Architecture & Urban Planning

Fellow Story

Geller leads bike tour of Portland's central city

Last night was the annual Portland Bicycle Advisory Committee (BAC) facilities tour. The BAC is a volunteer group of citizens who advise PBOT on how transportation policies and projects impact bicycling. Each year, they leave their usual City Hall meeting room to get an up-close look at bike infrastructure. Last year we explored east Portland, and this year the focus was on downtown and the inner eastside — a part of town the city commonly refers to as the central city.
September 25, 2012
Fellow Story

Making Affordable Housing Green

Housing developers are always looking to improve their bottom line. Homeowner's Rehab, , a small nonprofit that owns over 1,000 units of affordable housing in Cambridge, Massachusetts, goes about this in a unique and sustainable way. They "green" their portfolio by installing energy efficient devices in their properties, which helps them meet both financial and social goals.
September 13, 2012
Foundation News

Building a Network for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement in Conservation (Switzer Foundation Webinar Series)

Leadership grantee Sarah Reed (Associate Conservation Scientist, Wildlife Conservation Society) and her colleague Lindsay Ex (Environmental Planner, City of Fort Collins) discussed their effort to build a collaborative learning network for...
September 10, 2012
Fellow Story

Lerman on how native plants in urban yards offer birds "mini-refuges"

Yards with plants that mimic native vegetation offer birds "mini-refuges" and help to offset losses of biodiversity in cities, according to results of a study published today in the journal PLOS ONE. "Native" yards support birds better than those with traditional grass lawns and non-native plantings.
August 27, 2012
Fellow Story

Zavaleta's environmentally friendly new home wins award

It all started more than five years ago, when Tershy and his wife, Erika Zavaleta, were living in a different house on the Bethany Curve Greenbelt on the Westside. They knew they wanted to remodel their home, but they kept running into the same roadblock. “What we really wanted to do was turn our house, which was facing the street, around 180 degrees so it faced the park, but it seemed impossible,” explains Tershy. Luckily fate stepped in, and another lot on the park went up for sale.
August 22, 2012
Fellow Story

Hall featured in Grist story on Los Angeles River

Few weeks ago, Jessica Hall, a Los Angeles landscape architect who also co-authors the excellent L.A. Creek Freak blog, showed me around some of the little-known wetlands of the old Dominguez Slough, hidden in the South Bay cities of Torrance, Gardena, and Carson.
August 6, 2012
Fellow Story

Reed's work on effectiveness of conservation development featured

Editor's Note: The Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation helped fund Sarah's early work on Conservation Development with the Wildlife Conservation Society through a Leadership Grant.
July 31, 2012
Fellow Story

Geller on Boston's push to become a major bicycling city

Bike paths, bike lanes, bike racks, and cycle tracks. Bike this and bike that. Cities and towns across Greater Boston are peddling cycling construction projects this summer like never before: If it isn’t a Newton city committee proposing 30 new miles of bike lanes, it’s Malden and Everett converting downtown railroad beds into a multiuse path, or Charlestown and Jamaica Plain residents lobbying for bike improvements once antiquated highway overpasses are torn down. Read the full story
July 30, 2012
Fellow Story

Lerman awarded SEES Fellowship to study sustainable yards

This research will explore the motivations for and outcomes associated with the stewardship of sustainable yard practices and design, with "sustainable yards" being those that more closely mimic natural processes and vegetation composition and configuration. The research will be guided by a conceptual framework that focuses on the poorly understood linkages between the motivation for urban stewardship of sustainable yards, and the ecological outcomes from yard management.
July 25, 2012
Fellow Story

Baum highlights links between health and the environment

Five years ago, Women in Green: Voices of Sustainable Design was published after Lance Hosey and I spent 18 months interviewing hundreds of people and trying to understand why it seemed like there was a preponderance of women doing “green” in many fields. Individual stories poured out and we assembled a suggestive but hardly conclusive collective story. We had the privilege of dipping in and were the beneficiaries of the generosity of an amazing community of creative people—but it’s clear that there is much more to discuss on the topic.
July 12, 2012