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 [...]
Filed under: green infrastructure, maintenance/management | Tagged: baltimore, sustainability | 2 Comments »
GOOD magazine takes us to Philadelphia to look at the city’s new trash compactors. LOVE Park (or JFK Plaza as it is formally known) is seen in the background. more about “Trash Compactors in Philadelphia“, posted with vodpod
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The New York Times just ran a story about the increasing use of fees to gain revenue by local governments, ranging from trade licenses to public parks. This issue has been around for a while. As government has devolved down to the local level, these budgets have found themselves strained in the last twenty years. [...]
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Patrick McGeehan of the New York Times City Room blog has an interesting post on how to count visitors to parks, especially for well attended beaches and large public events. The case in point here is counting users of New York City public beaches. McGeehan describes how it is difficult to merely go around an [...]
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Kansas City is the City of Fountains, and some of them are now being powered by the sun through a partnership with the company Grundfos. From the Parks and Recreation Department: Two of Kansas City’s historic fountains are being removed from the electric grid and switched to solar power. The Thomas H. Swope Memorial Fountain [...]
Filed under: facilities, green infrastructure, maintenance/management | 1 Comment »
Ever wonder, what’s the size of an average U.S. city park? Well, we have the answer. The Center for City Park Excellence maintains a database of individual parks in the largest U.S. cities — currently at a total of 10,500 parks in about the 50 largest cities. So, a pretty big sample size to make [...]
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The San Francisco Chronicle blog City Insider points us to the city controller’s recently released annual review of city parks. San Francisco is unique in that it requires the controller to conduct an inspection and report on each and every park in the city. Here’s a summary of what’s reported (full report in pdf here): [...]
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MinnPost (of Minnesota) has an interesting article up about the many monuments and statues found within Minneapolis parks. Anyone interested in this subject would find it interesting and probably similar to other cities in how such items come about and have evolved. One particular snippet is that there are so many monuments and statues that [...]
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Many park agencies and park friends groups are trying to go “green” by reducing their carbon footprint. In many ways, this has nothing to do with parks themselves, but tactics to reduce energy consumption that would apply to many other companies or government entities. In any case, the Tacoma, Washington city parks agency just hired [...]
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The Sustainable Sites Initiative is inviting public comment on a new proposed set of standards for sustainable landscape design, construction and maintenance. The report, entitled Guidelines and Performance Benchmarks Draft 2008, is the most comprehensive set of national guidelines yet developed for landscape sites, and is available for download at www.sustainablesites.org. (An online feedback form [...]
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