• SOAK: Mumbai in an Estuary, by Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, published in 2009 by: National Gallery of Modern Art and Rupa & Co., New Delhi. 

The ceremony and reception will be held at the Washington Court Hotel on Thursday June 3rd, beginning at 7pm. Winning projects and commentary will be published in Places.

Judging for the thirteenth annual cycle of the awards (formerly known as the EDRA/Places Awards) was held Feb. 24-26 at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, jointly hosted by the School of Architecture and the Department of Landscape Architecture.  The jurors were:

• Ralph E. Johnson, National Design Director, Perkins & Will Architects, Chicago, Illinois.
• Laura J. Lawson, Professor of Landscape Architecture; Director East St. Louis Action Research Project, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
• David Miller, founding partner, The Miller/Hull Partnership; Department Chair and Professor of Architecture, University of Washington, Seattle.
• Lynda Schneekloth, Professor, School of Architecture and Planning, State University of New York at Buffalo
• Kathleen L. Wolf, Research Social Scientist, College of the Environment, University of Washington, Seattle and USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station 

The Great Places Awards reflect the related missions of EDRA, Places, and Metropolis.  EDRA, a national organization of design professionals, social scientists, scholars and practitioners, was founded in 1968.  Its conferences and publications explore the relationship between people and their physical surroundings, suggesting how environmental design can be more responsive to human needs.

The peer-reviewed journal Places was founded 26 years ago by architecture faculty at MIT and Berkeley. Focused on contemporary architecture, landscape, and urbanism, with particular emphasis on the public realm as physical place and social ideal, Places seeks to shift debate from the discussion of singular, visual objects to the way projects contribute to the larger environments that surround people's lives, and the public realm in particular.  Now a fully web-based, open-access publication, Places online publishes peer-reviewed scholarship as well as topical commentary, observations, reviews, and visual portfolios. Places maintains its commitment to design as a catalyst of change. 

Metropolis Magazine explores the ways a broad spectrum of design disciplines shape the world.  Metropolis is concerned with all aspects of design, from architecture to interior-design products to landscape design and urban planning.  It sees good design as a collaborative process resulting in work that is sustainable yet efficient and cost effective.

The postmark deadline for submissions for the next (2011) cycle of Great Places Awards will be February 10, 2011.  For more information, visit www.edra.org, places.designobserver.com or www.metropolismag.com

2010 Great Places Award - Place Design

Garbage to Gardens, Guatemala City, Guatemala

Associate Professor Daniel Winterbottom, University of Washington Department of Landscape Architecture with students of the Guatemala design/build studios

Turning "garbage into gardens," transformed a striving community in Guatemala City adjoining the largest garbage dump in Central America. The design/construction team partnered with the NGO Safe Passage and its member families to design and build three "gardens" for their learning park and educational facility founded upon decommissioned dump land. The project was guided by research about creating safe environments, the importance of direct exposure to nature for childrenÕs physical, mental and spiritual development, and the use of therapeutic play to address negative effects of disaster, poverty and displacement. The project engaged member families in participatory design of three age-group-specific gardens to serve children from 18 months to 17 years. The gardens were built in Guatemala City's zona three, a notably dangerous barrio with few green, safe parks or community spaces. These gardens help Mayan families, displaced from the highlands, to reconstruct a sense of community and reattachment to place in the sprawling city. Since the projects inception, stewardship for the gardens has strengthened, physical health and social skills of the children has improved, fewer youth participants are drawn to gangs and mothers have more hope for their families. The project is a notable example of empowerment and transformation in marginalized dump communities through environmental design and has been a model for other such projects undertaken in Central American communities.

Other credited individuals and groups: Project assistants: Jesse Alder, Malcolm Dole, Justin Martin and Kari Stiles, with Students and volunteers of the Guatemala design/build studios & Carol Bjork. Project Client: Safe Passage/Camino Seguro

2010 Great Places Award - Place Planning

Visioning Rail Transit in Northwest Arkansas 2030

University of Arkansas, Community Design Center and School of Architecture; Washington University in St. Louis, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts/Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design

Visioning Rail Transit in Northwest Arkansas is an advocacy-planning document envisioning smart growth development through rail transit at the regional scale. Before the current economic downturn, Northwest Arkansas (NWA) was the nationÕs sixth fastest growing region with its population of 350,000 expected to double within the next 15 years, growing to more than one million by 2050.  The purpose of this study is to mobilize support from local governments for a $2 million feasibility study to resuscitate the existing rail corridor as a light rail system. The larger planning goal is to incentivize this anticipated growth towards urban options that are presently underutilized and culturally devalued. Arkansas is the 49th poorest state in the union and yet has the 12th largest state highway system. NWA lacks planning capacity beyond highway development and is dominated by the presence of powerful logistical interests, being the home of Wal-Mart, Tyson Foods, and J.B. Hunt Transportation Logistics. These powerful forces have an interest in maximizing revenue streams towards highway development. However, the regionÕs linear morphology, new prosperity, growth rate and population density along existing rail corridors, suggest it could potentially be a national model for rail development in rural metropolitan regions. Visioning Rail Transit represents five years of research, grassroots advocacy, and planning studies by a consortium of design professionals, educators and students.

Other credited individuals and groups: University of Arkansas Community Design Center, Stephen Luoni, Director; Aaron Gabriel, Assistant Director; Jeffrey Huber, Project Director; Peter Bednar, John McWilliams, James Meyer; Project Designers. 

University of Arkansas School of Architecture, Jeff Shannon, Dean; Tim de Noble, Dept. Head; Professors: Greg Herman, Tahar Messadi, Eric Kahn, William Conway; Students: Rena Alexander, David Anderson, Michael Baldwin, Billy Bingham, Mary Bullington, Austin Chatelain, Nathan Dalke, Meredith Davies, Mason Ellis, Ignacio Gonzalez, Scott Grahem, Danielle Harbeck, Brent Hathcoat, Jason Jackson, Morgan Manning, Amy McCarthy, David McElyea, Gary Moore, Lauren Nestrud, Kara Peg, Jack Reilly, Victor Ross, Michael Trogeger, Allison Vandever.

Washington University in St. Louis, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts/Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design, Bruce Lindsey, Dean; Peter MacKeith, Assoc. Dean; Adrian Luchini, Dir. of Global Programs; Students: Timothy Breihan, Allison Hamm, Sujaul Khan, Jin Hee Lee, Erik Mease, James Morrison, Joe Vickery, Kyle Thiel.

2010 Great Places Award - Place Planning

Maasvlakte 2100: A Long Term Design Strategy for the Port Lands of Rotterdam

Open Systems, Project Directors: Pierre BŽlanger, Miho Mazereeuw

Maasvlakte 2100 describes an envisioning process for the Port Lands of Rotterdam, an industrialized landscape spread across 25,000 acres of manufactured sites bordering the River Maas and the North Sea coastline in the Netherlands. Raising critical questions about the future of urbanization with regard to rising sea levels, increasing flood frequencies, groundwater abstractions and complex estuarine ecologies, this synthetic planning project rethinks the traditional master planning process by visualizing a series of slow ecological processes and catalytic economic scenarios with their attendant urban effects. Employing strategic research and design intelligence to reformulate landscape as an instrumental infrastructure, the project further describes an array of unique synergies, correlations, and interdependencies made possible by the synthesis of economy, ecology and energy over time. Completed during a 2-year time frame with a series of open public presentations, the project triggered a pivotal decision making process about the expansion of the port lands engaging the Port Authority of Rotterdam, the Rijkswaterstaat (Dutch Water Authority) and representatives of the 1.5 million people that inhabit the Rotterdam urban region in the mouth of the Dutch delta. Anticipating a major paradigm shift in the de-carbonization of global industries and the de-engineering of coastal areas with the growth of ecologically responsive and socially relevant visions, this project thus proposes a model for future urbanization of deltaic regions throughout the world.

Other credited individuals and groups: Design Research Team: Kelly Doran, Dan Rabin, Aisling O'Caroll, Maya Przybylski, Fadi Masoud, Shadi Katami, Ed Zec, Behnaz Assadi, Hoda Matar, Connie Pei Lin.

Project Advisors & Consultants: Dirk Sijmons (Director, H+N+S Landschapsarchitecten), Isabelle Vries & Paul de Beijer (Port of Rotterdam Infrastructure Management & Planning), Dr. Jusuck Koh (Professor, Wageningen University Alterra Research Institute), Judith Smals (Stimuleringsfonds voor Architectuur), Ove Arup & NYFER Economic Research, Raamwerken Printing & Design BV.

Funding & Sponsorship: The Netherlands Architecture Fund, Port Authority of Rotterdam, Wageningen University, Canada Council for the Arts, Landscape Infrastructure Lab, Harvard Graduate School of Design.

2010 Great Places Award - Place Planning

Battery Park City Streetscapes & Security, New York City, NY

Design, Planning, Engineering, Construction Team: Rogers Marvel Architects, James Carpenter Design Assoc., Ducibella Venter & Santore, Sam Schwartz Co. LLC, Weidlinger Assoc., Fisher Marantz Stone, Robert Silman Assoc., P.C., Langan Engineering & Environmental Services, DVL Consulting Engineering, Inc., URS Corp., Hudson Meridian Construction Group, Metrotech Contracting Group, Tully Construction, Delta Fountains, Northern Designs, US Army Engineer Research & Development Center Geotechnical Structures Laboratory Mobility Systems Branch

This project to redesign streetscape was commissioned by the Battery Park City Authority after 9/11 in order to improve building security and pedestrian connections around the World Financial Center and New York Mercantile Exchange and throughout the North Neighborhood. Battery Park City is a 92-acre planned community on Manhattan's lower west side initiated by Governor Nelson Rockefeller as a vision of what urban life might be. Today, Battery Park City contains 9,000 residents, 9.3 million square feet of commercial space, 35 acres of parks, 3 public schools, 2 hotels, museums and the Irish Hunger Memorial. Built over Hudson river piers with dirt from the World Trade Center construction, it sits adjacent to the WTC site. The quality of public space was a driving force in the design of security measures that were to be implemented in subtle ways throughout the site. This project combines diverse programmatic requirements into a synthesized urban design and management solution. Through design strategies and innovative security measures being explores with the US Army Corps of Engineers, these disparate elements are combined into a visible whole in the Battery Park Streetscape and Security Plan.

Other credited individuals and groups: Client: Hugh L. Carey Battery Park City Authority, Photographers: Nathan Sayers, Paul Warchol 

2010 Great Places Award - Place Research

CITY SINK: Carbon Storage Strategies for Urban Landscape

Denise Hoffman Brandt

CITY SINK is a research project that investigates the potential for urban carbon sequestration reservoirs, or sinks, in New York City. This research is broad in scope, encompassing environmental science, ecological systems theory, international carbon policy, urban planning, and social and physical infrastructure finance models. This scope was necessary to take on the challenge of describing an operative ecological program for urban landscape design in the post-carbon era. The project asserts the power of local civic policy and community practice to engage global ecologies by integrating immediately implementable plant-soil systems in the public realm. The research resulted in a plan for a meta-park of dispersed landscape "infrastructure" boosting carbon stocks in both short-term biomass storage and through formation of long-term sequestration reservoirs for soil organic carbon in New York City.

Other credited individuals and groups: Research Assistant Alexa Helsell, A New York Prize Fellowship from the Van Alen Institute supported this work. 

2010 Great Places Award - Book Award

Greening Cities, Growing Communities: Learning from Seattle's Urban Community Gardens

By Jeffrey Hou, Julie M. Johnson and Laura J. Lawson. Published in 2009 by Landscape Architecture Foundation in association with University of Washington Press

The book Greening Cities, Growing Communities: Learning from Seattle's Urban Community Gardens presents a timely and significant contribution to knowledge about the community garden as an important place in contemporary cities that reconnect people to the environment and to each other. Community gardens are enjoying a resurgence of public interest in North America, catalyzed by a growing awareness of the garden as a community resource providing multiple personal, community, and environmental benefits. Yet, despite the recent resurgence, a full understanding of the issues in making and sustaining gardens has been lacking. The book builds on the literature of urban gardening, open space design and community development to examine cases of community gardens in Seattle, a city with exceptional institutional support, community involvement, and climate, all of which facilitate community gardening. Using a case study approach, the book provides a rich description of community gardens that synthesizes planning and design considerations with the personal social, and community outcomes. It reveals the capacity of urban community gardens to address extensive urban issues including community food security, environmental quality, active living, open-spaced networks, and concerns of low-income and minority communities, immigrants, and seniors. The place making of these gardens builds community, addresses social justice, and fosters a more sustainable and healthy form of open space. While urban community gardens are often lauded in general terms, this book provides crucial information to deepen knowledge about community gardens as land use and participatory activity.

2010 Great Places Award - Book Award

SOAK: Mumbai in an Estuary

By Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha. Published in 2009 by National Gallery of Modern Art and Rupa & Co., New Delhi

SOAK: Mumbai in an Estuary is a book and public exhibition that recovers the appreciation of Mumbai as a monsoon and estuarine landscape. Situating Mumbai in a threshold between land and sea rather than an island, SOAK calls for visualizing Mumbai as a terrain of monsoon holdings, overflows, and fluid negotiations. It images the sea and the monsoon not as enemies and agents of flood that the current visualization of this terrain perpetuates, but as inevitable partners in shaping the ground of settlement. This project offers a range of demonstrative proposals for designing with the gradient of an estuary. By elevating section over plan it provides an alternate way to read MumbaiÕs past, present, and future, and offers a new approach to the issue of flooding and habitation in aqueous terrains.

Other credited individuals and groups: Book Design: Trapeze, Bangalore, Exhibition Team: Exhibition Authors & Artists: Anuradha Mathur / Dilip da Cunha, Exhibition Director: Kavita Khanna, Exhibition Design: Trapeze, Bangalore.