User:Asphalt to Ecosystems

Asphalt to Ecosystems: Design Ideas for Schoolyard Transformation
Published by New Village Press

Asphalt to Ecosystems is a compelling color guidebook that broadens our notion of what a well-designed schoolyard should be, taking readers on a journey from traditional, ordinary grassy fields and asphalt, to explore the vibrant and growing movement to “green” school grounds in the United States and around the world. This book documents exciting green schoolyard examples from almost 150 schools in 11 countries, illustrating that a great many things are possible on school grounds when they are envisioned as outdoor classrooms for hands-on learning and play. The book’s 500 vivid, color photographs showcase some of the world’s most innovative green schoolyards including: edible gardens with fruit trees, vegetables, chickens, honey bees, and outdoor cooking facilities; wildlife habitats with prairie grasses and ponds, or forest and desert ecosystems; schoolyard watershed models, rainwater catchment systems and waste-water treatment wetlands; renewable energy systems that power landscape features, or the whole school; waste-as-a-resource projects that give new life to old materials in beautiful ways; K-12 curriculum connections for a wide range of disciplines from science and math to art and social studies; creative play opportunities that diversify school ground recreational options and encourage children to run, hop, skip, jump, balance, slide, and twirl, as well as explore the natural world first hand. The book grounds these examples in a practical framework that illustrates simple landscape design choices that all schools can use to make their schoolyards more comfortable, enjoyable and beautiful, and describes a participatory design process that schools can use to engage their school communities in transforming their own asphalt into ecosystems.

The author, Sharon Gamson Danks, is an environmental planner and founding partner of Bay Tree Design, in Berkeley, California, a women-owned landscape architecture and planning firm that collaborates with clients to develop lively outdoor spaces including ecological schoolyards. Sharon's schoolyard ecology background includes research, writing, and hands-on design and planning with school communities in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. She has visited and documented over 175 green schoolyard projects in North America, Europe, and Japan over the last ten years. This has helped her develop design guidelines and best practices for green schoolyards and informs her work as an author and designer. Since 2001, Sharon and her firm, Bay Tree Design, have assisted over three dozen schools using a participatory master planning process to help them transform their grounds from ordinary asphalt into vibrant ecosystems for learning and play. The green schoolyard master plans that Bay Tree Design follow ecological design principles and reflect each school's unique community, curricula and site-specific ecology. Sharon Gamson Danks and Bay Tree Design are currently working as Master Planning Strategists for a large green schoolyard program with San Francisco Unified School District. Ms. Danks has directed three hands-on schoolyard ecology conferences for the San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance and serves on their advisory board. She also serves on the national advisory board for the Community Built Association. In 2008, Sharon and Bay Tree Design designed a Sustainable Schoolyard exhibit for display at the US Botanic Garden in Washington DC. Sharon has written a number of green schoolyard-themed articles that have appeared in Landscape Architect Magazine, Orion, New Village Journal, and Green Teacher. She is also the lead-author of the Green Schoolyard Resource Directory for the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to a MLA-MCP from University of California, Berkeley, Sharon holds a Professional Certificate in Natural Resource Management from U.C. San Diego Extension and a BA from Princeton University. Sharon is also the mother of two expert playground testers, ages 7 and 9.