By Kayleigh Keating
In 2024, College of Architecture, Design and Construction alumna Maggie Brand was named a Fulbright Student Researcher. A graduate of the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture, Brand has been working in the Republic of Georgia for the past nine months on reforestation and designing public spaces in the city of Rustavi.
Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture Sarah Coleman helped connect Brand to Georgia for an internship in summer 2023 with Ruderal, a site engineering, landscape architecture, urban design and planning firm based in the capital of Georgia, Tbilisi. Brand then continued the work through an independent study in the master of landscape architecture program the following fall. When an opportunity emerged to return to Georgia through the Fulbright U.S. Scholars Program, Brand was excited for the chance to expand on her design research in the region.
Since arriving in the Republic of Georgia in fall of 2024, Brand has worked with Napirze, an organization based in the city of Rustavi which aims to improve local environmental conditions and reshape how people relate to their environment. Over the past year, Brand has worked closely with Napirze on one of their main projects: the design and rewilding of the abandoned floodplain in Rustavi’s city center.
Rustavi was an ancient settlement but experienced a period of rapid growth in the 1940s as a Soviet-era industrial city focused on producing steel products. The city is geographically split into two parts, with a river and adjacent 740-acre floodplain serving as the dividing point. When the Soviet occupation of Georgia ended in the 1990s, the resulting economic upheaval led to neglect of the area. The need for timber for fuel and heating led to deforestation of the floodplain in the late nineties. As the city has begun to experience growth again, stakeholders are considering how to reestablish the river and floodplain as an integral part of the city and recreational centerpiece.
When Brand arrived in Georgia last year, the first priority for the organization was to establish trails throughout the floodplain. Building trails across the region would allow the locals, some of whom had not set foot onto the floodplain, to get out into the landscape and see the importance of the work Napirze had set out to do. The work’s primary focus — making the floodplain a more public landscape — allows trail runners, mountain bikers and birders to access the space.
Since establishing the first trails, the organization has transitioned from maintenance and removal to planting. Napirze uses a Japanese planting method, the Miyawaki method, and adapts it for their own uses. The Miyawaki method of planting is a reforestation technique that creates dense and fast-growing forests by planting native species and mimics the natural layering of a forest. Each planting day, the organization plants double the number of trees as the previous planting day. In just over a year, Napirze has planted 3,500 trees, in the first work day planting 500 trees, and the most recent planting 2,000.
Much of the work Brand leads is accomplished by volunteers from Rustavi. Napirze hosts planting and maintenance days, and community members participate in the work. Most of the local community members do not have an ecological or landscape background, but are passionate about the place and the mission of the organization. Brand states that it is important to get people on the ground to plant a seed in their minds to care about this area. “The more people that care about it, the more the city will care about it,” she says.
As far as the relationship between Napirze and Rustavi goes, the city is now interested in a more formal partnership with the organization, which Brand says will help both groups protect the floodplain. This heightened interest on behalf of the city comes from the growing interest of the community members in the floodplain, due to the community-led planting and maintenance workdays. A formalized partnership that protects the floodplain would ensure its future as a public space for the city. Some of the floodplain is used for sheep grazing and cattle herding; future planning will consider how to incorporate recreational and farming components of the region.
In the short term, with funding from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Brand is working on a booklet that documents the methods and processes that Napirze has used so far to reforest the floodplain. This booklet will contain technical maps and drawings but will also tell a story of why this landscape was chosen for this work. When this booklet is published, there will be an event hosted by UNDP, the city of Rustavi and Georgian Ministry of Environment to present the work and next steps.
“It’s a chance to tell the story of the place,” Brand says, “documenting what it is, how the community has been involved and what the people of Rustavi hope it will become.”
