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 [...]

City Parks Alliance Seeks Nominations for “Frontline Parks” Section on Website

“FRONTLINE PARKS” highlights urban parks that are creating economic, environmental and social capital through new kinds of partnerships.  This feature on CPA’s website (www.cityparksalliance.org) promotes inspiring examples of urban park excellence, innovation, and stewardship across the country. Twelve parks – one each month – will be featured on CPA’s website home page in 2012.  Each [...]

Growing Community Gardens in Cities

An eighth excerpt from the recently released book published by Island Press called Urban Green: Innovative Parks for Resurgent Cities. In this post, we look at some cities who have created parkland by adding community gardens to underutilized spaces. Community gardens are a vastly underappreciated and underprovided resource for cities, both at ground level and on rooftops. As reported [...]

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 [...]

Secrets of the Private Sector: How Parks and Recreation Agencies Can Flex Their Marketing Muscles

According to a survey by The Trust for Public Land’s Center for City Park Excellence, almost half of the nation’s largest park departments do not spend any money on public outreach. Counting those that do, the average amount spent on marketing comes to only 46 cents per resident per year. Is marketing a smart investment [...]

“Dr. Park, I presume?”

This post looks at the role that doctors play in park prescription programs, while a later follow-up will look more deeply about the contributions of park departments that have partnered with clinics. The growing prevalence of obesity and illnesses related to inactivity underscores the importance of cooperation between the medical community and parks departments. This [...]

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 [...]

London’s A-Mazing Trafalgar Square

Sometimes all it takes is an unusual piece of greenery to draw visitors to a part of town not very known on tourist maps. London, England’s Trafalgar Square temporarily received a laurel and thuja hedge maze at the foot of Nelson’s Column earlier this month as part of the West End Partnership’s summer marketing program.  The program [...]

Recreational Programs a Hot Commodity in Chicago

The Chicago Tribune describes the nearly crazed demand for the Chicago Park District’s recreational programming. Th article indicates that a rush to get into classes was happening in “thousands of homes across the city Monday, as parents frantically attempted to get their children into the 10-week spring classes including gymnastics ($47), basketball ($20) and children’s [...]

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