July 20, 2006
Working for a greener future: Open Space Seattle 2100 brings UW, community together
No one can read the future. But if we’re properly informed and keep an open mind, maybe we can write some of it — and in doing so, help protect the ecology and lifestyle of the Seattle area for generations to come.
That’s the hope of a Seattle-based UW-community partnership called Open Space Seattle 2100, bringing together dozens of public, government, business and conservation agencies with a shared aim of ecological preservation and the pursuit of a “greener” lifestyle.
Fueled by the enthusiasm and energy of Nancy Rottle, UW assistant professor of landscape architecture, and the creative visions of about 350 students and community members, Open Space Seattle 2100 seeks to provide an alternative to a future of unchecked urban density, oil dependence and environmental degradation — to design, as program notes gracefully state, “an ideal city for the next century, knitted by an extensive cloth of green.”
Rottle directs Open Space Seattle 2100 with fellow landscape architect Brice Maryman of the Seattle firm Charles Anderson and Associates, who also is a UW lecturer in landscape architecture. The two have a bit of startup funding from the nonprofit Urban Land Institute, the UW and the City of Seattle.
“In order to have the future we want,” Rottle said, summing up the project, “we need to create a vision and a roadmap for how to get there.”
But to understand the origins of Open Space Seattle 2100, it’s best to go about a century back, to 1903. That’s when John Charles Olmsted of Olmsted Brothers, a landscape architecture firm out of Brookline, Mass. (the one that designed New York’s Central Park), was brought in to plan a park and boulevard system for Seattle that was designed to support the city for the next century, until the population had increased to half a million.
“The founding families of the city gave a gift to generations that followed them,” Maryman said. “We have achieved that 100-year time frame, and now the question is, what are we going to do for the next 100 years?”
That question became the starting point for what organizers called the Green Futures Charette (or, an intensive design brainstorming session), held over a two-day period in February at the South Lake Union Armory. There, 33 student team leaders and about 300 professional and community members, comprising 23 teams, worked on areas of Seattle divided not by neighborhoods or other human-made lines but by watersheds. The participants were asked to brainstorm freely, charged with two basic tasks: First, to create a plan for the their team’s watershed, designating areas that, in their views, should be preserved or developed as open space; and second, to develop designs for spaces within those areas. They did this for a 20-year plan, and again for a 100-year plan.
Rottle said the charette participants had to factor in several predictions of major changes to come, in population, lifestyle and, perhaps most dramatically, climate change, based on the Seattle Comprehensive Plan and other predictive information. Among these were:
- A predicted increase in Seattle population of 75,000 by 2020, to a total of about 642,000, and an increase by 2100 to more than a million people.
- The impacts of climate change will include wilder weather swings, less snowpack, more drought conditions and a possible increase in Puget Sound waters of between 1 and 3 feet. (“And we were a little bit conservative” said Rottle.)
- Other factors: Transportation will have evolved, a major earthquake may by then have taken place along the “Seattle Fault,” waste streams will be recaptured and used as a resource, clean air and water may be “commodified” among cities, and “natural capital” will be valued.
But above all, the participants were told to be bold, creative and fearless in innovating new open spaces for the city. Rottle said the charette was meant to bring out creativity more than to face all the practical questions of funding and implementation just yet. “If you get hit too soon with ‘can’ts,’ you can’t get to what’s possible,” she said.
In summing up the charette, Rottle wrote that proposals included:
- “A new salt-water lagoon where a shallow earthquake fault line runs south of downtown,”
- “vast new swaths of green space above a lidded Interstate 5,”
- “reclamation of public shorelines as Puget Sound waters rise in response to global climate change, and …”
- “model, self-sustaining eco-villages that supply their own energy, food and wastewater treatment.”
Through the use of geographic information systems technology, the different views of the city generated by the charrette and later refined by the students were collated into maps reflecting the city’s “green infrastructure,” both at 20 years and at 100 years out. These fascinating, futuristic illustrations were given to city leaders and also are installed on the walls of Odegaard Undergraduate Library, for a few more days. They will continue to be available online, however, at the project’s Web site, at http://www.open2100.org/.
If comments in the exhibit’s guestbook are any indication, many students passing by the Open Space Seattle 2100 posters hanging in the Odegaard library have been drawn in and impressed. One wrote, “This is what Seattle looks like in my dreams” and another commented, “You people are my heroes — I want to be like you when I grow up.” The comments were not all uncut praise, however; one practical-minded viewer noted, “An interesting prospect, but how will you convince the enormous number of potentially displaced property-owners to move?”
The charette phase of Open Space Seattle 2100 was the dreamy, no-holds-barred period of creativity, but, as Maryman said, the next stage will be more reality-based: how to get it noticed, funded and implemented.
“The thrust of the project was visionary,” said Maryman, “getting a lot of ideas on the table and beginning the discussion — tilling the field.” Next, he said, comes “the time to start weeding out the best and worst ideas.”
But perhaps the best part of the process, he said, was watching “the engagement between the students and all of these professional and community members, with the idea of instilling responsible, active, participatory citizenship within students, but at the same time to keep the academic focus.”
Rottle said another result of the ongoing project is the coming creation of a University center to be called the Green Futures Institute, “to strengthen the University’s role in helping to shape Seattle’s public spaces.” For Rottle, who has dedicated her teaching, research and service time to the project, the institute may also provide needed funding to continue her work of helping urban environments become more ecological.
In May, the Open Space Seattle 2100 advisory committee formally asked Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels and his administration to support the program by hiring a consultant to refine the plan, forming a task force to oversee the next planning step, and to begin studying the idea of a levy, replacing a current parks levy, to pay for some of the needed property acquisitions and changes.
The vision of Open Space Seattle 2100 breaks down into five main parts: to dream it up, to advocate it, to adopt it, to fund it, and finally, to start implementing projects.
As Rottle and Maryman wrote together in an article about the project, “The work of the Open Space Seattle 2100 coalition has tilled the soil; now citizens are challenging the City to plant the seeds for a new green infrastructure system.”
