Around San Francisco Bay, land is scarce and costly. And people have opinions.
By Peter Harnik and Ryan Donahue
Doyle Hollis Park. Courtesy Trust for Public Land.
Emeryville, California, squeezed between Oakland, Berkeley, and the San Francisco Bay Bridge, has 10,000 residents and 20,000 daytime workers on only 1.2 square miles of land. For most of the 20th century it was an industrial center, known for meatpacking plants and a Sherwin-Williams paint factory. It has since evolved into a shopping destination and a hub for biotech and software. Continue reading The Bay Area Park Squeeze→
This year’s bill cuts funding to major conservation programs for the first time since 1985.
By Arthur Allen
“Get your Farm in the Fight”, 1941 – 1945.” Courtesy U.S. National Archives.
Environmental issues don’t always focus the minds of the people who write the nation’s farm bills. A 2012 report showing that corn and soy plantings had chewed up 1.3 million acres of grassland in the upper Midwest raised hardly an eyebrow in Congress. Perhaps unsurprising, it took people with guns to draw the legislators’ attention to conservation.Continue reading The Not-so-Great New Farm Bill→
Most projects don’t have a soil scientist as a consultant, which leaves landscape architects to make important field decisions during construction. Continue reading Soils: The Measure of Moisture→
Two stories below ground, an exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art looks deeply (literally) at issues of landscape in Africa. With approaches ranging from land art to film to textiles, the artists in Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa are tackling intensely local topics, like mining and deforestation, that have profound but often invisible global significance.
James van Sweden, FASLA, the landscape architect and author who transformed the texture of American public spaces and gardens over four decades, died September 20 at his home in Washington, D.C., after a long illness. He was 78. Continue reading James Van Sweden, 1935-2013→
The Magazine of the American Society of Landscape Architects
