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

Posted on January 13, 2012 by Peter Harnik

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 [...]

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Time for City Parks to Pull Their Weight

Posted on July 15, 2011 by Coleen Gentles

We’ve written before about the need for urban parks to do more for public health. A new report by the Center for City Park Excellence, From Fitness Zones to the Medical Mile: How Urban Park Systems Can Best Promote Health and Wellness, looks at how individual parks and entire city park systems help people be healthier and more fit.  The [...]

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Green Gyms and Medical Miles: Promoting Public Health with Parks

Posted on April 27, 2011 by Ryan Donahue

We’ve previously looked at ways in which the medical community is using exercise prescriptions as a way to combat obesity and inactivity.  Park prescriptions are only a portion of the spectrum of exercise prescription programs. Fortunately, the growing awareness of the benefits of outdoor exercise – in addition to the cooperation of parks departments, environmental [...]

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Is There Room for Wildlife in City Parks?

Posted on May 26, 2010 by Elissa Hoagland Izmailyan

ASLA’s The Dirt recently covered the 2010 Dumbarton Oaks Garden and Landscape Study Symposium. This year’s focus was “Designing Wildlife Habitats,” which looked at ways to preserve biodiversity in rural and urban environments. America’s cities are an appropriate laboratory for such a movement, given that many city-dwellers’ encounters with wildlife are limited to rats, raccoons [...]

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Parks as Happiness Boosters

Posted on March 24, 2009 by Ben Welle

At Slate.com, Gretchen Rubin, writing for her Happiness Project blog, interviews Julie Morgenstern, who Rubin says “has done a lot of thinking about happiness, as it relates to managing our possessions and time.” Morgenstern’s response to one question provides a nice perspective on the value of city parks in keeping us uncluttered in the mind. [...]

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Study Finds Recess Recharge for Kids

Posted on February 25, 2009 by Ben Welle

The NY Times has an article this week on how “involuntary attention” such as being in a park or children going out for recess during school hours can foster better learning, health and development. Turns out, not so shockingly, that we need to recharge every once in a while. Sitting in front of a computer, [...]

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Parks: Medicine for Urban Mental Health

Posted on January 6, 2009 by Ben Welle

Jonah Lehrer writes the other day in the Boston Globe on how cities, as fun, energetic and vibrant as they are, for these very reasons can cause our brains to strain. He notes recent research showing this, but also evidence from studies showing how places like parks and trees can help alleviate the problem. He [...]

Filed under: health | Tagged: , | 5 Comments »

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