One way to examine this potential is to consider the entire campus with its buildings, roads and natural open spaces as a well-networked landscape system that supports student learning experiences. In doing so, we highlight two concepts that have been addressed in two different domains, bringing them together to help conceptualize future campus planning in relation to student learning. The concepts are – 1) direct and indirect attention and restoration, and 2) a holistic landscape. Before we outline each concept and propose their integration in this paper, we go back in time for a historical perspective of the evolution of campus open space.

The college experience is a stimulating and demanding time in a student’s life where a multitude of curricular and extra-curricular situations require frequent and heavy use of direct, focused attention and concentration (Wentworth & Middleton, 2014). Thus, university students as a group are at a higher risk of attentional fatigue.

Today’s university must be resilient spaces in which the learning environment encompasses more than technology upgrades, classroom additions, and its academic buildings – in fact, the entire campus, including its open spaces, must be perceived as a holistic learning space that provides a holistic learning experience

Sometimes transit will allow a person to get close to a given area, but not all the way there, leaving the rider in a dangerous situation.140 This was the scenario faced by Cynthia Wiggins, a seventeen-year-old woman who was hit and killed by a dump truck while she was attempting to cross a seven-lane highway to get to the mall where she worked

Residents and policymakers in those areas have rejected proposals to bring Atlanta’s rapid transit network (MARTA) into their communities, which would have allowed inner-city workers easy access to these suburban jobs via public transit.

As one scholar notes, “public transportation continues to be routed in a way that makes it difficult for some blacks to get to and from leisure venues that more affluent or more mobile persons freely enjoy.

If someone wanted to walk or bike to another area, then, it might have to be along the shoulder of a busy road or on the road itself.

Instead of garnering support to pass a law banning poor people or people of color from the places in which he did not want them—which, if the intent were clear, would not be permissible today84—Moses used his power as an architect to make it physically difficult for certain individuals to reach the places from which he desired to exclude them.

Moses’s biographer suggests that his decision to favor upper- and middle-class white people who owned cars at the expense of the poor and African-Americans was due to his “social-class bias and racial prejudice.”

Exclusion through architecture should be subject to scrutiny that is equal to that afforded to other methods of exclusion by law.

Although regulation through architecture is just as powerful as law, it is less identifiable and less visible to courts, legislators, and potential plaintiffs.

For example, Elise C. Boddie argues that places have racial identities based on their history of or reputation for exclusion, and that courts should consider this racial meaning for purposes of racial discrimination claims.

By including these features in a common interest community, a developer can deter unwanted potential residents—generally poor people and people of color—from buying homes in that development

At the request of white residents, in 1974 the city of Memphis closed off a street that connected an all-white neighborhood to a primarily black one.9 Supporters of this measure argued that it would ostensibly reduce traffic and noise, in addition to promoting safety.10 The U.S. Supreme Court dismissed a challenge to this action, stating that the road closure was just a “routine burden of citizenship” and a “slight inconvenience.”11 Justice Marshall dissented, acknowledging that this inconvenience carried a “powerful symbolic message.”12 He wrote, “The picture that emerges from a more careful review of the record is one of a white community, disgruntled over sharing its street with Negroes, taking legal measures to keep out the ‘undesirable traffic,’ and of a city, heedless of the harm to its Negro citizens, acquiescing in the plan.”13 He believed that through this action, the city was sending a clear message to its black residents,14 and he could not understand why the Court could not see that message.

Although the Atlanta, Georgia, metropolitan area is known for its car-centric, sprawling development patterns, it has a subway system: the Metropolitan Atlanta Regional Transit Authority (MARTA).