At Smith College, Landscapes Communicate Values

Right around lunchtime on a crisp fall day, Landscape Studies Senior Lecturer Reid Bertone-Johnson pulls up to the Julia McWilliams Child ’34 Campus Center on an electric bike, towing an 8-foot trailer. 

Pairs of students make their way over to him, eager to try their hand at riding the bike around Chapin lawn. As each student takes a turn, he jogs after them, offering encouragement and a steadying hand as they learn.

The items in the bike trailer—handmade chairs, games, tables, an umbrella, books, coloring supplies, and lots and lots of bubble wands and solution—make up what Bertone-Johnson calls the ParKit. Easy to transport, assemble, and disassemble, the ParKit gives students the ability to turn alleys, fields, parking lots, and other empty spaces into temporary public parks.

ParKit was originally envisioned as a construction-based, boots-on-the-ground project to build more permanent city parks, both to make unused spaces more inviting and to build community. When finances became a barrier, however, Bertone-Johnson tasked students in his design studio class with figuring out how to create a portable park kit that was smaller, more affordable, and could be transported by bike.

Once they’d come up with a solution, students worked with the College’s woodshop in Hillyer, the Center for Design and Fabrication, and the Design Thinking Initiative to craft chairs and games for the portable ParKit, creating what’s become an exciting touchstone—both on and off campus. 

Students and their families have flocked to the ParKit during events like Smith’s Family Weekend, while local residents enjoyed the temporary public park and its myriad activities during the Flo Fest street festival, Northampton’s Tuesday Market, and the Northampton Housing Authority and Grow Food Northampton’s harvest festival. The ParKit has given people the opportunity to not only connect with their community in different ways, but have fun doing it.

“The ParKit is the only place that I’ve seen an 11-year-old playing chess with someone with housing insecurity,” says Bertone-Johnson. “It’s a project that’s become flexible enough to support the interests of the students and serve the community at the same time.”

That sense of possibility and flexibility infuses Bertone-Johnson’s teaching style. As just one example, for the first project of the semester, students worked to arrange milk crates and wooden table tops to create their classroom space of choice within the Landscape Studies Studio.

“A lot of what I do is getting students to see landscapes in new ways, with an understanding that they didn’t just happen,” he explains. “They aren’t just a backdrop to your life. How were they designed? What are the cues that they’re being taken care of? Whose spaces are valued and being taken care of, and whose aren’t? Landscapes do, in fact, communicate values.”

In addition to his own teaching and mentoring, Bertone-Johnson runs the Greenway Lab with Gaby Immerman, Smith senior lecturer in biological sciences. Within the lab, Bertone-Johnson and Immerman lead students in projects, classes, and special independent studies related to landscape design, ecological restoration, and community engagement surrounding the Mill River. This semester, 16 students are involved in the Greenway Lab.

Bertone-Johnson earned a master’s degree in landscape architecture from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Before that, he received a master’s degree in education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a bachelor’s degree from Tufts University, where he majored in environmental studies and geological sciences. His experience includes stints working for the landscape architecture and planning firm Dodson Associates (now Dodson/Flinker) and for the Library of American Landscape History. 

“But I always knew that I was going to land back in teaching,” says Bertone-Johnson, who has been at Smith since 2007. 

His favorite part of the job?

“Getting students to appreciate and interrogate the nuance of complex situations, as evidenced in landscapes. Not accepting things at face value, and studying something enough to understand that there are implications for how it got here—who built it, who’s excluded from it, how it’s maintained,” he says. “You see the light bulb turn on all the time, when [students] start to see just how complicated it all is, and how they can move within that system to make a greater impact.”

As students continue to practice towing the ParKit back at the Campus Center, that light bulb is burning bright.