These are responses to a recent question on SCUP’s LinkedIn group. You may want to contribute to it?

The question: “Can someone recommend good master planning precedents for campuses that are more wooded, where the traditional collegiate green is not the best answer? I have looked at Wellesley, Mills, UC Santa Cruz and Woods Hole Quissett Campus. Surely there are others?” And some of the responses already:

• Neither Indiana or Kansas have traditional collegiate greens, and both have wooded areas.
• JCU and Griffith in Australia are good examples too (not woods but more jungle like - same theory can be applied though)
• I would look at UC San Diego and UC Berkeley. Both have significant wooded areas on their campuses as part of the overall campus master plan. Here at Wisconsin, about a third (300 acres) of our main campus is within what we call the "Lakeshore Nature Preserve" which is mostly wooded as well. We have a master plan for the latter to manage vegetation and cultural resources along with academic research and outreach activities.
• Lewis & Clark College outside Portland, OR certainly comes to mind.
• You might also want to look at the master planned development of the UC Santa Cruz campus, set on a hill in a Redwood forest overlooking the city and ocean beyond. It was initially planned in 1964 and has undergone more recent planning updates. There are some very distinctive elements in their development guidelines. The campus architect Emeritus. Frank Zwart, FAIA, might be able to help you.
• Smith College. Arboretum master plan by Towers Golde.
• Swarthmore is largely arboretum. Guilford College in North Carolina has a tree filled center and large forested area.

 ^{Go directly to the original of the resource described below.}

Eran Ben-Joseph is a professor of urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of Rethinking A Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking. In this essay for The New York Times, he shares some of the book’s ideas and philosophy. (You can purchase the book at Amazon here and, without increasing your cost, the society will receive a small bit of revenue.)

Consider visiting and contributing to SCUP's LinkedIn discussion about if and how college and university campuses may be inventorying and valuing their trees, and how integrated that is to master planning and overall planning work. We're looking for people to share current best practices.

It turns out that a campus tree has more value, and more kinds of value, than most people would think. A 2006 study of the value of New York City's tree inventory is one of a number of such studies, reflecting a growing number of institutional entities which consider trees to have both capital and operational value. If your campus is planning in an integrated way, in fact, it makes good sense to understand your tree inventory and its value to the institution.

• The article linked-to here, mentions i-Tree, a free software suite that lets people managing tree inventories to do so while taking many important variables into account.
• If you have an interest in campus heritage landscapes, you should visit SCUP's Campus Heritage Planning Network where, among other resources, there are several reports on campus-wide heritage landscape planning.

Trees provide solar reflection for energy savings, clean air pollutants, and intercept water to reduce stress on storm water runoff. New York figured that measuring the value of its 600,000 trees in this way results in a savings for the city of nearly $120 per tree, annually. Figure in aesthetics and things like property value, public health (visible trees reduce the length of hospital stays), stress, and so forth, and another $90 per tree per year in value brings the total to $210 per tree.

In New York City, that is a total of $122M in benefits from a department of the city that spends less than $15M on trees and forestry staff, resulting in an annual net positive value to the city of more than $100M, from urban trees.

SCUP's LinkedIn group is growing, and is now beyond the size it needs to be, in order for real community to develop there.

A post in January by Michael Radner of Radner Design Associates asked colleagues for images and other information about campuses that have turned streets into landscaped or shared vehicular/pedestrian spaces. To date there have been 28 responses to Michael's query, many informative on the topic.

Below is a summary of the discussion thus far, by me. (Note that one new volunteer opportunity for SCUP members is finding, starting, participating in such conversations, and summarizing them in this manner It's a great way to dive into a topic for professional gain, and then share it with others.) 

Among other things, we learned that if you search for "woonerf," you find that term describes the concept, in the Netherlands and also in other parts of Europe, of a "street where pedestrians and cyclists have legal priority over motorists."

Both the University of Toronto and Ryerson University, with the cooperation of the City of Toronto, are piloting a one-year street closure on each of the campuses. It's part of the Toronto Walking Strategy. The University of Toronto's is called Willcocks Commons, and is partially pictured at left.

San Jose State University was part of a partnership that redeveloped West San Carlos Street, in San Jose, into a very much more pedestrian-friendly environment. Here's a brochure (PDF).

Here's a photo of St. Thomas University's Student Life Mall.

There are a lot of nice photos here of Texas State University. Scrolling down you will find images of the location where the university of turning what was Concho Street into the Concho Green landscape mall. SCUPer Nancy Nusbaum, an AVP at Texas State, shares the following:

"The two projects I would have mentioned are the Concho Green (closure of a street and parking to students living in nearby residence halls) and the North LBJ Bus Loop. Both have been highly successful in that we have received many favorable comments. We have conducted two surveys of the nearby student residents on the use of Concho Green since opening. You see students on the Concho Green every day - studying, exercising, visiting, playing, etc... We also have plans to close Bobcat Trail, another street in the core of campus, to convert it to a pedestrian mall. The project is currently waiting funding but will most likely begin in 2012. The schematic design is gorgeous."

In 1996, Worcester Polytechnic converted West Street to a pedestrian plaza. This nice, informal summertime tour of that campus offers some nice photos of the plaza, which is described as:

Reunion Plaza is pretty much the hub of WPI because it’s a relaxing gathering place and is right in front of the Campus Center. This part of campus actually used to be West Street not too long ago, and cut right through WPI to the other side. I think somewhere around 1997/98, WPI reclaimed it from the city and closed it off so that all of their pedestrian traffic would be safer. That’s also around the time the Campus Center was being built as well.

At Georgia Tech, the Fifth Street Bridge over I-75/I-85 connects the campus with the Midtown neighborhood. As noted here by the National Transportation Enhancements Clearinghouse, bicycle and pedestrian users of the bridge enjoy the stark contrast with the 14 lanes of traffic rushing under them. Maybe they feel like an Elk feels, while crossing a natural wildlife overpass (image at right).

Bucknell University landscaped over a former parking area and through way between its engineering and science buildings, creating a nice entrance for the Engineering Building.

Locust Walk, at the University of Pennsylvania, is listed in the Project for Public Spaces "Great Walks."

Berks Mall at Temple University was renamed Polett Walk, garnering some Facebook opposition. One post suggested that Temple was currently creating an "interior pedestrian walk," but we have found no further details about that.

Winona State University has, over time, developed from a city block transportation infrastructure to more of an open, pedestrian-oriented campus. At this link, to a student project, you can view old and more current aerial campus images, and also some geographical "morphs" over time.

Arizona State University also, over quite some time, eliminated nearly all streets on campus. 

At Ohio Wesleyan University, the James A. Young Memorial Walkway, known as the "JAYwalk" is currently undergoing an upgrade using funds (PDF) from its Class of 1961's fifty year reunion gift.

North Park University's master plan won a state ASLA award, with VOA, for a master landscape plan, partly described this way: 

'The landscape architect envisioned a circulation system of clear visual and physical links to bring the disparate elements of the university together into a single, unified place. This was accomplished by a series of actions which included converting a disruptive city street and parallel alley into major pedestrian corridors.'

SCUP LinkedIn Group Conversation Participants as of February 1, 2011

Michael Radner, Radner Design Associates

Todd Maxey, Associated Spec Consultants

Jennifer Adams Peffer, University of Toronto

Donald Graves, Graves Engineering

Niraj Dangoria, Stanford University

Trent Rush, TBG Partners

Frederic Mulligan, Cutler Associates

Howard Wertheimer, Georgia Tech

Jeff Fullerton, Acentech

Nancy Nusbaum, Texas State University

Jill Morelli, University of Washington

James Goblirsch, HGA

Jaime Pumphrey, Sterling Barnett Little, Inc.

Lisa Macklin, Comprehensive Facilities Planning, Inc.

John Kellar, Kellars Associates

Conrad Fink, Moody Bible Institute

Interesting concept: Redfields to Greenfields. Could your institution find some value in turning formerly densely-populated urban areas into green spaces?

In the language of urbanism, “greenfields” usually means rural land at the metropolitan edge, where suburbia metastasizes. “Brownfields” are former industrial sites that could be redeveloped once they are cleaned of pollution. “Greyfields” — picture vast empty parking lots — refer to moribund shopping centers.

Recently another such locution was coined: “redfields,” as in red ink, for underperforming, underwater and foreclosed commercial real estate. Redfields describe a financial condition, not a development type. So brownfields and greyfields are often redfields, as are other distressed, outmoded or undesirable built places: failed office and apartment complexes, vacant retail strips and big-box stores, newly platted subdivisions that died aborning in the crash.

Now comes “Redfields to Greenfields,” a promising initiative aimed at reducing the huge supply of stricken commercial properties while simultaneously revitalizing the areas around them.

Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

Here's your SCUP Link to "Debt Hunters: Is Your Campus Missing Out on Megabucks Worth of Unpaid Parking Tickets?"

Inspired by the University of Central Florida's tapping him for $35 for an unpaid parking ticket from a visit nearly three years ago, Inside Higher Ed writer Jack Stripling investigates and finds a trend: Better technology to identify scofflaws and concerted efforts to tap into buckets of money owed to it. Some even hire collection agencies. UCF hired a company to collect from a pool of nearly $400,000 in unpaid tickets and has already collected $71,000. It can be tricky though and you might irritate alumns.

Central Florida’s increased collection efforts predate the deep financial crisis that has led to dramatic budget cuts across the state, but Merck says it’s “serendipitous” that the university was searching for cash under its proverbial couch cushions just before the recession hit.

Florida’s State University System does not receive any state dollars for transportation and parking services, so the brunt of the cost for parking decks and shuttles is passed on to students through per-credit-hour fees and decal charges. Thus, by failing to recoup parking fines, the university ends up increasing the financial burden on students. So while chasing campus visitors across state lines for $35 may seem excessive, failing to do so is unfair to students who end up with the tab, Merck says.

“We owe it to our students to try to collect it,” he says.

Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

Here's your SCUP Link to "That's Where the Walk Should Be"

Michigan Today has a thought-inducing article about the University of Michigan Diag, why it is shaped like it is, and the professor of history and law who planted many of the trees. (Professor White eventually became Michigan's first "Superintendent of Grounds." His pay was $75/yr. Oh, and he also went on to, among other things, found Cornell University.) So, why is the University of Michigan Diag the shape it is? We loved this part of the writing because it reminded us of SCUPers:

First, he observed the human geography—the paths that students had created simply by walking between buildings. No doubt he had in mind the same principle voiced some years later by President James Burrill Angell, who told students that "one of the finest examples of the value of precedent that I have ever seen is one of the paths which you fellows make across the grass of the Campus. We take that as clear proof that a walk should be there, and set about building one."

Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

Here's your SCUP Link on Go With the Flow: Campus Traffic and Parking Solutions

For University Business magazine, Ann McClure finds 20 tips/best practices regarding campus transportation management. They are divided into categories: Parking Practices, Mass Transit Options, Traffic Flow Tactics, Ride Shares, and Bikers Haven.

“The old-time pressures of parking and congestion are combining with the sustainability issue,” says Philip L. Winters, director of the Center’s TDM Program. Parking lots are not only expensive to build but take up valuable space that can be better used for classrooms or even green space. Solo drivers are also a big contributor to the campus carbon footprint. Safety is another issue because the more traffic you have the more accidents you might have, points out Sara Hendricks, the center’s senior research associate. However, improving traffic flow and parking on campus is very place dependent, Hendricks notes. Not every campus can tap into a strong local mass transit system. “It boils down to making sure you have options and not focusing on a single strategy,” Winters advises.