AGA Public Realm Strategists

Ever wonder who the modern day Frederick Law Olmsteds are? Who has the vision to create public spaces on the scale of Central Park? The next time you pass a beautifully manicured green, tree-lined boulevard, or activity filled park, give a nod of thanks to Alexander Garvin and Jess Zimbabwe. For although they may not have been directly responsible for that particular place, chances are it reflects their inspiration and passion. Their design of the public realm—the parks, great lawns, and city streets that bring life to our communities—differentiates them from others, and make them special places in our lives.

Alexander Garvin is president and CEO of Alex Garvin & Associates, a planning and design firm that specializes in designing parks and public spaces on a grand scale. His resume includes substantial stints as managing director of planning to bring the 2012 Olympic Games to New York City, vice president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the agency that tackled the revitalization of the World Trade Center following 9/11, and an adjunct professor of urban planning and management at Yale University.

On Garvin’s plate now is Hinton Park—a master plan to transform farmland into park land in Collierville, Tennessee.The town of Collierville acquired 110 acres of land to improve the quality of life of its citizens by preserving a beautiful landscape as a public park—one that enhances the site’s natural beauty and fashions a place for the community to gather, interact, and have fun. The Hinton Park Master Plan proposes immediate actions that will create an enduring framework for the park’s future, while the landscape matures and the surrounding area is occupied by new residents. They include: providing access and connections to residential areas via existing and proposed greenways and roads, establishing destinations that offer recreational opportunities not now available in Collierville,and minimizing future maintenance and operating costs.The master plan also delineates a sequence of expenditures that will allow the town to stage the park’s development in response to community demands and available resources. Also in the works is Shelby Farms—a 4,500-acre site just outside of Memphis, Tennessee. The historic farm is already the county’s largest park, but it lacks the activities and programming of a great recreational destination. Shelby County and a group of private foundations seek to transform the park into a vibrant multi-use community resource. Alex Garvin & Associates was retained to manage the design process and create the vision and program for the new park.

Working with key stakeholders, the firm will develop an RFP to solicit the world’s best landscape architects. When complete,the revitalized Shelby Farms Park will be integrated with adjacent neighborhoods, connect to a county-wide open space system, and create regional destinations for visitors and residents of the Memphis area. But it takes more than architects and landscape designersto create the master plans for projects of this scale.

Jess Zimbabwe is the executive director of the Rose Center for Public Leadership in Land Use at the Urban Land Institute, whose mission is to encourage and support excellence in land-use decision-making. Zimbabwe works to provide public officials
with access to information, best practices, and other resources in guiding them to make “creative, efficient, practical, and sustainable land-use policies” in their own hometowns. Zimbabwe and Garvin have collaborated on projects to ensure
better public participation. Together, Garvin and Zimbabwe form the perfect storm of design in the public realm. Parks, boulevards, open space—the spaces that we, the people, own. The spaces where we congregate, play a pick-up game of basketball, or listen to an outdoor concert. The spaces where we truly live. Or, as Garvin refers to them, our “outdoor living rooms.”

Parks & Recreation spoke with Garvin and Zimbabwe recently to ask them about the role that the public realm plays in our daily lives, how greening initiatives can improve our towns and cities, and what they see as the future of planning and design.

Your work focuses on the public realm. Describe this.

Garvin: We are suffering from a property-rights backlash in this country. I think we need to refocus on what we actually own and have control over. I have tried in my own work to focus on this: public property by public agencies. That’s a very old-fashioned way of dealing with things.In particular, I have been interested in public parks. I have decided in my professional life that we spend too much effort on regulations and incentives and what the private sector does. We should focus on what the public sector does best. Look at the potholes in any northern or midwestern city because we don’t repair the streets frequently enough, or the lack of shade trees. We’re just not spending money on [these issues]. Infrastructure is crumbling across the country.

Why is the public realm—parks, boulevards, open space—so important in a city or community?

Garvin: This is where we go shopping, where we go to meet people, to play, just to hang out. It’s our living room, and I think
we should take care of our living room. The public realm of any city is what people remember. They don’t remember the buildings unless it’s a unique architecture.These are the things that people care about, and it’s what they remember.

Zimbabwe: The public realm is the only space that is shared by everyone. In that way, it reaffirms one’s citizenship—not in a legal or documented status, but as a participant in the civic life of a community. My fantasy side-research project is to map the United States by calling a dozen wedding photographers in every city and asking them to list the places where couples request to capture their new union on film: the parks, plazas, doorways, boulevards, [and] lobbies where people want to document forever a public proclamation of their love. These are the most intensified[sites], perhaps, of this “public-ness,” but to varying degrees, all of the spaces where people stroll, shop, gossip, vote, work, learn, worship, protest, play, and vote contribute to a collective sense of humanity.

How does the public realm interact with its surroundings?

Garvin: That is the single most important thing. People come out of private property onto the public realm, and people from the public realm leave it to go to private property. If there’s a great public realm, people want to be near it. Look at Chicago’s lakeshore. Is it any surprise that businesses and people want to be near that? It’s an extraordinary public realm. The public realm itself is affected by the private property along it. The theather district in New York City is what gives the city its character. There is no Times Square without the flashing lights. I think that interaction is very important.

Zimbabwe: The public realm is a primary shaper of the privately held land around it. Often, public agencies try to shape development through regulating the use of private land, and there is reason to do so, but the real statement of how a city views itself can be seen in how they invest in the streets, parks, sidewalks, and plazas of their community.

Can this concept work in today’s environment of suburban housing tracts, strip malls, and sprawl?

Garvin: I spent well over half a year going to an intersection in DeKalb County, Georgia, where you will find the McDonald’s and the Target and so forth. We in America have reached saturation. There is terrible congestion getting to the interstate highways.What we are experiencing now is the move back from the extreme exurbs. The construction that is going on now is
right back downtown—or the inner-ring of suburbs is being replaced because it’s obsolete. Now you have to come back and re-create the public realm, and the businesses will comeback after it.

Zimbabwe: Yes, but the damage to some suburban landscapes is so extensive that it will take many years to reverse. In essence,a city is showing how much it cares about a street or neighborhood by how it chooses to develop the public realm. When cities build fast-moving, auto-dominated streets with meager or no sidewalks, transit facilities, or bicycles lanes, then the market responds by building drive-through restaurants, strip malls, and other visually unappealing development there.

How are you translating this public-realm energy to some of the current projects you are involved with?

Garvin: It depends on who my client is. I recently did a project outside of Austin, Texas. What [the client] didn’t have was a public-realm framework, so we created one that included parkland. They originally had a plan that included 1,600 homes; when we finished, it was almost 50 percent public realm, with most of it being parkland. No more cul-de-sacs,no more destroying the natural environment. Now they have places where you can go hiking, and have ended up with a development[that will have] 2,100 homes when finished.

Zimbabwe: I’ve worked with Alex several times on sessions to educate and empower public officials to make better design and development decisions, and he is masterful at rendering this connection clearly for that audience. Many academics in the environmental design disciplines maintain private practices in architecture, planning, or design, but few of them have Alex’s ability to combine a pragmatic understanding of what works politically and economically with what would just be a good idea.Alex’s plan for the public realm in DeKalb County, Georgia, exemplifies this, as he undertook extensive engagement with citizens, property owners, and other stakeholders to make sure the plan would have legs in the market and in the real process of getting things done in neighborhoods.

In your opinion, where is modern architecture falling short?

Garvin: The term modern architecture has so many meanings. It’s a debatable subject. I would rather say there are some great buildings being designed and built today. The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, for example, is quite extraordinary. I don’t think we’re lacking great buildings.What I do think is that we’ve come to a disease called “starchitecture.”People think if they get a star designer, they can do things that wouldn’t otherwise be done. What we need more of is ordinary buildings that are well-designed and executed with craftsmanship.In Chicago, for example, the most ordinary buildings are still better than most in the rest of the country. Everything is better built, more interesting. I think we need more emphasis on that. I find that the preparation of architects today is all about styles, and not enough about what’s involved in creating a sustainable environment. There are lots of different angles here, and I think we’re giving these things short shrift.

Zimbabwe: I wouldn’t characterize modern architecture as falling short. I’m a modernist in my design sensibilities, but I’ve arrived there because of a deep appreciation for historic buildings and fabric and a sense that our generation’s built works should have a currency with our zeitgeist, just as the remarkable buildings of history did with theirs. Modern architecture only fails when it is corrupted by the influences of undervalued design, poor planning, and a misunderstanding of how people will use and activate a place. The greatest contributions to our cities in the last decade have come from decidedly modern designers like Renzo Piano, Studio Gang, Frank Gehry, James Polshek, and Steven Holl.

Is there a vision for the “perfect city,” or is this a fairytale concept?

Garvin: I think it’s poison. I think that all cities are different, and that all parts of all cities are different. To create some fake utopia is to miss the point. Paris is a wonderful city. Now take a city like San Francisco that doesn’t look like Paris. Does that make it a terrible city? I don’t think so. It’s not a fairy tale concept at all.

Zimbabwe: The “perfect city” is a contradiction in terms. Cities are sublime precisely because of their complexities, their contradictions, and their constant demand for tinkering and change. To achieve a perfect city would require it to remain static, which would stifle it.

We hear a lot today about “work, live, play” environments. Is this attainable?

Garvin: I think we need to have a multi-functional public realm. I believe we have fought too narrowly. Streets are not just for moving motor vehicles. They are also for shopping, for hanging out, for meeting your friends. I would say that the multi-functional public realm is what it’s about. If you went to Paris and asked if you could turn the Champs-Élysées into a work-live-play environment, they would laugh at you: “Look, that’s what we have.”

Zimbabwe: The “24-hour” neighborhood, or downtown, is a laudable and often achievable goal, but it can take a long time, and many cities won’t have the demand for more than a few blocks of fully energized land. Most cities have successful neighborhoods that have only two major uses: retail and office, or housing and entertainment. The really dreadful places are large swaths of land with only a single use. Those places are soul-depleting.

Douglas Viara is a freelance journalist who lives in Charles Town, West Virginia.