For the second year in a row, The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) has made Design for Active Living the theme for its National Landscape Architecture Month. From Manhattan’s Central Park to Disney’s Celebration Village, landscape architects play a crucial role in promoting active living, says Patrick Miller, president of ASLA.   
 
Active Living Network (AL): Why is active living relevant to landscape architects?
Patrick Miller (PM): Human welfare in our design has always been important to us. I think the obesity epidemic has brought it to the forefront, but I think even when you go back to the traditions of Frederick Law Olmstead in the 1800s, the design of Central Park had a lot to do with providing opportunities for workers to get into a healthy environment, get fresh air and exercise.
 
AL: So this idea of designing and building places with health outcomes in mind isn’t new?
PM: Something people don’t realize about the projects we’re involved in—in terms of leveraging planning for greenways, housing developments, parks, trail systems—there’s a broad range. Often times in the past I think people have seen the value of those in terms of recreation and aesthetics, but perhaps haven’t realized how important they are to human health. So this whole movement has brought attention to that—the obesity epidemic and how we can, through everyday activity, help fight that epidemic.

AL: How and when did active living become a priority to ASLA?
PM: Particularly with respect to the obesity epidemic, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation [RWJF] had a representative come to our board of trustees meeting—I think it was the spring of 2004—and gave an excellent presentation that really drove home the point of how important this was. And last year our landscape architecture month had the [theme] “Design for Active Living” and it’s going to have the same theme this year.

AL: What does design for active living mean to you?
PM: We try to do a couple of things with it. We’re organized so that we have chapters in almost all of the states, and then we have materials posted on the national Web site that the chapters can use in working with children from grammar schools evaluating the walkability of their community. What we’re encouraging them to do this year is work with school groups. We want to bring this to the attention of not only the children and their parents and school officials, but also have it worked in with our public relations so that…people are aware of the importance of the obesity problem and of the design for helping to combat that problem.

AL: Is it an intrinsic part of what you do as a landscape architect, or is it a new thing?
PM: I think as I said, Frederick Law Olmstead—he’s considered the father of landscape architecture—was practicing after the civil war and for most of the 1800s in Central Park. He clearly he had a strong social motivation for Central Park, that it was to provide this respite from some of the cities [which,] at that time, were pretty crowded and polluted. In addition to that, one of his most famous designs is the Emerald Necklace, the park system around Boston, a whole series of connected parks.

It’s always been part of our tradition to be concerned about human welfare. When you see the statistics on the obesity epidemic and what it’s costing our country every year, it really drives home that it’s not just something that’s nice to do on a Saturday afternoon, but this is important for the health of our citizens.

AL: What are the biggest challenges to designing and building activity friendly communities?
PM: I think part of it is getting the word out. As I understand The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the biggest cause that they undertook was smoking. But not just from a standpoint to get people to quit smoking, but to get laws passed that would require people not to smoke in restaurants and public places and things like that. So I see a similar parallel in design for active living. When I see a housing development or subdivision approved by city or county governments, those governments need to ask, “are there walkways in this community, and do these walkways connect to anyplace? Can children get to school using these walkways? Do these walkways connect to shopping areas so that the facilities provide opportunities for everyday activity?”

AL: And how can landscape architecture play a role?
PM: I think it’s at a couple levels. We certainly, as a professional society, encourage our members to become involved with boards, committees and planning commissions in their communities, and to be advocates of design for active living that way—bring it to the attention of various local governments so they’ll see it as important.

Secondly I think [by] being advocates of it in our work. Oftentimes, we might be hired by a developer because the developer wants to develop housing or an industrial park—so they might not be thinking active living, but we need to be bringing that up and talking about, “well gee, this may be an industrial park, but there’s an opportunity for a trail to run across the site and connect up areas.” We need to be advocates looking beyond just the immediate needs of the project.

AL: In bringing up that conversation with developers and clients, have they been receptive?
PM: Two parts to that: I think in general today, most clients want to be perceived as friendly to the community and progressive—certainly that helps them in getting their projects approved. But of course, there are concerns, particularly if you’re talking about trail systems and greenways. Probably one of the biggest impediments is still convincing people that things are not going to be a hazard or a liability, or that people aren’t going to be discarding litter onto their properties, and that’s still an education program that has to be done.

I think we need to show them examples of trail systems, to show they’re not a nuisance. I haven’t seen any empirical proof of this, but I think [trails] probably add to the value of properties that are located in proximity.
 
I live near a trail, and other people have to drive long distances to come walk or cycle on the trail, and, I don’t. I’m sure that it adds something to the value of the house.

AL: What are some of the best examples of active living communities?
PM: The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has a [slide show] series that they show on “delightful density.” I like that term, “delightful.” We know that if we build our developments more densely people are closer to schools, closer to shopping, and that encourages them—makes it possible for them—to walk. The term “delightful density,” where you have street trees, and paving, and you make it a really enjoyable environment to be in, is what really causes people to want to walk, and ride their bikes.

[The slide show] starts with just a regular street and overlays images of how you improve it. And when you look at that final image, that’s what landscape architects do. A lot of times in the past I think that’s been thought of as frosting on the cake. Oh well yeah, it’d be nice if we had some street trees, some paving, and maybe a place for people to eat outdoors—it’s always been kind of frosting on the cake. Now we’re going back and saying no, this isn’t just something that would be nice, this is important for the health of the people who live in this community.

I think that some of the New Urbanist communities, they’re not done in the name of active living, but I think that now we’re seeing [examples] like “Celebration” in Florida, Disney’s community. They put walkways in—which some of the new communities don’t—and they put porches on houses and they put them closer to the street. The idea is that they create this kind of environment where people enjoy walking down the street and waving at a neighbor and saying good afternoon—creating that environment for people to get out and walk instead of getting into their cars and driving someplace. Seaside is another community that was done in that vein.

One of the other things that’s kind of interesting, I use this in some of the presentations that I do, is I talk about convergence. It’s the idea that a number of the things that we do that are good for people’s health, or good for the environment, overlap. The example I always use is the city of Seattle. The city of Seattle has this program where they’re coming back and retrofitting old communities—post-WWII, single family development communities—for water quality, so they take up a little bit of the street. Originally there were no curbs, no sidewalks, so they take up a little bit of the street on each side of the road—they put in swales, places to detain run-off, they put in shrubs and plants that are water-loving, they put in filter beds—and do all this in the name of slowing down the run-off and getting cleaner water into the streams which have salmon.

But if you look at what they’ve done, they’ve created walkways on both sides of the road, and the walkways are separated from the streets with some landscaping, and they’ve really created, going back to that Robert Wood Johnson Foundation term, that delightful density, or that delightful place for people to walk. And at the same time when you look, because they narrowed the street and they curve it, they slow down the traffic, which is another big thing for people when they talk about traffic calming.

So all of these things kind of fit together—it’s really interesting when you see something that’s done in the name of water quality, but it’s also really a delightful place for people to walk, it also calms the traffic—it converges together.

AL: How do you suggest that colleges better prepare future landscape architects to address design for active living?
PM: I think there’s probably a couple of things—I think that we really need to standardize the ways that we go about evaluating how well the community is doing in terms of active living conditions. Right now I think that we try to do that, but I don’t think we have it very well standardized or a thought-out method. So I think that’s one of the kind of things that would be helpful. We do things like map soil and land use, but I think we need to have a more systematic way of doing that so we can incorporate it into our plans.

And then, I would argue that we need to promote active living in every design project that we do in design studios. That’s how we teach landscape architecture. We have design studios and we give the students real projects to work on, and while the driver may be this is a housing development, or this is a park for the city, we need to make sure we are addressing active living in whatever the project is doing.

And then the third is design competitions. That’s something we often use in the design profession to give recognition to students that are doing good work. In fact there’s a proposal by a professor at Washington State University in Spokane, they have the Interdisciplinary Design Institute, and one of the professors there—his name is Bob Scarfo—has a proposal to do a design competition next year – I guess they’ll start planning it next fall then it will be due sometime later that year – that will deal with design for active living. First of all, that will help generate new ideas on how people are dealing with this as a design topic, and then it gives recognition for those students who are working on projects. If they’re doing a good project then they win a competition.

This is something that the American Society of Landscape Architects sees as a really important to what we do, and we really want to be behind it. And as president and spokesperson for this society, it’s great to have such a great cause to be able to speak to.

Patrick A. Miller, Ph.D., FASLA, is president of the American Society of Landscape Architects and a professor at the College of Architecture and Urban Studies at Virginia Tech.

Learn more about Design for Active Living during National Landscape Architecture month at: http://www.asla.org/lamonth/index.html