The Great Outdoors

When I was a child, my grandfather told stories of what happened to naughty children.  “A great big hoot owl will swoop down from the top of the big old pine tree, and he’ll snatch you up in his great claws and carry you way up to his nest at the top of the tree.  He’ll settle you down next to all the other lil’ baby hoot owls and feed you worms.  And we’ll never find you, ‘cause you can scream and scream but that ol’ hoot owl will just think you’re hungry, and keep fillin’ your beak with worms ‘til one day, you’ll turn into a hoot owl.”  This story was immeasurably improved by his raspy delivery on the porch at nighttime, creaking in the metal rocker.  We were protected from this fate, and by all of the unknown creatures of the Mississippi nightwoods, by only a thin mesh of wire screening, a few sticks of wood frame.  It gave my little sister and I chills, and while we visited, we were very, very good.

The terrors of being left outside at night were real to us, having experienced the feeling, although often at close range to safety.  But not many children today get as close to nature as we did in those southern summers, playing in the barn, the lake, the field; only excluded from the limits of my grandmother’s garden.  Children certainly aren’t permitted out alone, at night, beyond the safety of their backyard, if even there.  The majority of children are supervised when they play; 52% are supervised even in the garden. In natural places, this rises to over 80%, even in daytime.

The forest we feared gave us turpentine, lumber, and paper.  It also gave my grandfather and uncles a living, with jobs in the sawmill, construction, boatbuilding, farming and timber; it bestowed a subsistence through deer and turkey and pecans in the fall, figs and berries in the summer, and firewood all year round.  Fear of the forest recedes with familiarity, but this also inspires new concerns for what may be lost with the forest: for children, this includes a sense of capability and independence.  For medicine, the possibility of new cures from endangered species, and a weapon in the fight against obesity and diabetes.  For ecological balance, the essential predators and top-level species that check the population of prey and invasive species that can explode without their vigilance.  And for the climate, the carbon sequestration that is necessary to mitigate climate change.

To suggest that architecture has a role in encouraging people to spend more time outdoors seems counterintuitive.  And yet, good design can encourage interaction between inside and outside.  A trellis brings nature close for sensory pleasure; a glasshouse is one step toward a garden; a window an invitation to step beyond the frame.  Without architecture, the “great outdoors” becomes a threat.  In cooperation, the outside becomes a respite, a relief necessary for our mental health and regeneration.

What time is spent indoors should also promote health.  In the United States, this is 87% of our lives – about 69% within our residences, and 18% in work, school, or leisure.  Statistics in other countries are not wildly different.  With such a radical inversion in the location of human activity over the last two centuries, indoor air quality becomes much more important.  Architecture continues to pursue improvements such as reducing volatile organic compounds, and improving particle filtration, so as to reduce allergies and asthma for occupants.

Without nature, the real and unexpected, the living and unpredictable, shall we enjoy only conservatories filled with artifice, and survive like the characters of science fiction, with our only nature a covered roof garden populated with mechanized animals? Architecture preserves natural habitats through wise resource use, reclamation, rapidly renewable materials, and efficient structures.  And if, as work and school and media become less aligned with the circadian rhythms as also predicted in sci-fi, the artifice of aural and visual stimulation will do little to fulfill our sensory needs.  Nature, even at nighttime, supplies the experience of wind, the sounds of water’s movement, the call of birds and the rustle of leaves.

As cities become more dense, wild lands must be preserved through conservation.  Increasingly small patches of nature must rally to fight air pollution, and promote exercise, to counteract obesity and diseases such as diabetes.  The result of access to nature is not only the restoration of nature, but a human renaissance as well.

As schools become more protective of their students, will children forever lose recess outdoors, and be confined to gymnasia and lunch halls?  If lessons from the best school system in the world are taken to heart, the answer will be a resounding “No.”  Finland has the fewest class hours of any educational system in the developed world, yet maintains the highest scores in science and reading.  Elementary students get 75 minutes of recess each day, compared to 27 minutes in the United States.  A reporter for The New Republic writes, “While observing recess outside the Kallahti Comprehensive School on the eastern edge of Helsinki on a chilly day in April 2009, I asked Principal Timo Heikkinen if students go out when it’s very cold. Heikkinen said they do. I then asked Heikkinen if they go out when it’s very, very cold. Heikkinen smiled and said, ‘If minus 15 [Celsius] and windy, maybe not, but otherwise, yes. The children can’t learn if they don’t play. The children must play.’”

In rain and sunshine, nature provides essential human needs; in cold and wind it challenges our survival.  Architecture developed strategies to resist these threats, perhaps too well.  Now, the challenge is to create buildings without air infiltration which invite the breezes, structures immobile against floods which can later be moved to safer elevations, spaces immune to the sun’s daily heat gain but retain views of nature and the city surrounding us.  Nature deficit is not limited to the Western World, and is even noted in cities such as Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.  It is time for children to return to the wild, for architecture to halt the march across unspoiled land, and for designers to create a new interaction between building and the world outside. These measures will ensure not only the potential for ecological balance, but also that tales of the dark and spooky forest are not confined to the past.

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References:

Report to Natural England on Childhood and Nature: a Survey on Changing Relationships with Nature Across Generations: http://www.naturalengland.org.uk/Images/Childhood%20and%20Nature%20Survey_tcm6-10515.pdf

Samuel E. Abrams, “The Children Must Play.”  The New Republic, January 28, 2011.

Asphalt versus Concrete

Asphalt is unfitted to creating paths in coastal environments.  When storms rise and cover the pavement’s surface, the material breaks up into small chunks which are difficult to recover, and these can remain along the shoreline for years, breaking down into petrochemical products that continue to impact the water quality. 

This is very different from concrete paths and roadways, which admittedly require greater input of resources, but typically last longer.  The initial cost difference is about 135-150% of asphalt, but the expected life is 27.5 years, instead of asphalt’s 15.5 year life.  Both surface materials require proper sub-base beds to support anticipated loads.  Concrete maintains integrity under much greater loads, with higher traffic rates and lower maintenance.  When concrete breaks down, it is inert and recyclable.

Northern climates use asphalt because it is more flexible in cold weather, and less likely to be damaged by frost heaving or salt deposits from anti-snow measures.  In the South, the additional heat reflected by the black asphalt causes objects to sink into the pools of hot tar.  Concrete is a cooler material, reflecting sunlight rather than absorbing it, and lowering temperatures on top and surrounding it.

We are devoted to reducing ocean pollution and marine debris from storms and other sources.  The installation of roads and buildings should contribute as little as possible to marine damage.  Asphalt is not a good solution to creating roads, trails, and driveways in fragile coastal environments; concrete and permeable pavements are preferred solutions for access.

Edges to Urban Growth

Ebenezer Howard didn’t start the craze, he only picked up where the ancient Greek concept of natural limits to growth lay abandoned in the ruins of the agora. In the 2000 years since the explosive growth of Athens’ civilization, the normal moderators of population growth – plague, fire, food – ensured that population numbers remained in balance. But by the early twentieth century, the industrial revolution, plus the evolution of the medical and agricultural fields resulted in intense development pressures from overcrowded cities, which could only build up… or out.

The ancient Greek city could not be too far removed from the rural areas and Dionysian pleasures. Aristotle’s Lesson of Controlled Growth, with established natural limits. “What we have said concerning a city… is sufficient in itself to furnish what will make the inhabitants happy; for which purpose it must be able to supply them with all the necessaries of life; for it is the having these in plenty, without any want, which makes them content.”

Howard designed the Garden City for an ideal population of 32,000 people, with greenbelts encircling new towns, spaced about three to five miles apart, based on the distance between rail stations. The extension of rail lines in the 1840’s resulted in deserted stations offering the promise of things to come. Nearby landowners saw the benefits that the railway line would bring, by turning their farmlands into prime lots for development. Howard’s Garden Cities were built at Letchworth and Welwyn, England, with concentric rings of functions, preserving agricultural lands to prevent one town from encroaching on another.

In Jane Jacobs’ eyes, however, Ebenezer Howard “not only hated the wrongs and mistakes of the city, he hated the city…. His prescription for saving the people was to do the city in.” Jacobs took great exception to the series of “decontaminated sortings” that were the result of many of the Garden City recommendations, preferring instead the messy and unsorted life within the city – the small blocks and multiple paths of travel, the mixed uses, the generators of diversity that distinguish one neighborhood from another. In this, she was aligned in direct opposition to Lewis Mumford, who wrote, “The law of urban growth, as dictated by the capitalist economy, meant the inexorable wiping out of all the natural features that delight and fortify the human soul in its daily rounds.” Now, Jacobs was not suggesting wiping out greenspace, nor was Mumford in favor of the creep of grey infrastructure across the plains and prairies of open space. But it is true that at the first sign of a boom, skeleton streets are extended and infrastructure is laid, and with their existence arrives a self-fulfilling result, with the first scattered houses and convenience stores punctuating the edges of the asphalt ribbon.

Communal edges once provided buffers of non-developed land between cities. These green spaces acted as rings around the towns and cities, providing nature’s resources for the residents’ benefit. With the growth of mega-regions, the ratios have reversed; the stands of forest and sensitive lands that were once ignored in favor of more desirable (and more profitable) development are now converted into housing estates, manufacturing, and mini-storage. In response, cities from Minneapolis to Miami are beginning to define rigorous urban growth boundaries, instituting increasing fees and higher taxes for new “edge city” developments, or limiting water runoff, sewer treatment, and traffic to “pre-development” levels in an effort to control the uncontrolled expansion of community edges.

Regional plans encouraged by the Charter for New Urbanism recommend geographic boundaries be respected. “The metropolis has a necessary and fragile relationship to its agrarian hinterland and natural landscapes. The relationship is environmental, economic, and cultural. Farmland and nature are as important to the metropolis as the garden is to the house. Development patterns should not blur or eradicate the edges of the metropolis.”

But often, the edges become wastelands. Michel Foucault wrote, “in the margins of the community, at the gates of cities, there stretched wastelands which sickness had ceased to haunt but had left sterile and uninhabitable.” These edges are the blight-prone, dead-end, single use barriers that worried Jane Jacobs in “The Curse of the Border Vacuums”.

Community edges may save us from our own inventions, the chemical, biological, and mineral hazards we have unleashed. Creating green zones, buffers of wild lands between industry and inhabitation and dividing mega-regions into identifiable fragments, will mitigate the proximate effects of population expansion. In order to improve resilience and self-sufficiency, Camillo Sitte’s “sanitary and decorative greenery” that girdles, crosses, or encircles old and new communities may help us to process waste, build oxygen, sequester carbon, produce food, compost and recycle solid waste, and many more requirements, for cities to become true, circulatory ecosystems.