Recycling Spaces

Book excerpt: Cities are constantly evolving: Growing, shrinking, diversifying, sprawling, and densifying. Each phase of evolution brings a unique set of challenges to urban areas for how to remain vital and healthy for long-term sustainability. One of the most important questions facing urban centers today is how to keep people attracted to live in, invest in, and participate in the city. Recycling Spaces focuses on these questions broadly through conversations with experts in the fields of landscape, economics, and urbanism, and specifically through the work of world-renowned landscape architectural office, Martha Schwartz Partners. Martha Schwartz Partners breathes life into cities and neighborhoods by creating spaces that that make people feel emotionally connected, engaged, and invested in the long-term viability of the place. Places that resonate with people are sustainable places. This expanded notion of sustainability, is the basis of the firm's public work, and is illustrated here by a selection of the firms recent and ongoing design projects.