The semiarid cities of Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, technically stand on separate sides of the US–Mexico border. But together, they form a transborder metropolis known as Ambos Nogales (Both Nogales). These sister cities share a binational economy and culture, and they also share the same watershed—one where summer monsoons bring half a year’s worth of rain in two months.

On the steep, hilly, and more populous Mexican side, that deluge often turns deadly. In August 2022, three people in Nogales, Sonora, including two young children, were killed as heavy monsoon rains flooded the streets and trapped them inside vehicles. The summer before, flash flooding there claimed the life of a 24-year-old woman who had recently earned her civil engineering degree.

“Stormwater management is one of the major issues for the Ambos Nogales area,” says Joaquin Marruffo, border programs manager at the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. “Almost every monsoon season, at least one person dies on the Mexican side of the border [due to stormwater flooding], so that should be priority number one for local governments and for us as public officials.”

Like other border towns in Mexico, Nogales has grown rapidly in the last two decades; the population increased 20 percent between 2010 and 2020, as people from other areas moved there seeking work or hoping to enter the US. This growth has largely been unplanned, resulting in settlements springing up “in places that shouldn’t be established,” Marruffo says, “such as the top of the hills or where there is a floodplain.”

The heavy rains also wreak havoc on property and infrastructure, and pollute local waterways on both sides of the border with industrial contaminants, sediment, and sewage overflow. “The highest point of the watershed is Nogales, Sonora, and the lowest is Nogales, Arizona,” Marruffo explains. “So everything, by gravity, flows from south to north. Everything that starts on the top of the watershed is going to drain down to the US side.”

Seeking to build upon decades of cross-border cooperation on stormwater management and water quality issues, officials and representatives from both sides of the border last year participated in a two-day Growing Water Smart workshop organized by the Sonoran Institute and the Lincoln Institute’s Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy.

Growing Water Smart is a training and assistance program for local leaders that focuses on water and land use integration. The goal is to help officials identify and implement near-term plans, policies, and programs to achieve more resilient communities.

A major piece of the program is a multiday in-person workshop that brings together local and regional elected officials, water resource managers, economic development staff, sustainability officers, and planning commissioners, among others, who don’t always get to coordinate their efforts or pool their knowledge despite their shared goals. “It’s really about allowing them to discuss the issues and opportunities that are unique to them and to their context, and then supporting them with tools and facilitating good guidance,” says Noah Kaiser, Growing Water Smart program manager at the Sonoran Institute.

But the program is more than just a one-off workshop: The Sonoran Institute provides follow-up assistance to help communities secure funding and support project development.

Marruffo, who attended the Ambos Nogales workshop in June 2024, says the strong regional reputation of the Sonoran Institute brought credibility to the discussions, and that the ongoing support will help ensure that momentum doesn’t wane. “They’re probably one of the strongest collaborators that we have to address water issues, especially for the Santa Cruz River,” he says, which flows from Arizona into Mexico and back again.

The workshop “was a great opportunity to have a mix of different sectors involved from both sides, which is not easy to accomplish, getting local governments to speak face-to-face on the same problems,” Marruffo says. He felt encouraged by a new willingness on both sides of the border to make investments in Sonora, in whose steep and hastily settled hillsides most of the area’s stormwater issues originate.

“Every major artery or road in the city of Nogales, Sonora, aligns perfectly with the washes [or stormwater channels],” Marruffo says. “So in storm events, the roads become rivers or streams.” Many roads are unpaved, so fast-flowing stormwater gathers sediment that scours away aging concrete infrastructure and clogs sewers, sending raw sewage into the waterways.

“If you want to mitigate the problem, there are many things that you can do. But to really solve the issue, you have to start by addressing the origin,” Marruffo says. “So the narrative started evolving: What type of investment do we need in Mexico? Which are the major infrastructure projects? Where should we locate these projects?”

Working with a comprehensive green infrastructure plan for the Ambos Nogales watershed developed by Arizona State University Professor Francisco Lara-Valencia, the group discussed the kinds of interventions needed to further mitigate stormwater impacts, Marruffo says, such as building retention and detention basins in the upper watershed to reduce the energy of flowing runoff and help with infiltration.

These aren’t new ideas for the region; local, state, and federal agencies have been working on these very issues for years. Indeed, Marruffo says, “It’s part of our daily conversations.” But the efforts made on one side of the border often have little connection to those on the other side, and vice versa. “This is the first binational, holistic, comprehensive master plan that includes the whole watershed,” he says.

“There are a lot of people in the region working on this stuff,” Kaiser agrees. But getting them all rowing in the same direction can make their efforts that much more effective, he notes. Cross-border and interagency cooperation is crucial when it comes to practical matters, like installing green infrastructure such as rain gardens and retention walls to reduce the impacts of flooding. But it also lays a foundation for exploring what’s possible—like whether the two cities can see this challenge as an opportunity, perhaps capturing stormwater for reuse.

A few months after the Ambos Nogales workshop, the Sonoran Institute and Babbitt Center hosted a second, similar Growing Water Smart program in Mexicali-Calexico, where southeast California borders Baja California. “In the Mexicali-Calexico region, the New River, which flows from Mexicali northward into Calexico and into the United States, is an extremely polluted river,” Kaiser says. “So a lot of our conversations at the workshop in Mexicali revolved around, How do we manage this river on both sides of the border? How do we improve its water quality? How do we make it a valuable water resource for communities on both sides of the border?’”

These border community workshops marked a new international milestone for the Growing Water Smart program (and required a few adaptations, Kaiser says, such as bilingual facilitators and curriculum materials). The program began in Colorado in 2017, and later expanded to Arizona, Utah, and California.

While the program helps communities think about their long-term water resiliency, “it also helps them get momentum right away with some immediate actions,” says Kristen Keener Busby, associate director of program implementation at the Babbitt Center. In addition to guiding land use professionals and water managers through the carefully curated curriculum and facilitated dialogue, she notes, “it sets them up with some strategic planning they can implement right away.”

All Growing Water Smart workshops focus on creating a near-term 12- to 18-month action plan that aligns with a community’s realistic capacity; this is a physical document that community leaders can take with them, Kaiser explains. “We don’t want the workshop to be just another conference that they’re attending where they hear some panel information, and they have some conversations, and then they go back to work and nothing changes,” he says. “We want them to develop a tool that they can move forward with.”

One of the final working sessions is dedicated to action planning, with an in-depth exploration of funding sources, in-kind opportunities, and grants that teams can apply to. The aim is to help teams decide what they’re going to do, how they’re going to fund it, and other practical logistics. “What resources do we need? Which agencies are going to lead, which are going to support? Which other agencies do we need to keep apprised of what we’re doing? Who do we need to collaborate with? All those details go into the action plan,” Kaiser says.

“And we as facilitators from Sonoran Institute, Babbitt Center, and other partner agencies, we’re not deciding what that looks like,” Kaiser adds. “The point of the action plan is really for them to be able to take charge of it, and not to be assigned work to do, but to make their own decisions about what do we have capacity for? What is meaningful and makes the most sense to us, and how can we push that forward?”

The next US–MX Border Growing Water Smart event is a one-day convening in June, focusing on the cross-border sister cities of Douglas, Arizona, and Agua Prieta, Sonora.

After all, stormwater and contaminants don’t care about national boundaries, and need no visa to enter the US, Marruffa says. “So it’s fundamental to continue engaging between both countries. I think it’s important that we have these types of conversations and dialogue, because that’s the only way we can strategize and make better use of our resources, on both sides,” he says.

“There are asymmetries and disparities in many ways, socioeconomic and political. But I think these types of opportunities to talk face-to-face with partners, from both sides, always have positive results. Always, something happens that is one step forward.”

Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: The cities of Nogales, Sonora, and Nogales, Arizona, form the metro area known as Ambos Nogales. Credit: USGS.

This article is excerpted from an International Land Conservation Network paper.

In 1807, a boy was born by the shores of Portland, Maine, then a rugged port town roamed by sailors. With a grandfather who had been both a hero of the American Revolution and a representative in the United States Congress, and a father who also served in the United States Congress, the boy was taught to revere his nation’s history. At the same time, the richness of nature in his hometown stirred a romance between the boy and the natural world in which he would indulge for the rest of his life. His love of history and of natural beauty led him to own, care for, and venerate a house and plot of riverside property that had once served as George Washington’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Best known for his contributions to American literature, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a lifelong steward of the earth, and his legacy is part of an important chapter in the nation’s conservation coming of age story.

Today, Cambridge is known as a city bursting with innovation, culture, green space, and world-class universities. The city’s rich mix of amenities is the gift of forward thinkers, including Longfellow and his family. They perceived the value of open space and local connections to nature, and they foresaw how the city’s rapid growth could fundamentally change the landscape adjacent to the Charles River. As an early conservationist, Longfellow’s love for a bucolic riverfront estate kept a few acres of the city intact and open to the public long after he penned his last words.

Falling for Craigie House and the River Charles

In 1837, Longfellow was rebuilding himself. Two years earlier, he had been traveling across Europe and studying modern language to prepare for a professorship at Harvard University when his 22-year-old wife, Mary Storer Potter Longfellow, died following a miscarriage. In his grief, Longfellow ended his studies in Europe and traveled to Cambridge to take up his professorship. His wife’s body was buried in a plot he purchased on Indian Ridge Path at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge and Watertown. That now-historic landscape had been dedicated only a few years earlier, the land having been carefully surveyed by Longfellow’s first cousin, Alexander Wadsworth.

Longfellow took solace in the tranquil cemetery grounds. In an 1837 letter to a childhood friend, he wrote, “Yesterday I was at Mount Auburn, and saw my own grave dug; that I, my own tomb. I assure you, I looked quietly down into it, without one feeling of dread. It is a beautiful spot.”

The 30-year-old Longfellow was also taken by a nearby estate, then owned by Elizabeth Craigie, which he called Craigie House. On his first visit he fell in love with the grandeur of the home, the tranquility of its surroundings, and its association with George Washington, who had a makeshift headquarters there during the Siege of Boston. Longfellow wrote of that first visit to the house, which stands on the traditional territory of the Massachusett people: “The window blinds were closed but through them came a pleasant breeze and I could see the waters of the Charles River gleaming in the meadows.” Three months later, he had become a boarder occupying two rooms of the Craigie House, where he boasted to friends and relatives that he lived “like an Italian Prince in his Villa.”

Despite the pleasure he found in his new accommodations, Harvard friendships, and vacations to the White Mountains and the coastal town of Nahant, Longfellow faced persistent melancholy from the loss of his wife. He expressed his sadness, and his hopes for better days, in “The Rainy Day,” which includes the famous line “in each life some rain must fall.” That poem was published in Ballads and Other Poems in late 1841. In the same book, Longfellow offers insight into how the natural environment could bring him profound comfort. The poem “To the River Charles” gives perspective into the long-lasting attachment to the waterway that shaped much of his life, work, and philanthropy.

In the poem, Longfellow references a place

Where yon shadowy woodlands hide thee
And thy waters disappear
Friends I love have dwelt beside thee
And have made thy margin dear.

It is likely that these lines refer to his wife’s grave at Mount Auburn Cemetery, which lies less than a mile upriver to the west. The solace he found in his view of the river paralleled that which he found at her graveside.

Thus began Longfellow’s lifelong love for the geography of Cambridge and its surroundings. Over the decades he spent in the city, he was motivated to conserve land for a variety of patriotic, historic, aesthetic, emotional, and health reasons. He adored the Craigie House for its ties to George Washington; its extensive gardens, where Longfellow took contemplative walks; its stately elms that cast shade over the poet on warm days; the sweetness of its fruit trees; and—especially—its views of the river, which brought Longfellow and his family tranquility, comfort, and joy.

Over his lifetime, Longfellow and his family were careful to steward the house and property to preserve its original character. This work led, eventually, to the creation and conservation of Longfellow Park and the Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site, as well as parts of Riverbend Park and Harvard University’s Soldiers Field athletic complex. Similar values motivated Longfellow’s contemporaries to protect other historical sites in Greater Boston, including Boston Common, the Bunker Hill Monument, Mount Auburn Cemetery, and several extensive private estates, such as the nearby Gore Place in Waltham.

Acquiring and Expanding the Estate

The event that most clearly lifted Longfellow’s spirits following his first wife’s death was the acceptance of his longstanding proposal of marriage by the woman who became his second wife, the young Boston socialite Frances (Fanny) Appleton. It was Fanny, and her father’s fortune, that formally united Longfellow with the Brattle Street property.

After their wedding on July 13, 1843, Fanny joined Longfellow in his room in the eastern half of the Craigie House, which by then he was subleasing from Joseph Worcester, who had leased the entire house from Mrs. Craigie’s heirs. Fanny immediately began to write home about the beauty of the house and grounds and the newlyweds’ love for the place. She more than hinted to her wealthy father, Nathan Appleton, that she might like to own the estate, as well as the surrounding acreage. She wrote to him, “If you decide to purchase this [Craigie House] would it not be important to secure the land in front, for the view would be ruined by a block of houses?”

Appleton could not resist his child’s wish. He purchased the house and the surrounding acreage for $10,000. The house and five acres were presented to the couple as a wedding gift. In the following decade, Longfellow purchased the balance of the surrounding land (approximately four acres on the south side of Brattle Street) from his father-in-law for $4,000. Over the years, the property’s history and its aesthetic and recreational value drove Henry and Fanny—and, later, their five children—to preserve it.

From the late 1840s to 1870, Longfellow continued to expand the property, purchasing adjacent land to preserve views and establish an inheritance for his children. He tacked on an additional 2.26 acres to the four-acre meadow south of Brattle Street and bought a 1.7-acre triangle of land wedged between Mount Auburn Street and the Charles River. He then began to divide the land among his children.

Longfellow’s friends living near Harvard likely approved of his landscape conservation efforts. Longfellow lived within walking distance of many important figures in the founding of the modern preservation and conservation movement in America, including Judge Joseph Story, a US Supreme Court associate justice and a founder of the Mount Auburn Cemetery; Edward Everett, who served in the late 1840s as the president of Harvard University and was a key supporter of the privately funded Bunker Hill Monument, the Mount Auburn Cemetery, and the preservation of Washington’s Mount Vernon estate; Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., whose 1859 poetry commemorated the effort to raise funds to erect the equestrian statue of Washington that was eventually built in the Boston Public Garden; and James Russell Lowell, who in 1857 penned a proposal to create a society for the protection of trees in The Crayon.

Scrambling to Save the Meadows

In 1869, a slaughterhouse was proposed to be built across the river from the house, which threatened to sully Longfellow’s view of the water. Longfellow scrambled to organize a corporation to purchase the lot from under the developer. Within a year, the acquisition was complete. The corporation then donated the plot to Harvard College, with the stipulation that it remain as marshes and meadows, or be used for gardens, public walks, ornamental grounds, “or as the site of College buildings not inconsistent with these uses.” The land was adorned with the name Longfellow Meadows.

The land that Longfellow had been piecing together to leave to his heirs stretched all the way from his house to the north side of the Charles River. Longfellow Meadows, which Longfellow himself did not own, extended the scenic view on the south side of the river. Today, Longfellow Meadows is part of Soldiers Field, the Harvard University athletic complex. While not protected from all development, it maintains some open space and certain facilities, such as the track, that are open to the public.

In addition to conserving the land around his home through private acquisition or with special purpose corporations, Longfellow had an interest in more public conservation efforts. The archivist of the Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site, Kate Hanson Plass, reports that the site’s collections include two prints of the remarkable 1861 photographs of the Grizzly Giant sequoia in California taken by Carleton Watkins. The prints were sent east by Unitarian minister Thomas Starr King and lawyer Frederick Billings, both of whom were transplanted New Englanders with strong connections to literary, scientific, and political leaders of the era.

Prints sent to easterners in Boston, New Haven, New York, and Washington, DC, are believed to have played a key role in convincing Congress to protect western lands during the Civil War era. Abraham Lincoln signed the bill to create a state park at Yosemite in June 1864. Yosemite was the precursor to Yellowstone, the first true national park in the world, which Billings helped to create in 1872. Today there are national parks in nearly every country that is a member of the United Nations.

An Attempt to Save the Elms at Craigie House

The estate’s trees were another special interest of Longfellow, but his love for the property’s old elms caused him mostly heartache. In the late 1830s, the trees were afflicted with cankerworms. Longfellow described the infestation as a plague more troublesome than war, pestilence, or famine. In a lamenting letter to his father, he dreamed of sitting beneath their canopies “without being covered with creeping things, and brought daily like Martin Luther before a Diet of Worms.” Longfellow was desolate and spoke of rallying a “Society for the suppression of Canker Worms” to make “a regular crusade.”

He waged his own war on the pests, tarring the trees in hopes of ridding them of the worms. Joseph Worcester cut off the tops of the trees to try to arrest the infestation, but the effort was futile, Longfellow wrote: “Thus fell the magnificent elms which signalized the place and under whose shadow Washington had walked.”

In addition to honoring Washington’s memory, Longfellow was concerned with his own legacy. He dreamed of his descendants walking where he walked and savoring the same connection to place. In 1843, he planted a row of acorns, from which he hoped great oaks would grow. He wrote to his father, “you may imagine a whole line of little Longfellows, like the shadowy monarchs in Macbeth, walking under their branches for countless generations. . . .”

Longfellow repeatedly campaigned to prevent the City of Cambridge from cutting down trees along the sides of roads to make room for wider streets. Learning of Longfellow’s love for the trees, the children of Cambridge took up a collection to help pay for a special chair to be carved from the trunk of a chestnut tree that once stood in front of the blacksmith’s shop at 56 Brattle Street. This was the tree that had inspired Longfellow to write the line, “under the spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stands” in the poem “The Village Blacksmith.” That chestnut wood chair, which was presented to Longfellow in 1872 on his birthday, now sits in the front study of the Longfellow House.

Stewardship as a Social Identity

With fellow 19th century artists and writers including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and Henry David Thoreau voicing their reverence for nature, Longfellow tried his hand at nature writing, but this flavor of his work never earned the same acclaim as his other pieces. He also enjoyed styles of nature and landscape art that were gaining popularity among his peers. He traveled to exhibitions by the emerging group of Northeast-based landscape painters called the Hudson River School; attended artist lectures; and casually collected pieces in this style.

He was also influenced by his in-laws, the Appletons, who were avid art enthusiasts and may have encouraged Longfellow’s interest in the topic. One of Longfellow’s own pieces of work, “The Song of Hiawatha,” even shaped some of the art emerging at the time. Several prominent landscape painters, inspired by the epic poem, created notable works depicting its scenes. It is important to note that, while the poem is one of Longfellow’s most successful pieces, it is now considered to perpetuate cultural stereotypes and false narratives about Indigenous people.

There was an element of cultural conflict in the conservation movement at the time. A vein of anti-urbanism and anti-modernism ran through America’s mid-19th century elites. Both Henry and Fanny Longfellow wrote of their concern about the houses springing up around them, suggesting they felt protective of their exclusive enjoyment of the area. Similarly, Longfellow’s scramble to have the land across from his home purchased and conserved—not by him personally, but through a newly established corporation—is salted with not-in-my-backyard sentiments.

When a neighbor built a fence in the meadow across from the Longfellows, Fanny wrote that the structure grieved the family “whenever we glance at our lovely river.” Knowing that a house was slated to be built there as well, she lamented, “Is not this very vexatious? Until we came this neighbourhood was left in peaceful beauty, & now there seems a mania to build in every direction.”

Making Land the Longfellow Legacy

Longfellow’s values regarding the property lived on through his six children. To honor their father after he passed, they hoped to preserve a plot along the river as a memorial. When friends and colleagues of the poet incorporated the Longfellow Memorial Association to facilitate this plan shortly after his death, his children donated two parcels to kickstart its work, though they did not serve as members. The goal of the association was to erect a statue of Longfellow as a memorial and designate the land it stood on as a public park, to be gifted in trust to the City of Cambridge.

The children were more concerned with preserving the meadow as open space than they were with the monument itself. Ernest Longfellow wanted the area to be a “breathing space” on the river. He wrote that, as the city continued to grow more crowded, the park’s value as such would only grow and “would be a better monument to my father and more in harmony than any graven image that could be erected.”

However, the vision of the public that the surviving Longfellows hoped to serve may not have been entirely inclusive. As the park was designed and debate turned to the placement of their father’s monument, the children pushed back on recommendations for siting the statue. They worried that the suggested location would be too wet, and that the area was “not frequented by the same class of people” as others.

As a new century dawned, plans for Longfellow Park continued to develop. Upon donating the land, the Longfellow heirs stipulated that a road be built along the lot within five years. In 1900, Charles River Road—later renamed Memorial Drive and extended west along the river—was complete and was lined with plane trees. The Charles River Dam, finished in 1910, stabilized the area’s hydrology. The land was later incorporated into a linear park by the Metropolitan District Commission.

Some of the people involved in creating Longfellow Park went on to make notable contributions to conservation across the region. Charles Eliot, who helped design the park, later founded the nation’s first land trust, The Trustees of Reservations. He also led the establishment of the Metropolitan District Commission, whose first acquisition was the Beaver Brook Reservation in Belmont, Massachusetts, to protect the Waverly Oaks, a stand of 22 white oak trees. Only one of the Waverly Oaks remains, but the park is still home to impressive elder-growth trees, several of which may be much older than the park itself.

In the Care of Alice

Alice Longfellow, the poet’s eldest daughter, was one of only two heirs not to build a house on the estate after it was divided among the siblings. She lived in, and oversaw the upkeep of, Craigie House from 1888 to 1928. (Charles, the other heir who resisted building, was a world traveler with a downtown apartment on Boston’s Beacon Hill.)

Born at Craigie House, and raised in its rooms and gardens, Alice Longfellow had a connection with the home that was, perhaps, even deeper than her father’s and was fostered over a lifetime. The special affinity each of her parents held for the estate pulsed through their eldest daughter. The solemn and precocious child grew into a sharp-witted and capable woman who saw and responded to inequality in the world around her. She was a leader and advocate for opportunities in education for women and people of color and a philanthropist for schools for the blind.

Her political savvy also manifested in her conservation work. Her time as the estate’s matriarch marked an era of particularly lively community use. Alice hired the young and ambitious landscape architect Martha Brookes Brown (later Hutcheson), who refreshed and redesigned the gardens. The renovations restored some of the layout from the days when Henry Longfellow walked the grounds, but also made changes to better lend the area to social gatherings. When Alice traveled, which she often did, the house, porch, lawn, and gardens were all open to visitors. The space was often used for ceremonies, as a play area for children and dogs, as a baseball field, and as the grounds for an annual circus.

As the Longfellow children aged, they thought deeply about the future of the estate. They were concerned that future generations might not be well positioned to care for and preserve it. Alice was particularly articulate regarding these issues. After considering several options for preserving Longfellow’s home, the siblings decided on an Indenture of Trust, established in 1913. The trust transferred management of the estate to the Longfellow House Trust for the immediate benefit of the Longfellow descendants and the long-term consideration of the American people. Alice and other heirs could continue to reside in the house, but if and when they left, it would continue to be maintained.

After Alice Longfellow’s death, the trust became responsible for the estate and its maintenance. In the 1930s, the trust started to struggle financially and began a decades-long crusade to pass the house over to the National Park Service. The Longfellow National Historic Site was finally established by an act of Congress in 1972. It was later renamed Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site to preserve the memory of Washington’s time there during the Revolutionary War.

By the late 1800s, the waterfront had rapidly commercialized. The family parcel closest to the water was bounded by wharves, warehouses, a Cambridge Gas-Light Company structure, and the Cambridge Casino. The city undertook an ambitious riverbank improvement project two decades after Longfellow purchased the triangular parcel that became part of Riverbend Park. Without the family’s stewardship, it likely would have seen the same development that was being built nearby along the Charles River.

A Legacy and a Vision

Though it is only a portion of the property that once flourished under the Longfellow family line, the Longfellow House is—both historically and financially—more valuable than ever. Nestled amidst the built-up Cambridge of today, the house and gardens occupy two acres on Brattle Street, flanked by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and a campus of Lesley University.

The grounds are a National Historic Site and look out over Longfellow Park, another two-acre strip stretching from Brattle Street to Mount Auburn Street. Longfellow’s cherished river view has been partially obscured by Memorial Drive, which the city widened over time. Between Memorial Drive and the northern bank of the Charles River, another wedge of land escaped Cambridge’s rapid urbanization thanks to the Longfellow family. Today, the parcel is owned by the state Department of Conservation and Recreation. When Longfellow owned the property, it was marshy and prone to flooding. Today, it is grassy with a bank of woody shrubs and trees that thrive in stabilized hydrologic conditions engineered by the city.

Across the river, Harvard University students enjoy a sprawling athletic complex along Soldiers Field Road, thanks partly to Longfellow, who rallied friends and family to purchase 70 acres of the land in 1870 and subsequently donate it to the university. Back on the other side of the river and to the west, the Cambridge Cemetery and the adjacent Mount Auburn Cemetery complete, across several roadways, an arc of green that reaches from Cambridge into Boston and Watertown. With the nearby Fresh Pond reservoir as well as connective bike paths and the green median islands along Aberdeen Avenue, these protected landscapes form an expansive greenway in the midst of a busy, modern city.

The remarkable protected view of the Charles River from the Longfellows’ front parlor helped to frame what might be possible, through private and public action, across the nation, and around the globe.

Lily Robinson is a program coordinator at the International Land Conservation Network (ILCN), a program of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy that connects private and civic sector conservation organizations around the world. She worked previously as a freelance reporter for the Harvard Press and CommonWealth magazine.

James N. (“Jim”) Levitt is director and cofounder of the International Land Conservation Network. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of Mount Auburn Cemetery.

The authors would like to acknowledge the remarkably helpful and dedicated staff of the Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site in Cambridge, Massachusetts, including Chris Beagan, Kate Hanson Plass, and Emily Levine.

Lead image: The Charles River rolls on. Credit: Artography via Shutterstock.

The Lincoln Institute provides a variety of early- and mid-career fellowship opportunities for researchers. In this series, we follow up with our fellows to learn more about their work.

With a background in landscape architecture, Seung Kyum Kim has always been interested in the interplay between green space and the urban form.

After beginning his career at Design Workshop in Phoenix and Salt Lake City in the late 2000s, Kim relocated to South Korea in 2009 to take a role with the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport, working on flood mitigation, drought, and stormwater management. There, he got interested in “how to minimize risk from flooding, natural disasters, and climate change,” he says, which led him to pursue a master’s and a PhD from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

While at Harvard GSD, Kim joined a trip to several cities in China with Professor Richard Peiser and discovered he had an interest in housing and land policy as well. Since then, his research—which included work as an International Fellow through the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s China program in 2021—has spanned multiple disciplines, connecting urban planning, landscape architecture, housing and economics, environmental justice, and climate change.

In this interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Kim reflects on some of the most successful climate-adaptive green spaces around the world, why cities with aging residents are less likely to invest in new green spaces, and how park usage differs in the United States and South Korea.

JON GOREY: What is the main focus of your research?

SEUNG KYUM KIM: I’m currently a professor at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology [KAIST], which is very much focused on technology and science. The engineering school is very strong here, it’s like MIT in South Korea. My department is the Graduate School of Future Strategy, and I’m working on the economic side, urban planning and climate change, while some of the professors in our department are working on the engineering side.

I’m working on six research projects at the same time, so my field of research is kind of expanding, rather than going deep. I’m focusing on how climate policies like carbon taxes and the CBAM, or carbon border adjustment mechanism, influence the urban economy, particularly manufacturing competitiveness and urban inequality. I’m also exploring the long-term impact that these policies have on shrinking cities and urban revitalization.

One of my projects is on how blue-green infrastructure for climate change adaptation affects gentrification in urban areas in 32 countries on the African continent. And in one of my recent research papers, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, I was researching how an aging population impacts climate policy.

JG: What’s something that was surprising or unintuitive that you found in your research?

SK: I studied how the aging population impacts climate adaptation strategy in Southeast Asia. Using remote sensing and difference-in-differences approaches, I found that communities with a growing elderly population were seeing reduced green infrastructure and green spaces, making them more vulnerable to climate change. This was sort of surprising, and it underscored the importance of considering demographic change in climate policy planning.

As people get older in a community, the tax base decreases. So with a limited budget, the government’s priorities are different. As the people are getting older, the government mostly focuses on hospitals, the health budget is increased—but for environmental green space and parks, investments in those kinds of amenities, the budget is reduced.

JG: What do you wish more people knew about urban green spaces?

SK: I wish people understood that climate policy isn’t just an environmental concern. It is deeply connected to economic and social equality. Effective urban planning can simultaneously address environmental, economic, and social issues as well.

JG: You’ve studied green spaces all over the world. Are there any great projects that you think were particularly successful at combining green space and climate adaptation?

SK: There are a few inspiring examples of successful green space projects that also address climate change and provide cultural benefits. There’s the Cheonggyecheon Stream restoration in South Korea, this was 15 or 20 years ago. Originally it was a covered highway, and the Cheonggyecheon was restored into an urban stream and linear park in central Seoul. It significantly reduced urban heat island effects, improved air quality, boosted biodiversity, and provided the poor with an urban oasis in the densest area of the city.

One of the reasons they did not convert the covered highway into a stream and green space earlier was that land prices are very expensive in central Seoul, and because of traffic issues, transportation issues. So there were two phases. Before the Cheonggyecheon restoration project, they actually modified the transportation systems within Seoul. . . . The local government created a dedicated bus lane in the center of the road to solve the traffic conditions. After that, they did the stream restoration. So that kind of environmental project is not solely a green space project, it’s linked. That’s one of the reasons we need to see the broader perspective. We need to see the transportation and climate change and environmental benefits and the cultural benefits within urban issues.

China also has the sponge city initiative in various cities, including Wuhan and Xinjiang. It aims to incorporate permeable surfaces, wetlands, green roofs, and rain gardens throughout the urban area. The [sponge city] project improves urban water management to reduce flooding and runoff and enhance the urban ecosystem, making the city more resilient to extreme weather events.

JG: Have you noticed any differences in the ways we use or don’t use urban green space in the United States compared to South Korea?

SK: In the United States, green space often means larger parks . . . nature reserves and recreational areas that are generously spread out, especially in suburban or less dense urban areas. Expansive parks like Central Park in New York or Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, they’re intended not only for recreation but also for preserving nature and wildlife within an urban context.

But in Korea, the green spaces are usually smaller—it’s a small country, so they’re more strategically placed within dense urban neighborhoods because of limited urban land availability. The parks tend to be compact and highly designed to maximize efficiency, often equipped with walking paths, exercise equipment, benches, and community gardens. Also, in Korea green space focuses heavily on accessibility, daily convenience, and the well-being of residents fitting seamlessly into the high-density urban environment. Another difference is cultural usage. Korean parks often serve as a community space for daily activities, like group exercise and community gatherings, whereas US parks might see more individual, family-based recreational uses, like picnics and sports and leisure activities.

JG: What’s the best book you’ve read lately, or a favorite TV show you’ve been streaming?  

SK: Recently I read Elizabeth Kolbert’s Under a White Sky, which vividly explores how environmental innovations can sometimes have unexpected consequences. Another book I read recently was Ian Goldin’s Rescue: From Global Crisis to a Better World. That was also fascinating, especially how it highlights the factors determining urban success or failure.

Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: Former Lincoln Institute International Fellow Seung Kyum Kim. Credit: Courtesy photo.

El Instituto Lincoln ofrece una variedad de oportunidades de carrera temprana y media para los investigadores. En esta serie, hacemos un seguimiento con antiguos académicos y becarios del Instituto Lincoln para obtener más información sobre su trabajo.

Cuando Sonali Abraham comenzó a estudiar el uso y la eficiencia del agua urbana en la Universidad de California, Los Ángeles, en 2016, la región estaba saliendo de una sequía de años, por lo que es un gran estudio de caso sobre las actitudes y acciones de conservación del agua. Unos años más tarde, completó su doctorado con la ayuda de una beca de tesis doctoral del Centro Babbitt (Babbitt Center Dissertation Fellowship), que ayuda a los estudiantes de doctorado cuya investigación promueve la sostenibilidad y la resiliencia del agua. Ahora es investigadora sénior en el Pacific Institute, una organización sin fines de lucro con sede en Oakland, California, centrada en los desafíos y las soluciones globales del agua.

En esta entrevista, que ha sido editada con motivos de longitud y claridad, Abraham refleja acerca de las ideas erróneas que tiene la gente acerca de los paisajes sostenibles, por qué el agua se da por sentado, aún en climas áridos, y como las escuelas pueden tener un papel clave en la captura de aguas pluviales urbanas.

JON GOREY: ¿Cuál es el enfoque de su investigación?

SONALI ABRAHAM: El foco principal de mi tesis fue la eficiencia del agua, en especial al aire libre. La gran sequía acababa de terminar cuando obtuve la beca de tesis doctoral del Centro Babbitt, por lo que todavía había una conciencia en Los Ángeles y el suroeste de los Estados Unidos de que todos necesitamos conservar el agua. Pero cuando se trataba del uso del agua al aire libre, había una desconexión. Aún había personas con áreas de césped o fuentes de agua bastante grandes en su patio. Los Ángeles es un estudio de caso interesante, porque tiene ambos extremos: Tienes a las personas que son realmente buenas para conservar el agua y súper conscientes, pero también tienes personas que tienen los medios para no preocuparse. Primero analicé cómo la gente usa el agua al aire libre. . . y, luego, me centré en el sector comercial, porque me di cuenta de que había una gran brecha en nuestra comprensión de cómo las propiedades comerciales usaban el agua.

Estaba tratando de entender, ¿los espacios comerciales redujeron el uso de agua durante la sequía? ¿En qué están usando el agua, qué tipo de paisajes están usando? ¿Y cuáles son los paisajes sostenibles que podemos implementar que ahorren agua pero que también se vean bien? Queremos tratar de cambiar esta idea errónea de que los paisajes sostenibles son feos; no son solo un montón de rocas o cactus al azar, son hermosos por derecho propio. Se puede tener un paisaje sostenible que ahorre agua y recursos e, incluso así, tener un patio delantero realmente hermoso del que enorgullecerse.

JG: ¿En qué está trabajando ahora o qué quiere abordar a continuación?

SA: Uno de los proyectos geniales en los que estoy trabajando en este momento es buscar oportunidades de captura de aguas pluviales en las escuelas de Los Ángeles. El Distrito Escolar Unificado de Los Ángeles es uno de los mayores propietarios de tierras en Los Ángeles, y hay muchas áreas pavimentadas, por lo que había mucha preocupación por el efecto de islas de calor urbanas en las escuelas debido a todo el hormigón que las rodea y las altas temperaturas intensas. Se puede sacar esa superficie impermeable y crear ambientes realmente saludables, y de esta forma, ayudar a los niños que asisten a la escuela todos los días, pero también ayudar al medio ambiente en la comunidad circundante, de muchas maneras diferentes.

En el condado de Los Ángeles existe este programa llamado Measure W (Medida W) que grava las superficies pavimentadas o impermeables por pie cuadrado, por lo que hay un gran incentivo para que las personas lo cambien. El distrito escolar trabajó con una organización local sin fines de lucro, Amigos de los Ríos, e hizo un muy buen trabajo. Es un proyecto hermoso. Lograron una gran participación de las partes interesadas, es un gran ejemplo de cómo se pueden hacer las cosas de forma colaborativa e inteligente.

JG: Ha vivido en muchos lugares del mundo, algunos con abundancia de agua, otros enfrentando una escasez preocupante. ¿Ha visto contrastes o similitudes interesantes en la forma en que la gente piensa sobre el agua?

SA: La similitud es que, en general, las personas subestiman el agua. Tanto cuando tienes mucho como cuando tienes poco, la gente tiene la impresión de que el agua es ilimitada. Cuando ves cuerpos de agua, creo que hay una impresión de que es interminable.

Ha sido interesante ver el cambio en la política centrada en el lugar. Cuando estaba en la India haciendo la licenciatura, no se trataba tanto de la oferta o la escasez, a veces había en exceso, sino de la calidad del agua. Eso es muy diferente de cómo se habla aquí, o en el Medio Oriente, donde crecí, donde todo se trata de escasez.

JG: ¿Qué desearía que más personas supieran sobre la conservación del agua?

SA: La parte de que cada pequeña acción importa. Es aburrido, pero creo que es importante. En este momento, estamos haciendo un estudio en Pacific Institute que analiza una evaluación nacional del potencial de eficiencia del agua, por lo tanto, cuánta agua podemos ahorrar en todo el país si hiciéramos X, Y y Z. Estos son cambios muy básicos basados en la tecnología, como grifos eficientes, no son cambios de comportamiento, y te sorprendería el impacto que pueden tener. La gente descarta esos pequeños cambios con facilidad y cree que ‘soy solo yo, es solo un baño’, pero esas cosas se suman bastante rápido.

JG: En lo que respecta a su trabajo, ¿qué la mantiene despierta por la noche? ¿Y qué le da esperanza?

SA: La parte de la equidad, en especial en un contexto internacional. Los problemas que enfrentan las diferentes regiones del mundo varían mucho, y el agua no sigue las fronteras de los países. Pero la forma en que las personas abordan los problemas a menudo es sobre una base muy política, y eso me preocupa. . . . Tengo la esperanza de que haya un camino por seguir a medida que la gente investigue más y se corra más la voz de que estas cosas tienen que administrarse como un recurso para una comunidad en conjunto, y esa comunidad puede ser el barrio, puede ser la ciudad, puede ser el mundo, porque literalmente es transversal a todo eso.

La escala a la que van las cosas es realmente alentadora, la conciencia solo está aumentando y está aumentando a un ritmo mucho más rápido que cuando comencé este trabajo. . . . Es lamentable que el cambio climático sea uno de los impulsores que ha llevado a las personas a ser más conscientes, pero es genial que las personas tengan mayor conciencia.

JG: ¿Cuál es el mejor libro que ha leído recientemente?

SA: Tengo un libro que recomiendo que todos lean. Se llama The Covenant of Water (El pacto de agua). Es ficción y escrito por Abraham Verhese, un doctor que se volvió autor. No puedo decir mucho, pero toma lugar en el sur de la India, de donde viene mi familia, entonces tengo una conexión personal. Es parte misterio médico, parte ficción de familia y parte conciencia cultural del agua y cómo, fuera de todo lo científico y técnico, el agua tiene una importancia visceral para muchas comunidades.

Jon Gorey es redactor del Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo.

Imagen principal: Sonali Abraham. Crédito: foto de cortesía.

The Lincoln Institute provides a variety of early- and mid-career fellowship opportunities for researchers. In this series, we follow up with our fellows to learn more about their work.

How do you get people to consider drinking recycled wastewater? That was the challenge Marisa Manheim sought to address as a doctoral student at Arizona State University. With the help of a Babbitt Center Dissertation Fellowship, Manheim worked with 15 tap-water skeptics to conceive and codesign an exhibit aimed at inspiring curiosity about—and perhaps even acceptance of—a concept that many people reflexively reject.

While all water is recycled, in a sense—that’s how the water cycle works—some communities in arid areas, such as Scottsdale, Arizona, have been piloting direct potable reuse (DPR) systems, using advanced purification processes to treat wastewater to standards that exceed those of bottled water. Manheim decided to investigate the public’s response to such programs, bringing theories of embodied cognition to her research and exploring how emotions and bodily sensations contribute to decision-making.

Before pursuing her PhD, Manheim earned a master’s degree in experience design, and worked in corporate design research roles she found less than fulfilling. “A detour into activism” led her into urban agriculture just as the movement gained national momentum in the early 2000s.

Now an assistant professor of environment and sustainability at the University at Buffalo in New York, Manheim continues to take an interdisciplinary approach to her research. In this interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Manheim explains how good music can influence our choices, why urine makes great fertilizer, and what she’s learned about challenging social norms.

JON GOREY: What was the focus of your dissertation research?

MARISA MANHEIM: I was always trying to answer the question, why is urban agriculture such an amazing launching point for environmental awareness building and intersectional justice and civic participation and all these pieces that have a really hard time getting traction otherwise? And I eventually landed on embodied cognition and activism, which are ideas from cognitive philosophy and psychology about how we process the world around us. It’s very much trying to reintegrate ideas about the body and sensation and social situations into how we conceptualize consciousness and cognition, decision-making, and so forth. I wanted to study something that helped me to explore those ideas further, but didn’t know what it would be.

When I found the concept of recycling wastewater as a drinking water supply, it was basically love at first sight. It’s just such an interesting topic, because it’s about water policy, it’s about food policy, and it’s about novel technologies and the way we tend to be very distrustful or suspicious of them. And because it really comes down to this moment of disgust and reaction, and the way that all manifests, it allowed me to ask a lot of questions about embodied cognition.

The research itself looks at how we are responding to the idea of introducing recycled water into the drinking water supply in central Arizona, how the people in charge of that from a policy and instrumentation side are anticipating and responding to those consumer perceptions, and also how we can apply lessons from design practice and design research to help inform and improve how the decision-making plays out around that topic.

I recruited people who are specifically going out of their way to secure alternative drinking water—so they don’t drink their tap water. I worked very closely with this group of 15 water skeptics to understand and cocreate ways to help other people become curious about the possibilities of incorporating advanced purified water into the drinking water supply . . . and then turned that into an exhibit that engaged 1,100 people in three public festivals.

It starts at the entrance, where there are panels teaching you about water scarcity and the changing climate and the uncertain future of the water supply. Then you go through this inflatable tunnel with this big display about direct potable reuse and how it works. And then you go out of the tunnel, and you’re in this circle where people are standing around drinking water, and there’s lots of fun colors and greenery and music, and you’re invited to sample the water and share your responses to it.

At the entrance to the exhibit, which is called the Future Taste of Water, we had people vote by dropping a marble into one of three water bottles, so they were able to say whether they would support the use of recycled water as a drinking water supply. Something like 77 percent said they wouldn’t support it at the entrance. And then at the exit, they had the same question, and almost everybody supported it.

So the concept is, what works to promote curiosity about a topic with a group of extreme skeptics is highly likely to work with people who are more neutral or who haven’t made up their mind yet.

JG: Many solutions to our biggest challenges hinge on some kind of shift in human behavior. Has your research revealed any strategies that can help reshape people’s attitudes and actions?

MM: Mainly it’s bringing in materiality. It’s very easy to do with recycled water, because we have this artifact, this thing, the water itself. Taking it out of this conceptual, speculative space and making it about something that people can directly interact with completely changes the dynamics.

It’s also social setting; that’s the other ingredient. We did this in a very public space and did things to make it really cool and celebratory—[provided] good music, good aesthetics—and people were almost always surrounded by other people doing the same activity. So there was an opportunity to calibrate your response based on how you think others are responding around you. And that’s the other part of it—we’re constantly calibrating in relationship with the people around us, especially around things that challenge social norms.

Social norms are so important because they reduce the transaction costs of social exchanges. We don’t have to think about, ‘How should I respond to this?’ because social norms have shaped and patterned those responses. When we’re confronted with something and asked to actually slow down and consider responding differently, we can’t rely on those social norms anymore. We have to look around, and think about what we actually feel, the sensations that we’re getting from this beverage, and how we see other people responding.

So if you can make it material for people and if you do it in a social way . . . you can really move things into a space of positivity. . . . My suspicion is that, across almost all of these difficult sustainability transitions that we’re trying to overcome—why is it so hard to get people to ride public transportation? why is it so hard to get people to eat differently, in a more low-carbon way?—if there are opportunities to experience what it would mean on a daily basis, and how it would feel over time, it can provide an experiential foundation for larger changes.

JG: What have you been working on more recently?

MM: I was invited to sign on to a [National Science Foundation] grant as part of the Convergence Accelerator program . . . and the project that I’m a part of is about urine recycling using source separation. So rather than combining feces and urine into a flow and then having to treat them and separate out the things that are valuable for reuse later, the idea is that we can work upstream—literally—and separate the urine and then recycle it as a fertilizer. The piece that I’m responsible for on that project is drawing on my user experience and design research methods, doing a lot of exploratory user and stakeholder interviews and codesign sessions.

If we’re successful in phase two, we’re going to be building out a fully functional mobile demonstration unit with toilets equipped with urinals, female urinals, and potentially a source-separating toilet, where people can go and use the facilities. So it’ll help demystify what it’s going to feel like from a toilet user perspective, but then also you can see how the treatment system works, so it’ll help to demystify what it will look like from an operator’s perspective if you’re a building engineer, architect, or municipal decision-maker.

A big part of the other side of this research, in terms of the design work that I’m involved in, is to work with farmers, extension educators, and other people involved in the agricultural system to inform the product design for the granular fertilizer created by the dehydration process. What is the packaging and labeling? What kind of certification would be necessary? How important is it that it doesn’t have any smell? It has to be a certain size so that it can fit into farm equipment, and obviously the nutrient makeup has to be very consistent and accurately communicated. But there’s a lot more that we don’t really know.

JG: What’s the most surprising thing you’ve found in your research?

MM: Disgust is different when you give people the actual thing instead of the speculative thing. When I worked with this group of water skeptics in the Phoenix region, one person in particular thought that she would never, ever allow her municipal drinking water to pass her lips. They use it for cleaning in her household, and that’s it, because of the taste.

When we gave her the opportunity to try actual DPR water, because we went to the Scottsdale water treatment facility and she got to sample their advanced purified water, she thought it was so good. She had been skeptical about DPR, and she became a huge proponent: “I want that water. Why don’t I have that water now?”

JG: When it comes to your work, what keeps you up at night? And what gives you hope?

MM: The thing that keeps me up at night is the polarization in our society. I see it as a positive feedback loop—the more polarization we have, the more echo chamber and social division, people are only listening to people they already agree with. There’s not this cross-pollination and constructive debate that goes on in a society that isn’t polarized and divided. So it just increases, because you’re surrounded by people who share your viewpoint, and anybody who doesn’t is an “other” and is demonized, or at least not afforded respect.

What I think about a lot is, what can we, as individuals, as universities, as people involved in nonprofit organizations, be doing to help to pull people out of that cycle of polarization and positive reinforcement, and into a space of engagement and interplay and deliberation?

What gives me hope is the work that people are doing and all the intersections I can find. Even though we’re in this moment of crisis and it feels very hopeless, and things are headed in the wrong direction, I don’t know why I’m such an optimist. But I just feel like if enough of us are finding the kernel of truth that we feel motivated by, and if we are doing it in a way that helps us find each other, we can be building alternative futures.

JG: What’s the best book you’ve read lately?

MM: It’s called Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert, by Sunaura Taylor, who graduated from the University of Arizona. It’s about the TCE pollution [trichloroethylene, a carcinogen] in South Phoenix related to the aeronautics industry. I picked it up because I’m teaching a Water and Society course this semester, and I was looking for texts that might be worth including. She’s telling a really important story about environmental injustice and persistent pollution, but because she’s a disability scholar, she’s telling it from this embodied perspective that I think is often really missing in these narratives around the environment and injustice.

Forever chemicals and things that are consistently present in our environment—if they’re in our environment, then they’re in our bodies. And this has been borne out by a lot of research, that we are actually part of the disabled ecologies that we’re so concerned about. When we’re trying to restore an ecosystem because it’s an important site for waterfowl or something like that, we’re actually trying to restore our own bodies as well, because we rely on those ecosystems. And so pollutants really help to bring all that into focus. It’s a great way of pulling that all together for people, and I’m definitely going to be using it in my class.

Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: Visitors to an interactive Future Taste of Water exhibit sample recycled wastewater. Credit: Marisa Manheim.

This content was developed through a partnership between the Lincoln Institute and the American Planning Association as part of the APA Foresight practice. It was originally published by APA in Planning.  

In the immortal words of Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” 

Keep that in mind when you find that your next trip on a long weekend—which could be every weekend as more and more companies move to a four-day work week—will be on a solar—powered plane. Or when you buy your next multitool, which turns out to be made of a plastic that can change its form and properties when it’s heated or cooled. 

With a world moving faster than even a 24-hour news cycle can handle, it’s more important than ever for planners to stay one step ahead of the issues and prepare communities as change occurs. 

2025 Trend Report for Planners 

On January 29, the American Planning Association (APA) will publish the 2025 Trend Report for Planners in partnership with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. APA’s Foresight team and the APA Trend Scouting Foresight Community have identified existing, emerging, and potential future trends that planners will want to be aware of and understand so that they can act, prepare, and learn. 

The report includes about 100 trends and signals, exploring them in future scenarios, deep dives, podcasts, and more. Here are just a few of the trends you need to know about. 

1. More Housing Hurdles: Insurance Costs, Climate Impacts, and Population Shifts

Population is growing much more slowly in the US than in previous decades, and the Census Bureau projects just a 9.7 percent population growth over the next 75 years. The concept of family is changing, too. Single-person households and couples without children now make up more than half of all US households. Single-parent and multigenerational households also are on the rise, as are roommate situations. 

Less than one-fifth of US families now fit the traditional “nuclear family” model, and the typical concepts regarding households continue to evolve. But one thing that has not changed in recent years: finding housing that’s affordable is getting more difficult. According to research by Zillow, households need to earn $47,000 more than they did just four years ago to afford a single-family home. Inflation, high interest rates, and the shortage of affordable housing have put the American Dream out of reach for many, with homeownership now almost 50 percent more expensive than renting. 

Meanwhile, cities in the Northeast and Midwest are seeing population losses, while states in the South and West continue to gain residents even as climate change impacts are striking those areas the hardest. Relative tax burdens and lower costs of living are likely key factors. In fact, the drastic impacts of climate change are threatening the health, safety, and lives of millions of people, with 34 percent of people in the US living in areas at risk of natural disasters and flooding and 41 percent of rental units vulnerable to climate change. 

Climate change–related losses are also generating chaos in the insurance market. Insurance providers are raising rates substantially in many areas and have become reluctant or have refused to insure homes in hazardous areas. Big insurers have pulled out of Florida, Louisiana, and California, a state where insurance giant State Farm stopped accepting applications because of “rapidly growing catastrophic exposure.” (Future scenarios in the Trend Report can help planners explore how this situation could play out in the next 10 years.) 

To mitigate insurance market impacts to homeowners, regulators can employ strategies such as mandating insurance industry transparency and forbidding “bluelining,” the increase in premiums or withdrawal of services in high-risk areas by providers. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners recently adopted a National Climate Resilience Strategy for Insurance to guide regulators and providers alike, and Florida has passed several laws aiming to reduce insurance premiums and provide mitigation grants to homeowners and multifamily property owners.

2. Public Spaces for Shaggy—and Scooby Too

As the need for public, “third places” grows, some cities are reimagining how spaces can adapt or where new ones can be created. This includes factoring in places for pets, especially since more US households have pets than children. The global pet industry is expected to reach nearly $500 billion by 2030. Cities can obtain a “pet-friendly” certification to fetch more tourists, and the number of US dog parks is exploding, with a 40 percent increase in public dog park development from 2009 to 2020. In San Francisco, developers are adding dog-specific areas near housing complexes to attract buyers.

3. Water Is Precious and Under Threat

The Gulf of Mexico is the hottest it has been in the modern era, causing rapidly forming storms like hurricanes Helene and Milton this past year that devastated the US East Coast. Meanwhile, temperatures in the Great Barrier Reef are the highest they’ve been in four centuries, while heat-driven ocean expansion has caused a third of global sea level rise. In the Persian Gulf, water is scarce and valuable, as growing populations and development reach an all-time high. Globally, a quarter of all food crops are threatened by unreliable or highly stressed water supplies. At the same time, water currents in the Arctic and the Atlantic appear to be slowing down, with the potential to change weather patterns and put food-producing regions at risk. 

Meanwhile, large-scale commercial water bottling operations driven by private equity are posing an increasing risk to the stability of local water sources in the US, as is the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) data centers that need massive amounts of water for cooling. That is threatening local and regional reservoirs, aquifers, and freshwater sources, and some places are implementing water usage regulations as a response.

4. Could We Evolve to a Post-Work World?

The COVID-19 pandemic and the rise in remote work has blurred the lines of traditional work patterns. Take the growing popularity of “workcations” and “bleisure,” which suggest that work and personal life may increasingly overlap. Not everyone likes it; Australia enacted a “right to disconnect” law for workers in August 2024. 

Four-day workweek pilots introduced globally and in the US show that reduced hours can lead to higher productivity and greater life satisfaction. Workers think so, too. About 80 percent said they would be happier and just as productive dropping a day from the traditional schedule, according to the 2024 Work in America study. 

At the same time, our relationship with our work is shifting. A 2023 Pew Research Center study uncovered a new trend: only four in ten US workers see their job as central to their overall identity. This shift is reinforced by the idea of viewing a job as a verb (something you do) rather than a noun (something you are, like an accountant or technician). 

Attitudes toward leisure are changing, too. If individuals use their free time to pursue personal projects or passions, leisure could replace work as a primary focus in life. With the percentage of Americans older than 65 expected to rise to 23 percent by 2025, these current and future retirees also are seeking to make the most of their next chapter in life.

5. Digital Fatigue (and Pushback) Sets In

Digital fatigue is real. It is showing up in various ways, from a growing distrust of online news and increasing concerns over AI-generated content to disillusionment with online dating. Schools are banning mobile phones in classrooms, and states are restricting children’s access to social apps. The US surgeon general has even suggested that social media platforms should carry warning labels like those on cigarettes. In July, the Senate passed the first major internet safety bill for children in two decades. 

These measures reflect a broader effort to balance the benefits of technology with the need to be more conscious about the younger generation’s well-being. For planners, this trend suggests a greater need to balance digital public engagement with face-to-face interactions, fostering meaningful communication and empathy within communities. This includes creating in-person opportunities to engage younger people in planning processes, which can help connect those generations to their communities and each other.

6. Fungus Is the Future

Pop culture may lead you to think an age of fungi marks the last of us, but the ecological and health benefits of fungi should have more than just “mushroompreneurs” jumping for joy. Fungi can help shift us away from fossil fuels, lower cholesterol, help with successful organ transplants, tackle plastic pollution, eliminate micropollutants from contaminated water, and transition to more sustainable food systems. In 2023, US mushroom sales reached $1.04 billion, and the market is projected to triple in the next 10 years. As planners look for nature-based solutions for urban environments, fungi could become a key partner in creating better living spaces for all.

7. Balancing Green Energy Demand with Indigenous Rights

As the interest in renewable energy has spiked, so has the need for mining the raw minerals and metals required by these technologies—with some estimates believing demand will quadruple by 2040. These include lithium, cobalt, and silicon, as well as over a dozen rare earth elements. But mining comes with myriad human and environmental costs, often occurring in and at the expense of disadvantaged areas. This potentially pits government and private interests against Indigenous peoples, primarily through the extraction and exploitation of resources on tribal lands. 

More than half of projects to extract energy transition materials are on or near Indigenous land, and Indigenous peoples are directly impacted by over a third of global environmental conflicts, either through landscape, land, or livelihood loss. Some efforts are underway to boost Indigenous sovereignty. 

Central to the issue—and potential solutions—are land use and ownership, as well as the ability to apply different lenses to see the points of view and needs of the people these decisions will affect the most. Protecting the sovereign rights of Indigenous peoples could reduce the negative impact of environmental conflicts over the green energy transition and provide solutions. One such way is by adopting Indigenous knowledge into existing approaches to climate change mitigation and adaptation, like how several Native American nations are reintroducing bison to the US plains to enhance environmental and socioeconomic outcomes. 

The 2025 Trend Report for Planners was written by Petra Hurtado, Ievgeniia Dulko, Senna Catenacci, Joseph DeAngelis, Sagar Shah, and Jason Jordan. It was edited by Ann Dillemuth. 

Jon DePaolis is APA’s senior editor. 

Lead image: Steam rises above the cooling towers of Google’s data center in The Dalles, Oregon. Credit: Courtesy of Google.