02/09/2022
Climate issues are social justice issues.
A few years ago, I learned about the high amount of sewer backups and localized flooding in the Sherman park neighborhood and an idea to use basements of city-owned homes to store rainwater to prevent flooding.
I organized a group of students to consider what would happen when the houses were demolished. Could we imagine ways to keep the 'idea' of the house to help keep the fabric of the street and neighborhood intact?
These were people's homes and they were part of a collective history.
This is one example of work I do, and will continue to do, for CLIMATE HEALTH and A GREEN, RESILIENT, & ENVIRONMENTALLY JUST MILWAUKEE
"As innovative as the BaseTern was, Current had a hunch that the city would simply cap the BaseTern and plant turfgrass over top, making it indistinguishable from any other vacant lot in the city....
She and her students came up with three concepts....
[and each] design preserves the memory of the house, making visible with hardscape elements the house’s original footprint and limiting rain garden elements to the perimeter. “There’s a history to this,” Current says of the site. “It’s a homestead. People in the neighborhood know the house; they know the people who lived there.” She says it was important not to lose that."
read more here:
BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER From the July 2015 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine. By August, the faded yellow house at 3930 North 35th Street in Milwaukee will be gone. In its place, invisible to …