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“The American parks movement has been a success,” asserted Alexander Garvin, Yale professor of urban planning and a member of the New York City planning commission, at the opening of the 17th ULI/Joseph C. Canizaro Mayors’ Forum in Los Angeles, hosted by James Hahn, the city’s mayor. Reminding participants that public open space constitutes 11 percent of the land area in America’s 25 largest cities and that the National Park Service manages 80.7 million acres, Garvin cited increased amounts of leisure time, disposable income, and entertainment choices as reasons for maintaining a public commitment to parks and open space, not decreasing it, and enumerated several things he believes are needed to continue the success of parks into the new century.
Garvin’s List In his keynote address at the Mayors’ Forum in Los Angeles, Alexander Garvin, Yale professor of urban planning and New York City planning commission member, listed the following ingredients (with examples) for continued success in developing a 21st-century agenda for parks, recreation, and open space:
A shift to market- or demand-based planning. North Commons Park, Minneapolis, which has a tot lot, a waterpark, basketball courts, and a football field, exemplifies the shift from the old passive approach to recreation to a more active one and illustrates that neighborhood recreation services are essential.
User participation in decision making. Again, Minneapolis, “the best-located, best-financed, best-designed, best-maintained public open space in America,” is one example. Early in 2000, the city held a series of 18 “listening sessions” with 181 people in a four-block area for Peavey Park. The outcome was design recommendations for a large outdoor signboard listing activities on the park schedule, accessible bathrooms, telephones and drinking water, special attention to the north end, which was a social problem area, and longer operating hours.
Dependable, dedicated sources of funding. In addition to the customary tax sources available (property taxes and intergovernmental grants being the chief ones), other creative means of finance can be found: Herald Square and Greeley Square in Manhattan, for example, are run by the 34th Street Partnership (a business improvement district); fees and concessions are charged at Post Office Square in Boston; Hudson River Park in New York City occupies 550 acres on a five-mile ribbon and generates $10 million a year in lease revenues from 34 piers like the Chelsea Piers Sports and Entertainment Complex; Boulder, Colorado, has a dedicated sales tax for open-space acquisition; and private resources can be tapped, as is the case with the $100 million endowment managed by the Central Park Conservancy in New York.
A physical plant in good condition. For example, the goal of those who maintain the famed Bryant Park behind the New York Public Library is to pick up paper “almost as soon as it hits the ground.”
Continuous repositioning of existing assets. A small (0.433-acre) open space in Manhattan on East 12th Street, the Joseph C. Sauer Playground, used to be populated by 50 or more homeless individuals, drug dealers, prostitutes, and two crack houses, but it has been repositioned with a community garden for older people, shade trees, a sprinkler for summer cooling, benches in the sun, soft play surfaces, trellised pavilions, and an iron fence to screen out undesirables.
Reclaiming abandoned land for the public realm. In Detroit, 32 acres along the Detroit River near the downtown were turned into two parks and a marina. In San Francisco, 86,000 tons of soil-contaminating, hazardous substances were removed in the 200-acre Crissy Field Restoration Project near the Presidio, and replaced with acreage for a beach promenade, picnicking grounds, tidal marsh and grassy field areas, and a 100-acre park with visitor amenities and parking.
Contextual integration. The seven-acre Freeway Park in Seattle, with its 195 evergreens, 1,980 shrubs, 279 deciduous trees, and 20,000 cubic yards of sand and topsoil, is organized around four fountains. Offering a good example of combining public open space with other functions, it connects two different parts to the city divided by a highway and contains a 612-car municipal garage.
Stimulated by Garvin’s remarks, the forum discussion was divided into five parts: thinking about a new model for parks (cogitate); combining different elements into holistic thinking (integrate); devising creative new ways to fund and manage green and open space (innovate); building community support (advocate); and exercising leadership (activate).
Cogitate “Why should we have parks?” asked Galen Cranz, professor of architecture at the University of California at Berkeley, as she started the group thinking about the purpose of open space.
Noting that three new sources of land were becoming available for park development—waterfronts no longer used for development, military bases that had closed, and abandoned railroad rights-of-way—Cranz asked: “Are the new parks going to be developed in the old ways, or in this era of the open-space system? Do we have the guts to do really fundamentally appropriate installations?”
Putting the question into historical perspective, she pointed out, “Once upon a time, we did not have parks. We had cemeteries, some commons, and an occasional square. When this country decided to spend public money on building a park, that was a turning point.” In the mid–19th century, under the tutelage of park and city planner Frederick Law Olmsted, parks were viewed as pleasure grounds to escape the pressures and evils of city life. The Progressive Era ushered in smaller parks tucked into working-class tenement districts at the turn of the century—reform parks, Cranz called them. In the 1930s—the era of standards and formulas and the urban planning of Robert Moses, “a banal, boring period”—parks were viewed as facilities for recreation. Continuing her analysis of the evolution of thinking about parks in 30- to 50-year time periods, Cranz said that the 1960s, witnessing the riots, made parks an “instrument of social reform.” The emphasis no longer was on park standards requiring flat land and whole blocks. At that time, “fragments became acceptable—a little piece of space in the urban jungle, against a wall, underneath a bridge, connecting to the street, which could be a fun place, too.” She called this “the era of the open-space system.” Then, in the 1990s, Cranz continued, she started looking for evidence that something new might be afoot, and she came up with a new model: “the sustainable park . . . parks that use land to reduce or restore resource consumption; parks that don’t use resources from the outside.”
Bonnie Fisher, principal and director of landscape architecture at the ROMA Design Group in San Francisco, agreed that rethinking the role of parks and open space makes sense. “One of the major failures in reclaiming urban spaces is that they are reclaimed without really challenging the basic assumptions of what those spaces’ role is supposed to be.” She encouraged planners to give careful thought to the role a space is supposed to play and advocated taking “much more of a minimalist approach, looking at the essential features and functions and trying to design [according] to those values, rather than trying to think about how it can be made prettier.”
George Hargreaves, a landscape architect based in San Francisco who also teaches at the Harvard School of Design, had indeed thought about the question Cranz raised, and remarked: “We should think about the design and programming of public parks [which Olmsted never did] as a creative process, rather than reverting to thinking like engineers. We need to learn from the 500 years before us and move forward and understand the challenges in front of us that will take us toward many new ways of thinking about parks.”
Daniel Biederman, who has presided over the restoration and revitalization of New York City’s Bryant Park, remarked: “Ninety-nine percent of the new public spaces, whether plazas or parks, in the United States are not working.” He pointed to L.A.’s Pershing Square as an example. “Not enough people and not enough women [use it],” he said. He counted 60 to 70 people in the park on a recent tour, and concluded that was not nearly enough to make the park work. “Not enough ‘congestion’: 14 people per acre for an area of 2.5 million square feet.” And the visitors were mainly men—nowhere near a 50/50 split. “A lot of urban parks have too many men and not enough women. Women are aware of personal safety issues; men basically ignore them. The index of a sick park is if there are too many men in it relative to the number of women.”
Terry Schnadelbach, professor of landscape architecture at the University of Florida, encouraged planners to “think of open space as systems.” He cited two examples—one modern, one historic. He referred to the work of Edward Durrell Stone, Jr., in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, who developed the beach as a major green open-space entity with a promenade, plazas, sand dunes, native landscape, and the famous “wave wall” and riverwalk that connect the New River with the beach, the historic district, commercial areas, and neighborhoods. He also made reference to Philadelphia: Ben Franklin Parkway, cutting diagonally through the downtown grid from city hall to Logan Circle to the art museum, “the front door and the living room of the city,” and thence on to the Schuylkill River, Fairmount Park, and Wissahickon Park. Analogizing with an infrastructure of sewer and waterworks, “which you would not build in fragments,” he encouraged participants to think of open space and green space as “a system that has continuity through the entire mass.” Schnadelbach introduced the concept of green infrastructure into the conversation, seeing it as a way of “connecting the elements” and “creating an image for America’s cities.”
“How about converting the land along the miles and miles of derelict strip commercial corridors that planners once thought should all be commercial into really good places for people to move. . . ideal corridors” that would provide “unlimited possibilities for the creation of open-space systems that included parks and parkways?” asked Cy Paumier, a principal with LDR/HNTB in Columbia, Maryland. Allan Kingston, president and CEO of Century Housing in Culver City, California, agreed, saying that these strip malls represented “a great opportunity for open space and all kinds of green spaces.” He noted that much of this space could be privately financed if it was brought to the attention of the developers.
Integrate The discussion of connected systems led naturally to the need to integrate functions in a city’s green and open space. David Yamashita, a senior planner with the Portland, Oregon, parks and recreation department, pointed to the need for an integrated approach to park planning. “In our department, we have the designers, the planners, the leisure professionals, the maintenance people, and the recreation people, but it is very difficult to address problems in a truly holistic way. We try to meet the needs of the joggers, the cyclists, the off-leash dog people—you name it,” he said, and are so intent on addressing each user group’s needs that “we forget what a park is supposed to be about, which is about people coming together.” What is needed, suggested Yamashita, is “a whole new paradigm” of integration so that parks are not thought of merely as places for fun and games, but as places in which to improve public health, meet neighbors, and provide social services.
Speaking of public health, Gayle Berens, ULI’s vice president of real estate development practice, suggested that there is a connection between green space and walkability (to combat obesity) and pointed out that it is necessary to think about the overall urban form and “the connectivity” within it as much as about individual spaces. “Through public spaces, streetscapes, bike trails, walking paths, and waterfront connections,” she said, “this issue can be dealt with. It is less about a park than about making all these different spaces accessible to people, and doing it in a pleasurable way.”
Boris Dramov, president of San Francisco–based of ROMA Design Group, added that open space should be viewed and used as “a part of managing growth and environmental protection.” Dramov also opened up a new area of discussion by asserting that “we have to look at streets as part of our open-space system.” He appealed to the mayors not to let the “plumbers” take over, the traffic engineers who want to move traffic through town, and to view streets “in a multidimensional way to create a significant piece of the public fabric.” Con Howe, the Los Angeles director of planning, spoke of 14 streetscape plans as part of an effort to give more attention to detail and land use than has been customary in western cities that “grew far and grew fast.” He went on: “There are hundreds of miles of L.A. streets that are wider than they need to be. The engineers of the 1950s and 1960s laid out wide swaths of asphalt. You could open up the center lane for landscaped medians. The challenge for western cities is to create more intense use of open space and streetscapes and make them attractive and well maintained, because we just do not have the luxury of endless land we thought we had for 100 years.”
Andrew Lipkis, founder and president of Tree People in Los Angeles, spoke of a city as an ecosystem, but remarked that “nobody is managing it as an ecosystem. We manage a living infrastructure—the land—in a disintegrated way, because when we built our cities, we did not know how to integrate.” Lipkis’s remarks were very direct: “Los Angeles, in meeting its water fix, has been destroying its aquatic ecosystem.” He said a city needs “a vision of integration” so that different agencies can work together, and common problems can be analyzed holistically. As an example, he cited a cost/benefit modeling program his organization initiated in a 2,700-acre watershed in L.A. The county proposed putting a $42 million storm drain right through the middle of it to get rid of the water (that, in a city that was already 75 percent paved); Tree People recommended putting a forest in place of a storm drain, which, after they ran the figures, would cost $103 million, but produce benefits “up to $400 million.” Lipkis noted that parks should be regarded as water suppliers (water producers), not water users (cost centers), and that cities needed to view issues such as water supply, pollution, groundwater recharge, aquifer recharge, flood control, green waste mitigation, and wastewater treatment through “the unifying lens of green infrastructure.”
Joseph Petrillo, a partner with Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton in San Francisco who is involved in land use and natural resources law, used the metaphor of “the bigger circle” to state the case for integration of separate aspects of green and open space into a single planning area. He defined the bigger circle as “active and aggressive land/economic planning and implementation,” and suggested that conservancies and land trusts should work with mayors to help local officials understand how trails, preserves, urban forests, agricultural land, and parks all fit together. Forum members viewed his remarks as a “challenge to create the structures where these agencies can come together in a new way.”
Robert Bartlett, the former mayor of Monrovia, California, suggested this lens be used on a regional basis, to which Mayor Edward Garza of San Antonio responded that Texas had created a regional authority to monitor and oversee development over the million-acre Edwards Aquifer recharge zone. Pointing out that the aquifer is San Antonio’s “sole source of drinking water. . . and significant for the whole region,” Garza said he was pleased to report that although several initiatives on the ballot failed recently, citizens did vote, 70 to 30, to buy (with a new five-year sales tax) open space and preserve land over the recharge zone. The Edwards Aquifer Authority is composed of representatives from the 13 counties that make up that zone, “but it is still very young and has a long way to go.”
Gail Goldberg, San Diego’s director of planning, picked up on this point and described how in her city, 53,000 acres are being preserved as natural open space connected with a regional system. She also emphasized the possibilities of partnering with local schools in two ways. First, the city should work with the rapidly growing school district to build “vertical schools,” which use less land than typical new school construction, and also have underground parking, a daycare center, and a health care center. This “makes the school more than just a school; it is a facility open and available to the public. And second, the city should use school playgrounds as city parks when school is not in session to create open-space opportunities for neighborhoods.”
Deborah Myerson, ULI’s former senior associate, land use policy, reflected on green infill, not in the physical sense, “but looking at social services as a conceptual infill.” Her remark prompted Ellen Oppenheim, the former L.A. parks general manager who now works as director of San Diego’s department of parks and recreation, to address the serious problem of inner-city crime. Oppenheim reflected on the problem of how to “design to a human scale, how to make real places people want to use, that create warmth in a community and serve as a positive force, without making them prisonlike fortresses.” She told of a new piece of inner-city land her Los Angeles department had acquired in a Latino neighborhood (Blythe Street Pocket Park). She wanted to make it a soccer field, but the local leadership was adamantly against her idea. She quoted the local assemblyperson as saying, “I don’t want to build a soccer field, because in this neighborhood those kids could get shot. I want to build a gym. I want them inside, out of harm’s way, protected by four walls.” She continued: “I was appalled. That’s always the police response: harden the target; make it harder for the bad guys to get to the good people and cause problems.” She said she did not agree with that approach, and confessed, “I need help figuring out real solutions in the toughest neighborhoods that create high-quality space and bring people out of their homes. We are fighting some very tough societal issues.”
Finally, regarding integration, Greg Hise, professor of urban history at the University of Southern California (USC), raised the question of incorporating the “cultural landscape of the past” into new park developments. He referred to the conversion of a Pittsburgh steel mill into a museum, and thought this principle could be applied often. Manuel Mollinedo, the new L.A. parks general manager, emphasized the importance of including wildlife corridors and indigenous plants in the parks.
Innovate In spite of the value inherent in parks and open space, funding for their creation, maintenance, and operation is never easy to come by, and given the financial straits in which local, state, and federal governments currently find themselves, these items often are the first to be cut. For example, the Maryland Municipal League sent out a legislative alert in spring 2003 advising that the state budget would eliminate community parks and playground grants, suspend streetscape grant projects, and cut Program Open Space by 50 percent. Fiscal constraints are forcing states and cities to think about their goals and desired program outcomes, and then rank them by priority. Many governments also are undertaking systemic changes in the way their departments are organized, a more substantial effort than cutting a program here and there, as they try to reinvent how they operate. One can only hope that in the process of reprioritizing and reorganizing, green spaces and open spaces will survive the budget ax.
Two things will be necessary to ensure that a city’s green infrastructure thrives in times of fiscal constraint: innovation and advocacy. Innovation will create new sources of funding and new management strategies, chiefly through public/private partnerships, like the Central Park Conservancy in New York or the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy. Mayor Thomas Murphy of Pittsburgh explained in a dialogue with Peter Harnik, author of Inside City Parks, that the nonprofit Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy was founded by the private sector, the foundation community, and local government to assist in the maintenance of four 500-plus-acre parks in the middle of the city. He expressed the hope that someday the conservancy would “manage the day-to-day maintenance of our parks.” The innovative repositioning that Garvin mentioned is an ongoing process, not an end in itself, Murphy said. Steps such as tapping into private generosity, establishing a nonprofit foundation, generating eleemosynary support, privatizing some of the management responsibilities, and encouraging an “adopt-a-park” program can relieve the public sector of carrying the burden alone. Murphy suggested an innovative technique being used on Pittsburgh’s riverfront: “We build covenants into the deed requiring every property owner, residential or commercial, to contribute to a common fund for the maintenance of the park by private landscapers. So we are removing the long-term maintenance responsibility from the city.”
Government should do its share, to be sure. L.A.’s Mayor Hahn used the mayors’ forum as an opportunity for a press conference to kick off his “Green L.A. Initiative” that is intended to implement his commitment to making Los Angeles “cleaner and greener.” The Green L.A. Initiative, for example, has compiled a list of all surplus city property and created an “urban land trust” to expedite the acquisition of urban parkland, especially neighborhood pocket parks.
In Denver, according to Robert Searns, a greenway planner and developer for Urban Edges, Inc., based in Littleton, Colorado, a metrowide storm drainage utility was funded by a mill levy to maintain the drainage aspects of the trails and greenways system. “To the stormwater utility, the trail is not a bike trail, it is a stream maintenance access path, and we haven’t told them differently.” This multiobjective notion, he added, “is important in bringing in partners, whether it is a stormwater utility or somebody running a fiber-optic line, or other opportunities.”
But the government cannot do it alone. In many innovative ways, the private sector, both for-profit and not-for-profit, can assist. Rob Inerfeld, former director of Community Greens, based in Arlington, Virginia, brought up the idea of shared space behind the homes in a neighborhood (see article on page 36). Lipkis observed that in many smaller cities that cannot absorb the cost of park maintenance in the face of layoffs of municipal workers, nonprofit organizations like his could organize maintenance corps. He also suggested that “where possible, privatizing” the operations might work. Murphy said, “Increasingly, Pittsburgh is working with nonprofit groups to do the park maintenance.” David Biggs, Huntington Beach’s director of economic development, suggested partnering with corporations. He told the group, “Our community has Coca-Cola as the official soft drink. That generates $300,000 a year, plus in-kind contributions. Chevrolet donates the vehicles used by beach lifeguards and safety officers. So we are able to supplement our beach maintenance and capital budgets with these strategic partnerships.” Esther Feldman, president of L.A.-based Community Conservancy International, suggested establishing special benefit assessment districts, “like streetscape, landscape, and lighting districts for parks and open space.” Mary Eysenbach, director of the City Parks Forum for the American Planning Association in Chicago, pointed out that linking parks and open space with other municipal services like transportation, environmental protection, and education will “help find new pots of funding.” Larry Kaplan, who directs California Urban Programs for the Trust for Public Land (TPL), described how his nonprofit organization, “the real estate arm of the conservation movement,” can “provide a range of activities and services that cities don’t have” because it can move quickly and has more flexibility than government. He illustrated his point with Duck Farm, 57 acres along two miles of the San Gabriel River in the San Gabriel Valley. The owner was going to sell the property to a developer; government could not move fast enough, so TPL bought it and held onto it until the state agency could find the money to purchase it from TPL. And thus, “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity was not lost.”
Advocate A city’s green infrastructure needs advocates. Jennifer Wolch, a geography professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, spoke of the importance of producing GIS models that are user-friendly and sharing them with community-based organizations. People are more inclined to support a project if they have a clear understanding of what it entails. Murphy contended, “If you can get a couple handfuls of people who are sophisticated and understand the system and the lever points on it, you can get things done,” citing as an example the positive contribution of the grass-roots Friends of the Riverfront in Pittsburgh to waterfront restoration. Lobbying city hall and elected officials, not just on the night the budget is passed, but all year long, protesting deterioration where it appears, rallying the volunteer spirit of those who care, holding public meetings, and forming alliances and coalitions can be effective techniques in making a community aware of the need to preserve green space in the asphalt jungle of urban America. Feldman described how a neighborhood was convinced to support the reclamation of two square miles of oil-drilling fields and the creation of a modern park “in the middle of L.A.” by holding over 200 individual meetings during the planning process and conducting “a big series of community workshops.”
Activate Everyone agreed that it is one thing to create a vision and a plan for green infrastructure, but another thing to make it happen. Doss Mabe, a Los Angeles–based architect and urban designer, spoke of the increasing need to “harness and work with” local communities and neighborhoods that have “extremely diverse interests.” Feldman said she believes that “to get beyond the planning stage, the political will and leadership must be strong enough.” The attitude has to be: “We’re going to do this project. We’re going to stick the stake in the ground. No, we don’t know the answer to every question, but we are going to find it out as we go.” Murphy agreed: the key ingredient in making it happen, he said, is “political and community will.”
One can find a good example of the will to create positive change, which is the essence of leadership, in the ongoing development of the El Toro Great Park in Irvine, California. The vision is to convert a closed 4,700-acre Marine air base into a great park that will include 4,000 acres of open space with a central park, a habitat preserve, wildlife corridors, sports parks, an exposition center, 3,400 housing units, and 2.9 million square feet of commercial office and retail space. However, before this plan could be put in place, the community endured quite a struggle between those who wanted to build a regional airport or a mixed-use development or a giant park. The city spent almost $5 million surveying citizens’ desires for the property, and Irvine Mayor Larry Agran provided strong and persuasive leadership in helping the citizenry sort through the options. In March 2002, voters approved the Great Park idea. According to Glen Worthington, the park project manager, “The concept of preserving this as an open-space oasis—although that may sound strange in a suburban area—really resonated countrywide.” And Agran has told his constituents that the entire $353 million development now underway will be built without new or increased local taxes.
Indeed, to paraphrase Edmund Burke, the British statesman, the best way to ensure the triumph of failed green infrastructure is for good people to do nothing.
William H. Hudnut III is a senior resident fellow at ULI/Joseph C. Canizaro chair for public policy. He is a former mayor of Indianapolis, Indiana, and the current mayor of Chevy Chase, Maryland.