Quebec City's Winter Carnaval

With snow falling everywhere east of the Missouri River, we thought it a good time to further mention some things that make parks lighten the load of winter’s cold and ice.

Most of this actually involves embracing it. One example is the Winter Carnival or Festival. Whether it be St. Paul’s Winter Carnival, Ottawa’s Winterlude or Montreal’s pre-Lenten Winter Festival (taking place in its Parc Jean-Drapeau) or Quebec’s Winter Carnval, the idea is to provide lots of events and things to do both inside and outside. In St. Paul, the city’s European-looking Rice Park fills up with ice sculptures and residents search for a medallion worth $10,000 if found in the city’s parks.

In Minneapolis, the city recently started the only urban cross country ski marathon (called a loppet) that traverses the city’s parks and lakes. The big event includes professionals from around the world, but events occur for anyone to participate in. The Star Tribune has a video here of the “Luminary Loppet,” which involves a short ski or hiking course of lighted ice forms.

The coldest cities in the country cannot change their climates, but many of them have great park systems that are there year round. Might as well make good use of them to make living in the city during cold months a little warmer in spirit.

The major snow storm that hit Washington, D.C. this weekend may have shut everything down, but festive residents in the Columbia Heights neighborhood flocked to Meridian Hill Park to enjoy the deluge of white stuff. There seemed to be almost more people in the park than normally found on a Sunday in June.

People could be found building snowmen, sledding the snow-laden stairs, building forts, having fun with their dogs, playing football, walking around, snowball throwing and just watching all of this take place. Some pictures:

Compelled by concerns over public health and a returning zeal for urban life with fewer cars, cities across the world are closing roadways to cars and opening them for people. This trend is getting a great endorsement through the World Health Organization’s upcoming World Health Day on April 11, in which it is encouraging cities to close roads on that day for the enjoyment of people.

Car-free Sunday along Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro

The concept took hold in South America in Bogota, Columbia, with other efforts in Mexico City and along the beaches of Rio de Janeiro taking hold. In Rio, the beachfront recreational space is practically doubled (and so is the amount of users) during the weekly car-free Sundays.

Youth pitching in for Portland's Sunday Parkways in one of the route's park sites.

The idea has also caught on in the U.S. in Chicago, New York City, San Antonio, Baltimore and other places. Portland, Oregon’s Sunday Parkways shuts down eight miles of streets on three summer Sundays in three neighborhoods. The city’s transportation department views Sunday Parkways as ideal for connecting neighborhoods, bringing people together and providing something to do in the city’s many great neighborhood parks. Park and transportation officials have worked together to include parks along the route and program them with different events and attractions.

The event has been a hit. Tallies showed 15,000, 22,000 and 25,000 participants on the streets and in the parks for the three different days, with about 25% being non-bicycle riders — showing that these are not just “bike-people” events.

Meanwhile, cities are also continuing to close roads permanently or on designated days inside city parks. The park roads of Central and Prospect Parks are closed to traffic nearly full time nowadays, but places such as Kansas City are doing it, too. The city’s park department has shut down over two miles of Cliff Drive every weekend from May to September. And the National Park Service closed down the length of road that traverses Fort Dupont Park in the city’s economically depressed southeast. Both of these recent efforts have made the explicit connection in getting residents physically active — but in a fun way instead of preaching the virtues of fitness.

The upcoming 1,000 Cities, 1,000 Lives effort for World Health Day on April 11 is a great opportunity for cities to encourage their residents to get out, have some fun and together engage in some healthy activities — whether it be burning calories or warm conversations with newly-met neighbors and friends. Cities across the globe have signed up for the event. Though it is coming in only two months, there is still time to schedule something. The roads found within parks may be an easier route for those that are interested.

Looking beyond, the WHO event is about more than one day of road closures. It is about encouraging our cities to be healthier places by design. And road closures both in parks and city streets are one way to do this on a regular basis.

How can we better use space in cities? Allison Arieff takes a shot at answering this question and brings up some very interesting concepts. One of them is from a project called Local Code, an effort of UC-Berkeley professor Nicholas de Monchaux and some of his students to use mapping to identify unused pavement space in major urban areas. Arieff explains:

Local Code (video here) proposes a systemic re-greening of leftover pavement space on a large scale. Culled from a database maintained by the [San Francisco] Department of Public Works, the many sites for Local Code have been deemed “unaccepted streets,” that is, sites in the San Francisco grid that occupy the position of streets but are not maintained by the municipality, or necessarily even passable to traffic. Seen separately and individually, these are litter-filled, residual spaces — and there are 1,625 of them, mostly around highways and industrial sites. But seen as a whole, they have a combined surface area of more than half of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, for example.

“When we examined all the leftover spaces in San Francisco, New York, New Orleans, Minneapolis — we found the same thing to be true in every city,” de Monchaux says. “You had a whole archipelago of city-owned lots lying fallow. In New York they add up to the size of Central Park and Prospect Park together. It’s a massive untapped resource that’s impossible to visualize without these contemporary tools.”

The great video below shows the mapping of the spaces in San Francisco, an analysis that shows these areas have high asthma rates, stormwater and other issues, and a concept to make better use of one place.

This type of thinking is needed, especially in built-out cities. While the question would remain about how to maintain and program some of these new quasi-parks, the potential for more public space is clearly there.

The greenest cities are the most compact cities, says David Owen in his recent book Green Metropolis, pointing to New York City’s urban form as a model for sustainability.

For the most part, Owen is right on and the book is a good read. Citing high transit use, walkability and tightly packed buildings, he notes that “the average New Yorker annually generates 7.1 metric tons of greenhouse gases, a lower rate than that of residents of any other American city, and less than 30 percent of the national average, which is 24.5 metric tons.”

While the author has many strong arguments that will help change people’s view of dense cities, sometimes his thinking contradicts what actually is happening. First is the inference that New York is so compact, that biking is a common occurrence. The fact is that New York City ranks 32nd among U.S. big cities in bike commuting, and density alone does not guarantee high biking rates. Only under recent leadership has the city built substantial bike facilities, which requires taking away car space. Yet Owen disparages Mayor Bloomberg’s attempt to institute a congestion charge, even though it would have provided additional funding and roadway for bicycle and bus lanes. And he oddly objects to the city’s “Summer Streets” program, which banned cars from about seven miles of streets for three Saturdays in August, saying initiatives like this “treat pedestrians and bicyclists the way Robert Moses used to treat cars, by segregating them on expressways of their own.” What’s the problem with that?

The Central Park Mall, New York City.

The book also seems to veer off a bit when Owen infers that Central Park and Prospect Park are too big. While concerns about safety need attention, in most people’s view it’s wrong to say that these parks should not exist as they do. Meandering within the parks’ natural settings and enjoying the hundreds of things to do there is a joy to many who live in the city. In fact, Manhattan is still as densely populated and energy-saving as it is even with Central Park. Without it, probably more people would prefer leaving for sparsely populated New England hamlets as Owen did. A better point would be that the number of large parks should be limited and that they are more successful with packed housing around their perimeters — something exhibited by Central Park in any aerial picture.

But Owen nails it when he says that in built out cities, what is really needed to entice density are smaller parks within walking distance of residents. He has some wonderful points about the value of places such as Washington Square Park and how recreational space should be “distributed around the city” and placed “toward outer edges,” such as waterfronts.

In this lies the key to environmental sustainability: livable compactness. And on that is one of the most important points of the book, that “environmentalists tend to focus on defending places where people aren’t rather than on intelligently organizing the places where people are.” This means thinking just as much about creating pleasurable and compact cities for families as much or more about protecting land on the urban fringe. Because by doing so, curbing sprawl and reducing energy use is exactly what can be achieved.

Andrew Turco of the Regional Plan Association has some good thoughts on accommodating soccer as it rises in popularity in the U.S.:

Not only does this new population of soccer players put a certain type of new demand on grassy public space, but even within this diverse group of players, different sub-groups place different demands on field space. Youth soccer leagues require organized space that can be easily managed by coaches, while those playing casually often need to be able to show up at a field and play whenever they can bring together the needed number of people. For others, playing soccer in a public open space can simply be a way of building community and staking out a part of the public arena.

Those in charge of parks have the challenge of investing in facilities that respond to a variety of residents’ current interests and activities while, at the same time, balancing that responsiveness with the flexibility to accommodate new uses in the future.

Turco also notes that soccer is a highly adaptable sport, noting that a ball, a field of any size and surface, and something to mark two goals is usually all that’s needed. Like basketball, there’s a real pick-up nature to the sport, but without any permanent structures like a hoop required. A portable net or even a couple of orange cones will do fine.

Baseball diamonds can be used as multi-purpose fields. In the north, hockey rink boards can be left up and soccer played inside them in the summers. Parks can be designed to provide flat, open and unprogrammed areas for pick-up games. And so-called soccer “pitches” can accommodate the sport in small spaces, as advocated by Washington, D.C.’s Urban Soccer Initiative.

El Rosedal (wikipedia)

In this week’s “36 Hours” section the NY Times takes us to Buenos Aires, Argentina, recommending a visit to the 60-acre Parque Tres de Febrero (named after the date in which military leader Juan Manuel de Rosas was overthrown in 1852). The park is part of a larger area of parks that includes several museums, a planetarium, recreational facilities, lakes and gardens. The area is similar to New York’s Central Park in its local popularity.

Parque Tres de Febrero

Inside the space is the El Rosedal rose garden with nearly 12,000 flowers. As the Times points out, “often overlooked, the garden was recently spruced up with thousands of new roses, repaired pergolas and paths. If the mood strikes, rent a paddle boat and ride around the surrounding lake, crossed by an arched bridge.”

With under five percent of its land area in green space, Buenos Aires is not a park-rich city, but what it does have is very nice. And porteños (as its residents are known) living in this compact city do make sure to enjoy their public spaces. One common activity — a unique park use — is to drink mate, the tea-like herb common to the region. Walking through a city park you will find singles, couples and groups sipping from gords and passing them to each other. What a great way to enjoy a city’s outdoors.

Park going = mate drinking in Buenos Aires

We couldn’t grab the video, but the link to WTTW (PBS) provides a short video of Maureen Hackett talking about the comeback and operations today in New York’s Bryant Park. The attention to detail described by Hackett is good reason why when you visit the park, there so much to observe.

Cal Anderson Park, City of Seattle

Need a park in your neighborhood but don’t have any space? According to a recent article by Peter Harnik and Aric Merolli, one place to look is the large number of urban water reservoirs sitting inside cities. With new regulations requiring municipalities to cover reservoirs or institute water

The water feature above the water of the reservoir in Cal Anderson Park, (cc: flickr user djwudi).

filtration systems, new “land” is being created for parks in several cities around the country.

Most exciting is Seattle’s Cal Anderson Park, where two-thirds of the eight-acre park in Seattle’s most densely populated neighborhood was occupied by a reservoir. Today, the site is the relaxation destination for the Capitol Hill neighborhood and is quite possibly the most used park per acre in the city. (The great design by the Berger Partnership didn’t hurt this.)

The article discusses some of the tracks taken by other cities to keep or open up reservoir sites to the public, including preserving them as water features. Given the fact that they occupy large tracts of land, the idea of co-locating parks makes a good deal of practical sense.

We want to spread the word of Atlanta-group Park Pride’s 9th annual parks and green space conference on Monday, March 22nd at the Atlanta Botanical Garden (located inside the city’s outstanding Piedmont Park). Sponsored by The Home Depot Foundation, the theme of this year’s event is “the role of parks in the new economy.” The conference is hosting a range of speakers from around the country, from Seattle to Houston to New York City. The cost of the conference is only $89 (until Feb. 4) for the one-day event.