A grassroots “depaving” movement is slowly spreading across the country, with communities ripping up strips of asphalt and concrete to make way for pocket parks, gardens and nature play spaces. And some Chicagoans are on board.
“A year from now I hope I can say, ‘Yeah, we’ve done our first project and we’re onto the next, we have two more in the pipeline,’” McGuire said.First, here’s what depaving isn’t: McGuire isn’t proposing the bulldozing of expressways or a return to the days of dirt sidewalks.
Regardless of a project’s scope, McGuire acknowledges that the concept of depaving runs counter to the American psyche. “Depaving triggers some nervousness for people. Because it really needs a mental shift, and a lot of people aren’t ready to shift away from what they’re used to seeing.”— that goes a long way toward explaining why people will cling to pavement despite the problems it causes.
“What we’re doing when we’re talking about depaving is talking about removing a barrier toward transformation,” McGuire said. “It’s really about a transformation process ... and we need to depave in order to make that transformation.” “Asphalt’s this hidden-in-plain-sight thing. It’s everywhere; we don’t even look at it critically anymore,” she said. “It’s an infrastructure like lead pipes are an infrastructure. It’s been with us for so long.”
“This is the case down in the Calumet region, where a lot of communities don’t have adequate drainage infrastructure through the gray system. Water wants to be there, because water remembers,” McGuire said. “Those marshes were designed to hold water, that’s what they did. The soils that were there sponged that water up. And we lost the sponge. Depaving removes the root of the problem of runoff and flooding. It allows us to reengage with those soils again.
There have been some stunning examples of depaving projects conceived of by luminaries in landscape architecture. In Philadelphia, refashioned a Navy shipyard site into a headquarters campus for Urban Outfitters, demolishing asphalt and concrete and repurposing the materials as pavers and gravel in an industrial garden plaza.
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