For the 2015 Annual Loeb Lecture, distinguished journalist and architecture critic Inga Saffron will illustrate the complexities of creating park policy that contributes to reviving 21st century cities. One such example is Dilworth Park, in front of Philadelphia's City Hall, a plaza outsourced by the city to the downtown business improvement association, effectively privatizing a very symbolic public space. Saffron is the winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism and was a Loeb Fellow in 2011-12. For nearly 15 years, her weekly column for the Philadelphia Inquirer, "Changing Skyline," has insightfully analyzed the urban design issues facing Philadelphia. Her writing has appeared in the New Republic, Metropolis, Dwell, Landscape Architecture Magazine, Texas Architecture, and the Architects Newspaper. Before becoming the paper’s architecture critic, Saffron spent the 1990s as a foreign correspondent for the Inquirer in Russia and the former Yugoslavia, covering wars in Bosnia and Chechnya and bearing witness to the destruction of Sarajevo and Grozny.

Comments

1. Aside from reducing the heat island effect and stormwater runoff, what are the other benefits of "greening of school yards"? When I was growing up, we used our paved school yard as a blank slate to play football, soccer, roller hockey, and baseball competitively as well as to skateboard, roller skate, and freestyle bike. We can't just "green" every single open space on impulse; I believe that the greening of school yards would only limit the amount of energy that children could exert, compared to the ceaseless spirit involved in competing and enjoying the freedom of uninhibited motion on a large paved school yard, designated for and possessed by children, yet designed by the prevalent thinking of adults.