Reimagining A More Sustainable Cleveland
Picture this: It’s Saturday morning in Cleveland in late summer—the year 2019—you hop on your bike for a ride to see what’s happening around the city. Imagine that you greet neighbors who are tending their plots at the community garden in Slavic Village created 10 years earlier on a former site of abandoned buildings. You pass by what used to be a brownfield that is now covered in thousands of sunflowers. Using phyto-remediation (plant based clean up), these former health-risk sites have become gardens and greenspace that children and adults can use.
Next you ride to Tremont Farmers’ Market with a stop to say hello to a friend on Thurman Avenue—that cool tiny street where 10 years before the block club turned several vacant lots into off-street parking with permeable paving, bioswales and native plants. A crowd is gathering at the farmers’ market. You see dozens of vendors offering fresh produce grown in hundreds of market gardens by neighborhood entrepreneurs. The vendors are part of a nationally-known network of Northeast Ohio farmers—urban and rural—who command a market share now worth more than $1 billion.
Now you head north to the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood for a rain garden workshop at the EcoVillage. You work with neighbors on either side of a formerly vacant lot disconnecting downspouts and directing them into a rain garden that was just built between the houses. Then you take the lakefront bikeway over to Glenville to see the latest art installation at the corner of East Boulevard and Ashbury Avenue which was created by neighborhood children and artists who live next door.
The last stop is to see your former teacher who lives in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design grandparent housing on Cedar Avenue. Heading outside together, you walk on the path that links the senior-related buildings in the neighborhood that were built a decade earlier on a connected series of formerly vacant lots. You stop at the Fairfax Green Corps Garden on East 79th Street run by the Cleveland Botanical Gardens—one of more than 25 gardens around the city where kids are learning permaculture skills, growing vegetables and producing “value added” products for sale.
Back to 2009: The picture painted above is not a fantasy. It’s what is being created right now in Cleveland if we can properly and wisely manage our city’s vacant land. Cleveland has the same footprint as it did when it supported a population of 950,000 residents in 1950. Cleveland’s population is now half that size, which has resulted in approximately 3,300 acres of vacant land—with an additional 120 acres of vacant land created each year from demolitions of condemned houses.
With intentions of writing a new future for Cleveland, Neighborhood Progress, Kent State University’s Urban Design Center, key city departments, and many other collaborators undertook a year-long planning initiative to find progressive strategies for sustainable reuses of vacant land to benefit residents, neighborhoods and the environment. The study and its recommendations—Reimagining a More Sustainable Cleveland—were recently adopted by the Cleveland City Planning Commission. A demonstration phase to test the ideas and measure their impacts is being developed with funding provided by the city and local foundations. Pilot projects will include urban agriculture, planting of native species, phyto-remediation for soil restoration and lead containment, rain gardens, off-street parking with permeable paving, bioswales and more. The plan and a pattern book with resource information is available to community groups and individuals interested in developing projects on vacant land.
For more information, contact Bobbi Reichtell at 216-830-2770 or blr@neighborhoodprogress.org.