Designing with a Municipal Maintenance Mindset: A Seattle Parks Case Study

Abstract

By focusing on landscape maintenance considerations, public park design can synchronize with available maintenance resources, leading to the prolonged success of a design’s original intent. By using an asset-based approach to embrace the bureaucratic constraints of municipal maintenance departments, landscape designs can creatively engage with the material realities of maintenance, leading to a new set of design strategies. This project explores small-scale maintenance strategies that can be applied to small-to-medium, neighborhood parks across the Seattle Parks and Recreation Department (SPR). This study first looks at existing maintenance design theories, then identifies the specific dynamic between landscape design and landscape maintenance at SPR, and finally applies those findings to propose maintenance design interventions. A literature review collects the current thinking on the role of maintenance in landscape design practice and offers a conceptual platform for this work. The dynamic between design and maintenance at SPR is identified through autoethnographic reflection of this researcher’s experience as a maintenance worker for SPR, followed by interviews with maintenance workers and designers at SPR. It concludes with field observations of sample parks. Results from these methods reveal salient themes about the interplay between designed landscapes and their maintenance. Those results are then applied through proposed design interventions meant to amplify and augment the existing good work of SPR maintenance workers.