CHILDERN'S LANDSCAPES

Landscapes for kids

School yards, childcare centers, neighborhood parks, and community gardens each present rich opportunities for kids to play and socialize in complex ways that are comfortable for their care givers. Developing a landscape for kids is exciting work. Our best safe, universally accessible and manageable kid-friendly places are designed with features appropriate to the supervision available and in an age-appropriate manner.

Safety and accessibility are expressed through several sets of standards at minimum, including the regulations of the California Community Care Licensing Division, Consumer Product Safety Commission, and Americans with Disabilities Act. Safety and accessibility are also fostered by thoughtful design. If we attend to the ways that kids actually play, we can provide for it safely. At recess on a well-designed elementary school playground you’ll find proper facilities for kids running and being active, and for kids sitting in groups with a shade from the sun; and the whole place is easily supervised by the staff.

In a semi-private context, like a community garden with parents supervising their own children, there are great opportunities for open-ended play experiences. To hide, to make a fort, or to make mud pies can be activities in the garden ‘designed’ to make them manageable for the caregivers. Families living in apartments find a neighborhood garden with these experiences very valuable for two-to-five year olds who enjoy sand and water play. The learning experiences afforded in gardens for children are intriguing for all ages and begin with encountering nature and its bugs. The more complex tasks of growing radishes and carrots or shelling peas appeal to older kids and can be family activities.

Physical culture is a satisfying part of life that too many of us don’t participate in until we are older and a doctor orders us to exercise. When we provide young kids with unstructured play experiences where they can develop upper body strength, psycho-motor skills and run we build a valuable pathway for them to develop their own appreciation of exercise. Gardening is one of Americans’ favorite kinds of exercise.

Many of the most valuable parks, playgrounds and community gardens are small neighborhood places that don’t have regular supervision. The best of these escape vandalism and are safe even in sketchy neighborhoods. Developing ownership on the part of the surrounding neighborhood is an art, not a science; and it is this ownership that protects these neighborhood parks. The sponsor of a proposed park or community garden improvement can foster this quality by recruiting neighbors to the proposed park to help the effort by learning what their objectives are and working toward them. The neighbors can work on its construction as well as its design, and they can work on its maintenance and protection for all the years they live there if they see the benefits of their work. A partnership with a non-profit group helps to facilitate this type of work more easily than traditional contracting or public works construction can.

Glen Dake Landscape Architect

WATERSHED-FRIENDLY LANDSCAPES

Today well-designed landscapes distribute our constricted supplies of water with great care, and shed only clean water into our storm drains, rivers and Ocean. Southern California’s 35 million residents enjoy a beautiful natural landscape setting and a vibrant economy supported by a monumental infrastructure of water sources, storage, and managed runoff. The Spanish pueblo that became Los Angeles was founded in 1781 to take advantage of the waters of the Los Angeles River both as source and as drainage. As Southern California grew it drew strongly on distant water sources and made use of its rivers for wastewaters. With the settlement in 2003 of litigation on the LA County Storm water Permit, Southern Californians have come to appreciate the benefits of applying strong standards for water purity to our rivers and Ocean.

Green Buildings Capture Urban Runoff Water

Parking lot design presents a key opportunity to capture and filter urban runoff water. In a parking lot we might find trash from a few careless souls, automotive fluids that drip from our cars, and other wastes. With a little care we can plant an attractive set of trees in the lot and grade the pavement so that water flowing off its surface passes into a well-mulched planting area. Southern California’s challenges today are to clean, and to capture for later use, the very dirty water that comes across pavements in small amounts each day in the dry summer months from irrigation overspray, cars being washed, or household sewage spills. And in the wet winter months to clean, and to capture for later use, the huge amounts of water that falls from the sky.

Mulch is the answer

It seems like a small thing, but well-mulched planting areas are valuable to the effort to improve Southern California watersheds. The soil below the paved areas where we park our cars is inorganic and is compacted to 95%: it is hard and stable. In contrast a well-mulched planting area has an open, complex soil structure permeable to air, water, and plants. Like a sponge it can expand and contract, just what is needed if you hope to capture a little water flowing off the parking lot, store it for a day or so, and let it infiltrate into the ground below us. San Diegans: it is true that your soils often are completely hard clay from eroded mesas and no water or air penetrates, ever. But you have less water to manage with only 9.9 inches of rainfall each year, compared to the 14.8 that fall in Los Angeles.

Trees Contribute to Water Supplies

The first Los Angeles Aqueduct was completed in 1913, and in 1940 extended to the Mono drainage basin. The Colorado River Aqueduct was completed by the Metropolitan Water District in 1941. The State Water Project was completed to Castaic Lake in 1973. These are public works of another era. Southern California’s next increments of water supply are already with us: our storm waters and wastewaters. Landscape irrigation presents in many places an excellent opportunity to replace a potable water supply with a reclaimed water supply and the distribution infrastructure to support this extends further each year. We also know that the root zone of a beautiful old Oak tree holds thousands of gallons of groundwater. The San Fernando Valley, like many other old valley bottoms, is an ideal location for each of us to divert a little storm water runoff into the soil and let it percolate into the groundwater. Retention and infiltration projects can be elaborate and provide a comprehensive treatment train, or simple and informal. Groundwater augmentation is an important method of extending water supplies, and it can help to reduce the $65 million that the City of Los Angeles spends each year to operate its four water treatment plants.

Glen Dake Landscape Architect

PARTICIPATORY-DESIGN PROCESSES

Participatory Design Workshops

A traditional public hearing is a drag for everyone involved, but there is a way to make the community decision making process a lot more fun and more productive. A participatory design process can create a project that is a long term success in both affluent neighborhoods where NIMBY-sim is a hurdle for any project, and in lower-income neighborhoods where a shortage of neighborhood leadership and vandalism are long-term maintenance difficulties. A participatory design process is a series of meetings at which groups of people collaborate on design work, and then share that design work with the whole group.

Many counterfeit participatory design processes are staged each year with disappointing results for everyone. An authentic process is one that includes three elements: robust outreach and attendance by a representative sample of the impacted community; the availability of authentic design choices that can be expressed by the hands of the participants to an audience of other participants; a clear statement of which prerogatives the sponsor is offering to the participants, and which prerogatives the sponsor reserves for themselves. It is important that the project sponsor and the project designers have realistic, shared expectations of and a commitment to implement the results of the participatory design process.

The fundamental task of a design workshop is to put the designers tools into the hands of the neighborhood experts and get them talking to each other. Most plans presented to the public are not well understood by the laypeople looking at them, and a person will rarely will choose to draw a plan of their own. Models are much easier for people to understand, and people are comfortable working with models. In a workshop the tools to give participants are model trees, model buildings, and model cars.

An authentic participatory design workshop is carefully managed and requires a lot of staff or volunteer support. For work to be undertaken by a small group it is necessary that the group be diverse, so facilitators must manage self-selected groups and diversify them. Second, each small group working needs a trained facilitator to promote participation by the shy, to quiet the bold, and to encourage the group to resolve the problem and hash out their own design solutions.
A rich design discussion between eight or so people with diverse values and points of view is the meat of the workshop and yields two results. The first is whatever progress they have made towards describing a design that meets their diverse interests. The second is their personal experience of hearing view points opposed to their own and the reasons for them, and feeling themselves heard in the same way. For public servants to participate as normal members of the groups is valuable. In a public hearing this experience is not available.

One workshop is not productive, at minimum two are necessary and often three or four are conducted to get results. In the first workshop participants learn about the project sponsor, designer, and their neighbors; and they identify issues and the group begins to give these issues shared priorities. After the conclusion of the first workshop, with these issues in hand, the designer takes some time to develop a bit more of a design idea that expresses them. It is the task of the second workshop to look at this design idea and refine it or change its direction. At the end it is necessary to have a product that all the workshop participants can take with them and know: “this is what we agreed upon.” Often the designer can produce a small booklet to provide this product.

Projects developed through this process benefit from having a number of people who understand where the project came from and who might feel that it is in some part theirs: a great value.

Glen Dake Landscape Architect