Architecture & Urban Planning

“They’re kind of pushing their own limits and starting to think out of the box in terms of where we can put parks and what parks look like,” says Tori Kjer, Los Angeles program director for the Trust for Public Land, which has partnered on several parks. “If you look at South L.A. it’s so extremely dense and there’s really not any big parcels waiting to become parks, so we have to get creative about thinking about the properties we can go after.”

Nathan McClintock, a professor at the school of urban studies at Portland State University, sees a link between the rise of urban farming and a diminishing social safety net. “With the stripping away of the welfare state, there’s a growing dependence on food banks and volunteerism; people can rely less on government assistance,” he said. “People are also moving back to cities and they want a back-to-the-land experience.”

It is easy to overlook the pipes and boxes carrying water under our roads, but these parts of our transportation infrastructure can have huge impacts on freshwater health and road safety. 2003 Fellow Jessica Levine is working in the northeastern United States to replace and upgrade road crossings to benefit aquatic species and habitat along with other community goals.

When 2014 Fellow Karen Andradea arrived at UC Berkeley in 2009, she was surprised to discover how challenging it was for outside organizations to partner with students and faculty on research projects. So she set out to create the UC Berkeley Science Shop, a publicly accessible entity that connects small nonprofits, local government agencies, small businesses, and other civic organizations with undergraduate and graduate student researchers.

Earlier this month [December 2014], a team of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) gave their take on the revitalization of the Brickbottom neighborhood at a gathering of residents and community members at the Brickbottom Artists Building. The team of graduate students from MIT’s Department of Urban Planning worked with City Hall to come up with new ideas and more options for future development of the area. The students wanted to balance the needs of the people living in the area with possible future economic development.

For Erika Zavaleta and Bernie Tershy, biologists and conservation scientists at the University of California in Santa Cruz, building a bird-friendly house meant using nontoxic building materials like reclaimed wood and straw-bale insulation. (Birds, which have fast metabolisms, are highly sensitive to toxins.) The family and their friends spent a day packing 200 bales into the walls of the 2,650-square-foot house—to the birds’ delight.

Yesterday the Strategic Growth Council adopted guidelines for the Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities (AHSC) program and scheduled workshops for early February to provide technical assistance to potential applicants.

“It’s a way to achieve conservation in the context of development that is going to happen anyway,” says Sarah Reed, a conservation biologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society and affiliate faculty member at Colorado State University studying conservation developments. Conservation developments already account for a quarter of the private land set aside in the U.S. As their popularity grows, ecologists and conservation biologists like Reed are working to identify how to design, regulate and manage them to make them most helpful for biodiversity.