BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

Louisville’s Liberty Field is an urban destination for everyone—especially refugees.

FROM THE FEBRUARY 2018 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

Louisville, Kentucky, has long been linked with sports. Some know it as the home of the Kentucky Derby, others as the birthplace of the Louisville Slugger. But in recent years it’s become a city of soccer. In part, Louisville’s embrace of soccer follows national trends—soccer’s popularity has grown steadily since the 1990s—but it is also the result of decades of refugee resettlement. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2016, Kentucky had twice as many refugees (individuals who have experienced or have reason to fear persecution based on their race, religion, or nationality) resettled per capita as the national average.

This demographic shift inspired the creation of Liberty Field, a pop-up soccer pitch converted from an unused parking lot in the city’s Phoenix Hill neighborhood. The project, led by City Collaborative, a nonprofit urban research and design laboratory, is an attempt to better serve a population that is often overlooked. Patrick Piuma, a cofounder of City Collaborative, says he’s been troubled by the xenophobia that has become increasingly visible in many American communities. “The fastest-growing segment of our population is refugees and immigrants,” he says. “How do we humanize each other? Soccer seemed like the kind of thing that would attract people from all over.”

Indeed, in cities across the United States, soccer has emerged as a way to engage immigrant and refugee populations. Clarkston, Georgia, has a boys’ soccer program called the Fugees. San Diego has a club called YALLA (Arabic for “Let’s go”). Baltimore and Boston have Soccer Without Borders. In Louisville, Liberty Field is designed specifically for what’s known as “five-a-side,” a style of soccer that is popular in Europe and South America. The pitch measures 90 feet by 60 feet, with a synthetic turf field and shipping containers sliced open to form goals.

Adjacent to Liberty Field are gathering spaces, such as a bourbon bar. Photo by Louis Johnson, ASLA.

The project, completed in 2016 and expanded in 2017, is part of an effort called ReSurfaced, which temporarily transforms surface parking lots—which account for 25 percent of land use in downtown Louisville—into urban destinations. Liberty Field is the most ambitious undertaking yet. But though the field was used almost immediately, it took time for the rest of the space to fully come together. Among the challenges was the size of the lot. “Three-quarters of an acre is pretty big,” Piuma says. “You could go to a bar down the street, and if there were 50 people there, it felt like it was going on, but if there were 50 people here, it felt like it was dead.”

To help the space feel more welcoming, Piuma enlisted Patrick Henry, ASLA, and Louis Johnson, ASLA, two local landscape architects, who recommended tearing out more asphalt and adding additional trees and furniture. Custom bar tops encircle new lindens and Ulmus americana and double as supports. (Early on, a storm flattened the new trees, necessitating better support structures.) By summer 2017, the space included new artwork, an expanded beer garden, and a bourbon bar, sponsored by Brown-Forman, a local liquor company.

Image by Pat Smith/City Collaborative.

Liberty Field seems to have given Louisville’s various populations more reasons to interact. In an article he cowrote for Medium, Piuma quoted a lifelong Kentuckian who regularly uses the field: “You’re definitely not going to get a game like this anywhere else in Louisville,” he said. “You’ve got people from all over, people from Kentucky playing against people from Somalia or Southeast Asia.” A player from Kenya put it more succinctly: “This is the only space in Louisville, in this whole city right now, that gives everybody a chance [to] play.”

Timothy A. Schuler, editor of NOW, can be reached at timothyaschuler@gmail.com and on Twitter @Timothy_Schuler.