A pragmatic plan for tree equity in Los Angeles.

Until recently, green space was considered an ‘amenity’. But thankfully that perspective has shifted, accelerated by a global pandemic that exposed how essential access to quality urban green space is to human health. Today, we are reckoning with decades (and decades) of systemic lack of urban canopy in low income neighborhoods, finally confronting this poignant social and environmental injustice. Anyone living, working, and playing in these communities disproportionately bears the brunt of exposure to toxic, polluted air, water and the effects of extreme heat. Imagine sitting for a moment, at an exposed bus stop, on a sweltering 90 degree day surrounded by nothing but white-hot concrete. With no shade or shelter, and the constant bombardment of choking fumes from exhaust and dust, it takes but a few moments to realize that green infrastructure is absolutely not an ‘amenity’, but a necessity and right of every human being.

Los Angeles is a prime example of the scale of the problem. Tree-lined streets and backyards and public open space can generally be found in whiter, wealthier areas; meanwhile, low-income Angelenos of color are far more likely to be exposed to the high temperatures and air pollution that are associated with lower tree canopy. When compounded with disparities in access to healthcare and transportation, the existing inequity in tree cover across the city has major implications for the health, wellbeing, and quality of life of millions of L.A. residents. According to TreePeople the average existing canopy in the county is 20%, as opposed to the national average of 27%. Yet, in the majority of low income communities, we see averages of 5-8% tree canopy.

In 2019, the L.A. Green New Deal plan was proposed by the Mayor’s office. Amongst many other benchmarks, it strives to plant 90,000 trees by 2021, with the focus on increasing the tree canopy in low income communities by 50%. A tall order that can feel insurmountable when faced with real on the ground challenges. When analyzing typical streetscapes and urban intersections, the obstacles stack up with issues arising from the simplest of interventions. Large concrete driveway aprons, underground utilities and overhead power lines impinge even on simple tree planting efforts. Minimal soil volume, watering, and visibility issues, coupled with aesthetic and shared maintenance conflicts, derail more ambitious efforts and of course, removing any parking is a hot button issue. Yet, we have to navigate these barriers and find solutions to this intractable problem.

Recently, our team worked with a multidisciplinary team including City Plants, CAPA Strategies, TreePeople, the City's Chief Forestry Officer, as well as representatives from Streets and other city departments to help produce an Urban Forest Equity Streets Guidebook for the City of Los Angeles. The team’s research delves into the history of redlining and links disparities in tree cover with the long-term impacts of disinvestment and racial segregation. Working from case studies on ten streets (selected from across the city, and within some of the most socially vulnerable and those facing intense heat challenges, with a focus on South LA, East LA and the Northeast SF Valley to demonstrate varying conditions) the guidebook identifies challenges to implementation, potential trade-offs, and proposed improvements at multiple tiers of investment.

The plan breaks down improvements into 3 tiers. At tier 1, the team identifies opportunities that can be implemented with minimal cost and infrastructural change. For example, in Los Angeles available open parkways and private property were identified and solutions for easy low-cost planting presented. Yet, the reality is that even if all tier 1 sites were planted, the city would not achieve its 50% goal. Thus, the team proposed tier 2 interventions requiring more change and associated costs, and ultimately tier 3 solutions which involved new infrastructure like curb extensions and creating bike lanes and medians that would also help to calm traffic and filter stormwater run-off.

Before

Before

After

After

This framework offers a pragmatic, actionable plan to dramatically expand L.A.’s urban forest in the areas where trees are most urgently needed. It acknowledges the constraints and trade-offs while also providing solutions that can serve as a benchmark for other cities.

Learning resilience during Covid-19.

Image: © Mike Belleme

The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored and compounded systemic issues within nearly every sector of society, from healthcare to transportation to supply chains. It has forced disruption in previously inflexible systems and exposed the deeply rooted inequities and systemic racism that place people of color, immigrants, and lower-income individuals at significantly greater risk of economic and health impacts from disruptive events.

Climate change—an ongoing, yet slower-to-arrive threat—will have similar effects. Increased storms, coastal flooding, excess heat, drought, and other impacts will further expose and exacerbate the vulnerability and inequity created by our historic actions unless we begin now to dismantle these systemic patterns and realign our values to include and prioritize the most vulnerable members of our community. What we learn now through our failures and successes in response to COVID should serve as a lesson in adaptation and flexibility—in other words, a lesson in resilience

Our collective COVID response has shown that we can be flexible, that we can adapt and shift systems to new conditions and set aside regulatory and other limits in order to create new systems in a time of crisis. We have seen these adaptations across scales. Cities have made way for outdoor dining, redirected traffic to expand dining capacity, and created pedestrian-focused “shared streets” for community access and exercise. Restaurants have adapted in numerous ways, from shifting to outdoor dining and partial service to changing their menu entirely, depending on community need and the resources on hand. Others have gone so far as “burning it all down” and moving away from the cook-and-serve restaurant model entirely, as Irene Li of Mei Mei in Boston chose as the most appropriate “pivot” to make. Hospitals and health care facilities built critical-care centers in parking lots and manufacturing companies rapidly shifted operations to produce critically needed PPE. And textile-based companies added masks to their repertoire, often donating masks to critical communities for each mask purchased.

These shifts showed us that we have greater range than we have previously allowed for. Regulatory change is generally slow. Emergency-response projects undertaken due to COVID offer insight into moving such projects more rapidly through pilots and ongoing adaptation. Crucial to the future relevance of these projects is the scale at which they operate. Altering an entire block as an experimental response allows us to envision a new normal in a way that a single property or business making change does not. Similar to a pop-up store going online before opening a brick-and-mortar shop, these efforts can be a temporary means to gather data, experience new modes of interaction, and troubleshoot failures before we make wholesale regulatory transformation or spend decades planning to get all the pieces into place.

It would be short-sighted of us not to learn from these temporary measures and imagine how our cities could be structured to favor pedestrians over cars, to focus resources on the neighborhoods that are most in need, and implement systems that prioritize flexibility and community wellbeing over individual gain.

IT WOULD BE SHORT-SIGHTED NOT TO LEARN FROM COVID AS A TEST FOR THE UNSTABLE FUTURE THAT CLIMATE PREDICTIONS FORCE US TO ANTICIPATE.

It would similarly be short-sighted not to learn from COVID as a test for the unstable future that climate predictions force us to anticipate. Climate change will intensify the social and environmental challenges of communities that are already struggling with drought, food insecurity, housing insecurity, poor air quality, and high unemployment.

When COVID made it painfully clear that our health and our lives depended upon creating flexibility in healthcare and food-distribution systems, many communities responded creatively to test ideas and prioritize livelihoods and connection. We should approach creative solutions for the ongoing issues and climate-based risks, particularly those faced by low-income, historically disenfranchised populations and the farms and farmers that produce our food supply, with the same urgency, as though our health and our lives depend upon them. They do.

This essay was originally published in Designing the City we Want. Calls to action from the Van Alen Council in response to Covid-19.

Amy Whitesides expands role, focusing on Resiliency & Research.

As with any organization, Stoss is all about the people whose passion, focus and expertise drives the work. Meet Amy Whitesides. Amy has been an integral leader at Stoss for over 10 years, helping to shape both the firm’s portfolio and the studio’s culture. She has directed numerous award-winning projects that focus on environmental sustainability and resilience, including the Trinity River Waterfront in Dallas, Vision Galveston on Galveston Island, North Shore Promenades in Edmonton, and various Climate Ready Boston district planning studies including East Boston & Charlestown and Downtown.

In 2021, we are pleased to announce that she will build on her expertise as Director of Resiliency and Research. In this capacity, Amy will continue to build the practice’s climate related knowledge, bringing new insight and solutions to both the internal team and externally through her involvement with the Van Alen Climate Council, Stone Living Lab, ASLA, as well as teaching climate-related studios at Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Amy’s background in landscape, ecology and biology informs all aspects of her work and sparks a keen interest in the role of landscape in food production and in mitigating climate change. In addition, her life-long passion for open water swimming and surfing literally keeps her in touch with the effects of sea-level rise on the ocean and most critically along the shore. Currently, she is overseeing multiple waterfront design and redevelopment efforts in Boston, at the L Street Power Station, as well as a major renovation to Moakley Park–Boston’s most significant open space investment since Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace. She is also collaborating with our frequent partners in design, Weston & Sampson on coastal resilience engineering and design projects at Ryan Playground in Charlestown and along the waterfront in East Boston. And with Arcadis on Coastal Resiliency Planning on Nantucket Island. Amy’s work is sensitive to context and larger ecological systems while advocating for greater diversity and equity in the types of social spaces and open space experiences available in the City. 

Currently serving as a Design Critic at the GSD, Amy previously taught landscape history and studio courses at Northeastern University and University of Toronto. She is a graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Design where she obtained a Master of Landscape Architecture. As we head into the new year and Amy dives into her new role, we asked her a couple of questions.

How does your love for the water, as a swimmer and surfer, play into your focus on climate resiliency? What changes have you personally witnessed in the water or along the edge in your lifetime?

It is central to my interest in design and resilience specifically.  I have seen first-hand how dramatic the experience of being at the water and physically immersing yourself into it can be in people’s lives, my own and others. I used to volunteer with an organization that took kids with various physical and mental challenges out to surf. Watching kids who lived inland get out on a surfboard and into the water for the first time ever is incredible and solidifies the need for us to keep this resource public–and be the best stewards we can be. One way we do that is to ensure that protecting ourselves from coastal storms doesn’t cut us off from the water. In Boston in particular, a lot of work has gone into making the harbor safe and turning the City’s attention to the harbor as a public resource. Planning for coastal resilience needs to build on this work, not set us back to a time in which we ignore it and worse, make it uninhabitable for us and the marine life we rely on and admire. 

Living in coastal California for many years, I saw a lot of erosion and shifting beaches. The response to this has largely been development of hard infrastructure such as seawalls and fabricated cliff faces. It’s nice to hear more discussion today of nature-based solutions and opportunities for living shorelines and ongoing management tactics that allow for changing conditions that seek to improve ecological value while protecting human resources. 

You have an ecology background, how have you been able to incorporate this into your resiliency planning work for both coastal and inland projects?

My background in ecology drives my interest in resiliency planning. It doesn’t come into play per se, but informs how I think about resiliency and the values I put forward as we make decisions on what to prioritize. I want the city to thrive, but I want it to do so alongside a thriving ecology, in the water and out. Planning for stormwater management, improved canopy and coastal parklands helps to promote that. 

The City of Boston has been very proactive in planning for climate change and you have worked on a number of projects for them that have set the bar. Is the city shifting into implementation mode? Are you starting to see them act on the plans?

Yes! We are currently working on 3 projects that have emerged from the district scale planning and are moving into site-specific vision and design development in the coming years. Two of those were direct outcomes of our work on the East Boston and Charlestown Coastal Resilience Solutions project in 2017. 

Moakley Park is not well known in Boston but plays a huge role in protecting the city from storm surge, how might your work on this project inform how other coastal cities can adapt to a changing climate?

Moakley Park is a great opportunity to showcase many innovative design principles and solutions to very difficult challenges.  The Vision Plan itself is a good model for how city planning can lead to site-specific implementation and continue to coordinate with state and local entities to ensure construction aligns with adjacent efforts to complete a stretch of coastal flood protection. As we move through the design, we know that we will encounter many sub-grade challenges from varied urban soil conditions that tend toward subsidence to high groundwater and the presence of critical utilities. Stay -tuned for more as we collaborate with our engineering team to develop creative design solutions to these challenges. 

You are leading research initiatives at Stoss. What issues are you exploring, what areas of the practice are you looking forward to expanding in 2021?

Right now I am focusing on two efforts, one in Boston and one in Los Angeles. In Boston I’m coordinating with researchers at UMass through the Stone Living Lab. We’re working on ways to expand their research on seawall materials into the urban environment and hope to further expand this in the future. In Los Angeles, Stoss Associate, Davi Schoen, and I are working with City Plants and Tree People on a visualization of their efforts to establish principles and planning for tree equity in LA County. This means really looking at the current conditions of the tree canopy and evaluating how and where to increase canopy while focusing on the neighborhoods and communities that have historically suffered health and excess heat conditions that result from low canopy levels. 

The resurgence and resilience of urban forestry.

Rendering of the proposed urban forest at Triangle Park, Cambridge, MA.

Increasingly, a spotlight is trained on the layered benefits of the urban forest, highlighting the significant impact they can have on everything from climate adaptation to human wellness and mental health. Notwithstanding that trees can improve property values by as much as 15 percent, more critically they are instrumental in the mitigation of urban heat island effect, in improving air quality by absorbing pollutants such as nitrogen oxides, ammonia, sulfur dioxide and ozone, and urban forests are a key green infrastructure tool in the management of stormwater. And, it is critical to note that disadvantaged communities, particularly black, Indigenous and people of color are more impacted by the absence of trees further exacerbating the negative effects of climate change.

We are becoming a more urbanized nation. The U.S. Forest Service identifies urban forests as, “dynamic ecosystems that provide critical benefits to people and wildlife. By reducing noise and providing places to recreate, urban forests strengthen social cohesion, spur community revitalization, and add economic value to our communities.” According to the Los Angeles Urban Forestry division, “a properly selected and maintained tree can reduce summer cooling cost by 10 to 50 percent.” In addition, “trees produce oxygen, and a mature tree can produce enough oxygen annually to meet the needs of a family of four for an entire year.” 

It’s no surprise then that municipalities are increasingly developing urban forestry programs to evaluate, maintain and expand the urban forest canopy. The City of Cambridge is no exception and is developing a master plan to provide guidelines, goals, objectives, targets and best practices for the city's urban forests. As a demonstration, our team is currently working with the city on a naturalized forest habitat in a tough urban context. Triangle Park is one of three small urban parks designed as part of a new open space initiative. As a small ‘leftover’ space within a quickly developing area of Cambridge, this park is surrounded on three sides by highly trafficked roads and dense architecture. 

Current conditions 2020.

The goal for this 1 acre park was to create a buffer zone from the busy street, but also address urban heat island effect, stormwater management, and biodiversity. The design concept was to bring a naturalized forest habitat into this frenetic urban environment but also provide both passive and active recreation opportunities for those who live and work in the neighborhood. To that end, the natural forest succession and gentle topography are punctuated with a custom concrete bench system with varying profiles that encourage both socialization and the ability to sit quietly and enjoy the lush surroundings.

Moakley Park, a case study in Inclusive community engagement.

Image ©Mike Belleme

Moakley Park is the kind of multi-functional, complex project that we love to tackle: it’s both a neighborhood amenity for South Boston and a waterfront destination for the entire city. It has room for active recreation—tennis, running, basketball, and baseball, among others—as well as enjoyment of the waterfront, family barbecues or picnics, kids’ activities and play, or community gatherings. When renovated, it can play a critical role in Boston’s ecology and resiliency on many fronts, mitigating impacts from urban heat island effect, coastal flooding, and major rain events. It’s a park that holds many different meanings for the cross-section of Bostonians who come to Moakley to play, walk, sit, run, and hang out each day. 

When a single space performs so many functions for so many people, how do we craft an effective engagement strategy? Continuous and sustained communication, through a variety of programs and formats, has so far proven to be the key to success. Prior to COVID-19 and the need for social distancing, the foundation of our engagement strategy was Community Open Houses and on-site events, including ‘Discover Moakley!’—a daylong community event organized to bring fun and energy to the park with local vendors, an activated street, and booths for community input and resiliency education. We amplified these efforts with digital and physical surveys, one-on-one interviews, and mapping activities; these allowed us to initiate conversations with community members about how the park is used, and to better understand their hopes and dreams for the future of the park. 

Throughout the process, we tested a number of new tools. For ‘Discover Moakley!’, we facilitated an interactive activity in which participants poured water over different surfaces to see the rate of water infiltration, creating a demonstration of green infrastructure principles and porous pavement in action. In partnership with Boston Parks and Recreation, we developed a Moakley Park coloring book which we disseminated through social media, creating an opportunity for younger park users to participate.

This spring and summer, the COVID-19 pandemic has demanded a rapid transformation of existing engagement and outreach. This challenge has pushed us to generate ideas for engagement that overcome both existing and new barriers to participation and from which we can build better outreach practices, especially for those traditionally left out of typical processes, using strategies such as online surveys, virtual tours, and interactive video meetings. 

A previously recorded public forum during the Covid-19 pandemic on the Moakley Park project.

As we move into the next phase of work on the project, we are striving to engage even more voices to weigh in on the future of Moakley Park. It’s a process that requires commitment, time, honesty, and a willingness to gather input; self-critical assessment of our successes and failures; and tailoring our process to meet ever-evolving needs. We believe that meaningful engagement plants seeds that bear fruit far beyond the design process—and we hope that Moakley Park will continue to be loved by many generations to come. Learn more about Moakley Park!

Do you live in Boston? Would you like to to take the Moakley Park survey…. click here!

Seawall models engage Galveston residents in designing their future.

photo: ©2019 Mike Belleme

For planning projects at the city-scale, civic engagement is an essential tool to empower the public to actively participate in envisioning the future of their communities. If done authentically, with an open mind and a willingness to make it comfortable for people to share their stories, the process can be informative and provide a much-needed context regarding the complexities inherent in making urban design choices. The best engagement strategies are people-centric, hands-on, and creative.

A recent resiliency project in Galveston, Texas, offers a peek at how these types of gamified engagement exercises can both inform the design team and thoughtfully engage the public. Galveston is built on a barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico and is a small city with a history of hurricane devastation, most notably in 2008 when hurricane Ike made landfall. A 13-foot storm surge flooded nearly the entire island and in the immediate aftermath, the City’s population dropped from 57,000 to 48,000. 

The project began with an ambitious goal; to develop a community vision plan for Galveston by engaging at minimum 15% of the population. The team, a collaboration between Huitt-Zollars, Asakura Robinson, Mass Economics and Stoss proposed several initiatives that ultimately led to ‘Vision Galveston’, the framework plan that was developed through three rounds of public outreach. Throughout the process, the engagement team focused on involving as many as people as possible, especially the traditionally underrepresented, seeking groups that represented the diversity of Galveston in age, race, sex, and geography.

One of the highlights of the engagement process was an interactive exercise that involved developing a series of 3D printed seawall options that people could shuffle in order to design their ideal promenade, seawall and beach configuration. The seawall, a 10-mile long concrete barrier protecting downtown Galveston from tropical hurricanes, is central to Galveston’s identity and much beloved by the community. In fact, the Seawall is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. According to the report, “Recommendations and concerns regarding the Seawall were raised during the outreach process. This included requests for better access—more parking, free parking, improved connection to public transit, and safe crossings across the busy Seawall Blvd. … There were requests for better amenities for recreational activities along the boulevard and diversifying the land use and businesses across the street from the beach. Since the Seawall is central to the identity of Galvestonians, many people requested further beautification to the Seawall, using landscaping and other means.”

In order to better understand and convey these types of interventions, the Stoss team modeled, then 3D printed various configurations of the promenade, the seawall and the beach which allowed residents to configure their ideal sections. Seawall options included access ramps, a grand staircase, shaded overlooks, skate ramps and natural rocky shorelines. 

existing condition

ramps

grand staircase

shaded overlook

rocky shore

skate ramp

Seawall options paired with potential sea-level rise.

Public engagement poster.

During community events people were encouraged to play with the sections and share their preferred options which was then recorded by the design team. Not only did the team gather critical insight, but the community had an enjoyable time learning about the options and visualizing possibilities other than what exists there today. These types of exercises help transform a community’s mindset and pave the way for design innovation.

PROJECT DESIGN TEAM:
Chris Reed, Amy Whitesides, Lisa Hollywood, Rawan Alsaffar, Kanani D'Angelo, Chris Reznich

Water. Lifeblood to landscape.

“Where the waters do agree, it is quite wonderful the relief they give.”
― Jane Austen

No doubt, water is central to the ways landscapes—designed and otherwise—work and thrive. Water has the ability to inspire a playfulness in people, a letting down of the guard, a sheer exuberance in the ways we engage with the environment.

In one way or another, water infiltrates our practice, whether designing a waterfront park subject to climate change and storm surge, or creating an urban plaza that collects stormwater allowing for infiltration and regeneration. More and more, our work involves the challenges of climate change and the re-creation of green infrastructure like marsh habitats that can absorb, filter and accommodate the natural ebb and flow of water—not to mention foster a rich biodiversity. Additionally, the opportunities to re-think our formerly active industrial waterfronts and ports are helping to re-establish the connection of water within the urban landscape.

While we fully acknowledge the important ecological and functional roles water plays in our lives, we also look to transcend the pragmatics of water flows and explore the experiential, the immersive, the sensorial, even the poetic aspects of water. For us, water is both medium and canvas to enhance, to engage in its life-giving powers, to recognize that both the imaginative and physical forces of water are both bigger than and beyond us. Water incites a sense of play and exuberance in people (and animals) that is infectious.

Here’s to recovering the nothingness and mystical powers of water in landscape and the city.

Citydeck

Sweeney Playground

Erie Street Plaza

Erie Street Plaza

Venice Beach

Coldbrook Edge

East Boston & Charlestown

Citydeck

Galveston

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Petra Geiger is Communication Director at Stoss landscape Urbanism. All black and white imagery Mike Belleme.  All imagery ©2019 Stoss Landscape Urbanism.

Employing a multi-layered approach to deal with sea-level rise.

Carson Beach, South Boston | Image ©2018 Mike Belleme

In Boston, sea level rise is a big deal with even bigger consequences. In fact, a 2018 study suggests, “that some 90,000 homes valued at $63 billion could face chronic flooding by the end of the century — and that’s just in Massachusetts”. With projected sea-level rise of 21 inches by 2050 and increasingly severe storms, Boston has made climate change planning a priority.

In working with the City of Boston on many of their Climate Ready Boston initiatives, such as Coastal Resilience Solutions for East Boston and Charlestown, Moakley Park and Downtown Boston, our team has been knee-deep (literally) in this complex issue. And we’ve learned, there are no easy solutions.

In approaching climate change, we advocate for a multi-layered approach, involving numerous strategies and facets that in combination are effective and actionable, creating spaces that protect, energize, educate, and set up thoroughly new experiences. Applying diverse types of protection methods in combination to achieve success—including green infrastructure, gray infrastructure and, ‘living with water’, our team begins with the foundational belief that infrastructure should do as much as possible, that investments in flood protection should provide multiple benefits including social, environmental and economic.

GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE

Green infrastructure as a tool to combat climate change can no longer be overlooked, it must be scaled up and considered as fundamental to the planning and design process. In this vein, streets, open spaces, even buildings and infrastructures can be designed to act as a resilient landscape, directing, collecting and absorbing water. In some cases, the sustainability measures we design are explicit, as with the lowland marsh that collects stormwater and creates new space for river flooding in Erie Street Plaza; here sustainability is made visible and produces a beautiful space or element that might not be otherwise possible.

Often, though, we try to create special experiences, to bring resilient solutions to life for people. Our quadrangle, Gerstacker Grove, at the University of Michigan, is designed with lush, shady stormwater gardens with interactive lighting features that flicker in response to stormwater entering the garden—amplifying and creating a unique experience.

GREY INFRASTRUCTURE

When we incorporate grey infrastructure, we recognize that, where structural systems are necessary for resilience strategies to be effective, they need to be integrated with aesthetic character and broader landscape improvements, or be tucked away out of sight during non-flooding conditions. Designing “hidden” flood protection structures, including passively or actively deployed flood walls, piers and coastal structures, underground stormwater and sewer infrastructure, and other systems that are part and parcel of the urban environment. In the case of City Deck in Green Bay, WI, storm water protection measures are built into the structure, the seating elements act as flooding barriers as well as discrete collection spots for drainage.

LIVING WITH WATER

Protection against coastal intrusion is not always the first goal of a climate-ready strategy. Being resilient means being able to bounce back, withstanding impacts while being changed by them and adapting accordingly. For example, an approach which allows for flooding in certain areas while consolidating protection in others may be an effective strategy that can help to mitigate the challenges of threading flood protection infrastructure through a dense urban environment. In addition, in key places the landscape can be designed to withstand and even benefit from coastal inundation such as in our L Street Power Plant project.

EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES 

Lastly, wherever possible we look for ways that resilience strategies can become educational opportunities. How can we bring resilience to life in ways that people feel closer connections to the waterfront, the urban environment, and their neighbors? How can we tune and amplify environmental cycles, through technology and even art, in ways that are meaningful to the daily lives of people and to the life of the city? How can we educate people (especially children) on climate change and resiliency measures? To these ends, we think creatively and inventively about social interactions and resilience. This may include ‘living with water’ strategies that bring people closer to the water as well as other means by which the creation of flood protection becomes part of a community building.

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Petra Geiger is Communication Director at Stoss Landscape Urbanism.