The Creative City Challenge is a competition for Minnesota-resident architects, landscape architects, urban designers, planners, engineers, scientists, artists, students and individuals of all backgrounds to create and install at the Minneapolis Convention Center Plaza an artwork, which is an innovative use of the space and acts as a sociable and participatory platform for scheduled and impromptu onsite programs throughout the summer. — Minneapolis Convention Center

According to Jane McGonigal, a well-known game designer and researcher, “games build the kind of trust, relationships and social networks so critical to [collective action].” Playing games, people naturally weave a tight social fabric.” — Northern Lights Minnesota

“The project does not provide the storm damage mitigation and storm-surge protection that is promised, or at least the U.S. Geological Survey comments on the plan question the science behind those proposed benefits.” [...]

“A project like this, where the science is being questioned by government scientists and the environmental impacts are clearly negative, it’s a poster child for where we shouldn’t do this. This stretch of Fire Island is a park, for goodness sake.” — nextcity.org

On a breezy summer afternoon here in the newly renovated Sanayeh Garden, children are climbing the monkey bars, pedaling on bikes and kicking a ball by the huge water fountain in the park’s center. [...]

While this would be an ordinary scene in Paris, New York or Singapore, it’s practically a new invention for today’s residents of Beirut. Functional public parks have been virtually nonexistent here for decades. — citiscope.org

Olafur Eliasson has tried something else. For his latest site-specific project, which opens on 20 August, the artist has transformed the entire south wing of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark into a convincing riverbed – a messy, stony accumulation of sedimentary rock and watery channels that threatens to silt up the white space of the gallery entirely. The result is an uncanny collision of manmade and natural views, and a Sublime reminder of the slow power of nature to erode [...]. — apollo-magazine.com

London will soon be home to Europe’s largest urban wetland. By 2017, a large chunk of East London’s Upper Lea Valley will be re-wilded, its waters recolonized by reed beds and waterfowl, creating a marshy green chain leading from the built-up inner city out into open fields. By removing drainage from the rims of reservoirs and using fresh stretches of green to patch up a watercourse now truncated by brownfield and private land, the project will create a phenomenal result. — citylab.com

Sixty-five international designers created 22 garden installations at the 15th International Garden Festival, which opened this past weekend at the iconic Reford Gardens (aka les Jardins de Métis) in Quebec, Canada. Established in 2000, the event is one of the biggest garden festivals in the world. Located along the edge of the St. Lawrence River, the various installations are a playful reminder about the value of landscape architecture and nature in everyday living. — bustler.net

The jury is in and the Los Angeles River's future seems to be bright. After more than six months of intense lobbying by the city, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Army Corps) has announced that it will be recommending a more ambitious $1-billion plan to restore an 11-mile stretch of the Los Angeles River from downtown through Elysian Park. — kcet.org

When five of the nation's leading landscape architects gathered before their peers last weekend in Berkeley, the projects they discussed were located in Massachusetts and Minnesota, China and Spain. [...]

The issues and ambitions on display can be applied to any 21st century metropolitan region like ours, where the most challenging frontiers for growth lie in struggling with issues of growth and change; where the land in question is high-profile and politically charged. — sfgate.com

As the ranks of the super-rich swell, pride in property has expanded from the house and its trappings to the grounds. Bulldozers are mounding hill and dale, while hydraulic lifts heave massive trees into place and landscape designers orchestrate the creation of a new wave of artful estates. [...]

Why marvel at the scenery of a Romantic plein-air painting, when one can commission one’s own version of the sublime? — nytimes.com

“[...] data show the construction sector and many related industries are among the fastest growing private-company industries,” said Sageworks analyst Libby Bierman. “In the last year or so, the housing market really started to pick back up, which means more people employed real estate agents and construction firms for new or existing homes and buildings. [...] started to refresh the exteriors of residences and commercial real estate, using the services of professional landscapers.” — forbes.com