Parks / Recreation / Play / Sports Facility Design

90-Minute Education Session

FRI-A07 - Urban Wild! Making the Case for Our Unclaimed Landscapes

1.50 PDH, LA CES/HSW, AICP, FL, NY/HSW

Lead Speaker(s)

• 

  John Gibbs, ASLA, LEED AP

  Landscape Architect, Principal
  WRT

Speaker(s)

• 

  Jill Desimini, ASLA

  Associate Professor
  Harvard University
• SM

  Susan Moffat

  Founder and Executive Director
  Love the Bulb

Abandoned. Vacant. Brownfield. We easily create labels for urban landscapes not otherwise claimed for people. Yet it’s often in these margins we find our greatest connection to nature, each other, and ourselves. Join a practitioner, academic, and community organizer to explore the contradictions and unmistakable value of the urban wild!

Learning Objectives:

• Understand the unique social, cultural, and ecological role abandoned lands and urban wilds play in our contemporary cities, and the alternative perspectives they offer on vegetation, time, maintenance, and use.
• Learn about grassroots responses and uses of urban wilds; challenge our assumptions about these spaces.
• Discuss tools and frameworks that designers can learn from urban wilds that can inform how we approach designing parks and open spaces, including new planning categories for park systems.
• Discuss future trends and the place of urban wilds within changing demographic, cultural, and ecological contexts.