Ardent
suburbophiles sometimes try to position parks and urbanism as incompatible and
then use the evident value of parks as an anti-urban argument. As is true of most binary arguments, and particularly
true here, the reality is more complicated.
It’s true that many urbanist land-use configurations don’t easily allow
some of the park forms that we currently use.
But it’s also true that some of the current park forms aren’t well used. Perhaps urbanism can point us toward a better
park paradigm.
I’m on the
City of Petaluma Recreation, Music, and Park Commission. (Yes, it’s an oddly reordered version of what
most communities, along with Amy Poehler, would call a Park and Recreation
Commission, but I’ve become accustomed to it.)
One of my tasks as a commissioner is to periodically
observe five assigned parks. It’s a good
and appropriate task. It makes a meaningful
connection between the commissioners and the park system. And it provides additional sets of eyes that
might have different awarenesses to changes happening at the parks.
The anticipated
goal of the observations is providing information such as how the irrigation
system is working, whether the play equipment is in need of repair, and if the
paved surfaces are deteriorating dangerously.
But as I’ve
gotten older, I’ve become less good at coloring inside the lines. So I wander afield with questions like: “Shouldn’t we be looking at a large field of
bicycle parking so more people can come downtown on bicycles for community
celebrations? “ “Why can’t we provide a
gate in the fence between the low-income apartment complex and the adjoining
park?” And “Are we sure we that there’s
not a better use for the five acres lying unused within a park?”
I probably exasperate
the park staff, but it’s how I view the world.
Realizing
that I’ve usually looked at my five parks during quiet weekday hours, I recently
took a weekend tour to see how much usage was occurring on the days when the
parks should be well used. Especially
because all the parks are located within residential communities, surrounded on
most sides by single-family homes.
It was a
warm and sunny Sunday at the beginning of spring, exactly the kind of day when parks
should be thronging with people. Especially
between noon and 1 pm when I took my tour.
Without including the names of the parks, this is what I found:
·
Park 1: Seven adults and four children. Three of the adults were pushing an elderly
woman in a wheelchair, although they had to turn around where the concrete path
turned to gravel. The other adults were
the parents of the children and were engaged with the play equipment, although
most of equipment remained unused. Only
one of the three picnic tables was in use.
·
Park 2: One man throwing a ball for his
dog. That was it.
·
Park 3: Five adults and five children engaged in
casual ballplay. The play equipment and
picnic tables were unused.
·
Park 4: Two adults and eight children. One of adults was setting up tables for a
party later in the afternoon. (Six of
the children, who didn’t have a parent hovering nearby, were engaged in a game
with ill-defined rules and a fuzzy objective.
One child would regularly complain that “It’s not fair”, at which the
other children would huddle and renegotiate the rules. It was the fine example of good childhood play, the kind of play that
trains kids to be adults.)
·
Park 5: No one.
Acres of verdant springtime grass and not a person to be seen.
That’s a
total of 32 people. Yes, it could have
been even fewer, especially with Park 5 providing an example of a completely
empty park. But when we consider that the
parks serve neighborhoods with a population of perhaps 8,000, 32 people, 0.4
percent of the nearby population, seems paltry.
And overcrowding certainly wasn’t the issue. There were plenty of grass, play equipment,
and picnic tables going unused.
Trying to
decide if I should be distressed by the sum total of 32 park users, I visited another
couple of parks. Walnut Park is a block-sized
park adjoining downtown. Much like my
assigned parks, it has grassy areas, picnic tables, and play equipment. But with its proximity to downtown, it also
has a gazebo/bandstand and serves as the site for community-wide
activities. On the Sunday afternoon,
there were 23 people using Walnut Park.
Still not a big crowd, but far above the average use of my assigned
parks.
Putnam Plaza
is a mostly hard-surfaced park in the heart of downtown. Roughly the size of a building site, it
fronts on restaurants and other food services.
Despite its small size, it had 20 people on the sunny Sunday afternoon,
filling many of the available sitting locations.
To give
structure to these park usage figures, I’ll suggest that most cities have four
kinds of parks:
·
Large, natural parks that are mostly used for
hiking and perhaps bicycling. In most
communities, these parks are well-used and beloved.
·
Parks for organized sports. Few communities have enough parks for
organized sports. It’s the most pressing
park need in most towns.
·
Parks for casual play and family activities. My assigned parks are squarely in this group,
which are usually relatively small parks located within single-family subdivisions.
·
Urban plazas for socializing. Putnam Plaza is a
fine example and Walnut Park straddles the line between casual play and urban
plaza. My one day of observations indicates
that urban plazas are likely more popular than casual play parks.
The first
two types needn’t be discussed further here.
But the latter two are of great interest. Public opinion seems to generally support all
kinds of parks (at least until dollars are discussed). But when it comes time to actually use the
parks, the casual use parks seem under-used, especially compared to the other
types. And yet it’s the casual
play/family parks that are most frequently added to a park system, usually as
the result of a newly-approved drivable suburban subdivision.
I don’t
think there was this under-use during my youth.
One would see games of Three Flies Up or Pickle in most parks on a
Sunday afternoon. But park usage has changed
over the years, with televisions, DVRs, computers, and video games pulling
youth away. It isn’t a good thing. I would have loved to have seen a good game
of Three Flies Up during my park tour. I
would probably have sat and watched for awhile.
But it seems clear that there has been a change.
This ties
back to urbanism because parks in urban settings tend to be more like Putnam
Plaza, with the occasional Walnut Park, than like casual play parks. And some argue that that “Kids need places to
play.”
I agree that
kids need places to play. I’ve have
often argued that childhood play is a great thing. Integrating adequate areas to be a kid into
urbanist communities is a challenge of which urban planners are continually aware.
But the fact
remains that few youth, and few adults, are using many of the parks that are
now available, particularly the type of parks delivered by drivable suburban
development. As much as I’d like to
bring youth back into parks, arguing against urbanism on the grounds of hypothetical
youth use isn’t reasonable.
Instead, we should
be looking for comprehensive solutions that involve urbanism and effective
strategies for improving park use. (About
a year ago, I reviewed the current downtown parka and plazas in Petaluma,
while also proposing the need for another plaza. The posts have continuing relevance.)
It’s a
multi-faceted challenge of which I’ve only scratched the surface. Indeed, I’ve barely begun to define the
problem. But I’ll return to the topic. And in the meantime, we need to stop paying
attention to arguments that put urbanism and parks in opposition. The reality is far more complicated.
As always,
your questions or comments will be appreciated.
Please comment below or email me.
And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)
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