Pocket gardens are small, strategically implemented areas that feature plants and greenery, and provide respite from densely built environments. | Photo credits (all): Courtesy of Jeffery Totaro
By Eric Galipo
Across the United States, decades of development have greatly lessened people’s direct access to nature; however, a growing understanding of the benefits of access to even small outdoor space outdoors has encouraged designers exploring ways of subtly weaving green space into unexpected places. As cities expand, “pocket gardens” have emerged as a scalable response to introduce green interventions into densely built streetscapes. One surprisingly purposeful place that pocket gardens have taken root is in areas close to hospitals and healthcare facilities.
Pocket gardens are small, strategically implemented areas that feature plants and greenery, and provide respite from densely built environments. Many repurpose underutilized spaces to provide patients, staff, and residents with greater access to nature while softening the boundary between a campus and adjacent streets. When thoughtfully designed, these gardens enhance walkability, advance urban sustainability goals, and reconnect neighborhoods with nature without requiring large-scale redevelopment.
Improving Healthcare Campuses Through the Landscape
At the Newark Beth Israel Medical Center (NBI) in Newark, N.J., FCA worked with healthcare leaders to update and expand the 11-acre campus with the goal of reshaping how it connects to the surrounding neighborhood. NBI’s leadership emphasized the need for an improved sense of place and safety, ensuring that visitors would feel welcomed and reassured by the quality of the facility’s neighborhood and surroundings. Deliberately located pocket gardens were a specific urban design response to this effort create a more legible entry experience, showing that small green interventions can soften boundaries and create easily accessible natural moments day-to-day.
The project involved adding more than 50 new trees across NBI’s urban campus, along with strategic planting beds and mini plazas within expanded sidewalks and the transitional spaces between buildings. Equal parts aesthetic and functional, these pocket gardens reshaped the building’s relationship with its neighborhood and reinforced its broader goals of encouraging healing through intentional exterior urban design.
Historically, many medical centers contain hard boundaries that make them feel disconnected from their neighborhoods. The redesign of NBI softens its edges that abut historic residential neighborhoods, giving way to human-centered spaces that support interaction and connection to nature. They offer accessible moments of respite along city blocks, and the sense of a healthy campus that is tailored for both patients seeking comfort and neighborhood residents seeking leisure.
Whether someone is coming to or from NBI, or lives in the community, any pedestrian can make use of these restorative green pockets to pause, reset, linger, or support their physical and emotional well-being.
Enhancing Environmental Performance and Human Experience
NBI’s pocket gardens play an essential role in catalyzing interaction within the campus’s streetscapes. They also serve as open space and green infrastructure for the surrounding community, contributing to rainwater absorption that reduces stormwater runoff. Shaded areas with understory plantings also support cooling and mitigate urban heat island (UHI) effects that are characteristics of urban environments.
With cities working to address aging infrastructure and climate resiliency amidst population growth and development, pocket gardens provide an achievable, flexible, and minimally disruptive tool for enhancing environmental comfort and ecosystem services. They are particularly transformative for large-scale institutional campuses that are unable to accommodate more significant, green-focused changes or additions.
These areas also improve public health outcomes by encouraging the quality of pedestrian environments and access to comfortable outdoor spaces. Urban areas are typically automobile oriented, but these spaces refocus usability around the pedestrian. Thoughtfully integrated lighting, seating, and greenery around bus stops and key pedestrian routes also work to enhance visibility and safety of the campus while ensuring that these outdoor spaces can be enjoyed by anyone at any time.
Working together, these strategies elevate pocket gardens from a quaint feature to high-performing elements that merge environment, community and social infrastructure seamlessly.
Scalable Models for Other Campuses
One of the most significant advantages of pocket gardens is their capacity to effect incremental change at a reasonable cost. The inherent flexibility associated with these green spaces allows for gradual introduction, providing a scalable model that can be adjusted to the needs of different campuses, contexts and implementation phasing. At NBl, this flexibility allowed the FCA team to embed green infrastructure directly into the design process, making sustainability and community integration core tenets of the overall campus plan.
As healthcare systems look to expand in urban areas and attempt to bridge the gap between interior and exterior, the need for human-centric environments is only growing. Pocket gardens present an effective and impactful opportunity to enhance well-being and community connectivity while prioritizing environmental responsibility.
The lessons from our work at NBI demonstrate an opportunity: even the smallest green interventions can have an impact when envisioned and implemented strategically.
Eric Galipo is the Director of Strategic Planning and Design and an Associate at FCA.