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Posts Tagged ‘park funding’

Financing the Rebirth of Medellín

Posted in Cities, Design Practice, tagged , , , , , , , on May 21, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Medellín, Columbia, a city once known for catastrophic levels of drug violence and now considered by many to be “reborn,” was the subject of an article in the New York Times yesterday. New public architecture, infrastructure, and public space are noticeable drivers of change in this city, and the author, Michael Kimmelman, describes the physical changes and illustrates them with a slideshow. Kimmelman also calls our attention to an essential fact of urban renaissance – there has to be a mechanism for financing it. Medellín has a vehicle for transformation that no U.S. Rust Belt city has.

Medellín, by contrast [with Bogotá, a city now struggling to maintain its achievements], still counts on an almost fierce parochial pride, a legacy of decent Modernist architecture dating back to the 1930s, a cadre of young architects being aggressively nurtured and promoted, and a commitment by local businesses to improve social welfare that begins with the city’s biggest business: its state-owned utilities company, E.P.M.

You can’t begin to grasp Medellín’s architectural renaissance without understanding the role of E.P.M., the Empresas Públicas de Medellín, which supplies water, gas, sanitation, telecommunications and electricity. It’s constitutionally mandated to provide clean water and electricity even to houses in the city’s illegal slums, so that unlike in Bogotá, where the worst barrios lack basic amenities, in Medellín there’s a safety net.

More than that, E.P.M.’s profits (some $450 million a year) go directly to building new schools, public plazas, the metro and parks. One of the most beautiful public squares in the middle of Medellín was donated by E.P.M. And atop the slums of the city’s Northeast district, E.P.M. paid for a park in the mountaintop jungle, linked to the district by its own cable car.

Federico Restrepo used to run E.P.M., before he became the city planner under Mr. Fajardo. “We took a view that everything is interconnected — education, culture, libraries, safety, public spaces,” he told me, pointing out that while fewer than 20 percent of public school students here used to test at the national average in 2002, by 2009 the number exceeded 80 percent.

“Obviously it’s not just that we built and renovated schools,” he said. “You have to work on the quality of teaching and nutrition in conjunction with architecture. But the larger point is that the goal of government should be providing rich and poor with the same quality education, transportation and public architecture. In that way you increase the sense of ownership.”

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Park Facts

Posted in Parks, tagged , , , on December 11, 2011| Leave a Comment »

The Trust for Public Land just released the 2011 City Parks Facts report. Among the interesting findings:

  • 120 parks were added in the 100 largest U.S. cities in 2010, even as 3.9% of the park work force was cut.
  • The most parks per capita are found in Madison, WI, with 12.7 per 10,000 residents, with Cincinnati, St. Petersburg, Anchorage, and Buffalo following.
  • The greatest number of playgrounds per capita are found in Madison, Virginia Beach, Corpus Christi, Cincinnati, and Norfolk.
  • There were 110 fewer public swimming pools in operation in 2010 than in 2009, and this is the only facility type to decrease.
  • 20,000 community garden plots are found in the 100 largest cities, with the cold cities of Minneapolis and Madison leading the way, having roughly 33-36 garden plots per 10,000 people.
  • Minneapolis has 13.3 acres of parkland per 1,000 residents, considered a relatively high amount given the city’s dense development. Otherwise, spread-out cities like Anchorage and Albuquerque have higher rates of parkland per resident.
  • $200 or more per resident is the cost of parkland in Minneapolis, Washington, D.C., and Seattle, compared to a median of $84.

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What a Presidential Initiative Means These Days

Posted in Parks, tagged , , , , , on November 6, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Apparently some publicity and your project listed in an official U.S. Government report! This one slipped by me until now, when I read the USA Today article about the new Department of Interior publication called America’s Great Outdoors: Fifty-State Report, the culmination of President Obama’s year-long Great Outdoors Initiative. Two projects from each state share the honor of being identified as worthy of being promoted. According to Interior Secretary Salazar, these 100 projects are “among the best investments in the nation to support a healthy, active population, conserve wildlife and working lands, and create travel, tourism and outdoor-recreation jobs across the nation.” These projects would promote health and create jobs, two of the nation’s highest priorities! This would be why USA Today also reports:

The projects are part of President Obama’s Great Outdoors Initiative, announced last year, and result from 50 meetings between state leaders and senior federal officials. They won’t receive new federal funding but technical support and guidance.

The development of the report itself was a jobs initiative, keeping some Interior Department staff employed as they traveled the country meeting with state reps.

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Park Deserts in Chicago

Posted in Landscape Planning, Parks, tagged , , , , , , , on October 8, 2011| Leave a Comment »

A new series in the Chicago Tribune is shining a spotlight on a problem found in many large cities: the uneven distribution of parkland across the city and the general absence of open space in poor neighborhoods. The first article in the series does a great job of describing the overall problem and also, very importantly, making the argument tangible by giving a detailed example of a particular neighborhood. It will be interesting to see how the series unfolds, especially because Chicago’s new mayor, Rahm Emanuel, included the park allocation issue in his transition plan and because action on the problem will be challenging in this fiscal environment. The central argument in the article:

Despite former Mayor Richard M. Daley’s much-ballyhooed push for new parks and playgrounds, one-half of Chicago’s 2.7 million people still live in community areas that fail to meet the city’s own modest standard: For every 1,000 people, there should be 2 acres of open space, an area roughly the size of Soldier Field’s entire playing surface.

Many of these areas have so little parkland that it is no exaggeration to call them “park deserts,” a name that suggests a similarity to “food deserts,” where healthy, affordable food is hard to obtain.

Indeed, the park deserts extract a comparable human toll, denying children and adults a place to exercise, cutting them off from contact with nature, and robbing them of a chance to form bonds of community.

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Grassroots Beautification

Posted in Recession Watch, tagged , , , , , on August 20, 2011| 2 Comments »

Meadowbrook plantings

Municipal budget cuts have devastated the planting programs of many local governments. The hanging baskets and beds planted with annual flowers have disappeared in many cities, despite being loved by locals and visitors alike. Here in Syracuse, I regularly drive by some impressive floral displays in public rights-of-way that are immune to the City’s budget … because they are created by neighborhood residents. Along one street, Meadowbrook, nearby neighbors are particularly industrious, planting 27 beds, two at each intersection, along the length of the street. The results are idiosyncratic, looking quite different from “professionally designed” beds due to the broad array of plants selected, but they are effective and add to that neighborhood sense of place. Lately, custom-designed birdhouses have been added to a few of the beds. To me, this grassroots energy says “you’re in the right place,” and “this is a great place to live.” If a silver lining can be found in the rotten economy, I hope one such bright spot is more communities taking on the responsibility of making their place in the world great. It is clear that no outside help is coming…

With folk art addition

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Ecological Opportunity? High Mowing & Water Costs

Posted in Design Practice, Green Infrastructure, Parks, tagged , , on July 13, 2011| Leave a Comment »

In days of tight municipal budgets, all costs have to be scrutinized. The job of Parks and Rec departments across the country includes the maintenance of large expanses of lawn. This practice has long been questioned by the ecologically minded (couldn’t there be a greater mix of cover types?). For the past few years, mowing has been reduced in many places, often to a chorus of complaints, but water provision is also a consideration. For example, news from Helena, Montana (pop. ~30K) about the new Centennial Park, a traditional active rec park, being built in 3 phases on 60 acres (first phase construction began last summer):

The budget also increases water funds for the city’s parks. Of about $80,000, Centennial Park is expected to receive about $60,000 worth of water. The city  is looking to lay sod and start planting in the park soon, and Alles said he  thinks the park may be open for use by the end of the summer.

Looks like it is time to dust off the xeriscaping manuals. Public education about alternatives to lawn, and design to make the alternatives beautiful, will have to accompany changes to park planting and maintenance if ecologically beneficial changes are to take root. Otherwise, when (and if) city coffers are filled again, the default mowing and watering will make a return.

Update: A new study in the Journal of Applied Ecology further supports the idea of lawn conversion in city parks.

The study recommends planting more trees on lands currently maintained as lawns. Doing this on just 10% of lawn space would increase [citywide] carbon storage by 12%. (from Treehugger.com)

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Parks Under Seige

Posted in Parks, tagged on June 7, 2011| Leave a Comment »

From today’s New York Times, a story on the sad condition of state parks – drastically cut budgets, growing dependence on entrance fees and “marketing,” shrinking staff, maintenance backlogs, and more.

On proposed shale gas drilling in Ohio parks:

“I don’t want to see the parks become refineries or anything like that,” said Paul Wolf, president of Friends for the Preservation of Ohio State Parks. “But it’s a tough decision to make. If parks deteriorate, what good is keeping drilling out of the parks?”

And from the immediate past president of the National Association of Recreation Resource Planners:

But, Mr. Just said, a basic pact between parks and the public — the idea that parks will be easily accessible and affordable, and safeguarded by the state — is at risk. He recalled a new board member of the association asking, “In what way are they state parks anymore?”

What would those 19th and early 20th century visionaries think of our stewardship efforts? And guess what we did during the only prior economic crisis of the magnitude of the current one (i.e., during the Great Depression). We built parks – many hundreds of them – with the help of the Civilian Conservation Corps. Shame on the Feds for allowing the states to gut the parks now.

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