LA prof helping schools

The recent issue of LAM had a Bill Thompson piece looking at a Denver professor who has worked with local schools to develop a better template for designing schoolyards. While it isn't as glamorous as public plazas or patios for billionaires, Thompson points out that it represents a larger pattern of designers trying to make a difference:

What does this transformed schoolyard have to do with making landscape architecture a more visible, more influential profession?

By itself, probably not much. But suppose this schoolyard was part of a school-system-wide program for transforming most or all of the schoolyards in a large American city, and a landscape architect was the instigator of it all? Would that not give landscape architecture a more powerful role in community affairs and people’s daily lives?

The online comments at The Dirt show that there is some support, but you can be sure that the line will be much longer at a session on New Urbanism than community design at ASLA this fall.