In their 2018 report, the Trust for Public Land highlights pressing issues and emerging trends for urban parks around the country. Topics include public spending on parks and recreation, the growing role of nonprofit partners and volunteer groups, and the importance of community engagement.
As cities look for better ways to use the troves of new data at their disposal, augmented reality offers a new way of bringing this data to life. This technology has a unique capacity to make community planning processes more accessible.
Led by Urban Rivers, the Wild Mile is an initiative to transform the steel-walled North Branch Canal of the Chicago River into a lush wildlife haven. Urban Rivers envisions a mile-long floating eco-park, featuring floating gardens, forests, wetlands, public walkways, and kayak access points.
With more signature parks in the pipeline across the country, park advocates, community groups, and local leaders continue to grapple with the housing issues raised by these projects.
In the past few decades, New York’s piers have seen a renaissance; areas once left to decay have been transformed. Hudson River Park and Brooklyn Bridge park are just two examples of this phenomenon.
Trinity Park Conservancy’s Brent Brown speaks to the challenges of transforming a key piece of Dallas’ flood control into a space for recreation—one that makes everyone feel welcome.
Parks Project launched four years ago as a social enterprise specifically geared at funding much-needed national parks maintenance. Each purchase of a Parks Project item funds a specific backlogged maintenance project, identified by one of the 30 parks conservancies that have partnered with the company so far.
Seattle’s new regulations will require developers to begin community outreach at the very first stage of the review process. This requirement is intended to help developers better understand the local context and hear community interests and concerns related to their project from the start.
Today, the Center for Active Design and the Knight Foundation announced the release of the Assembly: Civic Design Guidelines, a groundbreaking playbook for creating well-designed and well-maintained public spaces as a force for building trust and healing divisions in local communities.
Buffalo Bayou Park is a strong model for Dallas’ Trinity Park—one that suggests that it’s possible to design a park that can withstand historic levels of flooding and quickly bounce back, just so long as that design is robust, respectful of local ecologies, and properly supported by a fund for maintenance.
