its surroundings, adding to that sense that it’s always been there.

Stand Out: Park systems as a whole benefit from having a diversity of spaces. Schenley Plaza is a one-ofa-kind space in the landscape of Pittsburgh parks. It might have been expected to spawn other parks hoping to replicate its success, but it seems to have served Pittsburgh and Oakland well to celebrate and concentrate the plaza’s unique energy in one, wellpositioned space. In doing so, they’ve focused their resources and efforts to create a standout destination for great programming, rather than trying to spread limited resources throughout the system.

The owners embraced, rather than resisted, the challenges posed by the small site. According to General Manager Mike Damas, their business has grown each year—right along with the landscape around it. That said, the exciting, beautifully executed menu of fresh locally-sourced ingredients (which I sampled no less than five times over the course of the three-day visit!) are proof that the restaurateur is not relying only upon the space’s intimate connection to the plaza to keep people coming back.

Equity and Diversity: People want to see a diverse group of users in their parks. In an informal survey of some of the thousands of plaza visitors present for the WYEP Summer Music Festival 2016, the most cited reasons for coming to the park were that it was welcoming to all people, and that it makes for excellent people-watching.

According to Dawn Weleski, co-director of the hugely popular Conflict Kitchen, “The way people utilize the park... You have this window into Pittsburgh with this little green patch that you don’t get anywhere else...you get a little cross section of the city.”

Architecture Embedded in the Landscape: The size of the footprint held open in 2006 for a future restaurant was carefully thought through, but still required a careful hand in design of the restaurant. The effort and expense the owners of The Porch went to, in order to integrate the restaurant into the small footprint, interlaced between rows of London Planetrees, has more than paid off in terms of the sublime experience of sitting on their porch in the shade soaking in the life of the plaza.

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PROJECTS

Completion Date Estimated completion Nov 2017 Size Citywide

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Services Planning

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Denver Parks & Recreation Master Plan CIT Y/COUNT Y OF DENVER PARKS AND RECREATION DEPARTMENT | DENVER, COLORADO

Denver Parks and Recreation (DPR) manages one of the most expansive and diverse system of parks in the west, encompassing over 5,000 acres of urban parkland in more than 250 parks, an auxiliary 14,000 acres of mountain parkland outside the city limits and 28 recreation centers.

Sasaki is currently working with DPR on an update to the Parks and Recreation Master Plan, which will clarify and re-fresh a vision for the role of the park system in their rapidly developing, densifying and diversifying city. Throughout an extensive analysis and public engagement phase, we tapped into local spirit through lively public forums, surveys and focus groups, and we harnessed the power of data visualization and mapping to understand how Denverites perceive and use their parks. This analysis has been captured in a comprehensive and robust existing conditions report, which serves as a launchpoint for the visioning phase.

Together with the city and its residents, we are now in the process of envisioning an equitable, ecologically-sensitive, and financially-sustainable park and recreation system that expresses Denver’s unique character. Our team has facilitated engaging stakeholder workshops around inspiring examples, provocative questions and activities that resulted in a set of draft guiding principles and goals for the system. Now in a period of public review, the draft goals as well as graphic visions for distinct elements of the system have generated thousands of productive comments which will help to refine the vision and target action steps for implementation.

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PROJECTS

PUBLIC ENGAGMENT INCLUDED 5 PUBLIC FORUMS THROUGHOUT THE CITY 34

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High Line Canal Vision + Action Plan HIGH LINE CANAL CONSERVANCY | DENVER, COLORADO

The Vision + Action Plan is about imagining the next century of a significant historic Canal.

The High Line Canal runs 71 miles through the Denver Region, but today faces an uncertain future. The planning process is a communitydriven vision for preserving, protecting, and enhancing the Canal.

Originally built in the late 1800s as a water delivery infrastructure, the Canal has transformed into an increasingly recreational resource. Today, more than 500,000 use the Canal each year for walking, bicycling, and other forms of recreation. The Canal is a significant economic, cultural, and environmental resource for the growing region, yet some parts of it are not as well-known or used, and increasing water scarcity is threatening the natural character that Canal users love.

This process engaged more than 3,500 community members, as well as more than 40 stakeholders, elected officials, and city planning staff.

Key achievements and innovations of the process included: branding the outreach process, increasing awareness of the Canal, and building consensus from diverse constituents.

Importantly, the open, broad, and inclusive process led to a shared vision – no small feat for a 71-mile Canal that passes through 11 different jurisdictions!

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Completion Date 2017 Size 860 Acres 71 Miles

Services Landscape Architecture Planning Graphic Design

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CELEBRATE DIFFER

PROJECTS

The Canal passes through many different communities a makes the Canal so special. A key part of the Vision is rec offer a varied experience for Canal users.

OUTDOOR CL ASSROOM

Adapting the Canal as a tiered social space where the low points could collect stormwater

STORMWATER

Adapting the channel to temporarily hold stormwater

ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION

The high and low variation could be enhanced for wildlife watching with elevated viewing platforms, boardwalks, and habitat enhancements

Wood PAR ALLEL TR AILS

Parts of the Canal could become a parallel path – or a protected area for dogs to play.

Rolling Foothills PICNICKING & BUT TERFLIES

Wider flat areas could offer space for picnicking, tossing a frisbee, or other play opportunities.

Wild Canyon

PL AY & PUBLIC ART

Shifting the trail alignment could provide a broader area for butterfly meadows, public art, or a nature-play area.

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#71MILES The High Line Canal’s incredible length , stretching 71 miles, all the way from Waterton Canyon close to the Denver International Airport, is one of its greatest assets.

You wanted to preserve and enhance its connectivity.

RENCES

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and ecosystems. You shared that this diversity is one of the things that cognizing and celebrating the five distinct “character zones,” which

Prairie Retreat

Urban Refuge

ded Village

Branding the Outreach Process

5 MILES

STORMWATER OPPORTUNITY

The process framed the Vision Plan as a forward-looking story of the Canal’s future. “Adventure on the High Line Canal”— branded to express a spirit of journey and an ambition to write a powerful forward-looking story — was a diverse, fun series of forums for public engagement and meaningful input. Each open house was a different “Chapter,” where the public could help write the story of the Canal’s next one hundred years.

Attendees left comments expressing their appreciation for the process and noting how much they learned at each meeting.

To preserve the Canal’s natural character, we must look for new water opportunities. One of the most striking findings of this process was recognition of the Canal’s opportunity to serve as a stormwater management resource for the region.

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Howard County Land Preservation, Parks and Recreation Plan HOWARD COUNT Y | HOWARD COUNT Y, MARYL AND

Public engagement took many forms in Howard County, many of which reached beyond the traditional model of a public meeting. Our team created pop-up booths at existing community events, interviewed focus groups, and developed an online survey to gather input. Wherever possible, we highlighted how public feedback was incorporated into the plan to encourage community buy-in.

There were four public engagement events held over the course of the plan.

The first engagement opportunity took place at GreenFest, an annual county festival focusing on sustainability. Over 220 festival attendees completed a survey about their usage of parks and recreation offerings. In July, two public meetings were held at the Roger Carter Community Center and the North Laurel Community Center. Attendees at both locations submitted over 250 comments in the form of group discussions, activities, and one-on-one conversations.

The last public engagement event was held in September at Department headquarters to discuss the draft plan. Approximately 30 community members attended this open house-style public meeting, which involved a presentation and small discussion groups around exhibit boards.

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Completion Date 2017 Size Countywide

Services Planning Landscape Architecture

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IMAGE COURTESY OF HOWARD COUNTY

Building on Past Successes The vision for Howard County’s LPPRP is predicated on the achievements of the system in providing the best programs and services for the community that allow the County to focus on creating a vibrant future. It complements the Department’s vision, mission and core values, and does not seek to replace the existing vision.

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Strengthening Connections Recreation and parks, natural resources, and agriculture are integral to the County’s history and legacy, recent successes within the system, and future opportunities for innovation and growth. The vision is a holistic approach to achieving these goals; it maintains the dense, neighborhood features of the eastern communities and seeks to preserve undeveloped lands in the west, but also encourages synergies to create One Howard.

IMAGE COURTESY OF NSPIREGREEN 43

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Completion Date 2017 Size 11.4 Square Miles

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Services Planning Landscape Architecture Graphic design

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City of Newport Open Space Plan NEWPORT OPEN SPACE PARTNERSHIP | NEWPORT, RHODE ISL AND

In 1913, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. created an open space plan for Newport, which greatly shaped how Newport developed over the past century. Sasaki is working with the Newport Open Space Partnership to create a comprehensive open space master plan to shape the next era of Newport’s outdoor spaces.

The plan will create a vision for the long term sustainability and stewardship of the parks, public open spaces, and trees in Newport.

The Master Plan reflects the community’s long-term vision and will shape Newport’s physical infrastructure, economic and cultural climate, health, and resilience of spirit for decades to come. The Master Plan also includes a framework for an inclusive model for decisionmaking for future tree, park, and open space planning and investment in Newport. Key focuses of the plan were addressing open space inequities in the city and planning for projected sea level rise.

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Focus on a More Resilient & Equitable System Newport’s North End is significantly underserved by parks, recreation opportunities, and waterfront access. This plan includes recommendations to create a more equitable system, and also focuses on looking ahead to plan for projected sea level rise. Public input was key to developing recommendations.

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Climate Change SEA LEVEL RISE 2030: 0.1’-0.5’ SLR projected 2050: 0.3’-1.4’ SLR projected 2100: 0.7’-4.9’ SLR Source: “Modified bathtub” coastal inundation analyses conducted by the NOAA Coastal Services Center and the RI Division of Planning. http://corpsclimate.us/ccaceslcurves. cfm

Exposed Assets

5’ Sea Rise 3’ Sea Rise

1’ Sea Rise

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29 acres city-wide 15 acres of park space 27 parks/open space

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154 acres city-wide 68 acres of park space 32 parks/open space

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439 acres city-wide 272 acres of park space 51 parks/open space 2 playgrounds 4 fields/courts

1 playground 2 sport fields

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IDEAS

Making Sense of Accessibility Metrics BRAD BARNETT

“What gets measured gets done” is a truism within management circles.

Parks planners embrace this philosophy and have long utilized measures such as Acreage per 1,000 Population and Expenditures per Resident to answer questions like: ÎÎ Are we providing enough and the right kinds of services that users need? ÎÎ How do we compare to other cities or parks systems? ÎÎ Where is the greatest need for us to invest our resources?

But acreage of parks or dollars spent cannot provide full answers to these questions, as these types of data serve as proxies of success rather than direct measures of effectiveness.

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What does this mean? Let’s take an example from another field with a long history of metrics use—transportation planning—which has just recently found better measures to represent performance. They’ve started to measure accessibility, examining how many amenities (jobs, playgrounds, grocery stores) a transportation system user can access in a given period of time. Accessibility measures highlight what ultimately matters— user needs and how they’re being met—and that kind of insight allows transportation planners to be more creative in how they plan a network.

Parks planning has an opportunity to take advantage of the same forces that have led to the rise of accessibility measures in transportation planning.

The first force is data availability.

Today, tools like OpenTripPlanner allow us to go beyond traditional 10 minute walk circles; we can now measure how many people can travel to a park in a given time by traveling along the road network. This level of sophistication makes it much easier to say specific things about what combinations of people, housing types, and other features that paint a more detailed picture of true need.

The second force is greater desire to understand park accessibility as urban living surges. Urban parks are a critical part of the urbanism equation: they provide the open space, greenery, and social space necessary for making denser, yard-less housing types livable.

If we want to see more people living in denser, more walkable cities, access to parks is a critical ingredient for making those urban neighborhoods work, and it’s more important than ever to uncover true needs and prioritize smartly.

Data on housing types—attached townhomes, apartments, or single-family houses—paired with demographics can be used alongside accessibility measures to test the “fit” of a community to the locations and types of parks available. Parks surrounded by a 10 minute walkshed that contains lots of children in more compact housing unit types can be prioritized for extra playground equipment and green space to absorb the additional demand. Similarly, neighborhoods surrounded with large yards might benefit from other park amenities that complement, rather than compete with, individual yards.

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ACCESSIBILITY ANALYSIS WAS USED TO IDENTIFY RESIDENT ACCESS TO LOCAL PARKS WITHIN A 10 MINUTE WALK FOR NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND. DARKER AREAS ARE HAVE ACCESS TO MORE PARKS WITHIN 10 MINUTES.

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Chicago Riverwalk CHICAGO DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION | CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

The Main Branch of the Chicago River has a long and storied history that in many ways mirrors the development of Chicago itself.

Once a meandering marshy stream, the river first became an engineered channel to support the industrial transformation of the city.

Following the famed reversal of the river, in which the city reversed the flow of the Main Branch and South Branch to improve sanitation, architect and urban planner Daniel Burnham introduced a new civic vision of riverside promenades with the addition of the Wacker Drive viaduct. Over the last decade, the role of the river has been evolving with the Chicago Riverwalk project—an initiative to reclaim the Chicago River for the ecological, recreational and economic benefit of the city.

The goal of embracing the river as a recreational amenity seemed impossible years ago given the river’s high levels of pollution. But today that vision is becoming a reality. Recent improvements in river water quality and the increased intensity of public recreational use signal growing life along the river, demanding new connections to the water’s edge. Heeding this call, the Chicago Department of Transportation led the construction of the Chicago Riverwalk, completing portions of the system that include very successful new spaces like the Veteran’s Memorial Plaza and Wabash Plaza.

In 2012, Sasaki, Ross Barney Architects, Alfred Benesch Engineers, Jacobs/ Ryan Associates, and a broader technical consultant team, was tasked with creating a vision for the six blocks between State Street and Lake Street. Building off the previous studies of the river, the team’s plans provide a pedestrian connection along the river between the lake and the river’s confluence.

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Completion Date Phase 1 completed 2009 (by others); Phase 2 completed May 2015; Phase 3 completed October 2016 Size 3.5 acres

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Services Landscape Architecture Planning Urban Design Civil Engineering

Illuminating Engineering Society International Illumination Design Award of Excellence, Outdoor Lighting Design, Phase 2

Select Awards International Downtown Association, Pinnacle Award – Public Space Category, Phase 2

Fast Company Innovation

by Design Awards, Finalist — Spaces, Places, and Cities Category, Phase 2

American Institute of Architects, Chicago Chapter, Design Excellence Award, Phase 2

The Architect’s Newspaper, Best of Design Awards, Phase 2

The Waterfront Center Excellence on the Waterfront Awards, Honor Award — Park/ Walkway/Recreational Category, Phase 2

World Landscape Architecture, Award of Excellence for Built Design, Phases 2 and 3 American Society of Landscape Architecture Illinois Chapter, Presidential Award, Phases 2 and 3

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In bold strokes worthy of Daniel Burnham, Chicago is confirming and renewing its identity as a civilized metropolis.

BLAIR KAMIN, REVIEWING THE RIVERWALK IN THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE

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Top Each of the six blocks of the newly opened Riverwalk offers visitors a unique waterthemed experience, connecting residents directly to the river’s edge.

Right The project makes places for the ever-growing recreational life of the river - including kayaks and small boats - to engage with the city.

Bottom Artful installations - like the reflective metal canopies under the bridges - enliven even the darkest of spaces with lights and joy.

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Leveraging the Private Dollar for Public Good JANUARY 2016

GIANT INFLATABLE BUNNIES ADORN THE LAWN ON D

Last month, the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority (MCCA) announced that The Lawn on D will open in 2016 for its third season. Built as a temporary park space with an initial expected life span of about 18 months, The Lawn has been immensely popular—even though reports show it to be operating at a deficit.

The MCCA is exploring several strategies to put The Lawn on track for a self-sustaining model, including offering expanded corporate sponsorship opportunities and constructing a tent space with a focus on event rental.

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Meanwhile, Chicagoans—who were just becoming accustomed to the recently completed second phase of the Chicago Riverwalk—encountered a new site by the river last month. Nike floated a barge-turned-workout space alongside the Riverwalk, offering programmed workout sessions for free.

Blair Kamin, the Chicago Tribune’s architecture critic, tweeted a picture of the structure, asking “Commercializing a public space?”

Kamin’s point is a valid one. The perception of what a public space “ought to be” has changed plenty in recent years. Still, for many, the idea of what makes a public space great is informed by the thoughts of Olmsted, Burnham, L’Enfant, and Cleveland—the revered planners who, in designing some of our nation’s finest parks and public spaces, also advanced the democratic belief that all people deserve to experience nature and spaces that transports them outside of the hustle and bustle of city life. With this notion of equal access in mind, apprehension in the face of private dollars shaping the atmosphere of public spaces is understandable.

But it is also important to consider some differences between Olmsted and Burnham’s time and now. Studies show that, for the first time in history, the majority of the world’s population lives in urban areas. As the average city apartment’s footprint is significantly smaller than those found in suburbia, city’s public spaces increasingly serve as an expansion of one’s apartment. The city, in essence, becomes one giant shared front yard. The importance of public spaces was driven home in our recent State of the City Experience report, which shows that of 1,000 surveyed city-dwellers, 65% reported that their favorite experience in a city was either in a park or on the street.

As public space is embraced as a source of civic pride, the expectations placed upon the stewards of these spaces goes up. Parks departments are increasingly expected to provide active programming for events like yoga, family movie nights, etc. “Moving programs to the outdoors provides greater accessibility to recreation programs and activities that urban residents otherwise would not have the opportunity to attend, says Barbara Heller, Sasaki’s Director of Parks Planning. “These programs result in a merging of all types of people, varied ages, ethnic groups, and income levels.”

SASAKI

These expectations come at a time when, across the nation, parks departments are making do with either decreased or stagnant budgets, meaning that allocating funds for active programming and other initiatives saps funds from already-strapped budgets. Working against this deficit demonstrates a disconnect between the expected and the practical, says Sasaki Principal Gina Ford, ASLA, who comments that “in an ideal world, our collective priorities would align and we would fund our park systems consistent with the value they bring to our lives and robustly enough to enable vibrant programming and sustainable maintenance.”

Cities are learning as quick as they can in reaction to these changing perspectives, and some are doing a great job. The Lawn on D, which is technically a public-private partnership under the purview of the MCCA, will incorporate more events into their programming schedule, bringing revenue, while, as in previous years weekends “will be free to the public, in an effort to offer what the agency calls ‘a community amenity’,” writes Jon Chesto in a recent Boston Globe article. The Chicago Riverwalk, which has been well-received by critics and the public alike, was funded through a significant loan made possible by the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA). “In the absence of the necessary operations and maintenance budgets,” says Ford,” those that manage our parks can choose to let these spaces lay fallow or seek creative partnerships and revenue streams to enhance and enliven them. The Nike barge does all of this while also increasing the visibility of an incredible natural resource—the Chicago River!”

Concerns over the influence of private investment in public spaces are not limited to urban contexts.

In “Our Pampered Wilderness,” a New York Times editorial from last year, Christopher Solomon laments the increase of “glamping”—that is, “glamorous camping”—at state parks.

Solomon sees the luxury camping trend, and the $200+ a night price tag associated with it, as “segregating people based on bank balance.” These are valid concerns, yet Solomon cites decreased budgets as the impetus for parks implementing resort-like features. Through charging top dollar for these amenities, parks are, in essence, able to subsidize other operations of the park, such as maintaining traditional camping sites and infrastructure. Additionally, Heller sees glamping as a means of expanding patron base, commenting that “providing resort-like features for camping resonates with me personally as I would not be inclined to camp, but I would be interested in glamping. This trend should result in a new audience of potential park users in addition to those who like more primitive types of camping.”

In a Boston Globe editorial, “Saving The Lawn on D,” Renee Loth cautions that the MCCA “needs to calibrate the tipping point after which the space ceases to be a public amenity at all. In getting The Lawn on D to pay for itself, will its operators discard what makes it great?” And she’s right. There must be some safeguards to incorporating private interests into public space. In these days of shifting perceptions and expectations of what a public space or park does for its city and people, let alone what qualifies as a “public space,” it should only be expected that the stewards of those spaces explore new business models that not only ensure the continued service to their community, but prepare them for responding to future changes.

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The Lawn on D THE MASSACHUSET TS CONVENTION CENTER AUTHORIT Y | BOSTON, MASSACHUSET TS

The Massachusetts Convention Center Authority (MCCA), in partnership with a Sasaki-led design team (including HR&A Advisors and Utile), conceived of the Lawn on D—a flexible, vibrant, and temporary urban space—to be an early arrival on D Street, setting the tone for civic impact and expressing the ambitions of a new district.

This new district, anchored by the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center (BCEC), occupies a critical mid-point between South Boston, the Innovation District and Liberty Wharf, and the Fort Point and Channel Center neighborhoods. This new district aspires to be interactive, flexible, technologically advanced, inspired by art and events, and inclusive of many constituents (residents, workers, conventioneers, tourists). The Lawn on D demonstrates and pilots these ambitions, testing spatial configurations and programming that will eventually be deployed to a future event space that will become the heart and focus of the new district along D Street.

The Lawn on D is conceived as a platform for innovation and an armature for infinite programming—packing multiple agendas and possibilities into 2.7 acres with skillful design and strong vision. It was designed for costeffective implementation, flexibility, and ease of transformation.

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Completion Date 2014

Services Landscape Architecture

Size 2.7 Acres

Awards Boston Society of Landscape Architects, Honor Award for General Design Boston’s Best 2015 Best New Addition in Arts & Entertainment, Improper Bostonian

AIA National Small Project Award, American Institute of Architects Downtown Merit Award for Public Space, International Downtown Association Honor Award for General Design, American Society of Landscape Architects

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Composed of two parts—the plaza and the lawn—The Lawn on D is a hub of activity for community events. The plaza’s paths blaze trails from D Street to the side entrance of the BCEC, its signature lights describe a rightsized space for gatherings, and its bright, playful, movable furniture invites visitors to make the space their own. The lawn at The Lawn on D—sited where four feet of urban fill used to block views and preclude access— now provides a gracious forecourt to the BCEC along D Street and hosts a range of shorter-term art installations and projects.

The Lawn on D grew out of a larger urban design and planning collaboration with the MCCA. The MCCA is planning a major expansion of the BCEC, which will require additional hotel rooms, parking garages, supporting retail, and, critically, a vision and identity for D Street. Sasaki and Utile, Inc. led the urban design team that laid out a long-term vision for D Street, created design guidelines for short-term projects along D Street, and engaged the surrounding community.

Art Everywhere The Lawn on D balances its role as both the city’s “backyard” and an experimental sculpture garden of sorts in a seamless way. Movable furnishings, lawn games, and food trucks ensure something for everyone everyday. The park’s large open lawn and flexible plaza can be easily transformed for outdoor movies, music, and events.

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Interactive Art The Lawn on D is host to a number of changing art installations, but none have been as photographed or as popular as “Swing-Time�. This adult-sized and solar-powered light-up swingset designed by artists Howeler and Yoon - is a hit with all ages.

Seasonal Change Programming of the Lawn on D has included an incredible range of events with an emphasis on seasonal and holiday-related festivals. Pictured here, the Fire and Ice event featured an ice maze, fire pits, and food trucks with hot chocolate.

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As Boston seeks to revamp its convention center and surrounding neighborhood, the redeveloped lawn sets the tone for the forthcoming district and serves as an anchor.

FAST COMPANY

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Cincinnati John G. and Phyllis W. Smale Riverfront Park CINCINNATI PARK BOARD | CINCINNATI, OHIO

The John G. and Phyllis W. Smale Riverfront Park is a 32-acre park along the banks of the Ohio River in downtown Cincinnati. The largest in a series of public parks along the high banks of the river, the park is framed by great city landmarks including the Roebling Bridge, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, the Paul Brown Stadium, and the Great American Ball Park.

With implementation currently underway, the riverfront park completes a necklace of open spaces on the river, links statewide recreation trail and bike systems, and reconnects the heart of downtown Cincinnati to the great Ohio River. Sasaki’s design for the park creates an appropriate setting for the Roebling Bridge—a historically significant architectural icon— along with areas for large gatherings, passive recreation, and programmed events.

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Completion Date 2015 (Pavilion) Ongoing (Park) Size Pavilion: 13,952 SF Park: 32 Acres

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Services Planning Landscape Architecture Civil Engineering Urban Design Awards National Recreation and Park Association, Park Design Award

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Our boundless and inclusive play spaces have become a sensation in Cincinnati, combining environmental engagement, education, exercise, and imagination.

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Top

Right

In our post-occupancy analysis of this inclusive play space, we learned that multi-generational play happens when collaboration is required!

Today’s play spaces should invite exploration and daring, allowing children (and adults) to learn, splash, touch, jump, slide and climb.

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The park acts as a setting and catalyst for civic activities and entertainment venues and is supported by partnerships with private and public funds.

Typical park events range from small picnic-like activities to larger preand post-game activities for the Bengals and Reds, concerts, and Tall Stacks—a music, arts, and heritage festival which brings 350,000 visitors to the downtown. The park includes several interactive water features, a performance stage, a sculpture play area, a pavilion, bench swings, water gardens, and Cinergy Trace, a 1000-foot-long riverfront promenade. Public landings and seasonal docking and wharves service the public and commercial cruise boat traffic. Park amenities are enhanced by a series of sustainable strategies, including an integrated bicycle center, support, and locker room facility and a restaurant pavilion supported by a geothermal heating and cooling system.

In the surrounding waterfront district, a six-block, mixed-use development is planned that will bring roughly 400 residential units and office and commercial activities to the area.

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The work of our outstanding team ensured that Smale Riverfront Park would exceed all expectations in terms of use and popularity—and it has.

WILLIE F. CARDEN, JR., DIRECTOR OF CINCINNATI PARKS, ON ACCEPTING THE NATIONAL RECREATION AND PARKS ASSOCIATION DESIGN AWARD

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Where Work Meets Play KATE TOOKE

The following was originally published in the July issue of National Recreation and Parks Association’s (NRPA) magazine, Parks and Recreation.

Screams of delight come from the slide hillside, mixing with the comfortable chatter of nearby parents. I watch a little girl launch herself down the slide.

She hollers cheerfully as she careens off the end, taking a tumble before regaining her feet. She turns and flashes me a big smile, eyes shining, calling out, “Mama, come play!” I scribble down a few last notes and run over to join her.

On this sunny Saturday in mid-October, myself, my daughter, Tessa, and a team of designers from Sasaki Associates Inc. are in Cincinnati to conduct a post-occupancy evaluation of the new playscapes at Smale Riverfront Park. The park sits on the banks of the Ohio River between Paul Brown Stadium and the Great American Ball Park. Cincinnati is hardly short on playgrounds—the Trust for Public Land ranks it No. 2 in the nation when it comes to playgrounds per capita—but in the six months since this playscape opened, it has become a regional destination for families. A park maintenance staffer said some parts of the park had “at least one child per square foot” on summer weekends.

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In part, the park is so popular because it is so different. Here, instead of the plastic post-and-platform structures of a typical American playground, climbing walls, boulders, bridges, logs and slide hillsides await curious kids. It’s a place that seems a bit wild and a little risky, a place where the unexpected can happen.

The refreshing change of pace at Smale is part of a nationwide movement to re-invigorate outdoor playspaces. Susan Solomon, author of American Playgrounds: Revitalizing Community Space, describes today’s default playground as “the McDonald’s model”: a garishly colored and unimaginative collection of posts, platforms, tunnels and slides stamped uniformly across the country. “Things like taking risks, learning to fail, learning to master something, to plan ahead, to develop deep friendships,” Solomon says, “none of those could take place on most playgrounds today.” Children are suffering as a result. A lack of free play opportunities is culpable in forming the habits of a generation of children who are less imaginative, creative, and expressive, according to Kyung-Hee Kim, an educational psychologist at the College of William and Mary and the author of the 2011 paper The Creativity Crisis.

During the past decade a groundswell of play advocates—including parents, teachers and designers—have begun arguing that a reasonable level of risk in play is essential to children’s healthy development. The pendulum is slowly swinging back, with cities increasingly engaging designers in the creation of custom play environments that are contextual, place-specific and creative in their interpretation of the safety guidelines.

THE PL AYSCAPES IN CONTEX T

The making of Smale Park is a decades-long story of transformation.

In the mid-1990s, most of the 32acre site was a brownfield covered in parking and vacant industrial parcels that were regularly flooded by the adjacent Ohio River. A bold master-planning process in the late 1990s laid the groundwork for the park. In 1999, Sasaki was selected to develop concept plans and a team of landscape architects, urban planners and engineers conceived a multiphase approach, which began with making room for the park.

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The park’s dedicated playscapes — the Heekin Family/Grow Up Great Adventure Playscape and the P&G goVibrant-scape—opened together in the late spring of 2015. They blur the traditional boundaries between park and playground—there are no fences separating zones. Instead, children and families encounter spaces from all directions and play spills out onto lawns and paths. The park was conceived as a family destination, integrating attractions like Carol Ann’s Carousel, fountains and a labyrinth, along with places to picnic, rent bikes, swing or sit by the river.

DESIGN PROCESS

The design team and park board together aspired to set a new standard. “We wanted a place of adventure and challenge, not a typical playground composed of off-the-shelf components,” says Steven Schuckman, superintendent of planning and design for Cincinnati Parks. The goal was to create a playground “as unique and grounded in the site and its history as is the rest of the park.”

At the same time, three important private funding sources stepped forward: The Heekin Family, PNC Bank and Proctor & Gamble. The Heekin Family, along with PNC Bank, donated generously toward a playground that would inspire and challenge Cincinnati children to be physically active. Proctor & Gamble’s charitable foundation offered a grant to create a playful, interactive space that would engage families in explorations of cause and effect, promoting fun physical exercise.

The aligned support of the park board and funders formed a strong foundation for conceptual design.

It’s a place that seems a bit wild and a little risky, a place where the unexpected can happen.

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A research-based process greatly informed the layout and specific features of the PNC/Heekin Adventure Playscape. The design responds to six categories of risky play, as defined in a 2011 article in the journal Evolutionary Psychology by Ellen Sandseter, a professor at Queen Maud University in Trondheim, Norway. They include great heights, rapid speeds, dangerous tools, dangerous elements, rough and tumble, and disappearing/getting lost.

Elements like the slide, climbing walls and bridges were designed to help kids achieve feelings of great heights and rapid speeds, while small nooks in the rock outcrops and winding paths capture a sense of mystery.

All custom design features meet the safety standards of the Public Playground Safety Handbook, a guide published by the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

The design team also sought to incorporate different types of play.

Sara Smilanski, a renowned Israeli child psychologist who trained with Jean Piaget, developed a widely accepted theory in the late 1960s about four types of play that contribute to children’s learning and development. They are functional play—physical and gross-motor activities; constructive play—building and creating; dramatic play—engaging imagination; and role playing and games with rules.

THE IMPACT

As excitement about Smale Park grew, designers at Sasaki became interested in understanding and learning from the project. They wanted to unpack how children and families use the playscapes and how the park was performing from a maintenance and safety perspective.

POST-OCCUPANCY STUDY

Methodology: Sasaki’s research/ design team—three landscape architects and one intrepid four-year old research assistant—traveled to Cincinnati to collect the data. We logged more than 45 observation hours and conducted more than 100 interviews.

Our chief methods included counting, tracking, listening and interviewing.

Every 30 minutes, we conducted a full count of the people in the playscapes, capturing where children, adults, teens, strollers and dogs were distributed.

Tracking consisted of mapping one child’s journey for 5 minutes. We tracked two to three times every 30 minutes. We conducted interviews with both visitors and stakeholders, including key park maintenance staff and leadership. And key to our qualitative data was intensive listening — we sat in each play zone for 10 minutes at a time, cataloging conversations.

A lack of free play opportunities is culpable in forming the habits of a generation of children who are less imaginative, creative, and expressive.

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Findings: We collected a substantial amount of qualitative and quantitative data, which revealed a number of key trends: ÎÎ The playscapes at Smale have a high level of intergenerational integration. Teens and adults can be found climbing, sliding, splashing, balancing and jumping right alongside their younger counterparts all throughout the playscapes. ÎÎ Design layout has a strong effect on patterns of movement.

The PNC/Heekin adventure playscape is designed as one fluid playscape, with different play elements linked together. Children moved in fast, iterative and looping paths here. By contrast, the P&G goVibrantscape is laid out as separate play “rooms” arranged along the central spine of historic Water Street.

Parents and children traveled together from room to room, rarely returning to a room after leaving it.

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ÎÎ A custom playscape continues to evolve over time, long beyond initial design and installation.

During the course of the first six months, the park maintenance and operations team modified almost a dozen responses to minor concerns like wear patterns in the grass, creaking joints at the flying pig and children bypassing the slides in favor of the contoured concrete base. Their simple interventions have subtly changed use patterns in the park. ÎÎ No matter the design considerations and operational measures in place, some kids will use the playscape in unintended ways. At Smale, children who want to be creative have plenty of opportunities for greater challenges, even as the custom playscape meets all safety standards. One group of boys used the Heekin Playscape as a parkour training ground, doing flips off the rocks, leaping over the climbing logs and swinging on the rope bridge.

These takeaways gloss over a million nuances of the post-occupancy data, but together highlight how the park has developed a life of its own.

As designers, funders, clients and stakeholders, we all dream big about what a park can be, but in the end, it is the community that really defines what it is. How they use the playscape, what they love and what they neglect— these are critical drivers of the park’s future and key learning moments for future designs.

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Completion Date 2013 Size 70 Hectares

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Services Architecture Civil Engineering Landscape Architecture Planning Urban Design

Awards Boston Society of Landscape Architects, Merit Award in Parks and Recreational Facilities Design

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Jiading Central Park SHANGHAI JIADING NEW CIT Y DEVELOPMENT COMPANY | SHANGHAI, CHINA

As part of China’s nationwide effort to create more livable cities, the Jiading district of Shanghai embarked on a significant endeavor to create public open space and restore natural systems within a new 70-hectare central park.

After five years of design and construction, Jiading New City Ziqidonglai Landscape Axis opened to the public. The linear park is the largest urban open space in this rapidly expanding district and acts as a walkable green corridor connecting otherwise separate urban neighborhoods and integrating with surrounding landscapes. Its combination of poetic form, cultural expression, public use, and ecological restoration creates a multidimensional experience that will be enjoyed by many generations to come.

At project outset, the district’s master plan failed to comprehensively understand the impact of cross-traffic on the public green space. In a critical first move, the design team intervened to minimize fragmentation, reducing the number of roadways crossing the park and constructing pedestrian overpasses or underpasses where roads remained—critically preserving a holistic park experience for wildlife and pedestrians alike.

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Sasaki’s design concept for the park, “Dancing in the Woods,” is based on a contemporary interpretation of traditional Chinese painting, calligraphy, and dance. The park emphasizes the rich cultural heritage of Jiading, and integrates this with the natural setting of the site. Natural landscape elements such as floating clouds and flowing water, common themes in the paintings of local artist Yanshao Lu, are reinterpreted into modern, dynamic forms representing movement and influencing how people interact with the landscape. Four major paths in the park interweave and interact with a variety of park elements in a choreographed composition, twisting and turning along the space and landforms. Spatial configurations within the park embrace dichotomies of form and purpose–openness and privacy, monumental and intimate, active and quiet, urban and pastoral, straight and curvilinear, elevated and recessed.

With a strong foundational understanding of the project context and an articulated design vision, the team embarked on sustainability-driven design that produced outstanding change for the area. This strong commitment to supporting the ecological system and a people-oriented spirit is manifested in sustainable design details, including universal accessibility on all pathways, restored wetlands, new woodland, native plantings that bolster the local biocommunity, a stormwater management system, limited artificial lighting, and efficient reuse of existing materials and on-site structures.

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As a result of an interdisciplinary approach, inspired vision, and meaningful sustainable design, Jiading Park in Shanghai has transformed the area. Restoring wetland and woodland has drastically improved water and air quality and biodiversity; Rainwater harvesting has decreased potable water demand by 3.3 million gallons annually; and reuse of materials like asphalt and salvaged roof tiles have reduced emissions and lowered construction costs.

Today’s park features clear water and fishermen where dirty canals and algae blooms once proliferated. A quiet promenade takes the place of a noisy roadway. Birds circle the skies and float on the canal. People of all ages take to the sports fields and wander the paths. The green corridor is the heart of the New City and has quickly become a new signal of vitality for the region.

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Completion Date 2017 Size 4.5 Acres

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Services Landscape Architecture Planning CIvil Engineering

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Moore Square CIT Y OF RALEIGH | RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA

The process of redesigning this 200 year-old square included extensive public engagement and historic permitting at the city and state levels. The design task was to reinvigorate the aging landscape as a vibrant hub of activity for the surrounding district, while preserving and celebrating its historic legacy.

In 1792, the same year Raleigh was founded as North Carolina’s capital city, the General Assembly chose Senator William Christmas, a surveyor, to envision the lots and streets of the new capital. Christmas laid out 400 acres of city fabric through 1,000 acres of woodland, in a geometric grid which emulated the plan of Philadelphia. Moore Square, along with Nash Square and Capitol Square, is one of three remaining squares originally planned by Christmas and, as such, it is a significant example of early American town planning.

The proposed design protects and strengthens the square’s historic configuration: a frame of large shade trees enclosing an open, sunny central space. At the street edge, where users requested greater connectivity to the adjacent blocks, the design features a “dignified frame” of widened sidewalks, granite seat walls, and spacious entry plazas.

On-street parking has been removed along the square’s southern edge to create a wide linear plaza that will host future farmers markets and other community events.

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Public Facilitation Sasaki worked with the city, public stakeholders, and a team of technical experts to develop a consensus-driven plan for the square.

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Respecting a Cultural Legacy While an enduring greensward, Moore Square’s landscape forms, spaces and surfaces have evolved over time. This evolution has occurred in response to changes in the character and use of the urban context—the surrounding blocks and buildings. As the area evolved from a residential to a commercial district, from an agricultural trading center to a vital business and commercial district including Raleigh’s African American main street during the Jim Crow era, the Square transformed the way vernacular landscapes do—incrementally, gradually, and often through a series of ad hoc measures.

The grand oak trees surrounding the square, some of which are over 200 years old, are the park’s defining feature. The design protects the trees by limiting foot traffic within their critical root zones.

In the interior of the square, circulation follows an historic X pattern, with a new perimeter path creating a promenade encircling the central lawn. The lawn has been engineered to meet the community’s demand for flexible open space, as well occasional need for larger gatherings. The entire lawn has a gentle pitch from northwest to southeast to create an amphitheater effect.

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Can Data Have a Heart?

Understanding Homelessness in Our Parks and Cities.

GRETCHEN KEILLOR

The following was originally published in the September issue of National Recreation and Parks Association’s (NRPA) magazine, Parks and Recreation.

In the midst of the complex societal issue of homelessness, urban parks can often be the visible and symbolic front line. The ability to provide accessible public spaces for all means park and recreation departments across the country are stuck — between methods of empathetic compassion versus those of policy enforcement. Many communities are struggling to find the right balance, where all people feel welcomed and free to share in the joy and respite provided by public space.

Park and recreation staff are often presented with the physical and perceptual challenges associated with homelessness in city parks, yet do not have the tools or the clear charge to engage with the underlying causes.

As Danielle Taylor noted in “Taboo Topic: Homeless in the Park” on NRPA’s Open Space blog, “Homelessness is an incredibly complex social issue with innumerable factors contributing to it. It’s not easy to address on a wide scale.”

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At the same time, all across the country advances in technology and data have made possible new ways of looking at this “wide scale,” and cataloging, assessing and addressing all forms of urban conditions. While technology and data can’t offer a panacea on their own, access to more accurate information can help us better imagine and assess potential policy, design or cultural changes.

We have seen an explosion of big data in the past 10 years, capturing everything from tweets to urban environment metrics. The design and planning practice for which I work, Sasaki Associates, develops dataanalysis tools, for instance, that can help park and recreation departments evaluate things like park accessibility, value creation associated with park resources, and the effective prioritization of investment. This exploration has proven beneficial for many problems; again and again, we see that better data translates into better solutions.

At the heart of these tools is a belief that alleviating a problem necessitates knowing more about it: defining its edges, identifying its heart, understanding its complexities.

Recently, we initiated a study to better understand how homelessness data can more effectively be captured and leveraged toward more customized and effective solutions.

Today, there are homelessness datasets available for public use.

Most notably, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) leads an effort to collect data on homelessness. Annually, it conducts a volunteer-driven pointin-time count (PIT) of the homeless people in shelters and on streets.

HUD also creates an annual inventory of housing options (HIC) that serve these populations and coordinates a Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) that stores client-level information. This data, reported by Continuum of Care (CoC) districts nationwide and compiled by HUD, is released for public use through the HUD Exchange site. HUD also releases an Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) that summarizes and analyzes this data. There’s even a site called Homelessness Analytics (last updated 2012) that maps HUD’s data against various other metrics.

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CLICK ABOVE TO VISIT GRETCHEN’S WEBSITE, UNDERSTANDHOMELESSNESS.COM

HUD does a great service by collecting and sharing a considerable amount of data and information. Still, we need to build on this to paint a more complete picture of homelessness.

By enhancing the level of detail collected, integrating data consistently and comprehensively, and thinking creatively about data collection methods, data could be shared and compared more easily and work toward alleviating homelessness could be better coordinated. Here are a number of dimensions to consider in building on HUD’s already robust data collection infrastructure:

Location specificity. Where current systems aggregate the count of homeless populations in varying scales (from a portion of a metro area to an entire state in some cases), more specifically geolocated data — using a tool like Fulcrum or What3Words, for example — would better provide a more nuanced and useful understanding of homeless population distribution and relationships to other urban factors.

Integration. Where current information systems are maintained by distinct CoC districts, a single nationwide system could enable services to be better coordinated and would allow for easier comparative benchmarks across geographic boundaries.

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ENGAGE WITH UNDERLYING CAUSES

Park and recreation staff are often presented with the physical and perceptual challenges associated with homelessness in city parks, yet do not have the tools or the clear charge to engage with the underlying causes.

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Accessibility and transparency. Where current methods include the capture of many different demographic data points and metrics that can quickly become complex to interpret, a streamlined and interactive interface could allow broader access to and easier exploration of the data.

Scope. Where current data collection is largely driven by volunteers conducting headcounts (with inevitable potential for error), strongly incentivizing self-reporting as a collection method may help to capture more complete information and subpopulations not included currently.

A powerful tool for strategic planning and resource allocation can be created through the improvement of data collection methods for homeless populations, the ability to better visualize and interpret the information, and the integration of disparate information systems into a unified whole.

Most importantly, there are a number of ways these improved datasets can help park and recreation departments — in close collaboration with other departments and agencies — better address issues of homelessness and the associated conflicts and negative perceptions.

Tailored service provision. Imagine if a community could better understand the needs and challenges of a localized homeless population.

Knowing, for instance, that the majority of the homeless population within a 10-block radius was comprised of single mothers, parks and recreation staff could focus on providing specialized child care or customized job-training.

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Symbiotic relationships. Imagine if a community could better understand the condition, skills and backgrounds of its homeless population. Like the city of Albuquerque, that hires its homeless as city workers, park and recreation departments could create programs to seasonally or permanently employ readily available homeless workers.

Homeless addresses. Imagine if homeless individuals — traditionally migratory and hard to locate — had a geolocated “address” (for instance, by using a technology like What3Words which creates a named location for every 3 square meters on the planet).

Communication and communitybuilding could be much improved, allowing for greater collaboration.

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CLICK ABOVE TO VISIT GRETCHEN’S INTERACTIVE MAP AND EXPLORE DATA RELATED TO HOMELESSNESS AT UNDERSTANDHOMELESSNESS.COM/EXPLORE

Public engagement. Imagine if a community could better access the stories and profiles associated with existing homeless individuals or families. Care for the city’s homeless could be shared more communally if local residents were engaged, inspired and able to help in direct and tangible ways.

In addition to the myriad innovative approaches being tested across the nation, the strategies outlined here are the beginning of a data-driven approach to thinking differently about the challenges of homelessness.

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Completion Date 2012 Size 1,400 Acres

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Bridgeport Parks Master Plan CIT Y OF BRIDGEPORT | BRIDGEPORT, CONNECTICUT

Bridgeport—also known as the Park City—is Connecticut’s largest city. To accommodate and bolster further anticipated growth, Bridgeport recognized the need to develop a parks master plan that sets forth a vision for its parks system with consideration of neighborhood needs, recreation, historic and cultural identity, circulation, design of open space, maintenance, public engagement, and sustainability.

The city engaged Sasaki to create the master plan that addresses these issues. More than just the sum of Bridgeport’s 45 parks, Sasaki’s plan provides a comprehensive outline of the importance of green, healthy open spaces to the community and to city-wide revitalization. The plan provides a new legacy for Bridgeport: an interconnected network of historic and community parks that respects and sustains the Park City tradition while endowing future generations with healthier ecological, social, and economic environments.

Public engagement and a realistic action plan were critical to the planning process. The engagement strategy was integrated with the development of a new, inspiring brand for the parks master plan that harkens to historic legacies while looking toward a brighter future. This optimistic message was integral to the plan’s success at gathering momentum and broad understanding, and has led to enthusiastic support from local and regional partners who will be engaged in its long-term implementation.

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Engagement The master plan is based on the philosophy that the park system belongs to the Bridgeport community, and that it requires ongoing commitment and investment from residents and private partners in order to endure. The plan creates a vehicle for engaging citizens and new partners in the parks, revitalizing the city and the region, and reconnecting to the city’s vast, but often hidden, waterfront. This expansive waterfront includes the popular Long Island Sound, the centrally-located Pequonnock River, and Yellow Mill Creek, which is slated for restoration. The plan celebrates unique places ranging from beachfront gathering spaces to host festivals and events to walkable playgrounds for the daily enjoyment of the parks by families on the East Side.

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Access The plan seeks to ensure all citizens and visitors have easy access to the parks. Sasaki’s solutions include a new system of centrally located “hyper-parks” and reinvestment in the streets and pedestrian environment that connect people to parks. A high-quality parks system will help to increase residents’ quality of life, attract and retain the next-generation workforce, and encourage residential and business reinvestment as Bridgeport builds toward a future with a revitalized downtown and thriving neighborhoods.

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Burlington Parks, Recreation, and Waterfront Master Plan CIT Y OF BURLINGTON | BURLINGTON, VERMONT

The City of Burlington is Vermont’s cultural capital and a regional destination for tourists and neighboring communities. The diverse system of parks, trails, open spaces, and recreation opportunities serve myriad roles for the city.

Waterfront parks serve as a source of pride for residents, community gardens as a gathering space for new members of the community, and the urban wilds as a reminder of the city’s commitment to sustainability and environmental ethic. Sasaki recently completed the Burlington Parks, Recreation & Waterfront (BPRW) Master Plan, the first comprehensive parks and recreation plan for the department. The plan, which includes all of the city’s 43 parks, specifically emphasizes improving access to amenities, increasing department visibility, creating regional connections, and fostering sustainability in parks maintenance and operations. A collaborative and engaging process ensured that community input influenced the ultimate vision and recommendations.

BPRW is poised at a moment of change and transformation, seeking both to build on the park system’s strong legacy and to create a fresh start that aligns with twenty first century goals and ambitions. With recent momentum around innovative city planning initiatives and a collective, community appreciation for the richness of Burlington’s parks, the BPRW Master Plan creates an achievable set of actions to guide the parks system into the future. The plan is intended to help the department efficiently maintain its assets, strive for sustainability, and set design aspirations to create better social spaces for Burlington’s role as the urban heart of the state.

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Completion Date 2015 Size Citywide

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Implementation Throughout the planning process, the team worked to identify and support opportunities for interdepartmental collaboration within BPRW and capacity to implement the plan. In addition to the master plan, Sasaki has helped the city pursue public funding by drafting concept plans and illustrative renderings for several capital improvement projects. Along with visualizing the projects, Sasaki has generated cost estimates and phasing plans for each proposal.

Plan Goals

Inventory and Outreach

The master plan focuses on a set of seven system themes: People: recognizing culture, community and partnerships; Wellness: enhancing recreation opportunities and programming; Connection: linking parks to people, Stewardship: protecting and preserving our environment; Community: creating inclusive social spaces; Service: streamlining operations; and Impact: motivating the local and regional economy. The plan guides policy development, prioritizes demands and opportunities, and generates a strategic action plan for future development and redevelopment of the city’s parks, recreation programming, waterfront, open space, trails, and facilities.

The planning process began with an in-depth analysis of the city’s park system, including a comprehensive inventory and assessment of park amenities.

The community was engaged by intensive public outreach, including a statistically valid survey which yielded exceptionally high levels of participation. Other methods included an online mapping tool, a community bike ride, and community-wide public workshops.

Additional neighborhood-specific outreach was conducted through staff presentations to Neighborhood Planning Assemblies. The process concluded with multiple visioning sessions which informed the final framework for the master plan.

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Tom Hanafan River’s Edge Park DEPARTMENT OF PARKS AND RECREATION | COUNCIL BLUFFS, IOWA

Directly across from downtown Omaha and at the foot of the newly-completed Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge, the Council Bluffs Riverfront Park is a 90-acre public park situated within the broad riparian floodplain of the great Missouri River.

Sasaki’s master plan for the park capitalizes upon the distinct character of the Council Bluffs side of the river—richly forested, green, and soft—in distinct contrast to the highly urbanized landscape that surrounds it.

The design of the park focuses intensity of public use and development in a core area of the existing site which allows access to the river and also preserves key habitat and riparian floodplain. Strategies to increase the ecological function of the site include nearly 20 acres of reforestation, roadside bioswales, porous pavement, diverse native plantings, and parking lot rain gardens. The ecologically sensitive areas north and south of the bridge’s landing are reinforced by reforestation and wetland enhancement strategies and accessed via a series of trails and environmental interpretation.

At the bridge landing, a “window” is carved out of the forest, creating an open landscape down to the water’s edge that can accommodate the city’s significant festivals and events and provide a view of the dramatic Omaha skyline. The edges of the window provide shaded groves for picnicking and a river-scaled sandbox for play at the water’s edge. All of these improvements are designed to withstand occasional flooding of the site and are coordinated with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

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Completion Date 2013 Size 90 Acres Services Architecture Landscape Architecture Civil Engineering Graphic Design Awards American Institute of Architects Central States Region, Honor Award, Master Planning/Urban Design Awards Environment & Open Space Award, Omaha By Design

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Community Arts The Great Lawn creates a flexible event space for the communities on both sides of the river to come together. Designed to flood and replete with all required supporting performance infrastructure, the Great Lawn can be used for the community’s recreational needs everyday and hold up to 15,000 people for large-scale events.

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The Levee Amphitheater Turning the challenge of existing flood protection into an opportunity, the team sculpted an existing levee into a terraced community amphitheater. This sculptural piece of land art comfortable holds 2,000 people, offering a smaller scaled venue to the Great Lawn.

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A protector of the Missouri River’s riparian woodland and wetlands, an example of award-winning public space design, and a testament to the power of regional thinking.

OMAHA BY DESIGN’S ENVIRONMENT AND OPEN SPACE AWARD JURY

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Top Multi-functional spaces allow for community fitness and recreation. Here, a high school team uses the amphitheater for sprints!

Right The site allows for a wide-range of events sizes - from regional events of nearly 20,000 visitors to small-scale performances for a few hundred viewers.

Bottom A comprehensive wayfinding and signage system provides visitors with the information they need while also celebrating the park’s ecosystems and significant donors.

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Between Floods: Resiliency & Urban Regeneration NOVEMBER 2016

100-year flood. 500-year flood. These are the curious and somewhat misleading terms that meteorologists, emergency response organizations, and resiliency planners use to discuss flood events. A 100-year flood is one that reaches a level that, statistically speaking, stands a good chance of occurring once in a hundred years.

Likewise, a 500-year flood might occur once every 500 years. However, this is not a schedule; It’s merely a statistic based on historical data and future projections. It’s useful for planning for the “worst-case scenario”, but it is important to remember that major floods can happen at any time.

Optimistically, a city might go three or four centuries without hitting 100-year flood levels. On the other end of the spectrum? Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

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Cedar Rapids, a city of 130,000, had only eight years between their first and second highest floods on historical record. First was the 2008 flood. Exceeding the 500-year flood level (that is, a flood that has only a .2% chance of occurring in any given year), the water crested at 31 feet above the riverbank. Emergency evacuation protocols and sufficient warning prevented any loss of life, but the impact shows in terms of displacement and dollars: 10 square miles of the city were flooded, some 24,000 residents were evacuated; damage to 7,000 affected properties tallied up to $6 billion. The impact of the more recent flood—this September— was considerably less. This is due both to the lower flood level (the water still crested at 22 feet, making it the second highest on record) and the

fact that the city was more prepared this time—largely due to a river corridor plan developed by Sasaki and the City.

Writing for Landscape Architecture Magazine (LAM), reporter Zach Mortice tells the tale of the city, its floods, and the years in between in “Cedar Rapids, Readier for this Flood.” He interviewed Sasaki Principals Gina Ford, ASLA, and Jason Hellendrung, ASLA, on work that the firm has done for Cedar Rapids.

Ford and Hellendrung, as Mortice relates, have a unique connection to the city and its challenges. Having traveled to Cedar Rapids on June 11, 2008 for a greenway master plan kick-off, they awoke the next morning to experience the impact of the flood firsthand. The flood would rise higher through the 12th, before finally cresting on the 13th.

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The Day After You can read the full story of those surreal days in the field on LAM—but it is no exaggeration to say that this flood would prove to be a defining moment of the project. It not only brought Ford and Hellendrung closer to the community’s experience, but refocused the entire purpose of the master plan. What was originally intended as a reinvigoration of the riverfront and city core quickly shifted to incorporating protection against future floods. Community outreach was critical and irrepressible to developing the plan—the community truly bonded together to share thoughts on how best to rebuild after this disaster. One of the most pressing questions moving forward centered on how to treat properties that had flooded.

“What made this effort so successful was how engaged the community was from day one,” says Hellendrung.

“Together, we developed several strategies against future floods as well as plans to reinvigorate the city.

Options varied from walling off the river entirely to buying out the 7,000 properties that had flooded. Through working with the community, we landed in the middle—leading to the development of the greenway and a vibrant Riverwalk in the downtown that could be protected with demountable flood walls.”

A FLOOD PLAIN MAP OF CEDAR RAPIDS SHOWS THE 100-YEAR LEVEL IN DARK BLUE, 500-YEAR LEVEL IN LIGHTER BLUE, AND THE EXTENT OF THE 2008 FLOOD IN GRAY-BLUE.

“THE CEDAR RAPIDS COMMUNITY WAS THE MOST ACTIVE AND ENGAGED OF ANY COMMUNITY WE’VE WORKED WITH BEFORE OR SINCE,” SAYS FORD.

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The Years After The purchase of 1,300 parcels paired with city-owned property enabled the creation of a 220-acre greenway.

Today, the sloping, lush greenway is a place for circulation, play, and programming in good weather, but serves as a levee in floods—a buffer between the river and the city. Along the west bank of the river is the popular McGrath Amphitheatre, which hosts several major concerts and events throughout the year— successfully activating the riverfront.

The amphitheatre, completed in 2014, and the greenway illustrate another central goal of our work in Cedar Rapids: designing double-duty infrastructure:

Beyond Resilience: Revitalization “Traditional flood prevention strategies often call for building tall flood walls along the riverbank,” says Ford. “While this is an effective strategy, it cuts communities off from their river—a great resource for recreation and natural beauty. In Cedar Rapids, we flipped the traditional treatment on its head. More than 99% of the time, the river isn’t flooded, so the question became ‘how can we design great public places that also offer proficient flood protection?’”

THE POPULAR MCGRATH AMPHITHEATRE DOUBLES AS A LEVEE DURING FLOOD EVENTS.

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The pre-flood impetus for the plan was to reinvigorate the riverfront and its connection with adjacent neighborhoods. “The Cedar River is an amenity that serves to enhance the quality of life attraction for the City,” says the original request for qualifications, “and its plans are to rival any of the greatest river towns in America.” Though the 2008 flood changed the conversation in many ways, the city and community was still committed to celebrating the recreational and social value the river offers.

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THE GREENWAY CELEBRATES THE CITY’S CONNECTION WITH THE RIVERFRONT.

It’s a smart investment, and Cedar Rapids is in good company. Cities across the country have begun viewing their river and waterfronts— which have all too often languished as post-industrial dead zones—as major opportunities for revitalization.

Investing in riverfront recreation is a proven economic generator for cities. A study we recently completed for Riverlife, a Pittsburgh riverfront advocacy group, draws a dramatic correlation. The study connects the city’s $130 million in riverfront investments to over $4.1 billion in development and soaring property values.

A 2013 study by the Friends of the Chicago River show that each dollar invested in the Chicago River “provides a 70% return through business revenue, tax revenue, and income while creating 52,000 construction jobs and 846 permanent operations and maintenance jobs.” The Chicago Riverwalk, which celebrated the opening of its final phase last week, is palpable proof of the activation power riverfront design offers. Blair Kamin, architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, described the project as a “path that will stretch uninterrupted for 1 and ¼ miles and will have transformed harsh industrial-era docks into a teeming postindustrial amenity” in a recent review.

We are humbled to have worked with such a strong community as Cedar Rapids. Together, we created a plan that invests not just in recreation space, not just in flood protection—but in both. That approach is reinvigorating the city’s vibrancy and has become a successful case study for planning for the worst while raising the quality of life to their best levels yet for the people of Cedar Rapids.

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Rebuild By Design US DEPARTMENT OF HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT | OCEAN AND MONMOUTH, NEW JERSEY

An initiative of the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force, Rebuild by Design is a competition that asks some of the world’s most talented design professionals to envision solutions that increase resilience across the Sandy-affected region. Leveraging nontraditional partnerships among designers, scientists, the local communities, and the federal government, Rebuild by Design is developing resilience solutions that are locally contextual, but also regionally scalable.

Sasaki’s proposal—selected as one of 10 from the 148 proposals submitted from around the world—focuses on resiliency for the Jersey Shore. Our vision for an overall framework is built upon one of the Jersey Shore’s most valuable assets: the beach.

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Completion Date 2014 Size 1,571 Square Miles

Services Planning Landscape Architecture Urban Design Graphic Design

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Deeper than the Beach New Jersey’s beaches compose a complex system of fluctuating populations, transit networks, settlement patterns, and ecological conditions that are unique to the Atlantic coast. Within this framework, there are three coastal landform typologies: barrier islands, the headlands, and the inland bay. Each offers unique characteristics and vulnerabilities, and they all appear in many other areas along the eastern seaboard.

Sasaki’s design evolves from not only a physical and ecological understanding of the three coastal typologies, but in fact a cultural understanding.

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Ultimately, the project goal is to protect future communities as well as the role of the beach as a cultural icon and economic driver for the Jersey Shore. To accomplish this, ecological relationships, beach infrastructure, tourism, and settlement patterns will be adapted to accommodate new modes of beach travel. Solutions for the three typologies will work in coordination and build off each other to create a new type of resiliency—one that not only protects the beach, but also enhances social capital and connectivity.

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AS PART OF OUR OUTREACH, WE ORGANIZED A RESILIENCE PARADE IN ASBURY PARK, NEW JERSEY, WHICH UNITED RESIDENTS FROM A RACIALLY DIVIDED COMMUNITY.

Coalitions and Regional Planning for True Resilience Realistic resilience planning must incorporate strategic planning, coalition building, and market analysis—none of which is exciting, obvious, or quick. Furthermore, the threat of sea level rise and storm surge knows no political bounds.

For true resilience, we simply must operate at the regional scale of the rising sea or a storm’s destruction.

Through our own recovery work, we’ve struggled with the limited capacity of small, individual communities to solve the significant, complex problems that climate change poses. Similarly, the communities our proposal addresses are small and politically fractured. But collectively, they represent a larger population— and the economic engine of an entire state.

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The process “electrified” the community and the team behind the Headlands project. It mobilized residents already committed to environmental projects in the area and also brought the concept of climate resilience to a broader audience in the town.

— C ITY COUNCILWOMAN AMY QUINN IN HOWTOGETTONEXT.COM 114

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Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool NATIONAL PARK SERVICE | WASHINGTON, DC

When the Lincoln Memorial opened in 1922, the National Mall was extended 2,500 feet westward on filled land toward the Potomac, creating a significant new national landscape.

Today, the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial and Reflecting Pool constitute one of the most iconic and recognizable landscapes in the country.

Completion Date 2012 Size 30 Acres Services Landscape Architecture Urban Design Planning Architecture

However, the 21st century has introduced extraordinary new demands on this prominent civic landscape. With over 4.5 million visitors annually, the site was being used far beyond the capacity of the original design— causing stress on the landscape, paths, and other pedestrian areas. Security and accessibility were also outdated. Finally, the Reflecting Pool was filled with potable water and, due to failing structural conditions, water loss necessitated refilling two to three times each year—using nearly six million gallons of potable water each time. The National Park Service sought Sasaki to update and revise this landscape to meet contemporary needs while preserving the defining character of this national landmark. Through an integrated approach, Sasaki resolved accessibility and security issues, increased the resilience of the site, and incorporated sustainable solutions.

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Stakeholders and Approval This remarkable project—the largest in the nation by the National Park Service under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—began in 2009 and was approved by the Commission of Fine Arts, the National Capital Planning Commission, and others in 2010. Design and approvals were expedited by Sasaki’s use of 3D visualization images matched to existing on-site photographs to review concepts as well as materials and details of design proposals.

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Accessibility and Visitor Experience Sasaki created new paths parallel to the Reflecting Pool to accommodate the thousands of people who walk each day from the Lincoln Memorial to the World War II Memorial. The existing Elm Walks flanking the Reflecting Pool are updated with new paving, benches, and baffled LED lighting that preserves the dramatic reflective quality of views to the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument.

Sasaki’s design also introduces new paths that descend to the Reflecting Pool with flanking walls that create a new security barrier. The walls relate and connect to the original terraces and are constructed with granite supplied from the quarry used for the Memorial.

The Reflecting Pool is deepened at the west end to serve as a new vehicular barrier, thus preserving the open view between the memorials at each end of the pool.

Sustainable Water Supply Sasaki studied numerous options during preliminary design for supplying the water to the Reflecting Pool in a more sustainable manner.

The selected direction eliminates potable water and plans for the Reflecting Pool to be supplied with water from the Tidal Basin that is filtered and recirculated to improve water quality. Daily water replenishment is supplied from the sumps in the subterranean pump room of the World War II Memorial.

Sasaki worked with engineers from Louis Berger in the final design of the water supply plan and site engineering.

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Completion Date 2012 Size 1,500 Acres

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Water Works Park DES MOINES WATER WORKS | DES MOINES, IOWA

Water Works Park is composed of 1,500 acres bisected by the Raccoon River and a 3-milelong infiltration gallery, which is a major source of drinking water for Des Moines. Des Moines Water Works, working in partnership with Iowa State University Department of Landscape Architecture, held an international competition for proposals to integrate the ecological and social functions of the park and river into a unified landscape, inspire the community, and generate discussion about watershed issues.

The competition also called for solutions for ecological and recreational challenges specific to Water Works Park. Sasaki’s winning plan, developed in collaboration with RDG Planning and Design and Applied Ecological Services, imagines Water Works as a place of adventure and water experience that serves as entrée to a restored, easily accessible wilderness and beyond—to a river system, a watershed, and a new understanding of the role of everybody in the region’s water story. The park becomes a reimagined public space on the Raccoon River, where the dynamic floodplain, the engineered water systems, ecology, and active recreation come together.

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Wild and Engineered Landscapes Sasaki’s plan shapes two distinct yet complementary sections of Water Works Park: the wild and the engineered. The wild offers immersion into the park’s magnificent natural setting through activities like horseback riding, hiking, and exploration. The engineered is the active heart of the park and provides more structured outdoor activities and event spaces.

The centerpiece of the engineered landscape is a recreational watercourse, experienced on standing paddleboards, that is linked to interpretive opportunities regarding the role of the site in harvesting and cleaning drinking water. The engineered landscape also connects to city streets, integrating the park with the urban fabric of Des Moines.

Education Through a series of engaging experiences, the plan offers the potential to realize Water Works Park’s mission: to transform the way society thinks and understands the role of water in the region. “Education and the connection between the river and the community were highly stressed in Sasaki’s winning plan,” said competition judge Ted Corrigan, Director of Water Distribution and Grounds for Des Moines Water Works.

“The concept of integrating recreation with water supply operational enhancements also stood out from the other submissions.”

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Completion Date 2016 Size 6,150 Acres

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Gulf State Park Master Plan THE UNIVERSIT Y OF AL ABAMA | BALDWIN COUNT Y, AL ABAMA

In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill devastated the Gulf Coast. In Alabama, beaches were closed, and the economic impacts were long-lasting. At 6,150 acres, Gulf State Park is the largest preserved open space on the Gulf of Mexico. The park serves as Alabama’s front porch on the Gulf, drawing visitors from the state and beyond.

Its popularity as a tourist destination generates park revenue that supports the rest of the Alabama State Park system. Sasaki’s Master Plan builds on the park’s unique assets to transform it into an international model of environmental and economic sustainability.

The Master Plan is rooted in five key elements – enhancing the visitor experience, restoring the dunes, building an interpretive center, establishing a learning campus, and rebuilding a Gulf State Park lodge, which was destroyed by Hurricane Ivan in 2004. The park’s 600,000 annual visitors will enjoy a vastly improved experience with nearly 10 miles of new walking, cycling, or running trails; approximately 3.5 miles of enhancements to existing park trails; and better connections throughout the park to reduce the need for vehicular transportation.

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Sustainable Development Practices New development defined by the Master Plan is concentrated within already disturbed areas, preserving core habitat in the park’s natural areas. At the same time, any future development will model green building practices that are friendly, and even beneficial, to the park’s environment. Taken together, these projects create an economically sustainable park, ensuring sufficient funding for landscape maintenance and restoration, as well as fiscal support for conservation across the State Park system.

Educational Programming A new learning campus for the Park will provide a variety of educational and research programs.

Additional lodging options will create flexibility for student groups, researchers, and park visitors, and a dining facility will serve all communities and park visitors. The learning campus will be located near the current park headquarters to encourage educational and programmatic connections with regional communities and schools. A new interpretive center will feature indoor and outdoor interactive exhibits, meeting space and educational environments. This “living building” will be overtly educational in its construction. Both of these projects are also underway.

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Dune Restoration The Gulf State Park dune restoration utilizes innovative techniques and native plantings (without trucking in more sand) to restore the equivalent of more than 50 football fields of dunes, which protect us from storms and provide animal habitats. Additionally, the plan calls for restoration of the natural habitat for wildlife, including the federally endangered Alabama beach mice, nesting sea turtles, and shore birds. By strategically cutting breaches into a constructed berm, and supporting them with native plantings, sand fencing, and invasive species removal, sand will flow more freely into secondary and tertiary dunes. The first breaches have been cut, beginning the process of dune restoration. Results will be monitored into the future.

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Emerald Networks: Reviving the Legacy of City Parks NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSIT Y | BOSTON, MASSACHUSET TS

Cities with park systems designed by historic visionaries are endowed with a legacy of generous, well-connected open spaces.

However, the financial pressures facing today’s cities, along with new thinking about park use, can challenge these historic frameworks.

Emerald Networks: Reviving the Legacy of City Parks explores how cities are innovating within historic park visions to meet contemporary needs.

This research initiative examines case studies of six cities with historically planned park systems: Boston, Chicago, Hartford, Minneapolis, Raleigh, and Washington, DC. Emerald Networks explores how these cities are building on their legacy plans with innovative contemporary projects focused on the principles of sustainability and resiliency, active programming and use, community connectivity, social equity, economic development, and rethinking infrastructure. The research initiative and exhibition build on Sasaki’s expertise in park system planning for cities across the country.

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Completion Date 2015 Services Graphic Design Exhibit Design Branding Research

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Historical Comparison The research included overlaying historic plans for the cities with current-day park systems, revealing which portions of the plans were realized and identifying opportunities for future connectivity.

PA R K S T O D AY | C H I C A G O , I L L I N O I S

IMPROVING LIVABILITY AND IDENTITY IN AN EVOLVING CITY Known as the City in a Garden, Chicago benefits from its location on the shores of Lake Michigan and from its strong planning legacy. The Plan of Chicago established the city’s open space legacy more than 100 years ago. Within this historic framework, the city is reinventing many of its iconic landscapes to enhance urban livability and civic identity. Today, expansions of green space in growing neighborhoods and improvements along the lakefront and riverfront are helping infuse Chicago with new civic life.

Through these varied efforts, innovative design and programming are activating new, culturally significant spaces for Chicago’s next century.

Historic Park vision Network vision (trail, boulevard, greenway)

Park System Today Park vision realized Trail network Additional parks City limit ½ mile

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Navy Pier

Chicago Riverwalk DOWNTOWN

Maggie Daley Park

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Interactive Engagement An interactive portion of the exhibit asked visitors to put forth their ideas for the future of Boston’s Park system—a particularly salient question, with the Emerald Necklace essentially in Northeastern’s backyard.

The Emerald Networks publication and exhibition build on Sasaki’s expertise in park system planning for cities across the country.

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Zidell Yards Master Plan ZRZ REALT Y | PORTL AND, OREGON

With a focus on innovation, quality of life, development opportunity and public life amenities, the Zidell Yards plan creates a 21st century district that will provide a different type of working, living, and recreational experience for Portland.

Over the past decade the area surrounding Zidell Yards has seen remarkable change, with the development of high rise condos, an aerial tram, streetcar, and a rapidly expanding medical university, OHSU. The Zidell Yards site is the largest and last undeveloped parcel in central Portland and its location within a rapidly developing district creates a multitude of opportunities for creating a connected heart along the river.

Zidell Yards is about a mile from Downtown Portland, nestled within the southern edge of the Central Waterfront. The once largely industrial, “working” waterfront is now largely composed of residential and medical high rises and is well connected to the downtown and across the Tilikum Crossing by streetcar, by aerial tram to the west, and in the future by bike along the South Waterfront Greenway. Occupying thirty-three acres in the evolving, vibrant South Waterfront neighborhood, the Zidell Yards site is poised to transition from a manufacturing center on the Willamette River to an equally important component of Portland’s next era.

The plan imagines the development of approximately five million square feet of mixed use retail, residential and office space in the coming years, bringing with it new jobs, thousands of residents and daily visitors. Finally, it honors Portland’s strong parks and open space legacy through the creation of a sequence of multiple parks, plazas and linear greenways that each offers its own unique public space activities, waterfront access and daily experience.

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Completion Date In Progress Size 33 Acres Services Planning Urban Design

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Top Left The Zidell Yards Master Plan sets a clear vision for a new district that will become the social heart, the retail hub and the creative center of the South Waterfront district.

With a focus on innovation, quality of life, development opportunity and public life amenities, the Zidell Yards plan creates a 21st century district that will provide a different type of working, living, and recreational experience for Portland.

Bottom Zidell Yards will introduce new ways for Portlanders to access and interact with the water and the Willamette River. Each open space has been designed to best take advantage of river views and, when possible, to provide direct access down into the water for active recreation and passive enjoyment.

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AWARDS

SELECT AWARDS FOR PUBLIC SPACE

CHICAGO RIVERWALK

WILMINGTON WATERFRONT PARK

THE LAWN ON D

Chicago Building Congress Merit Awards, Honor Award For Infrastructure Construction, Phase 2, 2016

Excellence On The Waterfront Awards, The Waterfront Center, 2015

Honor Award For General Design, American Society Of Landscape Architects, 2015

Illuminating Engineering Society International Illumination Design Award Of Excellence, Outdoor Lighting Design, Phase 2, 2016 Chicago River Blue Awards, Silver Ribbon, Phase 2, 2016 Fast Company Innovation By Design Awards, Finalist — Spaces, Places, And Cities Category, Phase 2, 2016 American Institute Of Architects, Chicago Chapter, Design Excellence Award, Phase 2, 2016 The Waterfront Center Excellence On The Waterfront Awards, Honor Award — Park/Walkway/Recreational Category, Phase 2, 2016 The Architect’s Newspaper, Best Of Design Awards, Phase 2, 2016 International Downtown Association, Pinnacle Award – Public Space Category, 2016

ZHANGJIABANG PARK Mipim Asia Awards, Bronze for Urban Regeneration, 2016 Boston Society Of Landscape Architects, Merit Award For Analysis And Planning, 2016 Boston Society Of Architects, Citation For Urban Design, 2015

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Urban Land Institute, Open Space Award Finalist, 2013 American Public Works Association, Project Of The Year Award: Structures $25 Million To $75 Million, 2012 Engineering News Record, National Best Of The Best Projects: Best Landscape/ Hardscape/Urban Development, 2011 American Council Of Engineering Companies California Chapter , Merit Award: Engineering Excellence, 2011 American Public Works Association Southern California Chapter, Project Of The Year Award, 2011 Engineering News Record, California’s Best Projects: Best Landscape/ Hardscape/Urban Development, 2011 The Associated General Contractors Of America, National Build Award: Environmental Enhancement Class, 2011 Master Plan — Merit Award: Excellence In Urban Design, American Institute Of Architects California Council, 2008 Master Plan — Citation: Excellence In Urban Design, American Institute Of Architects San Francisco Chapter, 2007 Master Plan — Honor Award, American Society Of Landscape Architects Northern California Chapter, 2007

Downtown Merit Award For Public Space, International Downtown Association, 2015 Boston’s Best 2015 Best New Addition In Arts & Entertainment, Improper Bostonian, 2015 AIA National Small Project Award, American Institute Of Architects, 2015 Boston Society Of Landscape Architects, Honor Award For General Design, 2015

TOM HANAFAN RIVER’S EDGE PARK Environment & Open Space Award, Omaha By Design, 2015 American Institute Of Architects Central States Region, Honor Award, Master Planning/Urban Design Awards, 2010

CINCINNATI JOHN G. AND PHYLLIS W. SMALE RIVERFRONT PARK National Recreation And Park Association, Park Design Award, 2013

CORPUS CHRISTI NORTH BAYFRONT PARK American Institute Of Architects, Honor Award, 2013

BRIDGEPORT PARK MASTER PLANNING SERVICES Boston Society Of Landscape Architects, Honor Award In Landscape Analysis And Planning, 2013

SASAKI

CEDAR RAPIDS RIVERFRONT American Planning Association Iowa Chapter, Excellence Award For Innovation For Sustaining Places, 2010

SCHENLEY PLAZA Schenley Plaza; Pittsburgh, Pa—Pinnacle Award, Downtown Achievement Awards, International Downtown Association, 2010 Pinnacle Award, Downtown Achievement Awards, International Downtown Association, 2009

WATERWAY SQUARE Park Design Excellence Award, The Texas Recreation And Park Society, 2009

CHARLESTON WATERFRONT PARK Landmark Award, American Society Of Landscape Architects, 2007

COCONUT GROVE WATERFRONT Orchid Award For Public Process And Participation, The Urban Environment League, 2007

ADDISON CIRCLE PARK Honor Award, Boston Society Of Landscape Architects, 2005

DETROIT RIVERFRONT CIVIC CENTER PROMENADE Honor Award In Urban Design, American Institute Of Architects Detroit Chapter; In Association With Albert Kahn Associates, 2003

INDIANAPOLIS WATERFRONT MASTER PLAN

BOSTON WATERFRONT PARK AND LONG WHARF

Upper Canal—Excellence On The Waterfront Honor Award, The Waterfront Center, 2003

Boston Waterfront Park — Asla Centennial Medallion Award, American Society Of Landscape Architects, 1999

WHEELING HERITAGE PORT

DOOSAN 100 YEAR COMMEMORATIVE PARK

Honor Award For Waterfront Design, Boston Society Of Landscape Architects, 2003 Excellence On The Waterfront Honor Award, The Waterfront Center, 2003

NARRAGANSETT LANDING Excellence On The Waterfront Honor Award, The Waterfront Center, 2001

CHARLESTON WATERFRONT PARK Honor Award, American Society Of Landscape Architects, 1999 National Landscape Award, American Association Of Nurserymen, 1993

INDIANAPOLIS WATERFRONT MASTER PLAN Capital City Landing—Merit Award, American Society Of Landscape Architects, 1999 Capital City Landing—Chief Of Engineers Design And Environmental Honor Award For Civil Works, U.s. Army Corps Of Engineers, 1998 Capital City Landing—Monumental Award For Excellence, 20Th Annual Awards For Excellence In Design, Development, Construction & Beautification In Indianapolis, 1997

Honor Award For Excellence In Architecture, Boston Society Of Architects, 1998

CITY OF FREMONT PARKS AND RECREATION MASTER PLAN Honorable Mention: Recreation/ Community Services Planning And Problem Solving, California Parks & Recreation Society, 1997

SACRAMENTO/WEST SACRAMENTO RIVERFRONT MASTER PLANS Outstanding Planning Award: Comprehensive Planning, Large Jurisdiction Category, American Planning Association California Chapter Sacramento Valley Section, 1995

ARNOLD ARBORETUM MASTER PLAN DESIGN STUDIES Merit Award, Boston Society Of Landscape Architects, 1994

NEWBURYPORT DOWNTOWN AND WATERFRONT BOARDWALK Honor Award, Boston Society Of Landscape Architects, 1994

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CONTACT 64 Pleasant Street Watertown, MA 02472 USA p 617 926 3300 f 617 924 2748 www.sasaki.com

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