It's fun to see a neighborhood through fresh eyes. Walter Hood's are particularly keen. Unlike most outsiders who are hired to make changes in neighborhoods, he isn't thinking about tourists.

Visitors are the reason many places are created. Lack of visitors is the reason many fail. The Hill District has defied outsiders to find it, and public policy has been even less welcoming to the people it belongs to. Mr. Hood, a landscape artist from Oakland, Calif., wants to help its denizens rediscover their places and stories.

He has become a regular visitor since getting two commissions in the Hill -- one from Find the Rivers! to develop a "Greenprint" to reconnect the neighborhood to its natural history, the other from the Sports and Exhibition Authority to design a walkway between the new Penguins arena and Epiphany Catholic Church.

Mr. Hood, a principal of Hood Design, is also a professor of landscape architecture, environmental planning and urban design at the University of California at Berkeley.

"Over the last few months, I have just been blown away by the layers of story here," he said on a recent walk through the lower Hill.

Standing across from the Mellon Arena, he looked in every direction amid the roar of traffic and construction.

"This used to be a district, not just a corridor. Disruptions cause people to feel alien in their own place," he said. "Our design work is really about how people navigate their space."

The project at the new arena, called "Curtain Call," is a walkway of steps and terraces that will curve downhill from Centre Avenue to Fifth Avenue. Pedestrians will have four curved terraces to turn into from the stair path. The lower terrace will be accessible to people in wheelchairs.

The curves will be supplied by 20-foot-tall glass-block "curtains," each block holding a polyvinyl image of Hill denizens past and present. One is of a man in a bowler hat and a woman in gloves. Another shows three pre-teen girls of today. In all, he has collected 5,000 images, he said.

"The photos will look like a quilt, and when the western light hits them, they will reflect on the ground," he said. "We're trying to find R&B tunes about rain" that will play as people step into the terraces. Each level will hold a garden to collect rainwater. "We're tapping into the drain and releasing water into the garden."

To be even greener, he asked crews to save the concrete they tear out so he can use it in his design.

Mary Conturo, executive director of the Sports and Exhibition Authority, said Mr. Hood's design was appealing because "it will be well-used, it addressed an environmental goal with the rain gardens, and the curtain walls are an opportunity to connect the space with the community."

For Find the Rivers!, Mr. Hood is working with the Studio for Spatial Practice researching the Hill's history to figure out how best to transform land that is now vacant.

Rivers! is a nonprofit collaborative of the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy, Hill House Association, Hill District Consensus Group and Community Partners Institute. Their goal is to bring the Hill back into contact with adjacent neighborhoods, the city as a whole and the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers it overlooks.

Mr. Hood recently presented his ideas -- still in the early stages -- at a session that included staff from city planning, Friends of the Pittsburgh Urban Forest and Uptown Partners, Hill District stakeholders and people in the arts community.

Breen Masciotra, director of Uptown Partners, said the ideas as yet are "a little heady, but it's really interesting to have someone look at this from a nontraditional perspective, to say, 'We're going to look at how people use their space regardless of where the streets are.' "

After all, she said, "what we try to do in community development is to understand what people want and what matters to them."

Using old maps, Mr. Hood's team has analyzed land use over the years. A map from 1815 shows little but a system of streams coursing throughout the Hill. An 1855 map shows a street grid as far east as Herron Avenue. Streams were still making their way up Kirkpatrick on an 1872 map but, in 1923, when the Hill was at its densest, the streams have all disappeared, buried and culverted.

"Looking at that map," said Mr. Hood, "it's as if the hills weren't even there."

By the 1960s, maps show a reversal of the earlier patterns of density. Most of the open spaces and hillsides are owned by the city, the Urban Redevelopment Authority or the Pittsburgh Housing Authority.

Jonathan Kline, a partner with Christine Brill in the Studio for Spatial Practice, said the team inventoried land zoned as green space and all the unpaved vacant lots to discover that "the Hill District is a really green place."

"The ways of understanding a landscape are passed down by generations," said Mr. Hood, who was raised in the South.

The passing-down trait is particularly strong in the South, a reason it is strong in the Hill, he said. Many forebears of African-Americans in the Hill emigrated from southern states to find work.

"A city person would think 'There's no trail there,' " he said, but someone with a country sensibility could lead you right to it. On one tour, a group of kids plunged into woods to show him a trail they used. No one thinking grid would ever see it.

Mr. Hood said the Greenprint project is "not about making a bunch of little parks tie together," he said. "The idea is to open the creeks. The natural topography will play a big role. There are even alternate ways of designing streets. There are amazing possibilities here."