Landscape architecture student Christina Hicks receives recognition in James River Green Building Council's 2009 Green Spaces Competition

Christina Hicks of Stafford, Va., a fifth-year landscape architecture student, is the Honor Winner of the 2009 James River Green Building Council's (JRGBC) Green Spaces Competition in the student division.

The James River Green Building Council, organized in 2001, hosts an annual competition with two categories — one for professional firms and another for students. Hicks received one of the two awards from the students division and will advance from the regional competition to Phoenix, Ariz., for the national competition.

Her project, Fulton Culture Park, focuses on creating a greenway that connects the Fulton Culture Park in Richmond, Va., to the city’s larger network of parks. The greenway will also serve as a connector to an access point to the James River from the Fulton Gas Works site.

Improvements to the location would include renovating the existing Gas Works building into an art gallery, eliminating old maintenance buildings to make room for playground areas, and repurposing the location of two old gasometers for an amphitheatre stage and entry plaza. Hicks’s plan also calls for the utilization of phytoremediation on the site to treat the soils that have been polluted for decades by the coal gasification process.

Written by Benjamin Woody, a junior communication student.