Here's a fascinating problem for the urban design crowd: Youngstown, Ohio, has lost nearly 100,000 of its citizens since the 1970s. The current city is plagued with an excess of infrastructure and does not have the tax base to pay for its upkeep. Now the city has pinned its hopes on "Youngstown 2010" a "comprehensive plan to reduce nonessential infrastructure, attract new businesses, and rehab deteriorated and abandoned spaces." Metropolis magazine covered the plan in late 2006 in "The Incredible Shrinking City." Anyone been to Youngstown recently and want to report on how the town is doing? Sound off in the comments!

In the July issue of Harpers magazine, writer Rebecca Solnit explored modern-day Detroit and found that the wilderness was returning to the city's many abandoned buildings and empty lots. Her piece, "Detroit Arcadia: Exploring the Post-American Landscape" (unfortunately available only to subscribers), showed how some city dwellers were reclaiming those empty lots by turning them into urban community gardens. While Solnit's piece was rightfully dinged in letters to the editor for being too optimistic that these activities would somehow lift all those living in Detroit out of poverty, the idea (and photographs) of new life returning to what was once one of the most populous cities in America is fascinating.

Now the Detroit Free Press offers a more down-to-earth take on the city's gardens and microfarms in a piece published late last month. Click through to read about urban farms in old, roofless factories, and how the city and foundations actively support the new farming methods.

News this week from the Toronto Star; five four [update below] landscape architecture teams have been selected as finalists for Toronto's Lower Don Lands redevelopment project. The Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation's website describes the Don River project as an attempt "to produce a bold and compelling concept for the Lower Don Lands that makes the river a central feature of the urban landscape providing the new waterfront development and new linkages to the rest of the city." Click here [note: pdf link] to download the project site's "Opportunities and Constraints" aerial map.

The following teams are short-listed:

• Atelier GIROT/Office of Landscape Morphology/ReK Productions
• Hargreaves Associates/Polshek Partnership/ENVision - The Hough Group/Dillon Consulting
• STOSS INC./Brown + Storey Architects/ZAS Architects
• Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates/Behnisch Architects/Greenberg Consultants/ Great Eastern Ecology
• Weiss/Manfredi & du Toit Allsopp Hillier

The Dirt continues to be amazed at Toronto's headlong push into urban renewal across the metropolitan area.

Hat tip to our friends at ArchNewsNow.

Update 1 02/15/07: Reader Terrence noticed that the Toronto Waterfront website and press release has been edited removing the Hargreaves/Polshek/ENVision/Dillon team with no explanation. A quick scan of each of the team members' websites lends me no clues. I'll keep searching.

Update 2 02/16/07: According to the VP of Communications at TWRC, the fifth team (of which Hargreaves Associates and ENVision-The Hough Group were a part) withdrew from the competition after they were awarded two other new projects.

After an introduction likening him to the Roman emperor Augustus Caeser, Chicago's Mayor Richard M. Daley, Honorary ASLA, gives this interview in Conscious Choice - found via Worldchanging - on environmental issues ranging from his philosophy on green space to what he learned on a trip to Beijing.

Chicago, steeped in a history of being ecologically unconscious, has in many ways become an urban showcase of sustainability for the United States under the mayor's watch.

Daley said people should make taking action a personal thing. "As far as the city is concerned, there has to be more recycling. There has to be recycling in everyone’s home and in every business," he said, adding that the Chicago River could be cleaner. The Dirt agrees.

In the interview, Daley also calls for "more green roofs, water conservation, more trees and flowers," noting he got the idea to implement green roofs from a trip to  Germany in 1996.

James Corner, ASLA, and Field Operations are taking on the creation of a 965-acre Lake Ontario Park. The Globe&Mail notes the challenging aspect of converting this area that seems to be a little bit country and a little bit rock-n-roll.

That's alright, says Professor Charles Waldheim, director of the landscape architecture program at the University of Toronto. Field Operations and Corner rises to the occasion on these types of projects, he says. "One of the great strengths of [Mr. Corner's] work is that if a site has an industrial history, continuing industrial uses and other development pressures, he doesn't see those as contradictory," said Waldheim.

Corner says he plans on linking recreation areas and restaurants with natural spaces through the use of pathways, as well as bringing together a "really fragmented" waterfront. The Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation is hoping that the park will become a central draw for the city.

Good luck and thanks to Archinect for the original post.

The Dirt has a sneaking suspicion that we could start another blog that just covers landscape architecture in Toronto, and never run out of entries to post. The latest news out of the city is the four finalists, short-listed for the Nathan Phillips Square Revitalization competition. They are (drum roll, please):

Baird Sampson Neuert Architects, Toronto, with VLAN Paysages (landscape architect, Montreal); Halcrow Yolles (structural engineer, Toronto); Cobalt Engineering (mechanical engineer, Toronto); and Mulvey & Banani International Inc. (electrical engineer, Toronto)

Plant Architect Inc., Toronto, with Shore Tilbe Irwin & Partners (architect, Toronto); Peter Lindsay Schaudt Landscape Architecture, Inc. (landscape architect, Chicago); Adrian Blackwell (design collaborator, Toronto); Blackwell Bowick Partnership Limited (structural engineer, Toronto); and Crossey Engineering Ltd. (mechanical and electrical engineers, Toronto)

Rogers Marvel Architects, New York, with Ken Smith Landscape Architect (landscape architect, New York); and Buro Happold (structural, mechanical and electrical engineers, New York)

Zeidler Partnership Architects, Toronto, with Group Signes (landscape architect, Paris, France); Halcrow Yolles (structural engineer, Toronto); and Hidi Rae (mechanical and electrical engineers, Toronto)

The finalists will submit detailed plans, which will be publicly displayed, by February 16, and the jury will meet to choose the winner in early March.

Six teams have been named as finalists to design a renovation plan for Pratt Street in Baltimore, Maryland, that includes a 16-block stretch from Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard east to President Street, The Baltimore Sun reports. The teams that made the cut from among 10 applicants are Ayers Saint Gross of Baltimore; EDSA of Columbia, Maryland; Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn Architects of Washington, D.C.; Hargreaves Associates of Cambridge, Massachusetts; Oasis Design Group of Baltimore; and W Architecture and Landscape Architecture of New York City. Next month the Baltimore Development Corp. will pare the list down to four teams, who will then have until February 12 to come up with final design plans to present to the city.

Columbia, South Carolina, is looking to connect several districts throughout the city that are seeing strong but distinctly disparate growth by "embarking on an estimated 10-year, multimillion-dollar effort to turn the area bounded by Calhoun, Taylor, Marion and Barnwell streets into a destination garden district," The State reports. Historic Columbia has hired South Carolina native Jim Cothran, FASLA, a landscape architect, author, and expert on historic gardens, to plan the expanded garden district. The effort has the enthusiastic support of Mayor Bob Coble, who told the paper, "connecting the city through green spaces, gardens and parks is very important. This could be an excellent connection between areas of the city that have historically been divided. It’s a tremendous step forward and deserves the city’s support. It’s perfect." Hmmm... he sounds like another South Carolina mayor we know and love.

The California State Parks Department has chosen Hargreaves Associates to design the Los Angeles State Historic Park, a 32-acre site adjacent to Chinatown, which has become known as "The Cornfield" because corn has sprouted on the site from kernels dropped by passing freight trains. The Los Angeles Downtown News has the details on the Hargreaves proposal:

It includes a 15-acre field flanked by a fountain-filled plaza on its southern side and nature-oriented wetlands and gardens that connect to the Los Angeles River on the northern tip. The plan includes providing access to the park with four bridges, two that connect to Broadway, one that soars to Spring Street, and a wide, landscaped bridge that reaches Elysian Park. There, they propose adding new trails, a habitat area and replacing some of the Dodger Stadium parking lots with playing fields.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Richard Weinstein, a professor of architecture and urban design at UCLA, gives the Hargreaves proposal a lukewarm reception, and says design competitions such as this one should take a broader view of the development in question and ask not just what can fill a site, but "what can be leveraged by its development."

Noting that private funding has helped the new Gold Medal Park in Minneapolis "appear almost instantly," Linda Mack of the Star Tribune looks at how two speakers at the 2006 ASLA Annual Meeting & EXPO and 43rd IFLA World Congress helped make similar private investments work for public spaces. First, Gordon Price, a former Vancouver city councilman, noted how private sector funds are being used to create parks and community centers as the city redevelops former industrial parks. Price said developers don't mind paying for the parks, because parks help them sell $700,000 600-square-foot condos. Second, Daniel Biederman, who runs the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, discussed how that group used security and maintenance to attract people to the park. He said security staff aggressively enforced prohibitions against alcohol, drugs, profanity, and even spitting, and that maintenance picked up trash 12 to 14 times to day. He added that the key to a successful park is its ability to feel safe to women, "and women look for visual cues of disorder, from litter to ratty flower beds and broken benches."