TREES to retrofit Los Angeles with urban vegetation at schools

Los Angeles is eliminating nearly 2 million square meters of pavement at local schools. This "de-paving" project is part of a wider effort of the Trans-Agency Resources for Environmental and Economic Sustainability (TREES) coalition, which includes an extensive strategic tree planting program.

TreePeople's T.R.E.E.S. Project stands for Transagency Resources for Environmental and Economic Sustainability. The project employs technologies that mimic the “sponge and filter” function of trees. It also demonstrates the technical and economic feasibility (and desirability) of retrofitting a city to function as an urban forest watershed.

In cities across the U.S. there is often not enough room for trees to capture all of the rainwater. The T.R.E.E.S. Project serves exactly that function, by advocating for a citywide system of cisterns and infiltrators to help capture stormwater runoff and recharge the aquifer -- just like a mature oak tree. This innovation also reduces the amount of pollution that reaches our rivers and ocean.

If implemented citywide, these best management practices could

Decrease our dependence on imported water by 50% and still keep the city green;

Reduce the threat of flooding and the quantity of toxic runoff to beaches and the ocean;

Cut the flow of solid waste to landfills by 30%

Improve air and water quality;

Decrease our energy dependence; and

Beautify neighborhoods in ways that would create up to 50,000 new jobs.


Lessons Learned: A Symposium on School Design
LAUSD / USC School of Architecture / J . PAUL GETTY Trust

The subject for this session of the symposium was Exterior Spaces. The general assumption underlying much of the discussion was that LAUSD building sites are getting and will increasingly get smaller and smaller over time thereby requiring buildings to become more vertical and reducing the amount of exterior open space available for use.

Increasingly, landscapes will exist on terra firma less and less, but will need to be conceived of at a variety of levels and on artificial surfaces. Current thinking needs to move from traditional notions of schoolyard exterior spaces of grass and playing fields to a concept for diverse environments with an appreciation for the climate and environment of Southern California.

There was a sense that everyone wished to integrate the curriculum with the outdoors including more exterior teaching stations. Teaching stations outdoors at the moment are very narrowly understood and should be revisited and imagined creatively by the LAUSD and everyone involved in their making. Exterior classrooms need to be defined as such and not nebulously conceived of as just another an aspect of a playground.

'Does the LAUSD have an expert in this area that can help set goals for play, recreation, and the integration of curricula with the outdoors?' Those desiring this philosophical reflection felt that often architects and landscape architects, drawing from personal experiences, were left as the harbingers of the values of exterior space and left to fight for these spaces relegated to secondary importance for one reason or another.

Creative programming and new ways of maximizing the use and appreciation of what the school has to offer is encouraged. In fact, contemporary examples have shown that when a community feels proud of their school, they become personally invested in, and begin to take responsibility for its maintenance and care - either in the form of planting and gardening or work parties to keep the school clean.

Key Issues:
Diverse Environments: Current thinking needs to move from traditional notions of schoolyard exterior spaces of grass and playing fields to a concept for diverse environments with an appreciation for the climate and environment of Southern California. Spaces of a variety of scales and material character should be designed to accommodate many different programs with differing physical activity levels for day, night, and weekend programming.

Problems:
Landscape architecture in general, and the design and planning of exterior spaces enters the project design sequence too late in the process. With the myriad of requirements the architect is expected to incorporate, the consideration of exterior spaces often gets postponed until the landscape architect joins the process. Typically, the landscape architect is contracted after the project had passed through the Design Review Board.

Opening schools to the community at night or on the weekends, while agreed to by all as a very important thing to do, puts incredible pressure on already over taxed landscapes, further reducing the possibility of foliage and other maintenance intensive aspects of the exterior space. An example of a space suffering from these pressures is the playing fields. The intensive, year round curriculum of the LAUSD system makes it difficult to re-sod the playing fields (which can take up to two months).

Many of the decisions for the exterior spaces of the school are made based on the cost at time of construction without consideration of the long term Maintenance & Overhead costs to the school. This is partly a problem of the structure of government funding policy. Sustainable materials for example, which may help reduce lifecycle costs and save the school money in the long run cannot be funded from Maintenance & Overhead budgets which is a common accounting procedure in the private sector.

Trees, as with most live materials, are generally difficult to include in school projects because they are so physically challenged. Saplings have difficulty surviving their early years of growth while more mature trees are generally too costly to include in the budgets.

Existing trees on the site, if any are always difficult to work around and generally wanted to be removed for ease of construction.

Maintenance and gardening costs also increase.

Considerations such as fire lanes or parking tend to eliminate possible locations for placement.

Trees are also viewed as problems in the main meeting spaces because they are seen to impinge on the flexibility and visibility that those spaces require.

Lastly, some voiced concerns that architects eliminate trees from their schemes for fear of obscuring the appreciation of the elevations of the buildings.

Design opportunities:
Because of the increasingly intensive use of our schools, new materials should be explored which will stand up to the challenges of increased, year-round usage. The example of the pressures that playing fields are subjected to must be considered an opportunity to explore other options for surfaces which are capable of withstanding intensive use.

Because less and less exterior space is left on the ground which we have always traditionally associated with usable exterior space, we must now consider the use of the tops and sides of buildings or garages as viable spaces for play or use. Also, because schools are now becoming multi-level, exterior program areas can be developed at a variety of levels throughout the project.

PROJECT EXAMPLE: Central LA Area new high school:

The main design concept for the landscaping lies in a series of formally distinguished, smaller, sub-spaces specifically programmed with a direct relationship to the activities going on in the adjacent buildings, all of which help frame the large central courtyard.

The main courtyard itself has a direct connection to the ampitheater and can be used for both large groups and teaching sites. Some of the other exterior spaces were a walled off music garden, a sunken court for the art studios, and reading gardens outside the ampitheatre.


Special features of school projects:

An herb garden located adjacent to a 'culinary arts center'.

A desert garden outside the second floor library doubles as an outdoor teaching center.

Benches and ground paving of colored concrete (considered rare for LAUSD projects because of cost). This was possible because the ampitheatre itself doubled as a stairway thereby eliminating the need for a second stair.

Many of the trees for the project (such as the grove of trees between the football and baseball fields) include donation by local nurseries and benefactors.

A garden just outside the library functions as a teaching site.

Placement of a small vegetable garden adjacent to the Kindergarten adding an outdoor and environmentally conscious element to the curriculum

The asphalt was painted in a variety of colored stripes to make the paving more lively and playful

Experiments with chain link fence were made to reduce the ordinary quality of it.

Specified decomposed granite in certain locations

Alternative materials for sound abatement were explored and deployed.

Create a conspicuous presence of trees. Find a way to be inclusive and protective of them; set aside funding for their maintenance. Many of the practitioners present recalled that the most prevalent memories from their own school years were memories of the trees on the campus. Use their intrinsic qualities to your advantage: ways of providing shade, gathering nodes, their natural ability to aesthetically soften spaces, controlling passive solar gain, etc. The LAUSD currently has a guidebook of acceptable trees which provides a diverse array of opportunities.


LAUSD will be opening up 243 acres of open space to communities all over Los Angeles in the coming years. These spaces are for the community. Because Los Angeles is in such dire need for new seats and space for a continually growing student body, the new buildings right now have a certain 'triage status' - mostly focusing on the provision of these seats.

VOLUNTEER COORDINATION?

As different each site is from one another, maintenance is as well. It has been shown that if the community feels proud of and connected with these spaces, parents, grand-parents, involved citizens and even some of the children will come on weekends and personally clean or plant these spaces out of care for the community at-large.