Ecological Design & Soil Ecology: Down-and-dirty courses
Ecological Design Approaches to Brownfield Redevelopment
By Danielle J Kahn
In the Fall 2007 semester, the University of Michigan Graham Environmental Sustainability Institute (GESI) sponsored an interdisciplinary brownfields course taught by landscape architecture professor Joan Nassauer. Many landscape architecture students participated in the course, along with students in law, policy, business, urban planning and engineering.
The course, Ecological Design Approaches to Brownfield Redevelopment, examined the rapidly evolving field of brownfield redevelopment through the lens of a cutting edge case study: the Harbor Point Redevelopment Project in Stamford, Connecticut. Each week, one or more experts spoke about a brownfield development topic, including brownfield law, liability and risk, insurance, real estate investment and finance, remediation, public planning and design, community involvement, environmental toxicology, and landscape ecology. Many of the experts who spoke to the class were from the Harbor Point project's development team, while several were University of Michigan professors, including Rita Loch Caruso (toxicology expert) and Jeremy Semrau (remediation expert). One noteworthy visiting lecturer was Andy Altman, who oversaw the Harbor Point planning process and hiring of the development team, and who previously served as the Planning Director for Washington, D.C., as well as the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Anacostia Waterfront Corporation, which spearheaded a nationally recognized urban redevelopment initiative to revitalize Washington, D.C.'s waterfront.
In addition to lectures, students took a field trip to visit the Harbor Point project. On the way to Stamford, Connecticut, the class visited several brownfield redevelopment case studies in the New York area, including Newport in Jersey City, the High Line in Manhattan, and the Rheingold Brewery Redevelopment Project in Brooklyn. In Stamford, students visited the Harbor Point site and participated in a two-day project charette. During the charette, project teams narrowed their topics and defined their projects, which became the basis for the rest of the semester's work. Projects addressed a wide array of brownfield redevelopment issues, including community organizing, community land trusts, preserving community identity, LID (Low Impact Development), use of LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), ecotoxicity, and global warming and sea level rise (See article titled Building Future Resilience: Minimizing Risk on Coastal Brownfield Development in light of Global Climate Change). The semester culminated with a presentation of final projects to a panel of invited guests, including George Andrews, a civil engineer at Loureiro Associates, Stamford, CT; Andy Hoffman, Professor and Co-Director of the University of Michigan Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise; Mike Long, brownfield insurance expert, Stamford, CT; Matt Naud, City of Ann Arbor Environmental Coordinator; and Jeremy Semrau, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Faculty Fellow for Research at the Graham Environmental Sustainability Institute.
Several project teams have applied to display posters of their final projects at the Poster Gallery of the 2008 National Brownfields Conference in Detroit.
NRE 430 - Soil Ecology
Presented in cartoon format!
