Galen Cranz

Defining the Sustainable Park: A Fifth Model for Urban Parks

How can parks contribute to the overarching project of helping cities become more ecologically sustainable? The history of urban parks in America reveals more concern with social problems than with ecological sustainability. Four types of city parks have been identified—the Pleasure Ground, the Reform Park, the Recreation Facility, and the Open Space System—and each of them respond to social issues, not ecological ones. Yet today, ecological problems are becoming one of our biggest social concerns, so a new urban park type focused on social solutions to ecological problems would be consistent with this pattern. Using the same social and physical criteria that described the previous four models, Part I describes a fifth model, the Sustainable Park, which began to emerge in the late 1990s. Part II postulates three general attributes of this new kind of park: (1) self-sufficiency in regard to material resources and maintenance, (2) solving larger urban problems outside of park boundaries, and (3) creating new standards for aesthetics and landscape management in parks and other urban landscapes. It also explores policy implications of these attributes regarding park design and management, the practice of landscape architecture, citizen participation, and ecological education.

Objective housing indicators as predictors of the subjective evaluations of elderly residents

Abstract This study examines objective housing indicators and their relationships with subjective housing quality evaluations for a representative national sample of independent elderly households. The environmental assessment paradigm in environmental psychology was applied to examine both main effects of objective housing indicators (E) and effects of possible interactions between personal (P) and environmental variables upon subjective evaluations. Objective environmental indicators were (1) structural adequacy, (2) maintenance quality, and (3) overhousing. Personal characteristics tested for interaction with environmental variables in affecting subjective evaluations were physical health and living arrangements (alone/with others). The main sample comprised householders age 80+ (1521 home owners and 644 renters); the cross-validation sample comprised householders age 75–79 years (1703 home owners and 666 renters). Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that two indicators of physical housing quality (structural adequacy and maintenance quality) provided significant and meaningful predictions of subjective housing evaluations, explaining from 4·8–18·5% of the adjusted variance after potentially confounding variables were controlled, whereas overhousing was unrelated to this outcome. Interactions did not improve prediction of subjective housing assessments for elderly residents. Study findings are discussed in terms of their implications for environmental assessment research, the development of housing quality indicators, and practical applications in social gerontology.

People in the Design of Urban Places

This issue of the Journal of Urban Design focuses on research related to social issues in urban design. Concern with social issues in urban design and planning arose in the 1960s in response to modernism’s flawed abstract, universal conception of human needs and blindness to social differences. A whole generation of sociologists and urban commentators emerged in response to inhumane urban renewal projects of the 1950s and 1960s, including Herbert Gans, Marc Fried, Jane Jacobs, William F. Whyte, Michael Young and Peter Willmott. At the same time from the design perspective, people such as Kevin Lynch, Donald Appleyard and William H. ‘Holly’ Whyte began exploring the psychological, social and cultural dimensions of place, and developing new methods for assessing them that would be relevant to design, with important early elaborations by Amos Rapoport, Clare Cooper Marcus and others. Environmental psychologists such as Kenneth Craik, Kurt Lewin and Roger Barker and the anthropologist Edward T. Hall also developed new ways of thinking about the role of space in intrapsychic and interpersonal life. The field of environmental psychology was born. The Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) was founded in 1968 and Environment and Behavior began publication in 1969. Research ranged widely, exploring the social and psychological dimensions of urban experience, from children’s conception and use of the city or the behaviour patterns of women in public spaces, to perception of the urban soundscape or social differences in cognitive mapping of the city. Prior to that, social scientists rarely dealt with space and place, and designers had not seriously attempted to understand the users of the environments they planned and built. The idea that design professionals and experts might learn from people who were not trained in architecture was uncommon, even unthinkable, and to this day some professionals continue to resist that idea. When architects and planners first invited social scientists to join their faculties the motive might have been to ‘fix’ the embarrassment of award winning projects such as Pruitt-Igoe being declared unliveable. Could social scientists help architects and planners avoid making such mistakes again? Since then the diversity and complexities of social research in the environmental design fields have tempered the myth that architecture and planning alone caused the social problems of that public housing in St. Louis. Journal of Urban Design, Vol. 17. No. 4, 461–465, November 2012

Communicating Sustainability: A Postoccupancy Evaluation of the David Brower Center

As the United States adjusts to the necessity of ecological sustainability, buildings play an important role because of their use of resources—and because they are potent nonverbal symbols of new societal values. The David Brower Center in Berkeley, California, strives to be a model for sustainability. Environmental impact is often the focus of those concerned with sustainability, but here, additionally, the designers aim to raise public awareness of sustainability through the building. For this reason, this building became the site for a postoccupancy evaluation class exercise; architecture students analyzed the building and what it communicates about sustainability from the perspective of its users. Findings indicate that many people did not adequately read the building’s green design characteristics: Social and symbolic communication could be improved by increasing signage and evolving clearer symbolism for “green.”