How many things can a river do? The people of the Tennessee Valley have not finished asking.
For 10,000 years the Tennessee River has both sustained human civilizations and attended their demise. One of the biggest rivers in the United States, the Tennessee is also among the most biodiverse, with some 230 species of fish and 100 species of freshwater mussels. In the 18th century, Cherokee, Creek, and Chickasaw tribes flourished in East Tennessee. Later the river was used to expel Indigenous people from the land along the Trail of Tears after the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Its bridges were burned during the Civil War, its soils stripped of nutrients, its banks eroded. After the federal government created the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in the 1930s, the river was asked to do ever more: to stop flooding, first and foremost; to generate electricity for thousands of unlit rural miles; to navigate boats and barges along its U-shaped course; to produce nitrates for war munitions and fertilizer for its depleted soils; to host landscapes of leisure and recreation; to make one of the country’s poorest regions prosper.
Now the Tennessee River is asked to be a park from its source to its mouth. Continue Reading »
The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.
Photo by Timothy A. Schuler.
From “The Bridge Builder” by Timothy Schuler in the November 2021 issue, about fourth-generation Arkansas Delta native Martin Smith, whose vision of an outdoor recreation-led reinvigoration of the delta is becoming a career-defining capstone.
On a cool Friday morning back in the spring, I stood on a small pedestrian bridge overlooking a tiny stream that feeds into the French Broad River in Asheville, North Carolina. Native species including cardinal flower, joe-pye weed, trumpet creeper, rhododendron, witch hazel, serviceberry, and river birch cloaked the crystal-clear streamlet, which meandered down a series of stone-lined pools in the ravine below. Less than a decade ago, the water meandered around rusted car bodies, tires, and slabs of concrete that had been tossed there over the years, part of an old, unpermitted landfill that oozed with heavy metals and hydrocarbon pollution. At my side were Paul Mills, ASLA, and David Tuch, who designed the landscape that has brought the place back to life.
As if on cue, a groundhog appeared from a burrow under a boulder they specified. “Snake!” Mills exclaimed a few minutes later, pointing to a serpentine line squiggling through one of the pools. As he and Tuch debated the species, a second, smaller serpent squiggled by after what I presumed was its mother. “It’s a family!” I shouted.
On the flat ground above this BBC wildlife special are intoxicating gardens of native plants surrounding a boozy business: the East Coast headquarters of the New Belgium Brewing Company. Mills’s firm, Russell + Mills Studios, is based in Fort Collins, Colorado, the brewery-laden city where New Belgium was established in 1991. Looking to expand a couple of decades later, the company decided on the Appalachian city of Asheville, which has the second-highest number of breweries per capita in the United States and has been deemed the nation’s “best beer city” by seriouseats.com. (Fort Collins has merely the 11th most breweries per capita.) Russell + Mills, the rare landscape architecture firm with a reputation for designing brewery grounds—they’ve worked on a dozen to date—was hired as the lead designer for the brownfield site. Tuch’s Asheville-based firm, Equinox Environmental, collaborated on plant selection and the design of stormwater management features.
The ravine bisects the 18-acre property—a 400,000-barrel-per-year brewery lies on one side; New Belgium’s Liquid Center, a tasting room and event space, on the other—which opened to the public in 2016. It lies less than a mile from downtown Asheville in the city’s River Arts District, a place of artisans’ studios and riverside parks that have replaced the industrial landscape that once enveloped the French Broad, a long-polluted water body that borders the brewery on one side. New Belgium’s $175 million investment represents a major step toward a riverfront reclamation that has been decades in the making. Continue Reading »
As the western United States continues to wither in an extended drought, the Colorado River’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, have fallen to their lowest levels since they were first filled—Lake Mead in 1935 and Lake Powell in 1963—according to John Fleck, a professor of practice in water policy and governance in the Department of Economics and director of the Water Resources Program at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Against this parched backdrop, the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy has published a timely new map of the Colorado River watershed that illuminates the complicated issues facing basin managers now and in the future as water becomes an ever more scarce and precious commodity in the West.
Portland Mall Revitalization, ASLA 2011 Professional General Design Award of Excellence, designed by ZGF Architects LLP. Image courtesy ZGF Architects LLP.
The House of Representatives just passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which makes significant investments in the nation’s transportation, water, renewable energy, and broadband infrastructure. The legislation incorporates 13 of the transportation,water, and natural resource policy recommendations sent by ASLA’s Government Affairs team to the leaders of congressional transportation and infrastructure committees and the Biden–Harris administration.
The legislation includes a five-year reauthorization of transportation programs and dramatically increases funding for safe, active, and low-carbon transportation programs such as the Transportation Alternatives Program, the Safe Routes to School program, and the Complete Streets initiative.
The package creates new programs that will allow landscape architects to lead projects nationwide. These include the Healthy Streets initiative as well as programs to remove invasive plants, create habitat for pollinators on highway rights-of-way, and plan and design new wildlife crossings.
There are also some first steps to address the legacy of environmental and social inequities in cities created by highways that have divided communities for decades. The Reconnecting Communities program provides $1 billion to remove highways and reconnect communities through multimodal transportation options, boulevard-like green spaces, and new connections to economic opportunity. These are projects landscape architects are poised to lead.
The legislation increases funding for the Drinking Water and Clean Water State Revolving Fund programs, which landscape architects will be able to access to help communities address their water quality and quantity issues.
The legislation will also create five new Stormwater Centers of Excellence. These will enable landscape architecture educators to explore new types of nature-based green infrastructure methods to improve existing designs and strategies for financing and rate setting, public outreach, and professional training. Continue Reading »
The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.
Image courtesy Russell + Mills Studios.
From “Home Brewed” by Brian Barth in the November 2021 issue, about New Belgium Brewing Company’s riverside East Coast headquarters in Asheville, North Carolina.
On the northern shore of Lake Ontario, 25 miles outside Toronto, a quarter mile of once-eroding lakefront is a case study in resilient design for the Great Lakes. Although at first glance it may not look as green or vegetated—as alive—as other so-called living shorelines, the new shoreline was planned and built around the needs of multiple vulnerable wildlife species and offers vital refugia for still others.
The stretch of shoreline belongs to Appleby College, a private preparatory school in Oakville, Ontario. Its largely natural shoreline was eroding at an alarming rate, battered by increased wave action caused by historically high lake levels and severed from natural replenishment cycles by shoreline hardening projects nearby. “They’d done surveying every couple of years, and in some areas, five, six meters of shoreline were just gone,” says Brad Smith, ASLA, a senior landscape architect at Seferian Design Group in nearby Burlington, Ontario, which was hired to help address the problem after a more typical hardening plan was scrapped. “The conservation authority came back and said, ‘We want something greener, softer, more dynamic.’” Continue Reading »
