Downtown Louisville’s urban heat island is shaping how comfortable it feels to walk its streets. Through the efforts of the Greenprint initiative and its partners, we are using nature-based solutions to not only cool downtown but also make it more attractive to residents, workers and tourists to help downtown grow into a vibrant neighborhood, not simply a business district.
On Friday, October 16th from 11 am to 3 pm, in the hours leading up to the opening of the PickleY’all Festival, we will temporarily reshape the 500 block of West Jefferson Street in front of Metro Hall with a street activation and community volunteerism event we call The Moving Forest. This event is made possible by generous support from the Humana Foundation.
From 11 am to 3 pm, hundreds of volunteers from major Louisville corporations will transform the streetscape, moving 70 garden carts filled with trees and smaller plants into new configurations. Volunteers will be guided by teams from the UofL Urban Design Studio, Christina Lee Brown Envirome Institute, longtime collaborator and landscape architect Patrick Henry, Louisville Grows, and other partners
Each 25-gallon centerpiece tree will be moveed as part of a choreographed sequence designed and led by Leigh Anne Albrechta, a Louisville Ballet dancer. These temporary landscape configurations on West Jefferson Street convert a planning exercise into a performance people can experience, watching it unfold in real time.
Our 70 centerpiece trees hail from Riverfarm Nursery in Oldham County. Our Greenprint partner, Louisville Grows, will manage the trees and prepare them for the event. Following The Moving Forest activation, Louisville Grows and another Greenprint partner, TreesLouisville, will prepare the trees for their final destinations and plant them in sites within the Greenprint and Green Heart Louisville Project areas.
Between 11 am and 3 pm, the volunteers will navigate the carts into different configurations, exploring how trees impact the look and feel of the block.
The Moving Forest draws inspiration from the ambitious temporary art installation Bosk that moved through Leeuwarden, Netherlands for 100 days in 2022.
Join Patrick Henry, Leigh Anne Albrecht, Patrick Piuma, and the rest of our team to see and experience what a greener downtown could look like, set to a soundtrack by our friend Sylvanus Hudson. For more information please contact Patrick Piuma.
Here are a few teasers we put together for The Moving Forest
Thanks to the Humana Foundation and other corporate sponsors for helping make The Moving Forest possible!
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