No longer just for coastal areas, WEDG 3.0 adds inland waterfronts to its certification.
By Clare Jacobson
Funded through the Rebuild Illinois capital plan, each breakwater features new below- and above-water habitats. Image courtesy Living Habitats.
In October 2023, the New York–based nonprofit Waterfront Alliance launched version 3.0 of its Waterfront Edge Design Guidelines (WEDG) and revised its WEDG Professionals Course, which the group describes as “tools for sites building resilience, ecology, and access at the water’s edge.” WEDG was updated in part to maintain best practices and to surpass regulatory codes, says Joseph Sutkowi, the chief waterfront design officer at the Waterfront Alliance. He notes changes to benchmarks for community engagement, long-term maintenance planning, and protection for flooding beyond a site’s property line.Continue reading Coming To A Shoreline Near You→
Four Vermont landscape architects talk about the state’s devastating floods and how its unique culture and topography could be both a limitation and a strength in a climate-plagued future.
Interview by Jennifer Reut
Emily Lewis, ASLA, working on-site; at DuBois & King, she focuses on community planning and design for small towns in New England. Photo courtesy DuBois & King.
Last July, Vermont experienced catastrophic flooding the likes of which had not been seen since Hurricane Irene hit the state in 2011. Over just 48 hours, Vermont received between three and nine inches of rain. In central Vermont, where the state’s capital, Montpelier, is located, the tally of rainfall at nearby North Calais was 9.2 inches.
A rural city bets on water access and landscape amenities as the keys to economic revitalization.
By Kim O’Connell
The project coincides with a decision to remove a defunct hydraulic dam. Photo courtesy City of Danville.
Throughout its history, Danville, Virginia, has been a pass-through city—a place where people and products were often headed someplace else. Located on the North Carolina border, this small industrial city is bifurcated by the Dan River but remains largely cut off from it.Continue reading Destination Danville →
There’s no swimming at Sugar Beach, but the crowds come anyway.
By Daniel Jost, ASLA
It’s 80 degrees Fahrenheit, or, as they say here in Toronto, a balmy 27 degrees. Stephanie McCarthy leans back in a white Adirondack chair and digs her feet into the sand. On Canada’s Sugar Beach she’s just a short walk from her downtown apartment, though as she sits in the shade of a pink umbrella, it seems a little unreal. “It feels like you’re somewhere tropical,” she says, “like a minivacation.” Continue reading Claude Cormier: How Sweet→
California repurposes farmland to save its water supply.
By Lisa Owens Viani
Orchards planted in the old Tulare Lake bed were flooded in atmospheric river storms. Photo by Ken James/California Department of Water Resources.
Last winter, 31 atmospheric rivers drenched California after an extended drought, filling the state’s reservoirs to the brim for the first time in years and enabling the state’s two main surface water supply systems—which bring fresh water from the mountains to thirsty cities and farms via a complex network of reservoirs, canals, and pipes—to provide all of their promised water allocations. Massive, long-disappeared wetlands such as Tulare Lake in the southern San Joaquin Valley reemerged, and other parts of the valley were still underwater in late spring. But despite the soaking, the state continues to plan for a hotter, drier future, including ways to recharge parched aquifers. “This year was an exception to the rule,” says Andrew Schwartz, the lead scientist and manager of the Central Sierra Snow Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. “We’re in an aridifying climate and things will just continue to get drier.”Continue reading Farm To Water Table→
Berger Partnership designs a green infrastructure facility that’s part of the neighborhood.
By Katharine Logan
The station models green infrastructure strategies to manage rainwater on a densely developed site. Courtesy Berger Partnership.
As climate change and urban growth stress the ability of combined storm and sewer systems to handle the volume of water besieging cities, infrastructure that would once have been relegated to industrial outskirts increasingly needs to fit within mixed-use neighborhoods. In south Seattle, the Georgetown Wet Weather Treatment Station is meant to model replicable solutions while becoming “an integrated part of the community: accepted, acknowledged, actually liked,” says Michael Popiwny, the architectural design and mitigation manager for the King County Department of Natural Resources and Parks, who served as the senior project manager during the design phase of the facility.Continue reading Resilience Theater→
The drought conditions affecting western states, along with increased water demands from a growing population and industrialized agriculture, have drained Utah’s Great Salt Lake to its lowest levels on record. A study conducted last year by a team of experts from Utah’s research universities, known as the Great Salt Lake Strike Team, concluded that if current conditions persist, and without interventions, the lake will disappear in five years.Continue reading A Lake at Its Limit→
The Magazine of the American Society of Landscape Architects
