Urban Open Space: Designing for User Needs
Mark Francis, FASLA

Successful public spaces respond to the needs of their users, are democratic in their accessibility, and are meaningful for the larger community and society. While numerous publications offer fragments of research on user needs and conflicts in open space, this Land and Community Design Case Study integrates all this knowledge and makes it available to professionals, students, and researchers.

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Village Homes: A Community by Design
Mark Francis, FASLA

The Village Homes neighborhood in Davis, California, built in the 1970s, is one of the few long-standing examples or sustainable community design. Mark Francis has been studying Village Homes for more than two decades. In this Land and Community Design Case Study he brings together new information—studies about children of the community and interviews with Village Homes designers, residents, and maintenance staff—as well as existing research.

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The Paris-Lexington Road: Community-Based Planning and Context Sensitive Highway Design
Krista L. Schneider

The Paris-Lexington Road, located in the heart of the historic Kentucky Bluegrass Region, is a scenic, twelve-mile corridor between Lexington and Paris. Beginning in 1969, the state of Kentucky set out to widen the road and improve safety and capacity, a plan that lead to a bitter twenty-year battle pitting local conservationists, historians, and property owners against motorists and pro-development interests.

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The Paris-Lexington Road: Community-Based Planning and Context Sensitive Highway Design
Krista L. Schneider

The publication shows how an interdisciplinary approach led by planners and designers with conservation biologists, restoration ecologists, and natural and social scientists can yield successful results and sustainable practices and minimize habitat loss and degradation.

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Upcoming Case Studies


Manuscripts for the following case studies are complete. The University of Washington Press will publish Urban Community Gardens in 2008.

Urban Community Gardens (Jeffrey Hou, Ph.D., Julie M. Johnson, ASLA, AICP, University of Washington, and Laura Lawson, Ph.D., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

An issue-based study will examine the design and development of urban community gardens as place making for healthy, active and sustainable communities. Six candidate sites, all located in Seattle, vary from brownfield sites and abandoned lots to the grounds of community centers and parks. The study will document the community garden as an active-living community framework, a link with other forms of recreation and open space, and pedestrian-accessible destinations that engage users in frequent maintenance work.

Designing Healthy Open Space: A Teaching Case Study
Mark Francis, FASLA

An important addition to LAF's Land and Community Design Case Study Series is currently undergoing peer review prior to publication. The series’ teaching prototype, Designing Healthy Open Space: A Teaching Case Study, will provide the realms of public and professional education with a systematic method of studying our built and natural environments, thereby training current and future generations of designers and policymakers.

To demonstrate the teaching model, this study will examine the relationship between public spaces and user health, safety, and welfare, and summarize advances in designing healthy public spaces. By using the issue of healthy public space, the teaching prototype will illustrate the use, value, and limits of the case study method in design education and will include sample assignments for seminar and studio courses, teaching notes, directions for future work, contacts, and relevant references and resources.


Case Studies Under Development


Clark County Wetlands Park
Robert France, Ph.D., Harvard University

A site-based study will document Clark County Wetlands Park, a hallmark example of community-based open space planning and natural habitat recreation. The site located near Las Vegas, Nevada, features forty-three miles of mixed trail types, including pedestrian-only, equestrian, multi-use, unimproved, and boardwalks in wetland areas.

MetroGreen: A Regional Greenway Initiative for Metropolitan Kansas City
Stephanie A. Rolley, ASLA, AICP, Kansas State University

A site-based study will document MetroGreen, a seven-county initiative to make cities more livable by uniting existing and proposed trails and open space into 1,144 miles of greenway in the Kansas City area. The connection of disparate recreation areas into a continuous system is creating additional places and opportunities for recreation and increasing access points throughout the region.

Three Pacific Northwest Environmental Learning Centers
Julie M. Johnson, ASLA, AICP
Nancy D. Rottle, ASLA, University of Washington

This issue-based case study will investigate, analyze and present the design programs, goals, concept, approaches, processes, built results and life of three environmental learning centers recently constructed in the Pacific Northwest: (1) Cedar River Watershed Education Center, (2) Islandwood Environmental Learning Center, and (3) North Cascades Environmental Learning Center. Landscape type, interpretive focus, ownership and design processes vary for each of these three environmental learning centers, illustrating transferability and a wide range of solutions.



 
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