Placemaking without Borders
Keynote Address at the New Zealand Institute of Landscape Architecture (NZILA), 2021
This article was compiled from a keynote lecture delivered at the New Zealand Institute of Landscape Architecture 2021 Conference, on 6 May 2021.
Thank you to the conference organizers for inviting me to speak today. Since I received the invitation last December (2020), I have been hoping for a travel bubble between New Zealand and Taiwan (where I am currently based) in time for the conference. Unfortunately, it hasn’t happened. But it’s still great to be here virtually to speak to the theme of “commons and catchments.”
My professional career over the last 30 years or so has been focused on the theory and practice of community design. The notion of “commons and catchments” in the context of community design implies boundaries and identities that today are constantly shifting. With the continued migrations and movements of people, the demographics of our urban and rural communities have transformed significantly. I don’t know enough about New Zealand, but this has been the case in many communities in Asia and North America.
Boundaries and borders also call into question the conditions of inequality in society which I believe is a challenge that the design profession needs to address. The recent events in the United States present a stark reminder of the persistent, structural barriers in cities and communities that we as a design profession have been complicit to as we shape the built environments that often reinforce those inequalities.
What I would like to do today is to share with you three projects that I think begin to take on the challenge of shifting boundaries and identities as well as addressing socioeconomic inequality in society. These are also three projects in which landscape architects have played a pivotal role.
Open Green Program in Taipei
Since I am in Taipei, let me start with a case here. The Open Green Program in Taipei is a municipal program that supports community-driven placemaking for urban regeneration. It started with small-scale experiments to program and activate vacant spaces in neighborhoods around the city, such as a community garden and projects that are made possible through partnerships and collaboration between residents and outside actors.
In 2014, an initial series of experiments were consolidated to form the Open Green program under the city’s Urban Regeneration Office, and a team of landscape architects became the lead in coordinating the project and assisting city residents in their initiatives. Open Green is basically a program that funds projects that activate paces in a neighborhood through greening and community gathering. The site could be a wall, a vacant property, a rooftop, or other unused and interstitial spaces.
Unlike typical and previous community projects in Taipei in that only a community can participate, the Open Green program was designed for anyone with ideas to create such space can apply. This mechanism opened up all sorts of opportunities for participation from people and groups outside a community, volunteers in particular, through social networks that have not been leveraged before. The additional actors bring with them knowledge, skills, and resources that the community may be lacking. Here, border-crossing here became a way to address socioeconomic inequalities.
Some of the projects included nature trails built with support from residents and volunteers from outside the community, alleyway activation and improvement using shade-tolerant plants (through an automatic irrigation system that can be controlled remotely from a mobile phone), vacant land turned into community gathering spaces in a neighborhood, community green open space underneath an elevated roadway, community gardens that involve collaboration between a hospital and local residents to serve both patients and residents, a schoolyard with healthy urban forests, and vacant space in the neighborhood converted into a multi-functional community space.
There are now over 75 sites throughout the city that have been funded and realized through this program. The role of landscape architects in the Open Green Program involves match-making by connecting residents and stakeholders with other professional and civic organizations. It is important to note that not only were the sites activated, but the program also facilitated collective learning among organizers and volunteers from different neighborhoods who participated in the project — another important aspect of border-crossing and addressing inequalities between the different communities. Collective learning and sharing also occur through field trips and site visits for Open Green participants to each other’s projects.
The vision of the Open Green program is to create bottom-up, community-driven places in the city that activates both space and social relationships. It has been rewarding to watch this program grow since its inception. As a reviewer of community proposals, I have also learned a great deal during this process. I, too, became a participant in this collective learning process that overcomes borders and barriers.
Hing Hay Park Expansion
Moving on to the second project, Hing Hay Park Expansion. For the past twenty years, a big part of my professional engagement in Seattle has been working with the community of Chinatown-International District which faces many of the same issues in other inner-city ethnic neighborhoods in North America, including a history of discrimination and displacement with the building of large infrastructure projects including an interstate freeway cutting the neighborhood in half back in the 1960s and a sports stadium in the 1970s.
Today, the Chinatown International District is a historic district with a predominantly Asian American population and also a high concentration of elderly residents with very limited income. The district has more food stamp users than any other neighborhood in the city. The district is also a multi-ethnic community, settled by different ethnic groups through multiple waves of immigration. The neighborhood is still receiving new immigrants who are in need of social services. At the same time, it is also faced with the encroachment of new developments and threats of gentrification and displacement.
For the last two decades or so, through mostly studio projects, faculty and students from the University of Washington, Seattle have worked with community stakeholders on open space projects to make the community a more welcoming place for new and old residents as well as visitors and those who work in the district and to provide more opportunities for social gathering and active living. The projects we have contributed to include the Maynard Avenue Green Street (completed in 2010), a project that expanded a sidewalk and made it safer and more welcoming for our elderly residents
The Renovation of an existing children’s park — the Donnie Chinn International Children’s Park considered the needs of different users, including not only kids but also parents, grandparents, and teenagers. Projects also included the activation of alleyways, through events and programming when funding was not available.
For Children’s Park, we used community engagement techniques such as photovoice, to see the neighborhood environment through the eyes of the local stakeholders, and design games that were embedded into everyday activities in the neighborhood, such as an ESL (English as Second Language) class. During the game, participants would use park elements with bilingual labels to design a park — They were designing and learning English at the same time — games that try to build on the skills and knowledge that residents already have.
In the case of our Chinese community, one of the strongest skills that residents have is simply eating a buffet meal. Holding a workshop in the form of a design buffet was probably one of the most successful workshops we ever did. Almost as soon as I announce that the game was like a buffet, everyone starts to get in line. There was no need for me to explain the design process further. Participants knew intuitively what they needed to do.
One of our more recent projects was the expansion of Hing Hay Park — an existing park located at the heart of the community. One of the key challenges for this project was to design a park that is welcoming and inclusive to the multiple cultural groups in the district as well as outside visitors — in other words — to overcome the cultural barriers and boundaries that have divided the community and the rest of the city.
We were very fortunate to have the opportunity to work with Turenscape, led by Kongjian YU who brought a kind of cultural and ecological sensibility that was much needed for the project. The design team also included a local firm MIG SvR. Working with the local stakeholders including a Friends group that I co-chaired, designers from Turenscape and MIG SvR developed a series of concepts that focus on the common ground between the different cultural groups, rather than their individual identities. They further considered the idea of the park as a theater, as a stage for community events as well as everyday activities. The second concept was that of harvest, i.e., how the park can become a productive landscape, a landscape of abundance. The proposal considered something that would appeal to all the cultural groups and asked “What if the park was an orchard?”
The third concept was that of “exchange,” using the landform of rice terraces as a nod to all the cultural groups, a heritage that belongs to all the ethnicities in the district. One can find the terraced landform in Vietnam, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines. It’s a common thread between the different cultures. Besides being an inclusive form, the terraced landform became a way to organize the circulation and address grade change on the site. The concepts were accepted by the community, with the terraced landform that would also serve as seating during a large event.
To gauge how well the park has performed, we did a post-occupancy evaluation back in 2018 with a small grant from the city. Based on a survey, the response to the park has been overwhelmingly positive. We have seen many more visitors to the district — before the pandemic, of course — visitors of different ages. The pavilion which was a trouble spot before also became more actively used. The park has been popular with the growing number of kids in the neighborhood for parents and grandparents to bring kids to play while they socialize.
We are also very pleased to see that the park has won several local and national awards in the state of Washington and is also featured in the Landscape Architecture Magazine. That was the story of Hing Hay Park expansion, a project that tries to be inclusive and engage a broad range of stakeholders in the planning and design process.
Seattle Street Sink
The COVID-19 Pandemic has reinforced borders and barriers through travel bans, lock-downs, and other forms of physical and non-physical barriers. At the same time, the crisis has also offered opportunities for overcoming different social boundaries and barriers. In the Chinatown-International District, as soon as the stay-at-home order from the State was announced, volunteers and nonprofit organizations have been organizing to coordinate donations and deliveries of food to those who could not leave their apartments in neighborhoods.
Artists and volunteers have painted boarded-up storefronts to make the community a more welcoming place during the pandemic and to show their solidarity and support for the community. Many of these folks are from outside the community and answered the call by the organizers to help. Hundreds of people, including artists and volunteers, parents, and young people, showed up for the event to support the local businesses, folks who may or may not be members of the community.
In the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington, inspired by the mutual aid efforts in the community, several faculty and students including myself have also been interested in finding ways to leverage our resources and expertise to help those in need during the pandemic. One of the projects that came through our door had to do with the need of folks on the street, people experiencing homelessness, which had been one of the challenging issues facing Seattle even before the pandemic. During the Pandemic, people living in tents on the street had no adequate access to washing facilities to maintain personal hygiene. This became especially a problem during the pandemic, as community centers, libraries, and public buildings were all closed during the lockdown.
The City of Seattle responded by renting portable units that were costly to maintain and were vandalized easily. So, through a collaboration with our architecture faculty, a practicing landscape architecture, and an organizer from Real Change, a homeless advocacy organization in Seattle, we came up with this rather simple idea, a DIY urban hand washing station that anyone can build with items available either online or off the shelves, and by connecting it to an outdoor hose bib.
To meet the requirement in Seattle that prohibits wastewater from going directly into the street drains, we added a bioretention planter so that the contaminated water would not be discharged directly into the sewer system. The more durable assembly also provided a more dignified experience for those who use it. Furthermore, the planters also help beautify the street corner. We call this project the Seattle Street Sink. Our first unit was installed just outside a young adult shelter across the street from our university. The entire unit costs less than $400.
The project caught the attention of Landscape Architecture Magazine which featured it in their July 2020 issue. This is probably the lowest-cost project ever featured in the magazine in its 100-year history. Unfortunately, on the day that the issue came out, our first unit was vandalized. A good thing about a DIY design is that it can be easily fixed. My colleagues replaced the legs and took the opportunity to make a few improvements by adding a plug and fortifying the connections. He also added the measurement marks on the soap bottle to gauge the soap use so we could estimate the number of uses for these sinks.
Since then, the number of units has grown steadily. The DIY sink has been adopted or hosted by schools, nonprofit groups, religious organizations, and so on, in and out of Seattle. This included the Duke University Center for Water, Sanitation, Hygiene, and Infectious Disease that had borrowed our design and created a program with more than 20 sinks located in public spaces throughout the city of Durham, in North Carolina. My colleagues in Seattle have been working on a 2.0 version, a much sturdier design using fewer parts and a taller bioretention which makes the unit heavier and harder to move. It will also be ADA-accessible.
Seattle Street Sink is also a project that has broken down borders and barriers between academia and civil society groups, between people who wanted to help and people who needed help, particularly during the pandemic, between architecture and landscape architecture, and between different cultural groups in society. Seeing the potential for the project to scale up, our partner Real Change worked with members of our City Council to put the project on the City Budget for this year. As a result, $100,000 was allocated to support making publicly-accessible sinks throughout the city. We estimated that the funds would be enough to implement 60 units throughout the city.
Landscape Architecture without Borders
I hope that through the three projects I present to you today, one can see how landscape architecture as a practice can contribute to breaking down and overcoming borders and social barriers, addressing inequality in society, and building networks and relationships across cultures, professions, and institutions. By understanding the nuances of social and ecological systems, we as landscape architects can do even more with our skills, knowledge, and expertise.
The grand challenges that we face today as a planet also require us to go beyond the borders of disciplines, cultures, geography, and institutions. With our understanding of systems and processes and our ability to give forms and expressions to meanings and identities, landscape architects can play an even more critical role in reshaping the world. My talk today is a challenge to you all.
