The excellent city park system: what makes it great and how to get there - History: UPARR at 25

Beginning in 1859, when Frederick Law Olmsted, Calvert Vaux and more than 3,00o 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 do parkland planning, 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 that 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 native 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.

But every pendulum eventually swings back, and the effort to revive city park systems has slowly gained momentum. 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 are belatedly trying to create vibrant downtowns and walkable neighborhoods for a more cohesive urban identity. In both old cities and new, there's rising interest in the use of parks to help shape vitality. The breadth and depth of a park system, they said, can't 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?--a multifaceted group of e5 urban and park experts was convened by the Trust for Public Land. The Trust for Public Land, a national land conservation group, has had a so-year interest in providing park land for city residents, and the organization is committed to understanding the factors that go into successful park making. As a result of the intensive two-day meeting, a list of ]even broad measures that make the greatest difference in defining a successful system were identified. The seven measures are:

A Clear Expression of Purpose

Park systems don't just happen. Wild areas don't automatically protect themselves from development, outmoded waterfronts don't spontaneously sprout flowers and promenades, and flat ground doesn't morph into ball-fields. The citizenry must clearly set forth in writing the purpose of the park system and a mandate for the park department. The department must then use that mandate as a springboard for its mission statement and the definition of its core services.

Also, to inform the public, the department should regularly publish an annual report summarizing its system and programs, and showing how well it fulfilled its mandate. Unfortunately, less than half of big-city agencies publish an annual report or give a comprehensive budgetary report.

Ongoing Planning and Community Involvement

To be successful, a city park system needs a master plan. A plan is more than an intention. It's a document built upon a process, demonstrating a path of achievement and expressing a final outcome. The department's master plan should be substantiated thoroughly, reviewed regularly and updated every five years. The agency should have a robust, formalized community-involvement mechanism (which means more than posting the document on a Web site and hoping for feedback).

As confirmation of its involvement with the community, the department should have formal relationships with nonprofit conservation and service-provider organizations. Also, no city can have a truly great park system without a strong network of park "friends" groups--private organizations that serve as both supporters and watchdogs of the department. Ideally, a city will have one or two city-wide organizations plus scores of groups that focus on an individual park and its surrounding neighborhood.

Sufficient Assets in Land, Staffing and Equipment to Meet the System's Goals

Obviously, a park system requires a land base. But the size of that base isn't an immutable number: big-city systems range in size from almost 20 percent of a city's area down to 2.5 percent, and from more than 45 acres per 1,000 residents to just more than 3 acres per 1,000. While there's no ordained optimum size, a city's system should be large enough to meet the goals outlined in the agency's master plan.

Newer systems in younger cities are, naturally, growing much faster than older systems in mature, non-expanding cities, but it's not true that older cities can't increase the size of their park systems. In the past 30 years, the amount of parkland in Denver and Seattle grew by more than 44 percent each. Even cities that are considered all built out can use redevelopment to increase parkland. Outmoded facilities like closed shipyards, underutilized rail depots, abandoned factories, decommissioned military bases and filled landfills can be converted to parks.

Park and recreation departments need sufficient public revenue for land management and programs. This entails both an adequate operating budget and a regular infusion of capital funds for major construction and repairs and land acquisition. A detailed survey of the 55 biggest cities showed that, in fiscal year 2000, the adjusted park budget--the amount spent by each city on parks operations and capital, minus everything spent on such big-ticket items as zoos, museums, aquariums or planetariums--came to an average of $80 per resident. Moreover, there should be an effective, complementary private fundraising effort--one that serves not only signature parks, but the whole system. Although private efforts should never be designed to let the local government off the hook, they can be valuable in undertaking monumental projects or in raising work to levels of beauty and extravagance that government on its own can't afford.

Equitable Access

The excellent city park system is accessible to everyone regardless of residence, physical abilities or financial resources. Parks should be easily reachable from every neighborhood, usable by the handicapped and challenged, and available to low-income residents.

Preferably, urban people and parks are no farther than 10 minutes apart by foot in dense areas or 10 minutes apart by bicycle in spread-out neighborhoods. Moreover, it's not enough to measure access purely from a map; planners must take into account such significant physical barriers as uncrossable highways, streams and railroad corridors, or heavily-trafficked roads. Cities should also assure park access by a wide range of challenged persons, including the elderly, infirm, blind and those confined to wheelchairs. This includes appropriate surfacing materials, ramps, signs, handicapped parking, etc.

Finally, agencies must assure equitable access for those who can't pay full price. While it's acceptable to charge appropriate fees for some park facilities and programs, agencies should consciously plan for the approximately 20 percent of residents who can't afford such fees, utilizing such alternatives as scholarships, fee-free hours, fee-free days or sweat-equity volunteer work.

User Satisfaction

High usership is the ultimate validation that a park system is attractive and meets people's needs. High attendance also increases safety. Knowing the level of park use requires measuring it. Most departments can track their paying users--golfers playing rounds, swimmers using pools, teams renting fields--but the true total is much higher. As for satisfaction, most agencies rely on informal feedback such as letters of complaint or messages relayed back by the staff. This is unbalanced and ineffective, and doesn't provide the agency with clear direction. The proper approach is to devise a scientifically accurate survey and assure that it's given broadly and often enough to be accurate.

Safety From Physical Hazards and Crime

To be successful, a city park system should be safe, free both of crime and of unreasonable physical hazards like sidewalk potholes and rotten branches overhead. Park departments should have mechanisms to avoid and eliminate hazards as well as ways for citizens to easily report problems.

Park visitors are reassured if they see other users and uniformed employees. Even if the number of police or rangers is small and their rounds infrequent, the perception of order can be extended simply by making sure all park workers and outdoor maintenance staff are dressed in uniform.

Basic to any safety strategy is the accurate, regular collection of crime data in parks and, preferably, near parks, because parks and their surrounding neighborhoods are interrelated. (Only about half the surveyed agencies currently collect this data and, of those that do, most have no strategy to use the information.) Similarly, well-run youth recreation programs have been shown to decrease delinquency and vandalism. The excellent park system takes it even farther by tracking youth crime by neighborhood over time.

Another valuable piece of information is the ratio of male to female users in each park. A low rate of female users is a strong indication that the park is perceived to be unsafe.

Benefits For the City Beyond the Boundaries of the Parks

The value of a park system extends beyond the boundaries of the parks themselves. In fact, the excellent city park system is a form of natural infrastructure that provides many goods for the city as a whole, including cleaner air, cleaner water, reduced health costs from sedentary lifestyles, increased learning opportunities from "outdoor classrooms," increased urban tourism and business vitality, natural beauty and respite from traffic and noise.

Taken together, good parks have been shown to increase the property value of residences up to a radius of about two-fifths of a mile. (Of course, troubled parks can have the opposite result.) The sophisticated park agency regularly collects financial data (or contracts with a university or other entity) to know which of its parks are positively impacting the surrounding neighborhood.

Urban parks don't exist in a vacuum. Every city is a complex and intricate interplay between the private space of homes and offices, the semipublic spaces of shops, and the fully public space of parks, plazas, streets and natural areas. The goal is to have park systems that enrich cities, and cities that nourish their parks.

Peter Harnik is director of the Parks for People Program of the Trust for Public Land, based in Washington, D.C. This article is a condensation of his new 44-page report, "The Excellent City Park System: What Makes it Great and How to Get Them," available for $15 from the Trust for Public Land, 116 New Montgomery St., San Francisco, CA 94105. Alternatively, see www.tpl.org.

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