As the final week of class comes to a close, we wanted to pass along a few end-of-term reminders.

On Thursday, we’ll wrap up the term with presentations from the following groups:
Northeast False Creek A, Northeast False Creek B, and Arbutus A.

Peer review will be provided by members of UBC Hospital C, Arbutus B, and Arbutus C; any students who have not yet had a chance to serve as a peer reviewer should join one of these panels to ensure they receive credit for this component of the course.

On a related note, please ensure that you have posted at least one question and one comment to this site by Wednesday, April 12 at 4 p.m. to meet the requirements for blog participation.

Finally, if you’d prefer to hand in a hard copy of Assignment 3, you can do so during the final class session. Please make sure that it is a single package that includes print-outs of your two group and two individual slides along with the brief narrative (one to two pages) in support of your individual component. If possible, please also include a short statement about your role in the group and your assessment of your fellow project members.

Alternately, a single PDF package containing all of these items can be submitted via e-mail to Sara Fryer Barron by 4 p.m. on Wednesday, April 12.

Looking forward to our last time together in class!

The term has gone by so quickly! On Tuesday, we will have our last lecture. We will also have some time to go over the final assignment requirements and give you a few minutes to discuss your final presentation preparations as a group.

Group presentations begin this Thursday, March 30 and continue on Tuesday, April 4 and Thursday, April 6. We ask that each of you attend class to listen to all of the presentations and arrive on time to avoid interrupting your classmates. As part of your participation, you will provide feedback to the members of another group; please be kind and considerate with your comments.

There are still a few questions about how the assignment works. We are asking for a single 12-slide presentation from each five-person group. The first two slides will give a general outline of your designs for your site, and the key concepts/themes/ideas that directed your decisions. These two slides should be prepared as a group. The next 10 slides will be made up of five sets of two slides representing each group member’s individual component. Please stick within these limits.

Much of your grade will be determined through your presentation, but we are also asking you to submit a one- to two-page individual summary after your presentation as well. This written component is designed to allow you to respond to feedback you received during the presentation and to provide additional description about what you included in your two individual slides.

We hope you are enjoying the project and are looking forward to seeing the final results!

This week’s lecture provided a history of urban forests and human well-being from a Western perspective. The weekly reading is a review article by Catharine Ward Thompson titled “Linking Landscape and Health: The recurring theme”

On Thursday, we will move our class to the BC Hydro decision theatre on the main floor of the CIRS building at 2321 West Mall. Directions to the room are here, and will also be given during Tuesday’s lecture. We will provide maps and trace paper. Please work within your groups to figure out who can bring pencils, markers, and anything else you think you might need to start working on your site together.

In addition to going over the grading rubric for the midterm and answering any related questions, lecture provided a brief introduction to the evidence regarding the role of the immune system in connecting urban forests to health.

Because the groups for the final project were newly formed last week, we’ve decided to postpone the design charrette until next Thursday, March 14. We’re hoping this will give you time to visit your site as a group first so you’ll have a solid foundation for the hands-on work that will take place in the charrette.

To support this team work, this week’s seminar offered hands-on instruction in how to represent trees as part of landscape designs, with a particular focus on doing so in the fast-paced environment of a charrette.

Part of this week’s seminar will consist of a group reading exercise, based on the article “Uncommon ground – our new urban oases”, which appeared in The New York Times Sunday magazine last year. You’ll have time to read the piece together, but feel free to take a look in advance as well.

Returning from reading week, lecture focused on methods of understanding and measuring access to urban forests to advance public health. Such interdisciplinary conversations and collaboration are critical to maximizing the potential health benefits of urban forestry. In seminar, there was a guest lecture from Lorien Nesbitt on her research into equity issues in urban greenspace.

One way to advance intersectoral collaborations is by identifying the potential monetary benefits of greenspace interventions, and the article examining the impact of parks and trees in Toronto by Kardan and colleagues achieves just that. The methodology is fairly complex, so you may want to focus on the introduction and discussion sections. If you’re interested in how these findings were translated for a broader audience, take a look at the Washington Post’s summary of the piece.

Offering additional insights into how evidence is put into practice, the BC Provincial Health Services Authority’s Healthy Built Environment Linkages toolkit is directed toward public health professionals, urban planners, and resource managers and explicitly links research to best practices for creating a healthy built environment.

Unpacking research articles can certainly be challenging, but it’s also a critical skill you need to develop both as a student and practitioner. This step-by-step guide to reading a scientific article is an excellent foundation for honing this skill.

Finally, we’re hoping students have found time to review Assignment Two – which is due by 4 p.m. next Thursday, March 9 – so feel free to post any questions about the assignment either here or on the Assessment page. And, as always, your comments on what we’re reading and learning are always appreciated!

This week’s guest lecture by Cecil Konijnendijk delved into the importance of social connections for our health, and the roles that urban forests can play in strengthening these connections.

In seminar, we built upon this discussion by talking about how to design spaces to promote social interaction, and thereby improve health. Students broke into small groups to redesign one of UBC’s public open spaces, resulting in a range of proposed improvements.

As a guide to understanding the many forms of scientific literature presented throughout the course, this was accompanied by a brief introduction to evidence development and appraisal.

Although we were only able to watch a small portion of the William Whyte’s Social Life of Small Urban Spaces video during seminar, you can view the entire piece on Vimeo. The work done by Frances Kuo in inner-city Chicago is described in greater detail in her article “The role of arboriculture in a healthy social ecology”, which is an optional reading for this week.

For Week 4, there are two required readings: a brief report on the health and financial benefits of access to nature in urban environments across the lifecourse and
a discussion of the role nature can play in encouraging the types of pro-environmental beliefs and behaviours that are critically important in responding to the threat of climate change. Expanding on this second reading, this week’s lecture will explore the impact of nature on individual beliefs and behaviours related to environmental sustainability and climate change mitigation.

Both of these readings will be included as part of this Thursday’s reading quiz. Based on the input you have provided through the blog and during seminar, here is a list of potential questions that may appear on the quiz. Seminar will also include a guest presentation and a brief overview of academic writing.

Now that the quiz is over, if you’d like to learn more about the fishing game used to test an individual’s level of cooperation, take a look at “Cooperation is in our nature”; to explore the concepts described in the lecture by Paul Piff in greater detail, consult “An occasion for unselfing”.

Week Three’s Lecture delved into the scientific theory and evidence linking nature to health benefits. One issue that arose during lecture was whether the potential benefits ascribed to natural space exposure might be in part due to the placebo effect. Can you think of a way you might go about answering this question through a scientific study?

In seminar, we discussed the results of the group site analysis we carried out last week, delved into this week’s required reading, and carried out the mental mapping exercise that is one component of Assignment 1.

Reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of this field, the required reading – Chapter 9 from the textbook Environmental Psychology: An Introduction – expands upon the role of theory in creating healthy environments by focusing on applicable theories from the field of architecture and building design. If you’re interested in learning more about how early human history informs modern-day reactions, take a look at the article by Ohman and Mineka on the evolutionary development of our fear of snakes.

Once again, we’re asking for your own questions in response to this reading, and anything you submit may appear on next week’s reading quiz. Submitted questions can range from the simple (“Name one important difference between social design and biophilic design.”) to the more complex or applied (“As individuals who primarily focus on outdoor environments, what ways can urban foresters inform the use of biophilic design for built environments?”); additional questions related to the reading appear at the end of the chapter.