American landscape architects helped Qataris set up a framework for their first national park, but the follow-through seemed to disappear into the dunes.
By Craig Pittman
Inland Sea in the Persian Gulf, in Qatar’s Khor Al-Adaid region. Courtesy National Park Service.
We Americans sometimes take our national parks for granted. After all, we’ve got 59 of them, and they’ve been around since 1872, when President Ulysses S. Grant signed the law creating the first one the world had ever seen, Yellowstone National Park. Continue reading NPS Aids Qatar with First National Park→
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→
The first section of The Mall’s new lawn is looking good, and so far, shrugging off heavy use.
By Linda McIntyre
In December 2006, as the National Park Service was starting up the process of developing its National Mall Plan, Susan Spain, ASLA, and Alice McLarty, who are landscape architects with the park service, took me on a tour. As we walked along the rock-hard compacted soil underneath the iconic, yet worn and weedy, lawn panels of the Mall (the tree-lined central axis of the wider National Mall in Washington, D.C.), Spain and McLarty told me how the park service hoped to overhaul the site’s decrepit infrastructure, including, incredibly, the turf (see “Pall Over the Mall,” LAM, April 2007). Continue reading The Green Carpet→
As parks the size of postage stamps pop up all over San Francisco and spread to other cities, “tactical” urbanism is taking on a cannily strategic edge.
By John King, Honorary ASLA
SF Planning.
If you’re a tourist who’s visiting San Francisco, you’re unlikely to find yourself on the 4600 block of Noriega Street near the Pacific Ocean, and until recently there’s been little to miss. Continue reading Parklets, Everywhere→
As the Occupy movement mushroomed around the country last October, most aspiring activists didn’t agonize over which patch of grass or concrete to take over in solidarity with those who were camping out on Wall Street. Continue reading Your Tent has No First Amendment Rights→
The Port of Los Angeles wanted to move further inland. The neighbors said: We have a better idea.
By Jennifer Zell, ASLA
The Arup designed cable-stayed pedestrian bridge has become an iconic image for the park. Photo by Craig Kuhner.
On the southern edge of the city of Wilmington, California, just before the Port of Los Angeles begins, lies the newly constructed Wilmington Waterfront Park. It will be remembered for some time, maybe this lifetime, maybe longer, as a place of contention. Continue reading Reparations Becomes a Park→
The Magazine of the American Society of Landscape Architects
