Micro-Forest Project

view of founders square from the Louisville Gardens on Armory — *View of Founders Square from the Louisville Gardens on Armory*

With a mission to explore the linkages between the design of our cities and their impact on human health, the Envirome Institute's Urban Design Studio at the University of Louisville will begin to oversee a project to intensely green Founders Square in the heart of downtown Louisville. Through the generous support of the Trager family, we will reimagine urban greening and measure its impact on the health of our community.

This project is about designing a healthier city while revitalizing our downtown. It is about the way the core of our city looks and functions for the people who live, work, and visit. It is about considering the needs of the entire community, including those whose needs are typically overlooked. This is about pointing in a direction and working towards a goal to not simply bring downtown back to what it was before 2020, but to move towards a city that makes people happier and healthier.

Through the Trager Micro-Forest Project, the Urban Design Studio and Envirome Institute will explore how an intensely planted urban green space can become a catalyst that promotes health and transforms people’s perception and attachment to the heart of our city.

Stay tuned to this space to learn more about The Trager Micro-Forest Project at Founders Square.

Downtown is at a pivotal moment. The old model of relying on office workers to sustain the vibrancy, shops, and restaurants of the central business district (CBD) is no longer possible. We need to find creative solutions that spark energy and life into downtown today. We need to build a strong foundation that enables our urban core to become a thriving neighborhood unto itself, something it once was.

Source: https://historiclouisville.weebly.com

You would be forgiven if you mistook the photo above for being in New York or Chicago, but it is of Louisville in the late 1940s. Downtown was the vibrant center of activity, from shopping and office work to entertainment and culture. Sidewalks were packed with the bustle of people.

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The hollowing out of downtown during urban renewal is easy to see from the maps above. There once was a fine-grained urbanism in Louisville. The 1905 map shows hundreds of small and medium-sized buildings, representing mixed-use retail and housing, that once sat on what are now expansive surface lots.

Even with the loss of the city’s once fine-grained urban fabric, downtown Louisville is still the only place in our region that offers people searching for city life the opportunity to find it.

Beyond the lack of street life, there are various obstacles holding us back from offering a great city experience. We can't have a great city without a vibrant downtown. We can't have a vibrant downtown until we improve the design and function of downtown.

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Some of these hurdles are:

Auto-centric City

Too many areas of downtown are asphalt surface lots, making the neighborhood feel more dead than alive. The image above was taken at 5th Street and Muhammad Ali Boulevard, which is just one block away from 4th Street, essentially the north-south spine of the city. The urban fabric of the city falls apart so rapidly heading west that when you’re only one block away from the city’s center, it barely feels like you’re in a city environment at all. Beyond the blight that these surface lots produce, they also contribute to excessive heat downtown making the area both much less comfortable and much less attractive.

Pair the overabundance of surface parking and lack of trees with all the one-way streets, and our downtown tells people that their cars are more welcome than they are. In cities with a vibrant urban core, you have to try hard to find a surface lot; in downtown Louisville you see them almost everywhere.

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Flight of the Office Workers

Cities across the U.S. are dealing with the flight of office workers from downtowns as remote working becomes ingrained in the workplace. According to some analysts, downtown office occupancy rates are only at about 40% of pre-pandemic levels.

The loss of office workers severely impacts the restaurants and shops that relied on the pre-pandemic levels of workers to operate. This creates a self-perpetuating downward spiral. As businesses close or cut back their hours and services, there are fewer dining and shopping options, further eroding the experience of downtown and perpetuating the perception of downtown as lifeless and not worth visiting.

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Safety Perception

Even before 2020, downtown suffered from a biased perception that it was unsafe in the media and other messaging. The protests of 2020 further reinforced this notion in many people’s minds, with visions of concrete barriers and dump trucks blocking off whole sections of downtown.

Two years later, there are still a number of high-profile buildings with boarded up windows, continuing the negative narrative. For most people who live and work downtown, the reality is the urban core is safe. It would appear – and, in fact, become – more safe if more people were out and about.

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Lack of Trees and Quality Greenspace

For close to a decade, we have known that Louisville has a major issue with tree canopy loss. This is a particularly acute problem for the city’s urban core where large expanses of surface lots and treeless streets not only make for an ugly and uninviting streetscape, but also an increasingly inhospitable and unhealthy pedestrian environment, particularly during our hot and humid summers.

Trees and their leafy canopies provide ecosystem services by cleaning the air and through transpiration which has a cooling effect beyond the shade they produce. Urban trees also help mitigate stormwater runoff and provide habitat for wildlife, among some of the many benefits to overall human and environmental health. Street trees also provide an increased level of safety and comfort for pedestrians. They serve as a barrier between moving vehicles and the sidewalk as well as effectively slowing traffic speeds.

An overlooked aspect of urban trees and vegetation is that they can obscure some of our longer-term issues like surface lots and blighted streetscapes. Unfortunately, even when we try to plant trees in urban environments, we often fail, as evidenced by the parking lot just off Broadway (see photo above) where trees have been planted but not properly maintained.

Network of Green Spaces

Pulaski Square in Savannah

Walkable access to quality green spaces improves health outcomes and creates places that are beloved and inviting to full-time residents, daytime workers, and tourists alike. Creating a network of green spaces connects people to nature and provides a framework for improved biodiversity and urban regeneration.

This can be seen in Oglethorpe’s plan for Savannah, Georgia. More than 20 park squares are laid out in a grid ( map above left). These squares provide critical shade and access to nature every few blocks, meaning that inviting and refreshing green spaces are within a short walk for anyone living in or visiting the area.

In Louisville, there are very few parks or quality green spaces in the urban core (map above right), meaning most people have to walk a long way to reach one. We need to increase people’s access to nature downtown in order to make it a more appealing place to visit or to live.

One of the benefits of having so many surface lots downtown is that there is an opportunity to think strategically about the benefits of a network of pocket parks and green spaces and work to incentivize such a vision as those surface lots get developed.

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Connective Green Corridors

Portland Park Blocks

Beyond networks of pocket parks, some cities have incorporated green corridors in their urban cores, linking important natural areas. Some, like Garfield Place in Cincinnati, only stretch a few blocks. Others, like Park Avenue in Portland, Oregon (map below left), stretch for many blocks and provide a linear park connecting the city’s core with edge neighborhoods.

Louisville has few parks downtown. Most happen to be within a block of 5th Street making a north-south axis along or near this corridor make sense as a first concept connector. Muhammad Ali Boulevard provides a solid east-west axis connecting the Medical District to the east with significant development happening in Russell west of 9th Street.

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Rough concept of what potential green corridors might look like

Focusing greening initiatives just off of 4th Street provides several advantages for increased impact. 5th Street south of Liberty is fairly underdeveloped. Investing in green corridors can spur economic activity and development where there is a need for it and fewer obstacles, yet these green corridors will be close enough to take advantage of higher pedestrian traffic corridors.

Further feasibility study is needed for which corridors make the most sense and what a green corridor means in our urban context. But concentrating streetscape greening along specific corridors rather than spreading tree plantings and other vegetative interventions across downtown will have more of an initial impact in changing perception and seeding additional improvements in a shorter period of time.

Engagement & Visioning

We believe strongly that having a breadth of thought, perspectives and experiences around the table early is critical in goal setting and building a strong foundation of ideas to drive innovative projects forward. During the initial phases of the project, we will engage with community stakeholders for both the larger goals of the project as well as the more immediate prototyping and activations. Working with our research partners, this will be the time to start defining and collecting baseline data to understand our starting point as well as the measures we can work into the project to improve the health and function of the immediate area.

Figuring out the overall plan for the space begins to happen at this stage. Taking the thoughts and ideas from the stakeholder engagement, we will work with professionals in landscape architecture, public health and other related areas to develop an adaptable framework for the park that addresses a primary goal of creating a space that improves the health of the city and the people as it serves as a launch pad for innovations in urban greening.

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Activations

Bringing people together in community through the activation of underutilized urban spaces has been a hallmark of the Urban Design Studio’s work for more than a decade. We have explored the value and opportunities for creative reuse our underutilized surface lots through the ReSurfaced projects. We have collaborated with different organizations to pull together all sorts of people in unique and unexpected settings.

The civic engagement and energy-building of activations are as important in the early stages of a project as the overarching goals of revitalizing spaces into places. The activation phase unites engagement and prototyping efforts to bring the community and other stakeholders along in the learning process. Activations also help bring attention and awareness to the value of the overall project, build support for a shared vision, and bring people to an underappreciated part of town.

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Prototype Testing

First Park(ing) Day event at the Urban Design Studio in 2010

An important part of this project will be “previtalization” activities on the site to build momentum around the project, test potential configuration ideas, and engage the community, all while educating people about the value of nature in urban spaces.

Prototyping that will inform the design of the micro-forest will build off of work done by the Urban Design Studio on such tactical urbanism projects as ReSurfaced. The ability to bring in large trees in containers and other temporary elements will immediately and actively shape the landscape and offer the ability to experiment with the square while testing the various iterations for effectiveness.

From organizing Park(ing) Day events that converted public parking spaces into temporary parks, or the Tactical Urbanism Salon on East Market where we worked with people to physically envision the imminent streetscape plans for NuLu with live trees and other amenities, the Urban Design Studio has used prototyping as a tool and lighter-lift way to see the change you want to make while engaging people in the process. We plan to put our prototyping expertise to good use in this project.

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Creating Magic Moments

We want the micro-forest at Founders Square to offer a sense of surprise and delight when people happen upon it. Much like the transformation of an unappreciated alley off of 4th Street between Louisville Public Media and the Mercury Ballroom (pictured above), people should catch a glimpse of something unexpected and want to see more. See for example the use of eye-catching materials like the recycled Cardinal Stadium seats that were installed at bus stops around the city. The stadium seats addressed a need for seating while providing a light-hearted moment within the mundane context of mass transit that made people smile. The Trager Micro-Forest Project at Founders Square offers the opportunity to create a space that will make people want to search it out and experience it for themselves.

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Baseline Data Collection

The Urban Design Studio has begun the process of developing baseline data about the environment in and around Founders Square. Previous property documentation searches came up empty. There was some concern that the old visitor’s center at the site may have been demolished and dumped into its own basement and covered with dirt. So we contracted with a service to run ground penetrating radar scans and found the site to be clear of debris and any other unwanted underground surprises.

We are also conducting public space activity-mapping studies of Founders Square to get a clearer picture of how the park is currently being used. From observational studies, it is clear that the majority of activity in the park takes place in the small sections with fixed benches in the shade of trees along the periphery. This information and more will help inform the direction of the project.

The Trager Micro-Forest Project

at Founders Square

Latest Trager Micro-Forest Project Related News & Notes

March 2: The Trager MicroForest Project Open House

Progress on Founders Square: Site Survey and 3D Scan

Trager Micro-Forest Project Press Release

Why Focus on Downtown

Pivotal Moment for Downtown

A New Vision of Health Campus

Big Picture Goals

Why Founders Square

The Micro-Forest Concept

Next Steps

How to Get Involved