Frontline Park for May: Hunting Park

Each month, City Parks Alliance recognizes a “Frontline Park” to promote and highlight inspiring examples of urban park excellence, innovation, and stewardship across the country. The program also seeks to highlight examples of the challenges facing our cities’ parks as a result of shrinking municipal budgets, land use pressures, and urban neighborhood decay. This 87-acre [...]

What is Your City’s ParkScore?

How many people in your city live within walking distance of the nearest park? In what neighborhoods should park improvements or additions be targeted to maximize impact? How well is your city’s park system serving the needs of its residents? Are there disparities between the inner-city core and the lower-density urban fringe, or between different [...]

Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory Discusses Downtown and New Riverfront Park

Smart Growth America recently completed video interviews with several mayors and other prominent elected officials nationwide, and will be releasing them over the next several months. The first is with Mayor Mark Mallory from Cincinnati — he speaks to the need to invest in downtowns and to make the right kinds of infrastructure investments to trigger job creation [...]

Cities with Health Promoting Park Systems Provide Mixed Uses and Adequate Programming

An excerpt from The Trust for Public Land’s report From Fitness Zones to the Medical Mile: How Urban Park Systems Can Best Promote Health and Wellness. We wrote a preview of this report in an earlier post. In this post, we look at a mixture of uses and a maximum amount of programming. Mixing uses in parks [...]

2011 City Park Facts Released: Urban Parks Grow as Employment Declines

The Trust for Public Land has released its most recent data on city park systems from across the country, showing that the 100 largest cities added more than 120 parks in the past year. Despite aggregate increases in acreage and facilities across the U.S., many city park departments are struggling with funding shortages. Operational spending [...]

Creating and Financing Infill Parks in the Bay Area: Part IV

The Trust for Public Land’s Center for City Park Excellence performed a study for the Association of Bay Area Governments, one component of which was identifying examples of how recently completed infill parks were financed. This is the last of the four cases studies we’ve published from the study. (See the first three in Emeryville, Windsor, [...]

Grapeland Water Park and Mary Bartelme Park Selected as July’s “Frontline Parks”

Each month, City Parks Alliance recognizes two “Frontline Parks” to promote and highlight inspiring examples of urban park excellence, innovation, and stewardship across the country.  The program also seeks to highlight examples of the challenges facing our cities’ parks as a result of shrinking municipal budgets, land use pressures, and urban neighborhood decay. July’s Frontline [...]

Houston Skatepark and Charles River Esplanade Selected as June’s “Frontline Parks”

Each month, City Parks Alliance recognizes two “Frontline Parks“ to promote inspiring examples of urban park excellence, innovation and stewardship across the country in the face of shrinking municipal budgets, land use pressures and urban neighborhood decay. What does a daffy have in common with a downward dog? Both are moves you might see in [...]

Ask the Expert: Are Artificial Turf Fields Safe?

After a damp, cold winter that morphed into a damp, cold spring, Portland was recently forced to close all of its grass play fields for several weekends in order to prevent irreparable damage (see right photo). On a typical weekend, the fields are replete with soccer players, kickball tournaments, and pick-up Frisbee games. Should Portland follow [...]

Dumpster Diving on New York’s Park Avenue

Credit: Alan Miles NYC (Flickr Feed) Of the many unique activities New York is known for, the most entertaining this summer involved closing roads and opening pools, specifically dumpster swimming pools.   For the third summer in a row, New York’s Department of Transportation presented the Summer Streets program, closing almost seven miles of posh Park [...]

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