Why So Few Postoccupancy Evaluations?

Can landscape architects learn anything from visiting their built public projects and studying how people use them?

You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Postoccupancy evaluations (POEs) are a means of continually improving one’s design skills by avoiding repeating the same mistakes. The results could be used to compete for new jobs and could be published, thereby advancing the entire profession. I’m sure there are many other benefits. Yet very few landscape architects ever undertake POEs of their own work. Why?

One reason is that even a rudimentary POE is likely to cost time, effort, and money. A simple walk-through that involves talking to users and performing some sort of elementary audit requires training if a landscape architect is to perform it. (Does any landscape architecture program even teach students how to perform POEs nowadays?) If a trained assessor performs the POE, money will have to be found to pay him or her. The upshot: POEs are rarer than hen’s teeth.

If you are a landscape architect and have done POEs on your own or others’ work, I would love to know of it. Even if you haven’t done a formal POE, have you at least revisited and informally assessed your own key projects? If so, what have you learned?

Because of the dearth of POEs, I was surprised to learn that Teardrop Park in New York’s Battery Park City (“Abstract Realism,” February 2007) had been the subject of one. What sparked this most unusual undertaking? Nothing less than Teardrop’s gaining the dubious honor of being listed on Project for Public Spaces’ Hall of Shame (www.pps.org/great_ public_ spaces). “There is almost nothing to do in this park,” charged PPS, “and nothing to attract the people who might use it.”

This allegation so rankled Robin Moore, Affiliate ASLA, who had consulted on the planning of the park, that this professor of landscape architecture and director of the Natural Learning Initiative at North Carolina State University traveled up to Manhattan to assess park use (or lack thereof) for himself. He and two other experienced field researchers spent nine person hours on two consecutive afternoons mapping the behavior of children and adults and interviewing parents and others. The results, summarized in this month’s “Critic at Large,” show that Teardrop is a vibrant and much-used public space. Moore ended by wondering whether PPS uses much rigor in assessing landscapes before consigning them to the Hall of Shame.

PPS has ruffled the feathers of many landscape architects, who object to its relegating some of the most revered works of landscape architecture to a “shamed” status. Would it be better for the profession, then, if PPS would just go away? Underlying that question is another, more profound, one: Is criticism good or bad for landscape architecture?

My take is that POEs such as Moore’s add to the store of information about how people use urban landscapes, and if these are sparked by criticism, then criticism is a good thing. And Teardrop isn’t the only example of a critique inciting a POE. I recently read one of an urban square in San Francisco that demonstrated, via observation and counting users, a very high level of use. When I asked the landscape architect why he had commissioned the POE, he admitted that one reason was a critical review published in LAM that questioned whether the park’s design would ever attract many users.

But why does it take the critic’s goad to incite a POE? What would it take for landscape architects to initiate POEs just because they want to know whether people love the places they create?

J. William “Bill” Thompson, FASLA
Editor / bthompson@asla.org