The Book Eden by Design by Rachel

The Book Eden by Design by Rachel - May 2017 Scholarship Essay

The most interesting book that has best influenced my life was a book I chose to read for my senior honors thesis, called Eden by Design. It forever changed my life, as it fostered my passion for preserving nature through urban planning.

When people think of nature, they often think of destinations or places one would have to get in a car to see and experience. What I learned when I took an urban sustainability class my junior year in college - and more importantly when I read the book a semester later - was that nature does not have to be so distant and far away to be enjoyed. Nature shouldn’t be miles away from human contact. It shouldn’t cost gas money or hours to get there. Nature should be very real, very attainable, and very close in proximity to society. There are examples of metropolitan areas, like New York, that grew so large, so fast, and so stripped of the living world around it that landscape architects like Frederick Law Olmsted had to fill within the vacuum of blighted skyscrapers and smokestacks the creation of and desperate need for Central Park. Studying how to bring nature back to urban areas by reading this book formed my passion for sustainability.

In my thesis, I focused on the revitalization of the Los Angeles River and how I thought it would help continue to catalyze urban and environmental sustainability throughout LA and its metropolitan region. I chose the River because it is so central to many different things in LA. Reading the River's Master Plan, Environmental Impact Reports, and historical documents dating back to the 1920's showed that the River touched upon many different aspects of the city, from transportation to housing, to water resource management, to art and culture. It was a great way to immerse myself in many different topics, familiarize myself with all the current amenities that make LA such a wonderful place, and to educate myself on possible future amenities yet to come. My two specific areas of interest are revitalizing underutilized areas (like brownfield sites and the LA River itself) into publicly accessible greenspaces.
The visionary moment in my undergraduate career came at the junction between past and future. As part of reading up on the context and history of the LA River, I had been recommended a book called Eden by Design which chronicled a widely ignored report, called the Olmsted-Bartholomew Report of 1930, that forewarned of a heavily crowded and over-urbanized future Los Angeles. It was so fascinating that I found I could not put the book down once I started reading it. This nearly one hundred year old report seemed not only to prognosticate LA’s overflowing population but also its dangerously limited amount of open space for its residents. After the first few chapters, I realized I could continue what the Olmsted brothers had left unfinished. LA will continue to urbanize in this century, but there are ways to implement the ideas of the past to future development through innovative design without sacrificing nature in the process. By learning about ways to bring nature back to cities, society will begin to help preserve it.

Many people believe that conservation begins and ends at protecting state parks, but changing the way development progresses into the future can be just as effective, if not more so. State parks are miles away, and because of that distance people don’t see conservation as their problem to fix. However, modifying the physical world around them shows people daily visual representations of conservation they cannot ignore. That is the reason I am getting my Master’s degree in Urban Planning with a concentration in Sustainable Land Use Policy at USC. The most amount of good I can do is bring conservation to the forefront by transforming cities like LA into sustainable metropolitan regions.

All of these ideas, perspectives, and research that has culminated to my vocation in urban planning would not have been possible, had it not been for receiving that book in the mail. That is why Eden by Design, by Greg Hise and William Deverell is the most important book that has best influenced my life.