Fast Company magazine has a section devoted to the intersection of design and business. In it, Jack L. Robbins writes about Active Design. Here is, also, the Wikipedia article on Active Living by Design.

Given the size of the nation's obesity problem, intentionally integrating active design elements into every campus facilities and landscape planning process - especially in areas of student services, housing, pedestrian circulation, and so forth - seems a no-brainer. We've seen campuses to things that align with this philosophy, although unintentionally, or for other reasons. If you know of campus planning that has incorporated this in an integrated fashion, please share information about it in the comments, below, or in SCUP's LinkedIn group. Thanks.

Here's more from the Fact Company article:

Environments that are unwalkable are boring, feel vast and scaleless, and present blank unvaried views. Contrast a vast parking lot with a lively café-lined street and it’s clear what makes an environment walkable.

Variety and stimulation is especially important for the young digerati who have grown up in a wired world that brings a universe of entertainment and social interaction to them through a screen and a keyboard.

To motivate the under-25 crowd to use their legs—instead of their thumbs—to explore the world, the real world must compete with the digital one in terms of stimulation. Dense, multi-use urban environments with a variety of offerings can provide the stimulating surroundings that encourage walking and real-life social interaction.

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

Charles A. Birnbaum says that there is a lack of landscape architecture criticim and media coverage, and, he says, writing in The Huffington Post, that's a problem.

Birnbaum is a keynote speaker at SCUP's national Campus Heritage Symposium next November 2-3 in Washington, DC.

Here's a game I like to play. Try to find decent criticism about landscape architecture, planning and design, particularly regarding public space, in any of the major US dailies. Go ahead... I'll wait why you think about that.

Actually it's no game... it's a problem, especially considering the role that landscape architecture and planning plays in shaping our communities and cities. We have no shortage of architecture critics (who on occasion cover landscape), and there are a fair number of garden writers, but criticism about landscape architecture, planning and design is essentially restricted to publications geared to professionals, and largely absent from major dailies.

So will design coverage in New York and elsewhere transcend traditional buildings as objects (Zaha's latest) or industrial design (sleek toasters and iPhones) and recognize the new possibilities that public landscape offers? The time is now for mainstream print and web to pick up on the signals in this white noise, because the future resides in systems-based design solutions that affect our everyday lives in new and sometimes unconventional ways. If not, design remains marginalized as a commodity and the public is poorly served.