A 100-year plan for open spaces in the Emerald City

is the title of an op-ed piece in today's Seattle Times. From the article:

By the year 2100, Seattle is poised to double its current population. Along with this influx, our city will confront increased density, more compact urban centers and less reliance on automotive transport — all sound strategies to minimize our impact on climate change and reduce the pressure of suburban sprawl on our outlying farms and forests.

But what is missing in this laudable civic program is a long-term vision of how we will maintain our once-famous livability. Now is the time that we have to ask ourselves critical questions about the city our children will inherit. How will nature maintain itself within Seattle's concrete corridors? Where, in our constellation of urban hubs, will there be places to meet, talk with and engage our fellow citizens? How are we creating long-term strategic plans to invest in our green spaces in the same way we invest in transportation, sewage systems and communications infrastructure?

They are asking important questions that we need to be asking ourselves, in the "other" Washington, Washington, DC.

Given all the development plans for the City of Washington's green, open, or "opener" spaces (see the op-ed piece by Stuart Gosswein, "Emerald City: We Need to Honor the Plan for Washington's Green Space" from the Washington Post):

-- McMillan Reservoir
-- the U.S. Armed Forces Retirement Home
-- St. Elizabeth's Hospital Campus
-- development plans along the Anacostia River

as well as the desire for the city to continue to attract as many as 100,000 more residents compared to 1998 (and according to recent Census decisions, the city is on its way in terms of adding population) shouldn't we be asking these same questions, and addressing these issues on the same kind of timeline, for the next 100 years?

Instead, the question is how to develop all these places to cram more people in, when we need to look seriously at planning for open spaces and green infrastructure, as well as at adding housing in places where the extant infrastructure means that new residents can be added in a way that is sustainable and resource efficient. For example, commercial corridors are a good place for such housing, and it adds patrons to the potential customer base needed to make such districts successful and important connecting places in stable neighborhoods.

One such practical example is outlined in this piece from the Washington Business Journal, "14th St. center to give way to $100M redevelopment." which describes how a parking fronted strip shopping center is going to be redeveloped into ground-floor retail and 220 condos, within two blocks of the Columbia Heights subway station.
Paul Joseph Brown / Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Residents gather at the South Lake Union Armory to plot out Seattle's civic future at the Green Futures Design Charrette. The group in this photo was working on designs for Lake Union.

In Seattle, the Open Space 2100 project is a collaboration between the community and the University of Washington to create a 100-year plan for Seattle's open spaces. Hundreds of people participated in this volunteer effort, and detailed plans were developed for 18 different areas of the city. (See "Planners map out Seattle for next century: 350 participants in 'road map' event tackle issues" from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.)

The companion blog to the project also is full of interesting thinking on the issues.

Index Keywords: urban-design-placemaking; comprehensive-planning