Olmsted Symposium Focuses on Building Sustainable Cities

The School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) celebrated the father of landscape architecture Monday as it also launched its search for a faculty member to fill a newly endowed chair.

The Frederick Law Olmsted Symposium assembled six experts in sustainable urban infrastructure to talk about the man and the concepts he created. It was the start of a conversation about who can best advance the ideas of sustainability in our cities and suburbs as the new Olmsted Chair in CEE.

“The speakers were carefully selected to touch on different, but complementary topics related to the research and teaching we envision the chair holder doing,” said Reginald DesRoches, Karen and John Huff School Chair and professor in CEE.

DesRoches and Ellen Dunham-Jones, professor of architecture and urban design in the College of Architecture, are leading the search committee for the new chair holder. 

Though the Olmsted chair will be housed in CEE, the position will serve as a link for faculty and research in engineering, economics, and the College of Architecture.

“We strongly believe that the most critical advances occur at the intersection of disciplines,” DesRoches said. “The problems that will be addressed by the Olmsted Chair are at the interface of the built environment, natural systems, and social systems.”

The new Frederick Law Olmsted Chair in CEE is made possible through a gift from Jenny and Mike Messner, a 1976 civil engineering graduate of Georgia Tech. Their vision is that the person selected for the teaching and research position will instill Olmsted’s concern for engineering urban spaces with long-term public benefits in his or her students and academic pursuits. 

"It's not yet clear what kind of connections between Architecture and Civil Engineering this professorship will forge, but there are certainly many possibilities having to do with the integration of sustainable and healthy infrastructure, the design of cities, the design of green infrastructure, multi-modal boulevards, and public spaces," Dunham-Jones said. 

Looking to Olmsted’s Legacy

Monday’s speakers set the stage for the needs in sustainable urban infrastructure and how Olmsted’s legacy could help address them.

“Olmsted’s real genius was in figuring out what was needed to solve a problem and then assembling the people and resources necessary,” said Douglas Allen, professor emeritus in the School of Architecture who opened the symposium. “Along the way, Olmsted attempted to do what any good poet does: he tried to tag poetic language to regular language. So a sewer becomes a parkway.”

That was one of Olmsted’s ideas: a new kind of street that accommodates many modes of travel, “piggybacked onto the concept of a park and a sewer system,” Allen said.

“[Olmsted’s] own education was unorthodox,” said another speaker, Frederick Steiner, dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. “But his singular brilliance and scope of accomplishment is worthy of this [endowed chair].”

Howard Frumkin, dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Washington, said following Olmsted's example means designing the built environment to give people what studies have shown makes them happy: clean air, quiet, short commutes, contact with nature, beauty, and “third places” — areas outside of home and work where people can go to be social and enjoy life.

“Human well-being should serve as the north star on our trek toward sustainability,” he said.

Health is also a piece of that well-being, according to Richard Jackson, chair of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles Fielding School of Public Health. He noted that a 20-year-old’s lung function is a good predictor of how long he or she will live. Likewise, the quality of parks in an area can predict how long people in that area will live.

“If you want people to walk, you have to give them a place they want to walk,” Jackson said.

Of course, it requires public investment and political will to change cities’ approaches to streets, parks, and other parts of the urban landscape.

Any bold idea that transforms how cities are using land is bound to be controversial, according to Diane Davis, a Harvard professor of urbanism and development. And since cities are constantly changing, the politics of sustainability is also always shifting. So it comes down to leadership, she said.

“Mayors are key players in transforming the urban landscape,” Davis said in her presentation. "But designers have to help. They need to be able to think like politicians and help the politicians think technically."

Congress for the New Urbanism’s incoming President and CEO Lynn Richards said both designers and politicians need to think in terms of building infrastructure that meets multiple needs. Cities can’t just spend billions of dollars installing pipes to handle storm water. Those projects need to have other benefits for the community as well, she said.

In cities where no land remains to create new green space, maybe that means thinking about using projects to connect existing parks across a region, Richards said, drawing parallels with Olmsted’s linear parks. Maybe it means making our streets places for people rather than just cars, she said, and making our built environment feel more like parks.

Some communities are starting to experiment with those kinds of ideas, turning urban roads back into something resembling the parkways Olmsted created to accommodate all kinds of transportation modes.

The term these days is “complete streets,” which Elizabeth Macdonald defined as providing for multiple forms of movement and gathering while also providing for urban greening.

Macdonald, an associate professor of urban design at the University of California, Berkeley, said it’s possible for more communities to build urban parkways like Olmsted’s.

“No [user] gets everything [they want], but everyone gets a lot,” Macdonald said. Designers don’t have to solve every possible problem, she said, which just leads to designing bad streets.