The field of landscape architecture has been increasing opportunities to assist small- town communities in connecting their important natural and historic cultural resources to nationally and regionally identified "green" heritage corridors, such as rail-to-trails, river corridors and other projects. In Indiana, steps have been slow in developing and restoring natural and cultural resources unique to these small-town communities in relation to larger recreational corridor initiatives. Facts showed that the Mid-North region of Indiana were drastically short of publicly accessible regional parks and recreational open space. Incorporating community landscape preferences and values and private property rights in the overall approval of a project - particularly those planned from a regional scope - has often been excluded from the design processes to meet these needs. New sensibilities and sensitivities in landscape architecture must evolve to include identifying local visual and behavioral attachments to the landscapes in the design process, especially those projects concerning recreation and open space, since these proposals tend to be one of the flashpoints of public funding concerns in land development.Adjacent to the small town of Williamsport, Indiana, is the tallest waterfall in the state. Williamsport is also located on the Wabash River, which has recently been promoted as a strategic national and regional heritage corridor potential by various state agencies and the National Park Service. This study chose to explore a planning and design process to incorporate local aesthetic and cultural values for the Wabash Heritage Corridor system. a now nationally recognized network of nodes and linkages along one of America's most famous historic waterways. The Williamsport Falls site represents one of the few remaining Hoosier natural resources overlooked for protection due to its proximity to urban environments.Assisting the community in identifying visual and landscape values, and including these assessments as a design process modifier, along with strong local contact and project interaction by the designer / researcher. further the landscape architect in developing a more thorough site program and design.This study demonstrates community input in the programming and design guideline development for the recreational and natural systems resources of a site, and to a lesser degree, assessing relative cultural and historic factors. Local citizens were given a visual preference and landscape characteristics values questionnaire, from which site preference and visual conservation zones were determined. The resultant data was used as a design modifier for the park's visual regime - physically and legally defined protection areas for viewsheds and natural character areas within and adjacent to the site, as well as for the overall recreation and preservation goals of the project. By generating mappable visual attributes of the site that were identified as important by the community members, the site design process was modified to insure that the community's collective visual and landscape preference values and concerns were honored in the site Master Plan.Hopefully, the scholarly contribution of this work was not just be the inclusion of visual assessment and landscape preference methodology in analyzing a unique landform (though this is critical), but also a deeper level of documentation showing the importance of recognizing and preserving significant local and regional natural resource character areas of small-town communities along the Wabash Heritage Corridor. / Department of Landscape Architecture
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BSU/oai:cardinalscholar.bsu.edu:handle/185762 |
| Date | January 1996 |
| Creators | Fisher, Eric J. |
| Contributors | Ball State University. Dept. of Landscape Architecture., Smith, Leslie H. |
| Source Sets | Ball State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | viii, 128 leaves : ill., maps ; 28 cm. |
| Source | Virtual Press |
| Coverage | n-us-in |
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