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EVENTreport
Optimizing Urban Environments: An AGNR Cornerstone Event
By Brandie Bland and Jaime Breeden
The College of Agriculture and Natural Resources (AGNR) at the University of Maryland College Park (UMD) held their fourth annual cornerstone conference recently. This year’s conference was in person for the first time in two years due to COVID-19 and focused on optimizing urban environments. The conference offered a variety of urban environment presentations with topics ranging from agricultural education in Baltimore to improving food resiliency on UMD’s College Park campus. Planning has begun for next year’s conference, which will focus on advancing innovative, profitable, and sustainable agricultural production systems.
Opening Remarks
AGNR Dean Craig Beyrouty and University of Maryland, College Park Provost Jennifer King Rice welcomed attendees and delivered the opening remarks for this year’s conference. Beyrouty highlighted the AGNR’s land grant mission to promote and provide proper food access and agricultural education to at-risk youth in urban environments. “Many of our youth in metropolitan areas...have real serious issues with regard to accessing education and developing important careers following their educational and academic endeavors,” Beyrouty said. A part of the college’s strategic initiative includes lucrative partnerships with agricultural professionals who provide education training and hands-on experience in Baltimore City schools. “These strategic initiatives are very, very exciting,” Beyrouty said. Many of these professionals presented during the conference. King Rice spoke about campus-wide support for the college’s mission and rebuilding marshes and wetlands to be better protected against future climate disasters while allowing people the opportunity to visit and experience ecosystems they may not have had before—all of this, Orff reiterated, graphed against a timeline of impending climate crises. “You can design these things in Photoshop and then when they actually happen, it’s quite a mind-bender,” Orff said, “That is a huge labor of love. That is eight years. That is a fast-track climate project after a massive disaster. There’s a lot of change that needs to happen in a very short amount of time.” Orff also understands that the key to keeping the future safe isn’t just to remake spaces to better fit the world, but to remake perspectives to better keep it healthy. Many of her projects, like Tom Lee Park in Memphis, TN, act as immersive classrooms, diagramming the ecology that a particular facility is inhabiting and teaching people about its own inhabitants. “It’s a project that’s trying to reach way back into Memphis and celebrates Memphis’s relationship to the Mississippi River. We even worked to develop a free downloadable curriculum kit that is basically a companion to the physical park,” Orff said. “You get hands-on, science-based learning directly related to the physical environment.” Orff explained that the intersection between people and their understanding of what’s around them can be the best way to facilitate the practices necessary to foster long-term ecological recuperation. “This is a way forward. It’s not just about having an idea and going to the community and saying, ‘Do you like this idea?’” Orff said. “It’s about setting up processes that truly interlock people with the physical landscapes that they will cherish and steward for the years to come.” The talk wrapped up with a reminder to not only reflect on the topics presented today, but actually try to incorporate these ideas into the fabric of one’s life—not needing to create such large, elaborate structures to commence change but trying to be a force at a personal, local level. “It’s time to get our hands in the mud.
UMD’s plan to help improve agriculture through education and innovation. “Our campus strategic plan has also wrapped its arms around this mission,” King Rice said. According to King Rice, UMD’s campus plan is called “fearlessly forward in pursuit of excellence and impact for the public good and centers on public good, a land grant mission, and dedication to the good of our state and our broader society. “We’re really working toward a better society and world. And the work that you all do here is right at the heart of that so I want to thank you for that,” King Rice said.
Keynote: Kate Orff
Before a ballroom packed with hundreds of students, colleagues, and other guests, landscape architect Kate Orff asked the room to consider what it meant to build for the future—not just erecting structures for the needs of the people of Earth, but for the Earth itself. This isn’t a revelation for Orff. Conservative landscape design has been a founding focus for her work: She turns projects into messages of social reconnection and environmental reconstruction. “For me, the landscape and thinking about a healthy, robust, contiguous mosaic of interconnected, healthy landscapes is truly a way to go, relative to bridging and thinking about the climate changes before us,” Orff said.”There’s that statement—if you’re a hammer, everything is a nail. I am the hammer of landscape.” Throughout her talk, Orff described her recent projects in detail. Building plazas shaped to resemble coastlines with enough space for community gatherings, coastlines rebuilt to help the ocean’s at-risk populations rebound,
Tending to and dwelling among our living landscapes can start small: plastic pick-ups, piling up logs for habitat, gardening with oysters, and pulling ivy from that patch of tulip trees down the block. We face a global landscape emergency. Let’s knit what we can back together.”
Urban Agriculture: Baltimore Lessons Learned
Neith Little, an urban agriculture extension educator for the University of Maryland College Park’s Baltimore City office, talked about her work with urban farmers in Baltimore City and other parts of the state. Extension is a department within the agriculture school that ensures everyone in the state of Maryland benefits from the research and education that happens in the university system. While Little’s talk highlighted some of the lessons her office has learned through their work with urban farmers, most of it focused particularly on collaboration, which Little called essential to community work. “Collaboration is so important for doing community work, and in particular, in urban communities when there’s such a large community,” Little said. Through UMD’s urban agriculture extension program, Little works with local community leaders to create and further develop agriculture programming that empowers citizens with the resources to grow their own food, curate their own green spaces, and learn about agriculture and the environment. “We must navigate and collaborate, not just with farmers and gardeners, but also with community leaders, nonprofits, other educational institutions, city agencies, and policymakers,” Little said. One of the lessons Little and her office learned through their work is that there is a lack of organizations centered on civic engagement that go into communities to interact with members and leaders who are already doing the work. “They’re already out there, scrounging resources, starting after schoolprograms, building gardens, and they don’t have time to come make our work happen,” Little said. “We need to go learn what they’re already doing and figure out how we can put our pieces together.” The second lesson Little learned is that collaboration is not a one-way street. For the extension program to be successful, Little brings education from the university to local communities and brings the communities’ collective needs to researchers and policy-makers to better serve the communities she collaborates with. Through the collaborative work she does, Little has worked with Whitelock Community Farm, Allen AME Church, and Strength To Love Farm II and is piloting an urban nutrient certification program at Green Street Academy, a charter school in Baltimore City. Little is also working with Baltimore City Arabbers to figure out a way to compost their horse manure. Arabbers are street vendors who use horses to pull carts of fresh fruits and vegetables throughout the city.
Lauren Gray, a landscape designer, presented her thesis work on sound composition in urban green spaces. Gray’s work investigated sound as it exists in urban settings to see how it can be created in a way that is pleasing to humans. Gray completed her research at the Kennedy Center and four parks in Washington, DC, during the height of the pandemic: Bernardo de Gàlvez Memorial Park, Triangle Park, Walt Whitman Park, and Rollins Park. At each location, Gray recorded natural sounds over multiple days and at different times. “There were 24 recordings and 23 different sounds,” Gray said. Of the sounds recorded, Gray found that natural sounds were the most diverse while mechanical sounds were the most consistent. After collecting sound data, Gray began to examine the design of the soundscape to figure out what architectural or landscape objects affected sound in a particular location. In Rollins Park, a water fountain and walls affect how sound is transmitted because as the walls keep sound outside the park from coming in and the sounds of the water fountain act as a deterrent to the human ear. “The soothing sound of the water fountain is what humans tune into and, despite the harsh noise that is actually happening, you will hear less of it,” Gray said. At Walt Whitman Park, plants and the solid ground made natural sounds harsher because sound travels faster through solid materials. Bus shelters at Bernardo de Gàlvez Memorial Park act as sound sculptures to elevate the sounds of the road below the park that are above frequencies the humans can register. Despite the constant traffic below the park, it will sound quiet to humans. “Overall, these explore different ways that sound and landscape can be designed and interacted with,” Gray said. Another important variable Gray found that affects sound composition in urban green spaces is cultural identity. Some cultures incorporate music that tends to be played loudly. While some people will find it soothing, others may find it unpleasant. The go-go music issue in the Shaw community in DC is a great example of this. While some residents argued that the loud music is a nuisance, others heard it as a familiar sound. Gray’s research highlights that when the harsh sounds of urban environments are combined with the natural sounds of the environments, sound in landscapes becomes an important symphony.
Barriers and Transaction Costs in Household Adoption of Rain Gardens
Dr. David Newburn, AGNR associate professor, presented his team’s findings on the likelihood of homeowners in the Baltimore region converting part or all of their lawns to more ecologically friendly alternatives, like rain gardens or conservative landscaping. Across the region, Newburn’s team, a group formed from several North American and international universities, surveyed 1,749 households, primarily determining the financial and operational barriers homeowners would face navigating variables within a prospective cost-share program for the renovations.
