Strategic Solutions for Park Partnerships
In 2013, I interviewed Jesse Brackenbury, Executive Director of the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy in Boston, for a City Parks Alliance blogpost about the challenges of operating a city park owned by the state – the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In 2008, legislation established the Conservancy as the official steward of the Greenway. This year, Brackenbury …
Continue reading “Rose Kennedy Greenway’s New Business Partner”
Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded. –Yogi Berra Summertime in our city parks means preparing for the millions of visitors expected looking for a place to spread their picnic blanket, toss a Frisbee and walk the dog. The popularity of parks – city and national – is soaring, especially as the weather warms. In …
Continue reading “Summer Festivals in the Park: Too Many People, Too Few Parks?”
Can pop-up parks and public space projects trigger investment in new public parks? Is there a role for community-generated projects in the formal planning process? The Miami Foundation is working to find out with its Miami Public Space Challenge, now going into its fifth year. The Public Space Challenge uncovers the best ideas for creating, …
Continue reading “The Creative Culture of Parks: Moving from Pop-ups to Permanent”
Place management is defined by the Institute of Place Management as “a coordinated, area-based, multi-stakeholder approach to improve locations, harnessing the skills, experiences and resources of those in the private, public and voluntary sectors”. However, as a conceptual field it remains relatively underdeveloped because of its infancy. –Wikipedia Try Googling ‘public parks’ versus ‘public spaces.’ Then …
Continue reading “Public Place-making and Place-Keeping: Where Do Public Parks Fit In?”
“I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.” ― Dr. Seuss, The Lorax To be a tree in the city is very hard. A tree that would live 80 years in the forest has a life expectancy of 20 years in the suburbs, and less than that in an urban setting where trees …
Continue reading “Speaking for the Trees: The New Urban and Community Forestry Action Plan”
On a recent cool and rainy Thursday afternoon, the City Parks Alliance board traveled to the DC waterfront to visit a couple of the city’s newest parks and to hear how they are being managed in a creative partnership with the Capitol Riverfront Business Improvement District (BID). Michael Stevens, President, Capitol Riverfront BID and Dan …
Continue reading “Business Improvement Districts: Driving Investment in Public Parks”
If Googling parks and equity were your only measure of who is taking on this issue, it would seem that only the city of New York is – with stories about that city coming up in the first ten responses to my query. But in fact, most of the country’s largest cities are developing programs …
Continue reading “Change the Culture and the Rest Will Follow”
Despite widespread acceptance regarding the value of city parks we have surprisingly few ways to measure their individual and collective success. The Trust for Public Land’s ParkScore Index is one tool that measures how well the 75 largest cities are doing meeting their park needs. The City Parks Project’s green access and equity maps for …
Continue reading “Beyond Fairness: New Strategies for Achieving Equity in City Parks”
Houston’s Park Partners: Obsessing Over Urban Green Something is up in Texas. Philanthropy has discovered parks. In Dallas, the Belo Foundation, looking to build on the success of Klyde Warren Park, Belo Garden and Main Street Garden, has just announced an ambitious plan – and $30 million in funding – to realize a vision for …
Toronto’s Park People: Making Sense of Community Engagement in the Parks Business Involving citizens and communities in the process of managing city parks may represent a new way of doing business for public park agencies, but it is an increasing necessity to have a constituency that supports and advocates for what the agency does. How …
Continue reading “Making Sense of Community Engagement in the Business of Parks”
Returning the Boldness of the World’s Fair to a San Antonio Park “…the fair is fun, southwest style, but,” she continued, “what San Antonio does with the center-city site after October, will be the real measure of HemisFair’s success.” –Ada Louise Huxtable, Architecture Critic New York Times, April 4, 1968 The 1968 world’s fair is …
Continue reading “Returning the Boldness of the World’s Fair to a New City Park”
City Parks and Gentrification – A Different Kind of Tragedy of the Commons? Part 2 “The question is: How do you improve access to parks and open space but not trigger this shift in property values and land uses that completely transform a community?” –Jennifer Wolch, Dean of the College of Environmental Design at UC …
City Parks and Gentrification – A Different Kind of Tragedy of the Commons? Part 1 The new 606 is open in Chicago – a mix of 2.7 miles of elevated trail with four ground-level parks along the route. Amidst the excitement of this new linear park which will bridge four neighborhoods historically underserved by parks, …
It was a kind of San Francisco parks ‘love-fest’ that evoked images of another set of park-lovers from the 1960s. But this time the peace-loving vibe was coming from civic leaders and park professionals attending the City Parks Alliance (CPA) international parks conference, Greater and Greener: Innovative Parks, Vibrant Cities, a few weeks ago in …
Continue reading “Greater and Greener – A Victory Lap in San Francisco’s Parks”
Peter Harnik at The Trust for Public Land has once again added to the foundation of knowledge about city parks with a new report issued by the Trust’s Center for City Park Excellence. “Public Spaces/Private Money: The Triumphs and Pitfalls of Urban Park Conservancies” is a report by Harnik and Abby Martin that looks at …
Continue reading “City Park Conservancies-A Treasure Trove of New Knowledge”