Landscape Architecture Magazine April 2022

SAM BLOCH (“License to Cool,” page 24) is a journalist based in New York City. You can follow him on Twitter @samkbloch. “In some districts, Phoenix asks developers to shade 75 percent of adjacent sidewalks, whether from trees, awnings, arcades, or building shadows.” BESS WILLIAMSON (“From Compound to Playground,” page 140) is a design historian, professor, and the author of Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design. You can follow her on Instagram @accessible.bess. “I realized my own biases toward thinking of mental health in terms of individual experiences instead of the spaces that everyone shares—especially in a school.” GOT A STORY? At LAM, we don’t know what we don’t know. If you have a story, project, obsession, or simply an area of interest you’d like to see covered, tell us! Send it to…

You can’t be faulted for missing the big reveal about the Library of Congress and the ASLA Professional Awards in late January. A big announcement had just dropped that ASLA had joined with Land8, the online network for landscape architects, and with LABash, the student-run annual conference that’s been going for more than 50 years. This was big news, and there was a flurry of activity on social media, but when the dust settled, I worried that the library news had gotten lost, or worse, that it wasn’t seen as relevant to the working landscape architect. If you don’t live in Washington, D.C., then you may not know that the Library of Congress is a physical building (three, actually) that anyone can visit and use. The library has a branch that…

MORE MAIL ON LICENSURE I recently got my February issue of LAM and came across the reader comments in Letters. When reading about professional development hours, I couldn’t help but think about how the state of California does not require any. Due to the lack of required hours, we do not have our own state conference where we can assemble to gain more knowledge. As a recently licensed landscape architect, I feel that a yearly conference would provide a great opportunity to revisit new laws and regulations that pertain to landscape architects as well as be a platform to increase membership. Just a thought, but more education in this fast-paced line of work would be appreciated. NICK STRAABE, ASLAORANGE, CALIFORNIA Why are the ASLA indicators—memberships, licensure, and school enrollment—down? Are people not interested…

Viewed by both designers and departments of transportation as an inexpensive way to improve the public realm, street murals that embellish or sometimes even replace traditional crosswalks have become staples in the placemaking playbook. Over the past two decades, artistic crossings have popped up in New York; Charleston, South Carolina; Chattanooga, Tennessee; Oakland, California; and Des Moines, Iowa; to name a few. City transportation officials have said these street murals, often funded through Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Asphalt Art Initiative, improve pedestrian safety by slowing traffic and benefit communities by promoting public art. But according to a group of eight United Kingdom-based disability rights organizations, crosswalks that diverge from standard street markings pose real dangers to people with disabilities. In an open letter sent to London’s mayor this past September, the organizations, which included…

It’s always been hot in Phoenix, but with temperatures rising above deadly levels and more warming to come, America’s desert metropolis has opened an office of heat response and mitigation—the first of its kind—to tackle the issue. The office has two responsibilities, says David Hondula, an Arizona State University associate professor and urban heat researcher who was named the office’s director in September. The first is to lower the number of heat deaths and illnesses. In 2020, Maricopa County withered under triple-digit temperatures from April through October, and set its fifth consecutive year of record-breaking heat deaths. Most fatalities occurred in Phoenix, the most populous city. On dangerously hot days, Hondula says, volunteers will hit the city’s scorching streets, trailheads, and sunbaked transit stops with water bottles and solar umbrellas, with…

The Essex-Hudson Greenway in northern New Jersey exists now in a state of latency. The former railway line runs through some of the densest suburban space in America. It crosses the Garden State Parkway, the Passaic and Hackensack Rivers, and the New Jersey Meadowlands, and it terminates in Jersey City, a short train ride from Lower Manhattan. Its potential as recreational infrastructure is so blatant that the Open Space Institute (OSI) had to tread a fine line of expectation building, even as it has worked to help acquire the property on behalf of the state. The trick, says Dene Lee, the land projects director at OSI, was to “create materials that would capture the imagination of people that were seeing this for the first time, but not be so detailed or…