In the follow up episode to Beyond Greenways, we discuss a 2011 article Putting Greenways First by Randall Arendt. His article highlights how these corridors not only enhance community health but also weave nature into our daily commutes and activities. We discuss some real-world examples of great greenway design and how impactful they can be when designed first, with the rest of the development following.
Show Notes:
Link to article referenced in the episode: https://planning.org/planning/2011/aug/greenwaysfirst.htm
To view the show transcripts, click on the episode at https://bookedonplanning.buzzsprout.com/
Follow us on social media for more content related to each episode:
In the follow up episode to Beyond Greenways, we discuss a 2011 article Putting Greenways First by Randall Arendt. His article highlights how these corridors not only enhance community health but also weave nature into our daily commutes and activities. We discuss some real-world examples of great greenway design and how impactful they can be when designed first, with the rest of the development following.
Show Notes:
Link to article referenced in the episode: https://planning.org/planning/2011/aug/greenwaysfirst.htm
To view the show transcripts, click on the episode at https://bookedonplanning.buzzsprout.com/
Follow us on social media for more content related to each episode:
Before we jump in, we want to take a moment to thank our episode sponsor, Marvin Planning Consultants. Marvin Planning Consultants was established in 2009 and is committed to our clients and our professional organizations. Our team of planners have served on chapter division and national committees, including as Nebraska Chapter President. In addition, we are committed to supporting our chapter in various APA divisions. You're listening to the Booked On Planning podcast, a project of the Nebraska Chapter of the American Planning Association.
Stephanie Rouse:
In each episode, we dive into how cities function by talking with authors on housing, transportation and everything in between. Join us as we get Booked On Planning. Welcome back, bookworms, to another episode of Booked On Planning. In this episode, jennifer and I are discussing greenways as a follow-up to our previous episode covering the book Beyond Greenways by author Robert Stearns. The article we're discussing was written by an author we had on the show in season one, randall Arendt. At that time, we were discussing the book Rural by Design, which Arendt brings into this article on greenways, making the connection between rural and urban areas. He starts the article by saying greenways and the parklands they connect with the neighborhoods, schools and mixed-use centers provide the unifying element that allows urban and rural values to merge, producing a superior hybrid community form.
Jennifer Hiatt:
Rural by Design will always hold a special place in my heart because it was the first book that I read for the podcast, back when you had the revolving co-posts. Randall makes the point that elements of rurality which I struggled with that word in the first episode too must be a part of truly livable urban design. Every time I read any of his work I am reminded of the dichotomy of our founding fathers on their opinions of how the country should develop, like Jefferson's pastoral versus the city living. And of course we now know that Jefferson's pastoral preferences did not win out, as approximately 83% of the US population lives in urban areas today. But the incorporation of greenways and other major park systems shows that, no matter what, we will still need to bring some nature into our cities.
Stephanie Rouse:
We actually talked a little bit about Jefferson's pastoral preferences in our episode last year on Cities of Tomorrow, where we had a whole chapter that was devoted to that. Right, I'm not making that up.
Jennifer Hiatt:
No, we talked about it on City, on a Hill.
Stephanie Rouse:
City on a Hill Too many books.
Jennifer Hiatt:
It is starting to get to be a lot of books. Stephanie Just like now we have a lot of projects from all of the books that we have read. We now have too many books too. It is good.
Stephanie Rouse:
Some of the most notable greenways were designed by landscape legends, such as Olmsted, with the plan for Central Park. Boston's Emerald Necklace and one that I'm very familiar with is in Minneapolis, designed by Horace Cleveland. Thinking of these earlier greenway projects designed at the turn of the 20th century, they're quite different from the way we plan today. They don't seem to have the grandeur they once had. Instead, they become more about trail planning and reserving the most narrow widths of rightaway necessary to keep developers happy, while also making connections in the trail system.
Jennifer Hiatt:
We do dream of a day that we get a developer in our office. It's just like. I love parks. Let's plan our development around a park. It'd be great. Yes, as with most things today, it seems like we're developing even our green spaces, like you saw, with trails around transportation of some kind. I was in Boston last fall and spent some time in the back bay fence portion of the Emerald Necklace. It was actually a really unseasonably warm October day. We were sitting out in the park and enjoying it. There were also a lot of people who were clearly native to the area enjoying this space. It reminded me that we don't really plan for these types of larger public third spaces anymore. In our more consumer-driven world, we've designed our third spaces to be more like bars and restaurants and shops. I would love to see some more intentional greenway development as a third space in the coming years.
Stephanie Rouse:
Yes, I agree. I'm also jealous. I've been wanting to go to Boston for so many years and just have not made it there. I'll have to get there eventually and see what their Emerald Necklace actually looks like.
Jennifer Hiatt:
Podcast vacay trip, I think.
Stephanie Rouse:
Be nice.
Jennifer Hiatt:
Yeah.
Stephanie Rouse:
The benefits of recreational facilities have been well documented for a while now. This article that we're referencing here in this episode is from a 2011 Planning Magazine issue, and even then the statistics indicated lower medical insurance claims for individuals that regularly exercised, which includes a $0.24 savings for every mile a person walks. It's much easier to want to walk when there's a pleasant and safe environment to do so. Arendt describes some of the areas he uses for walks in his community that link schools, transit, natural areas and various communities together. Here in Lincoln, we have that in the form of urban trails converted from old railroad corridors back in the 1980s and 90s. These are some of our highest activity corridors because they're completely separated from traffic and nestled into the middle of neighborhoods.
Jennifer Hiatt:
I definitely use the trail that runs parallel to my neighborhood. Here Randall also discusses the social benefits of using greenways. Although the benefits are less well-officially documented, I can attest they're pretty real. Greenways are a great place to meet your neighbors and people who live in the surrounding neighborhoods, because people naturally tend to gravitate towards good open space. Other social benefits include increased safety in neighborhoods as well, because once you get to know your neighbors, you typically look out for them a little more and notice the people who are new in your area.
Stephanie Rouse:
Arendt mentioned that he advocates for far more density than most cities would allow, but only when they come with first rate community spaces that are often bike-friendly, multi-use greenways linking neighborhoods and key destinations. Here in Lincoln, we often don't see this go hand in hand with much of our density all at the core, which relies a lot on sidewalks and on-street bike infrastructure, while all our new trails are going into new areas with low-density housing developments. We have a few great urban trails from the rail conversions that I mentioned, but it's definitely not as green and connected as the new subdivisions, which have internal paths and connections through the middle of these subdivisions. I think that it's a trade-off that many planners may miss when offering up density bonuses, which are usually tied to affordable housing. It makes sense, though, that more residents in an area should be met with more green space for them to use and may make the investment pay off in the short term.
Jennifer Hiatt:
It absolutely does make sense. But I know it's a struggle to retrofit green space into developed cores. Most of my work is in that redevelopment space and it's a struggle. I think part of that struggle at least is in a lot of midsize Midwest cities. They were never actually designed for true density in the first place. Most of the buildings in the core areas were only ever three or four-story buildings, maybe five at the maximum, and they often don't have a large amount of right-of-way to offer up. Of course, that always leads us back to the priorities conversation. There would be plenty of right-of-way if we reduced lane widths or closed streets down altogether, like in Lincoln with the Centennial Mall. Actually, if I remember correctly, we even shut down O Street at one time to vehicular traffic for a while. Using surface parking lots or dilapidated or vacant lots into parks is always an option. It's always possible. I think cities just need to really rethink how we use our incentive-based programs to get what we're actually looking for instead of maybe just some nice streetscaping sometimes.
Stephanie Rouse:
Yes, I think that a lot of programs are going to get stuck in a rut and have the same incentive programs that have been around for decades and don't think about how things are changing or priorities have changed and the incentives that go with it need to change as well.
Stephanie Rouse:
So the planning concepts of new urbanism and conservation design are often referenced a few times, as they each emphasize greenways in their approach. The example given for an early master plan community, memphis's Harbor Town, begun in 1987, includes extensive greenways along the riverfront and through its center in a long, crescent park. The one new urbanism style community that's here in Lincoln started about 10 years ago and exemplifies this really well. It's designed around a system of linear pathways that flow through the town square and circle the development connecting the residential neighborhoods around it. Again, it's a new suburban edge development which has room to design around this, but the major issue with it is that it's really not connected to the rest of the city and has some major barriers of highways in an interstate system separating it from the rest of the community.
Jennifer Hiatt:
You know it's interesting to me because both of our neighborhoods that were designed with the new urban concept have some of the highest property values in the city and yet as our developers come in and consider redevelopment in the core or some of the other, like less planning minded developers work throughout the city they don't seem to take that into consideration. So you could be getting more money here.
Stephanie Rouse:
I don't feel like it's a very well publicized fact, though I think those of us that work in a day to day know this and there's this education gap with the developers of showing them how impactful these kind of communities are.
Jennifer Hiatt:
Note to self, send this episode to all of our developers. The article highlights all the well-known new deal and early master plan communities, from Radburn in 1936 up through Reston and Columbia in the 1960s, and from these communities Randall draws the conclusion that they all succeeded because they identified the green infrastructure first and then carefully interweave a modern grid like street network into it. Firms today usually do this as a reaction to topography, but less so when the environmental constraints are limited. It doesn't matter whether there are natural waterways or it's flat and dry. There should be consideration of greenway systems to be created to ensure that we don't just lay out boring, unconnected subdivisions, which is literally everybody is building these days. It's so frustrating. I think this happens mostly because developers hire engineers to lay out the plots and don't include designers like landscape architects or planners, and it's really frustrating.
Jennifer Hiatt:
I took a call one day that was like can you give me the name of a firm that could actually lay out something, a neighborhood like this? And so I told this person I was talking to some of our major engineering and planning firms and they were like well, they can't do that. And I was like well, they can do that. Every single one of those firms has a planner, has a design team that could lay out what you're looking for. It just costs a lot of money and they have to be told to do that. And the guy got really frustrated. He's like I've not seen that in Nebraska and he's like, well, it's because we don't prioritize it.
Stephanie Rouse:
There is one in Nebraska and they've been doing a pretty good job with it. It's slowly developing out in Omaha outskirts of Omaha. It's like Prairie Queen, I think, is what it's called I can never remember its exact name but they're actually putting a lot of time and energy into creating different types of housing and less on vehicles and more on mixing uses, and I think it'll be pretty interesting.
Jennifer Hiatt:
Good, I'm glad. Maybe we'll have an example to show people moving forward.
Stephanie Rouse:
Yes. So one of the recommendations was to front homes directly onto green space with outly loaded garages, and we recommended this when I was a development review planner for a project that was struggling to fit all of the units in without creating this whole concrete jungle. And there was this block of historic homes in Minneapolis that are arranged in a similar manner, although they didn't have the rear access garages. They just didn't have garages, and I always thought it was one of the coolest little enclaves turning into the central green space rather than fronting out onto a street, and there was also a bunch of really cool historic homes, so that made it one of my favorites as well. And one of the newer communities in Lincoln attempted this, but only in a small portion of the development, reverting back to the traditional approach of fronting on the street. For the rest of it it's reminiscent of the bungalow court, a popular layout between 1910 and 1930, with cottages grouped around a common green or garden courtyard and garages on the perimeter.
Jennifer Hiatt:
I was walking my dogs in my neighborhood the other day and there's a street that I just really love to walk down and it's in my neighborhood. It was built in the 1950s. I could not put my finger on why I enjoyed it so much, and a few days ago I was walking through and I realized that there are no garages. There are driveways off the parcel but no garage fronts the curb, so they're all in the backyard. Because of when the houses were built, garages weren't a priority and so fine, there's a driveway, All the houses are pulled forward. It's more interactive to the street. I was like well, that's why I like it so much.
Stephanie Rouse:
What's funny is, when I was living in Minneapolis, that was just the way all the houses were built, and so when a friend came to visit from Lincoln and stayed with us, he was like where's your garage? How do you get to your garage? I was like alleys. That's why our streets look so cute Bring back the alley guys, bring it back.
Jennifer Hiatt:
So finally, randall recommends the concept of neighborhood greens and greenway streets. Neighborhood greens are like those in Narbrick Park in Narbrick, pennsylvania, where the housing development creates kind of a little crescent off of an internal green. So there's a long fronting green space and then a crescent that kind of builds off of that, creating small green spaces that branch from the main loop but create more of that internal private space. The green street concept involves closing occasional cross streets, set to a grid to traffic, and substituting shade and grass for asphalt Because access to the home is being taken from a rear garage. Alleyways provide primary vehicular and fire safety access to the home. Again, bring back the alleys. The best example of this type of development is Belgravia Court in Louisville, kentucky, and he closes the article by reminding us that there is very little new under the sun. So if you need to show examples of different types of development to convince your planning commission or city council members that something could be a good fit for your community, there's a solid chance that it already exists and is working somewhere else.
Stephanie Rouse:
That's how we start. Nearly all of our text amendments is figuring out who's already done it, to show our commissioners that it's not the end of the world to try this new idea.
Jennifer Hiatt:
Sometimes you have to work really hard to convince them. Though we hope you enjoyed this conversation on Greenways, remember to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts and please rate, review and share the show and join us on our social media pages under the Booked on Planning podcast. Thank you for listening and we'll talk to you next time on Booked on Planning.