LAND online: Land matters

Photo courtesy of Flickr user andrea2382

With only 15 percent of today's children walking or biking to school, is there anything that landscape architects can do to change that?

In the April 15 edition of LAND online, a news digest produced by the American Society of Landscape Architects, editor J. William Thompson asks if landscape architects are part of the problem, making their money on the exurban fringes instead of modernizing older schools in walkable neighborhoods.

Saying that today's children have a "nature-deficit disorder", Thompson takes suburbs to task for their physical layouts - the lack of sidewalks, the wider crossings, the faster traffic - which is says is a product of parental fear that one's child could be snatched up by a predator.

He also lays blame on state governments that require minimum acreages for school siting, often requiring school districts to find former farmland or other far-off parcels to accommodate the acres of parking and other "campus" ephemera.

The National Safe Routes to School Program, which has been funded with $612 million in federal transportation dollars for the period 2005-2009, is attempting to show communities how to plan, build, and maintain safe walking routes to school.

Will this program make a dent in our current way of building, and can landscape architects be expected to do more with all of the constraints that we've put on them?