Grassroots: The agent of green change

How do you systematically redesign a place that’s already filled up and covered over with stuff you may not want, but can’t easily get rid of? The answer is: Maybe you don’t. And that’s no fun to hear when all you really want to do is level the mess, haul the rubble away and start all over.

I talk not of teen bedrooms, but of whole cities and regions. It’s hard to drive through any older population center and not feel as if a good mass implosion were the only answer for all the crummy parts, followed by an invitation to some latter-day Baron Haussmann to come in and reshape the whole metropolis from the sewer pipes on up (ignoring the distasteful fact that you’d also need an Emperor Napoleon III to decree and pay for the whole project on the backs of the working poor).

But Terry Schwarz thinks that’s the wrong approach. The interim director of Kent State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative , who’s been working on Cleveland’s land-use and environmental problems with Neighborhood Progress, Inc. and the City of Cleveland as part of the Re-Imagining a More Sustainable Cleveland  project, suggests that the grassroots are literally and figuratively the answer.

She sees good change coming to cities such as Cleveland in two ways. One is the actual grassroots: developing a flexible framework of strategies for returning key areas, such as watersheds, to the green states and purposes nature intended, so “we can more easily adapt, grow and shrink.” Two is the metaphorical grassroots: Within the framework, giving ordinary residents the freedom to experiment with ways of cleaning and greening their own lots and reconnecting their neighborhoods to the changed spaces around them.

Land reuse thus becomes – you saw this coming – organic. But it’s not the same thing as just letting the city “return to nature,” Schwarz says.

Thousands of people still live there and can’t be displaced like heads of lettuce just because you need to clean the refrigerator. Plus, grand plans are hugely expensive, logistically complicated and obstructed by people’s ownership of – and emotional ties to – their property. They also can’t anticipate every circumstance and end up being rigid impediments to good sense and individual initiative.

So engaging everyday people in the process of creative change becomes essential – and an opportunity for innovation on every level. (Schwarz reports that a visiting Environmental Protection Agency member took a look at Cleveland and exclaimed, “This is an ecological-restoration bonanza!”) 

More than 50 small pilot projects are already underway in Cleveland neighborhoods, Schwarz says, and they range from restoring a tiny bit of prairie to phytoremediation (planting therapeutic species that will, for instance, clean the soil of heavy metals such as lead) to landscaping on vacant lots to make city blocks look cared-for and so reduce crime.    

Schwarz sees Cleveland’s encircling “Emerald Necklace” of parks eventually turning into a larger green network, an “emerald web” of restored watersheds and tree canopy connected to strings of neighborhood green patches. Though removing structures and creating a lot of green space sounds like a danger to the density a city needs to support public transit and other essential services, Schwarz calls it “managing decline in a way that actually promotes growth” – and cites the city of St. Paul, Minn., where the restored wetland that replaced a failing mall proved so attractive and desirable a spot that new homes were built around the edges of it.

Among planners and environmentalists, there’s a fair amount of argument about what will work best. But as Schwarz notes, the damage to places like Cleveland has already been done; it’s never going to be 1910 and the Midwest’s industrial heyday again. So such cities will have to create the best outcomes that they can with the hands they’ve been dealt.  

“We will have to choose,” she says. “We have to take some risks. There is no model. We have to be the model.”