Expanding Urban Parks

Students and faculty at the California State Polytechnic University (Cal Poly) in Pomona, California, a city to the east of Los Angeles, have used GIS software in the landscape architecture department for nearly two decades. Basic GIS training forms a key component of the program, and students often use such software in developing research projects, particularly as part of the department’s graduate-level 606 Design Studio. Begun in the 1970s, the studio focuses on real projects from regional to local scales in a planning context, that students can explore, ultimately focusing on three to four actual sites they must then design for landscape. In 2011, Karen Hanna, a professor of landscape architecture, acted as advisor to a 606 studio project for a national program called Red Fields to Green Fields (R2G).

The R2G project (rftgf.org) began at the Georgia Institute of Technology as part of a program principally sponsored by the Speedwell Foundation, a nonprofit that supports expansion of urban parks. The intent of the project is to transform economically distressed urban properties (red fields) into community parks (green fields). New parks would be directed toward neighborhoods that were disadvantaged in terms of real estate foreclosures, property values, and average income, as well as underserved with public green space. Los Angeles was selected as one of 11 cities nationally to participate in R2G. Cal Poly assisted a consortium of city agencies and a variety of nonprofit advocacy groups to lay the planning groundwork.

Cal Poly – Pomona’s Red Fields to Green Fields, Typology Map of Los Angeles

Classifying the City Landscape architecture students in the 606 Design Studio at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona combined a variety of datasets, including land use, population density, median income, park land area, and others, to produce this map that helped them narrow their search for disadvantaged neighborhoods that could benefit from new urban parks. This approach represents the great potential for visualizing traditional urban planning analysis of demographics and real estate factors in a series of maps and diagrams that make the process much more accessible and transparent in its aspirations. As a model, this use of GIS demonstrates how an informed design team can combine a disparate group of data sets into a logical, design-oriented process. This is promising, since the explosion of publicly available data on cities and its inhabitants will dramatically alter how we develop cities in the future. Currently, few architects and planners have established clear models for working with this new data. Image courtesy of 606 design studio

Hanna, who wrote the 1999 book GIS for Landscape Architects says the scale of Los Angeles would have been daunting for such a broad project without GIS. “GIS was used to analyze the city’s physical and cultural data, to develop a process, and to ensure that students were looking at different types of neighborhoods,” Hanna says.

The student team began by dividing up the city based on neighborhoods. Using existing maps, they could start to parse the amount of parkland in each neighborhood and classify those that qualified as “park-poor.” They could then overlay maps of red fields developed from distressed property data sets provided by CoStar Group, a company that specializes in commercial real estate market analysis. In spring 2011, when the students were at work, CoStar reported thousands of distressed commercial properties in the Los Angeles region. Abby Jones, one of the Cal Poly students on the project, says the CoStar data somewhat underrepresents the situation, since during site investigation trips, her team found many abandoned or run-down properties in neighborhoods that were not classified as distressed. Such discrepancies illustrate why GIS data sets often require field verification.

In this first phase, the students considered pedestrian and transit infrastructure, land use, topography, natural resources, and demographics. They also identified existing parks using a variety of data, including a comprehensive Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks Community Needs Assessment report from 2009. Once they could identify all of the red fields in each neighborhood, they developed a capability analysis consisting of a series of GIS map sets. These considered the aspects of each red field that would make a good park, including slope, sun access, and commercial zoning. Finding many applicable red fields, the team narrowed its focus to a suitability analysis with additional aspects, including size, vacancy, and [or] proximity to bike lanes, and transit nodes. Each of these site characteristics would define the most suitable red fields for transforming into one of four types of green fields—urban agriculture, recreation, community, and ecology. The students used a variety of features within Esri’s ArcGIS platform, including ArcMap to create their GIS maps and ArcCatalog to create and view each data set layer they analyzed.

The students found each data set needed its own development approach, since their particular site metrics were not commonly available files that could easily be layered into their model. For example, to analyze the solar access for each site, the students needed to consider the heights of adjacent buildings for overshadowing. “We developed a formula for building height and parcel size that calculated the percentage of shading based on sun angles,” Jones says. “If less than half the site was shaded, we called it sunny.” The students did not have access to a three-dimensional model of their sites, so they had to develop their own based on a combination of field investigation and Google Maps with street view. Although three-dimensional models of cities are increasingly available, obtaining accurate models outside of the limited capability of Google Earth can often prove expensive, particularly for small-scale projects. Given advances in quick modeling software like Google SketchUp, creating a three-dimensional model is becoming easier.

In the end, the students designed four exemplar parks for the Lincoln Heights, Westlake, and Florence neighborhoods surrounding downtown Los Angeles. For example, in Lincoln Heights, the students created an urban agriculture park with community gardens, a bioswale, a juice stand served by an on-site orchard, and a shaded plaza for a farmer’s market. Efforts are currently underway to raise the money needed to acquire properties and develop the parks.

Connecting the Dots

Although GIS can support activities as diverse as planning urban parks, responding to disasters, and the design of renewable energy systems, the sheer numbers of data sets and kinds of software required can create obstacles that only savvy programmers can currently circumvent. Esri’s Wittner is optimistic that the OGC will eventually develop an industry cross-model that could collapse all data into a single file type. The company has been paying close attention to the OGC’s evolving Geography Markup Language (GML), a programming language that many in the industry expect to become this common platform. “In the next 10 years, most of the European Union nations will adopt GML as a standard,” Wittner says. “And it’s getting better every year.”

Russell Fortmeyer is an engineer, sustainability consultant, and journalist based in Los Angeles.