2018 Healthy Places Competition

Food is absent in contemporary American urban planning and policy. There are many reasons to grow food once again in the city, including access to a skilled labor force, greater food security, economic development, and establishment of local markets for high-value nutritious product. What would the city look like if locally-consumed food were to be grown, processed, and distributed around the city? Keep in mind the role that urban food hubs for wholesale, indigenous growing systems, and edible public landscapes once played in feeding the city as well as new technologies and spatial formats like vertical farms. Greenhouses, for instance, ensure greater control over climate, disease, and pests. How might growing systems, food processing, and marketing be cross-programmed with other land uses in the city? In formulating toolkits, think about closed-loop systems between growing systems, urban ecosystems, and cities. Consider appropriate scaled technologies, large-scale nutrient management (building healthy soil), waste recycling, and growing mediums (e.g., wetlands, healthy soil, hydroponics, espaliers, etc.).

More than half of America’s waterbodies are unsafe for swimming, fishing, and as sources of drinking water due to anthropogenic activity. Typically, urban development eliminates essential watershed landscapes (floodplains, wetlands, riparian corridors, upland buffers, and drainage ways) and functioning. How might city form be reconciled with watershed functioning? How might all new urban infrastructure investments provide ecologically-based water management and deliver the ecological services that all healthy ecosystems like watersheds deliver (University of Arkansas Community Design Center b)? In formulating toolkits consider fluvial geomorphology—the architecture of streams—in terms of their sinuous geometry, erosion and deposition zones, riffle-pool-glide stream section, and riparian cross-section types (Rosgen). Address development problems (e.g., flooding, sedimentation, erosion, etc.) induced by “urban stream syndrome” and the terms by which watersheds and cities can be reconciled. Do not neglect the street network and connectivity in developing reconciliation urban landscapes.

According to a 2015 report by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, 41 percent of households living in the 10 highest-cost major metros could not afford the housing in which they were living. While housing cost increases continue to outpace inflation, a neglected opportunity in housing affordability lies with provision of “missing middle” multifamily housing (Parolek). Missing middle types, including townhouses, duplexes, four-squares, assorted multiplexes, bungalow courts, live-work, and courtyards have not been built since the 1940s once policy and financing privileged single-family home ownership. How might we, once again, build walkable neighborhoods of moderate densities with updated versions of these diverse housing types that were responsive to shifting household structure, and income levels? Toolkits should consider the small scale, incremental quality of missing middle housing fabric that allowed non-commercial builders to build quality housing at affordable cost points. Missing middle fabrics are flexible, offering opportunities to include neighborhood services like daycare, senior community centers, small business, community kitchens, and co-working spaces.

By 2030, close to 80 million Baby Boomers will have turned 65 at a rate of 10,000 per day. While more than 85 percent will age in places and housing fabrics that do not support their needs, a tsunami of systemic challenges will compel this cohort to embrace more cooperative structures of living (Blanchard; and University of Arkansas Community Design Center a). The dramatic increase in single-person households among seniors will exacerbate the challenges. Consider that a majority of assisted living residents are institutionalized due to a social deficit (e.g., inadequate housing, absence of caregiving or individual support network) rather than a medical problem. How might low-density residential environments be rethought to support new forms of social and creative activity among senior populations? In constructing the toolkit consider innovation of housing models in between the single-family house and institutional settings, like assisted care, that are unaffordable to most populations. How might fabrics overcome the divide between real estate products and service platform models (Assisted Living, Memory Care, or Skilled Nursing, etc.) to incorporate at-home care services within non-medicalized housing fabrics?

Writers and sociologists from Jane Jacobs to Robert Sampson view the neighborhood as the irreducible spatial format for determining livability, risk, and protection—what Sampson calls “neighborhood effects”. Life chances are shaped largely by one’s neighborhood. Subdivisions and gentrified downtowns reflect what Sharon Zukin calls “investment climates” shaped by growth of the FIRE industries (finance, insurance, and real estate). How might we build places that privilege human capital over investment climates? Human resource planning emphasizes affordable and quality housing, possibilities for social integration, economic competiveness, and health services involving child and elderly care (Ryan; Sampson; and Sharkey). In developing the toolkit, consider what constitutes a neighborhood and its minimum necessary components, scale, limits, and public space network. What kind of spatial or architectural frameworks are necessary to foster security and social connectivity—protections that constitute resilience?

Urban livability is determined by how we move around. What if transportation systems were to be conceived as an ecology encompassing intermodality rather than a pitting of one modality (cars, trains/streetcars, sidewalks, bicycles) against another? What if streets—our largest single classification of public space—once again were cross-programmed to deliver non-traffic social services related to gathering, strolling, recreating, celebrating, and dining to become the city’s best landscapes (Dover and Massengale)? In constructing toolkits, recall the relationship between transportation and land use neglected in most current planning, except for Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) based on trains. Perhaps modeling begins with Development-Oriented Transit rather than the conventional TOD. Also, consider the role of green streets, parking, and trail infrastructure that deliver ecological services where streets are ecological assets rather than liabilities (Metro; and University of Arkansas Community Design Center c).