The Excellent City Park System
The Excellent City Park System:
What Makes it Great, and How to Get There
 |
- a clear expression of purpose
- an ongoing planning and community involvement process
- sufficient assets in land, staffing and equipment to meet the system's goals
- equitable park access
- user satisfaction
- safety from crime and physical hazards
- benefits for the city beyond the boundaries of the parks
Originally published in 2003, the recently reprinted 34-page report also provides examples of exceptional practices in the cities studied along with a referral to some of the city park facts collected by the Center for City Park Excellence.
The Excellent City Park System is available for free PDF download or for $15 for a paper copy.
Download the report. (864K PDF)
Purchase a paper copy of the report
Introduction
Beginning in 1859, when Frederick Law Olmsted, Calvert Vaux and more than 3,000 laborers created Central Park, a wave of enthusiasm for urban "pleasure grounds" swept the nation. Thousands of parks were constructed and millions of words were written about their features and attributes. Over the next 75 years the purpose and design of parks metamorphosed, but they remained so important to cities that even during the depths of the Great Depression many park systems received large influxes of money and attention through the federal government's relief and conservation programs.
During the height of the city park movement, from about 1890 to 1940, great efforts were made to plan for parkland, to understand the relationship between parks and surrounding neighborhoods, and to measure the impact of parks. Leaders in Boston, Buffalo, Seattle, Portland, Denver, Baltimore and elsewhere proudly and competitively labored to convert their cities from drab, polluted industrial cores into beautiful, culturally uplifting centers. They believed a well designed and maintained park system was integral to their mission.
Inspired by boulevard systems in Minneapolis and Kansas City, and by Olmsted's "Emerald Necklace" in Boston, many cities sketched out interconnected greenways linking neighborhoods, parks, and natural areas. Careful measurements were made of the location of parks and the travel distance (by foot, generally) for each neighborhood and resident. The field of park research was supported by the federal government through the National Conference on Outdoor Recreation, which provided funding for data collection, research, analysis and dissemination.
Following World War II the nation's attention turned toward the development of suburbs, and the commitment to the urban public domain began to wane. There was even a naive assumption that private suburban backyards could replace most of the services provided by public city parks. Many of the ideas regarding parks' role in city planning and community socialization were lost. More importantly, ideas about measuring park success, assuring equity, and meeting the needs of changing users languished.
Over the next half-century, much of the vast urban park system fell on hard times. Few cities provided adequate maintenance staffing and budgets, and most deferred critically needed capital investment. Many parks suffered from overuse -- trampled plants and grass, deteriorated equipment, erosion, loss of soil resiliency and health. Others declined from underuse -- graffiti, vandalism, invasion of noxious weeds, theft of plant resources and crime.
The decline was camouflaged.
In the older northern cities, general urban deterioration grabbed headlines and made parks seem of secondary importance. In the new cities of the south and west, low-density development made parks seem superfluous. Intellectual inquiry into city greenspace dwindled to almost nothing (with the single exception of the "urban natural area," the new concept of preserving wetlands, deserts, forests and grasslands for their ecological values and benefits).
But every pendulum eventually swings back, and the effort to revive city park systems has slowly gained momentum. When the Trust for Public Land was founded in 1972, it was the first national conservation organization with an explicit urban component to its work. At the same time, fledgling neighborhood groups began forming to save particular parks, either through private fundraising or through public political action. There arose a new appreciation of the genius and work of Frederick Law Olmsted, and in 1980 the Central Park Conservancy was founded. In that same year, pioneering research by William H. Whyte resulted in the publication of The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces and the formation of the Project for Public Spaces. The rise of the urban community gardening movement and the spread of park activism to other cities led in 1994 to a $12 million commitment by the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation and the creation of the Urban Parks Institute and the City Parks Forum. Meanwhile, city park directors formed their own loose network through the Urban Parks and Recreation Alliance.
Beginning in 1995 many older cities such as Chicago, Boston, Washington and Cleveland started bouncing back from years of population loss and fiscal decline. With new residents and a greater sense of optimism, they and other places like them began seeking to reestablish a competitive edge by combining their strong geographies and histories with their newfound economies. Elsewhere, in fast-growing, low-density places such as Charlotte, Dallas and Phoenix, planners were belatedly trying to create vibrant downtowns and walkable neighborhoods for a more cohesive urban identity. In both old cities and new there is rising interest in the use of parks to help shape vitality.
A New Emphasis on Research
By the mid 1990s, after years of fieldwork creating parks, TPL became concerned about the woeful lack of basic information about city systems. Seeing the need for a round of exploration, TPL initiated a research program to collect data and revisit old ideas about parks and cities. Statistics regarding land ownership, recreational facilities, and budgets were assembled for the first time in more than 50 years.
The result of the research was the book Inside City Parks, co-published with the Urban Land Institute in 2000. The book, which looked at the park systems of the 25 biggest U.S. cities, resulted in a storm of publicity for places given the highest and lowest rankings and also stimulated many other cities to ask to be included in future studies. At the same time, a number of critics suggested the research was too restricted. The breadth and depth of a park system, they said, cannot be determined by simple statistics on acreage, recreation facilities and budgets. It was time to determine exactly what factors make for a truly excellent city park system.
To study this question -- "What makes an excellent city park system?" -- TPL convened a multifaceted group of 25 urban and park experts. The intensive two-day meeting in Houston in October 2001 resulted in a list of seven broad measures that make the greatest difference in defining a successful system. Detailed surveys studying the key indicators of those seven measures were mailed to directors of 69 park and recreation systems in major cities. This report is based on the results of that survey.
The Trust for Public Land's goal for this project is to re-create the kind of framework that existed in the early part of the 20th century to sustain city parks as valued components of a vital urban community. This report, and the data collected to support it, is a first step toward benchmarking goals for city park systems. It aims to help answer the question posed by mayors all around the country: How do I achieve the best possible park system?
Updated 5/2006
Digg
del.icio.us
Facebook
Favorites
Google
Multiply
Newsvine
Reddit
Technocrati
StumbleUpon
MySpace