An Inclusive City Nature Experience
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24C, mostly sunny, light wind on an August afternoon. In the Porto city center, the Serralves Foundation park offers a natural world enclave. By bringing nature into the built environment, it offers an usual sensory experience: the Treetop Walk.
What is Serralves?
The Serralves Foundation seeks to share culture and art with a broad audience, and operates a contemporary art museum, a surrounding park and various other assets. It’s located in Porto, Portugal, near the city center.
An interesting element of the Foundation’s outreach to a diverse audience is their long-standing free entry program on the first Sunday of every month. I have very fond memories of family outings taking advantage of this option.
Reflecting this mindset, they also made a number of design choices and offer a variety of accessibility options to disabled visitors.
What’s a Treetop Walk and How Inclusive is it?
The Treetop Walk is a walkway built at the tree canopy level to provide a different experience to Serralves’ various audiences. Again, the Foundation’s audience includes disabled people, so physical and sensory access needs should be considered here.
Physical Access
This comprises the surface, amount of space and clearance, visibility considerations, and even rules for the use of the built environment.
I consulted with a friend who’s a wheelchair user on this topic. She turned me on to that last point when I asked about clearance for a wheelchair user to cross paths with a person walking in the opposite direction. My friend estimated that that would be reasonably comfortable, but that two wheelchair users wouldn’t be able to roll past each other. That’s where the rules come in: as indicated in the map of the walkway, there is a set direction of travel. People shouldn’t be going in opposite directions at all. I hadn’t even noticed this, but maybe that’s because I wasn’t looking for it.
Treetop Walk entrance III (at Flickr)
This goes to show 1) they did a good job here, and 2) we don’t know what we don’t know, and that’s why we need to learn and pay attention to lived experience.
As for the walking or rolling surface, it’s made of flat and nicely fitted wood boards with gently angled metal interfaces with the gravel paths that cover most of the park. Comfortable for different types of shoe ware, for wheels, for paws, and for mobility canes - support canes get good purchase, white canes get good feedback.
The fences and handrails are angled outward, allowing for extra visibility opportunities, looking downward. There are also handrails at two separate heights, allowing for comfortable use by people of and at different heights, including children. The mesh size is tight enough to reduce the risk of limbs and objects getting caught, and the fence itself is dark enough to reduce glare and improve visibility.
Walking along the treetops (at Flickr)
There is one concern here that’s not so easy to manage, but is indicated at the entrance: some tree branches will be a hazard at head-height. Blind and visually impaired visitors may want to be mindful and use an upper protective technique, or wear a hat - they add 2 to damage resistance form overhanging objects and 3 to charisma.
Sensory Experiences
The previous section covered an important aspect of the sensory experience: there is good downward visibility. At the same time, the very nature of the Treetop Walk makes for unrivaled visibility into the treetops themselves. Humans rarely get this kind of access.
Humans certainly don’t get this kind of hands-on access to treetops. Do you want to learn about the different kinds of leaves from the tree species at the park? Touch them.
Similarly, this offers enhanced access for other senses. Sounds and scents may travel longer distances than touch, but the perspective here is still different. Particularly for smell, it’s easier to pick apart what you get from each tree, without having it blend in with all the others. By being this close, you get access to the oils on certain leaves, what they feel like and what they smell like.
Connection With The Rest of the Park
The height of the Treetop Walk also offers a unique perspective on other parts of the park. On my visit, I was able to photograph an installation by Yayoi Kusama made from hundreds of floating aluminum spheres.
Thee is a viewing area with seating to take in the rest of the scenery.
Inclusion and Connection
As the temperature starts to fall and gravel crunches under my boots, instead of wood, the walkway proves itself to offer a variety of unique perspectives and to be accessible to many. From price, physical accessibility, to the rare sensory experiences, I believe the Serralves Foundation’s goals are met. The Treetop Walk is open to a broad and diverse community and enables education - formal and informal. It further connects the city to nature and to art in novel ways.
Some design decisions that went into this project may seem clear in retrospect, but they surely took careful analysis and consideration. As a whole, they help connect people to their community. Diversity and inclusion beget connection and shared experiences, and projects like this provide the conditions for that.
If you’d like to connect with me after reading this, I’m very easy to find online. The way I see the world is also easy to find, by following the links on this post to my Flickr photo stream. If you have thoughts about this topic you’d like to share, please do reach out. Where do you go in your area to get experiences like this? Are those spaces accessible and inclusive? Did I miss something? If so, I’d love to learn more from your experience.