On Conducting a Cultural Landscape Assessment

Examine the future of boulevards in cities and understand how assessing the cultural landscape can assist in understanding and adapting these corridors to meet contemporary transportation and accessibility needs.

As planners transform urban boulevards to expand people-centric functionality, they must address challenges such as accommodating the lifespan of street trees; improving pedestrian experiences, accessibility for multiple user groups, and traffic safety; and ameliorating the scale and layout of the urban boulevard model. Learn how to evaluate historic landscapes as important places within the built environment and apply the cultural-landscape methodology to understand multifaceted urban landscapes as places endowed with cultural meaning.

Benjamin Franklin Parkway, in the city’s arts and culture district, illustrates how a significant urban landscape can be reimagined as a complete street. The plan for the Parkway was never fully realized, leaving behind both a challenging urban renewal legacy and contemporary issues including multimodal user circulation; access to adjacent cultural institutions; unsatisfactory pedestrian experiences; and the need to re-contextualize historic monuments to tell a more inclusive story.

Learn about the Parkway’s historic and contemporary perspectives from planners, designers, and public officials who are working to reimagine the corridor, while others, including landscape historians and architects, explain how the cultural-landscape approach can inform a robust planning process.