The playground group Kaboom! released a report earlier this month featuring 12 best practices in play from across the country. Entitled Play Matters, the report describes successful local initiatives to improve opportunities for play and draws conclusions about why they have worked. The group aimed to address three issues: 1) increasing the quantity of available play spaces and play opportunities; 2) improving the quality of spaces and experiences; and 3) increasing safe access to play. It also provides a summary of information linking play initiatives to positive outcomes in health, education, the environment and the economy.
Some of the case studies included are the schoolyard-to-park initiative in Denver called Learning Landscapes; the ParkScan project of San Francisco’s Neighborhood Parks Council (that tracks maintenance through an innovative web tool); and how the High Point housing redevelopment in Seattle incorporated play by adding parks, playgrounds and trails. All of these are great case studies and are worth a read through.
Adrian Chen writes in Slate about the hobby of many today to go “graving,” pointing out the roots of the rural American cemetery:
In 1831, the Massachusetts Horticultural Society founded Mount Auburn Cemetery just outside of Boston. The meticulously landscaped, 72-acre Mount Auburn was a major improvement over the typical urban graveyard of the time, which was cluttered and poorly maintained. Bodies were stacked on top of one another in the ground, leading to the occasional protruding bone. Then there was the smell: Occupied graves could lie open for days before being filled. Mount Auburn, by contrast, offered a pastoral landscape dotted by stately monuments.
Within a few years, Mount Auburn was being mentioned in the same breath as the Erie Canal and Niagara Falls, two popular tourist attractions of the 1830s. In cities across America, associations began buying up suburban land for the dead—they wanted their own Mount Auburn. Green-Wood [in Brooklyn, New York], founded in 1838, was the product of this “rural cemetery” movement. In 1869, the art critic Clarence Cook wrote of the rural cemeteries: “They were among the chief attractions of the cities to which they belonged. No stranger visited … these cities for pleasure or observation who was not taken to the cemeteries.” But even by the time Cook was writing, memories of Civil War killing fields and the rise of city parks had dampened the public’s enthusiasm for cemeteries.
Mt. Auburn is actually still today an attraction for residents and visitors, for which the cemetery’s website describes. Several others do the same, or more. Peter Harnik had more in a recent article on this issue in today’s context:
Is a cemetery a park? A cemetery certainly qualifies as pervious ground and “breathing space,” but whether it does any more than that depends on the rules and regulations governing the facility. The more one can do there – walk a dog? cycle? picnic? throw a ball? sit under a tree?—the more it’s like a park. The more restrictive, the less justifiable it seems to pretend it’s a park.
The Washington, D.C., area has extremes on either end of this spectrum. At Arlington National Cemetery, which is a vast space almost as large as the entire park system of Arlington, virtually nothing is permitted other than walking from grave to grave – jogging and eating are prohibited, and there are almost no benches. Across town, at venerable (but littleknown) Congressional Cemetery, not only are picnicking and child play allowed but the facility is also a formal off-leash dog park. (Dog membership is limited to a sustainable number and costs nearly $200 a year, with the funds used to support the nonprofit organization whose mission is to operate, develop,
maintain, preserve, and enhance the cemetery grounds; use by
humans is free and unrestricted.)
Another famous cemetery, Oakwood, in Hartford, Connecticut, not only allows residents to run, walk dogs, and ride bicycles, but also programs the space with jazz concerts and other events and even allows residents to bring food and wine. Atlanta’s historic Oakland cemetery, owned by the city’s parks department and run by a foundation, is designed as a pleasure ground. It has benches, gardens, and a central building for events and programs, and it allows visitors to jog and stroll with their dogs. In Portland, Maine, 240-acre Evergreen Cemetery is much larger than the city’s largest “regular” park. Owned and maintained by the city’s parks division, and containing gardens, ponds, woods, and open lawns, Evergreen is used for hiking, walking, running, biking, birding, picnicking, cross-country skiing, and snowshoeing.
Revitalization starts with goats, or so it goes for Baltimore’s Druid Hill Park. The city’s Parks and People Foundation is undertaking a $10 million renovation of a decrepit mansion on the edge of the historic 745-acre park that will house an environmental learning center, the group’s main offices and trail connections to the rest of the park. With the mansion property in need of severe brush clearing, the group weighed the options and found the most reasonable to be hiring a goat herd.
The Baltimore Sun covered the herd of 40 urban brush chewers and reported the following:
“They’ll eat just about anything, except the stuff that’s poisonous,” Knox said…….. The Boar and Spanish species of goats in their second day on the job had been eating much of the vegetation and left a lot of twigs and bare trees. They can reach up to 6 feet off the ground. Goats have been used around the region before to clear parks, residential properties and the shoulders of highways.
The foundation had to gain permission from animal control and health department officials to bring in the goats, which are considered exotic animals in Baltimore. There is some interest in having a resident goat to help maintain the property, but that’s still against the law in Baltimore – unless you’re the zoo. Interestingly, sheep were once used to tend to the lawns of the park, possibly through World War Two.
Should small projects be the big attention getters of those trying to remake their cities? Citing the success of Bryant Park in New York, Campus Martius in Detroit and Discvovery Green in Houston, Andrew Manshel suggests just that in City, saying:
Small changes are appealing for many reasons. They’re cheap, for one thing. Also, what works can be easily expanded, and what doesn’t work can be as easily terminated or altered. One successful food concession can become two; an unsuccessful stall selling local crafts can be replaced; a planter made from a material that discolors or chips can be replaced with a better one. Contrast that with grand schemes, which can attract broad opposition and be subject to complex political, logistical, and financial obstacles. Once an elaborate design has been committed to, backing away from it—or even altering it—becomes both politically and mechanically complicated. Further, planners have a limited capacity to predict how people will respond to their designs. The larger the project, the more likely unintended consequences become, and the more difficult it is to change course.
Above all, small ideas for revitalizing urban areas work, as the success of Bryant Park and its emulators has demonstrated. Why? Because, as Whyte (and Jane Jacobs as well) understood, people in public spaces respond to thousands of subtle visual and aural cues, and successful places manipulate these cues (often without premeditation) to provide familiar assurances of comfort and well-being. The cues prompt a person who encounters a new place to predict a positive experience there—above all, that he will be safe. The most important cues transmit a sense of order and social control. And the best new or restored spaces, like Bryant Park, Campus Martius, Discovery Green in Houston, and most recently the High Line park on Manhattan’s West Side, provide their patrons with the premonition of an enjoyable experience. Those engaged in the work of downtown renewal and urban revitalization should always remember that truth. It will help them identify, and integrate into their projects, the helpful small ideas that can make cities more enjoyable places.
More or less, investments in parks and public spaces are economic development.
In some neighborhoods, it can mean revitalizing an existing park. This would be the Bryant Park model, or perhaps the story of Patterson Park in Baltimore, in which the Patterson Park Community Development Corporation took to renewing the 155-acre park at the neighborhood’s core and drew home buyers by doing so.
In other areas, it can mean creating a new park to spark investment. This would be the Campus Martius model. Think of all the cities with parking lots ringing their downtown. Could investments in parks reorient these central areas as new compact neighborhoods?
Parks & Recreation magazine interviews New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg about his commitment to parks, and the Mayor is quite the spokesman for them. In his own words:
New Yorkers have a special relationship with parks. After all, they’re our backyards. They’re where we go to relax, spend an afternoon outdoors, and share good times with family and friends.
That’s enough reason to make them a priority, but our parks have many other advantages as well. They teach our children about the natural world. They help clean the air we breathe They encourage exercise and fitness. They increase property values and boost tourism. And the list goes on.
That’s why we have focused so intently on improving our parks system. In fact, one of the main goals of PlaNYC, our long-term sustainability program, is to ensure that all New Yorkers have a park or open space within a 10-minute walk of their home. It’s an ambitious goal, but we’re well on our way to achieving it. In the last eight years, we’ve added more than 500 acres of new parkland to the city — the largest expansion since the 1930s.
This picture of a sign from Bryant Park pretty much speaks for itself. Lots of parks have don’ts signs, but few have dos and don’ts signs, which really change the feeling of welcome-ness. (Our earlier post, aided by Gil Peñalosa thoughts on the subject.)
The New York Times City Room reports on an actual 210-year old gravestone that was found when workers were digging in a section of Washington Square Park. Once a burial site, the land was covered to become a military parade ground and then to its current use as public park. The remains of up to 20,000 people are said to be lying underneath the park, but this is the first discovery of a headstone. Many of the nation’s very old urban parks were either burial, military grounds or common spaces for animal grazing the the like before they were parks. This is a quick and interesting history on one of those parks.
The folks at GOOD magazine have unveiled a “platform” on ideas and action in cities. As part of this, they put together the short, entertaining and informative video below describing initiatives from around the globe to reduce carbon emissions and make cities better places to live. The piece mentions bus rapid transit in Bogota, bike sharing in Rio, trash collection in Curitiba and the creation of an urban stream and linear park in Seoul, Korea.
An AP reporter takes a trip to Savannah, Georgia, the historic city on the Atlantic coast and provides some background on the its famous network of public squares:
But the reason for those public spaces might surprise modern visitors: British General James Oglethorpe designed them as part of a military grid so his troops could set up camp and have shaded meeting spots. The soldiers were there to keep the Spanish from advancing north to the English colony in Charleston, S.C., and Oglethorpe’s statue faces south, as if still keeping a watchful eye on things.
Originally the city had 24 squares. It’s a remarkable feat of preservation that 22 are still in existence and one more is being restored.
Today the squares are home to great old Oaks, benches for people to sit, gardens, meandering pathways and attractive fountains that invite people in and make the city such a pleasant place to be.
Much of their success also has to do with the street layout, in which the squares usually occupy a square block and streets intersect but do not pass through — essentially encouraging through pedestrian traffic. (See figure below.) Via PPS, a submission on the squares quotes Allan Jacobs, author of the definitive book Great Streets, who wrote “. . . [T]he grid pattern of Savannah . . . is like no other we know in its fineness and its distinguishable squares. . . . [O]nce seen it is unforgettable, and it carries over into real life experience. See it . . ., in person, on the ground, and it is not difficult to draw. See it in plan, on a map, and you will recognize it on the ground.”
As cities have rebounded, and walkable urbanism has emerged again as a priority for planners, creating the day-to-day park experiences found in the pedestrian green spaces of Savannah is surely one model to consider.
Earlier this month, Rep. Earl Blumenauer announced the creation of a congressional Livable Communities Task Force, with a mission to make the Federal Government a better partner with communities in their efforts to improve quality of life. The now group indicates that it will will promote Federal policies that:
Allow for local community involvement in government decisions at all levels;
Provide communities with the tools to solve their own local problems;
Promote cost-effective, environmentally friendly solutions to infrastructure problems, thereby preserving and conserving resources;
Encourage multi-objective management — i.e., management choices that have multiple beneficial results;
Prepare communities to function in a global environment;
Coordinate transportation, housing, and environmental policies and investments; and
Focus on partnerships among and between local government, private companies, federal agencies, non-profits, and citizen groups for funding solutions.
As for parks, the group’s legislative agenda, at this point, includes the recently proposed program to invest “in the health, economic vitality and well-being of communities across this nation by providing safe and affordable places for recreation. The Act would provide federal assistance grants to rehabilitate and develop urban parks and community recreational infrastructure and for the continued investment in community programs, such as those aiding at-risk youth.” (The legislation was announced only earlier this month and now has 74 co-sponsors.)
Any effort to create livable communities means something to city parks, but some of the other notable agenda items include a bill to allow cities to revitalize abandoned property and a bill requiring 10 percent of (climate change) cap-and-trade revenues to go towards low-carbon transport such as bikeways. (Additional items in the future will likely be added.)
Kaid Benfield comments that though the group is a Democratic party-only effort, that this concern is “eminently flexible.”
The playground group Kaboom! released a report earlier this month featuring 12 best practices in play from across the country. Entitled Play Matters, the report describes successful local initiatives to improve opportunities for play and draws conclusions about why they have worked. The group aimed to address three issues: 1) increasing the quantity of available play spaces and play opportunities; 2) improving the quality of spaces and experiences; and 3) increasing safe access to play. It also provides a summary of information linking play initiatives to positive outcomes in health, education, the environment and the economy.
Earlier this month, Rep. Earl Blumenauer announced the creation of a congressional 