Mayors' Institute on City Design Seeks Landscape Architects
Two ASLA members discuss their experiences working on municipal problems with the nation's mayors.

This year, two ASLA members, Bonnie Fisher, FASLA, and Barbara Wilks, ASLA, served as team members on two separate sessions of the Mayors’ Institute of City Design (MICD). The MICD is a partnership program of the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Architectural Foundation, and the United States Conference of Mayors. The MICD organizes sessions where mayors meet for two days with leading design experts to find solutions to urban design challenges in their cities. Each mayor presents a problem from his or her city for the other mayors and designers to discuss. Design professionals also give presentations during the sessions to discuss their ideas on good urban design. Each session is made up of 20 participants: 10 designers and 10 mayors; details on what is discussed in each session are private.

Bonnie Fisher, FASLA, served on the MICD West session at the University of Washington in July 2007. Mayors in attendance included Mayor Boyd Dunn of Chandler, Arizona; Mayor Peter Lewis of Auburn, Washington; and Mayor Charles Tomlinson of Corvallis, Oregon, among others. Fisher thought the entire process was “extremely positive. I feel it is very important to have landscape architects there when public space issues are being addressed,” she said, noting that many of the problems mayors presented directly are the issues that landscape architects can and do address. She also believed her session was “extremely beneficial” to the mayors in attendance because of all the practical advice they each heard and shared among themselves. Fisher suggested that landscape architects who are interested in city building, city design, and the civic structure would be most pleased to be part of the conversation at the MICD. “Helping mayors build better cities really is a good thing,” Fisher concluded.

Barbara Wilks, ASLA, echoed Fisher’s positive comments on the MICD. Wilks served on the Providence, Rhode Island, MICD session in July 2007. Mayors in attendance included Mayor Virg Bernero of Lansing, Michigan; Mayor Bob Blanchard of Santa Rosa, California; and Mayor Ron Littlefield of Chattanooga, Tennessee, among others. Wilks was pleased to find out that “the mayors understood how design and planning can help their cities,” adding that “99 percent of them were able to see the larger issues and the relationships between and among different parts of their communities.” She also found it very gratifying that the mayors came to understand that to fix the urban problems in their cities they would need to look to “more comprehensive solutions, not simple fixes.” She found the conversation among the different types of design professionals invigorating and found it interesting that each mayor in attendance had the same problems as the other mayors.