Jason Miller and Justin Alexander win BSLA Merit Award in analysis and planning

A New City Rising: New Orleans , Louisiana

Accelerated sea-level rise is regarded as one of the most costly and biggest consequences of global warming. The Disaster of New Orleans created opportunity to analyze the potential problems and come up with sustainable and innovative design solutions for the future. Our solution for New Orleans is a series of islands that are edged with greenway and blue ways. The water channels are no longer engineered systems. They are going to be systems that are dealt with through a sustainable and natural way. In the greenway system there is a series of parks with the appropriate circulation systems.

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Two for Two: UMass Landscape Architecture Graduate Students win Two Major Competitions

Ziying Tang and Dong Zhang, graduate students from the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning have won first prize in two design competitions this fall. They won the IFLA-UNESCO first prize in the 2004 international student design competition organized by the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Institution (UNESCO). They also won first prize in the National Low Impact Development Design Competition, organized by the University of Maryland .

Their IFLA-UNESCO entry responded to the competition’s theme "Harmony and Integration in Landscape and Architecture". The design included a series of water gardens for the Olympic Forest Park of the 2008 Summer Olympics to be hosted by Beijing , China . They integrated traditional Chinese garden design elements (gargoyle garden and wall screens from the Forbidden Palace in Beijing) with innovative techniques for improving water quality through biofiltration, infiltration and aeration. Their idea was to integrate an ecological water system to improve urban water quality within a traditional contemplative Chinese garden. The Forest Park site is located in the northern side of Beijing on the historical axis that starts in the Forbidden city . They chose the 2008 Olympic Forest Park in Beijing as a case study because of serious groundwater issues facing the city. In the last 50 years, annual rainfall in Beijing has decreased by 50%, emphasizing the need to cleanse and infiltrate groundwater as a matter of urban planning and design policy. The design demonstrated how the ancient city of Beijing with 800 years of history, can preserve its historical traditions while addressing contemporary ecological challenges through innovative landscape design.The award was presented to Ziying and Dong at the Annual meeting of the American Society of landscape Architects in Salt Lake City in October. The jury commented that the design presented "a very good traditional landscape approach and techniques well incorporated into a modern urban park".

In the National Low Impact Development Design Competition, Tang and Zhang also won first prize in the group category. This competition required students to re-design a section of their campus, integrating low impact development strategies and practices to reduce the impact of the built environment on surface and groundwater resources. They selected the east side of the UMass Amherst campus around the Fine Arts Center , the Isenberg School and Whitmore Hall as their site. The design employed new rain gardens and infiltration areas to maximize infiltration of ground water and reduce sedimentation and erosion resulting from major rainfalls. The improvements to the water quality in this area would bring significant improvements to the Campus Pond. The design provides numerous opportunities for informal gathering, and for interpretation of the innovative ecological treatment integral to the solution.

The Department of LARP has mounted a display of the students projects in the lobby of Hills North (open daily, 8-5 PM )

Beijing Olympic Forest Park

UMass Low Impact Development Demonstration

UMass Planner Wins National Student Award

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UMass regional planning alumna, Ann Chapman (MRP ’04) received a 2005 American Institute of Certified Planners Student Project Award for best example of Applied Research for her masters project “A Conservation and Landscape Planning Heritage Trail in Massachusetts.”

Ann Chapman’s Heritage Trail was inspired by visionary regional planner Benton MacKaye, a long-time Shirley, Massachusetts resident, best known as father of the Appalachian Trail (AT). MacKaye’s 1921 proposal for a continuous, multi-state footpath from Maine to Georgia built and maintained by volunteers captured the imagination of the public, and within a few decades made the trail a reality. As envisioned by MacKaye, the AT wasn’t merely a hiking trail, it had an important regional planning role - to provide the “backbone” of a protected wilderness system along mountains and ridges building a “levee” to control the “flood” of urbanization, currently known as sprawl.

MacKaye’s AT proposal included “feeder” trails from major cities. Chapman’s proposal creates a “feeder” heritage trail, linking Boston with the Appalachian Trail at Mt. Greylock. The trail uses historic sites and landscapes along the route to illustrate stages in an American conservation ethic that evolved over centuries. Contributions of Massachusetts visionaries like Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles Eliot, and Benton MacKaye are also highlighted in historic sites along the route.

Chapman worked with professors Robert Ryan and Ethan Carr, using established and emerging preservation planning tools to identify the most significant historic sites and landscapes to include in the trail route. National Register Travel Itinerary program guidelines were used to format the project, and to identify historic sites listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The project has major implications for public education; open space planning and management; greenway planning; and heritage tourism. Chapman believes that her project, much like Benton MacKaye's proposal for an Appalachian Trail, could spread to other states, and eventually lead to a connected network-- not only of trails, but of conservation history stories along the way. As a recent graduate, Ann is already on track as a leader of the next creative chapter in Massachusetts landscape architecture and planning--and in grassroots advocacy.