En comunidades de todo el país, este año se ha visto un aumento drástico del uso de parques y espacios abiertos, donde la gente busca un refugio y un respiro de la pandemia de la COVID-19. Las pautas de salud pública recomiendan quedarse cerca de casa, y los residentes urbanos han estado usando los espacios públicos como nunca antes para ejercitar, estar en contacto con la naturaleza, socializar, comer o comprar con distanciamiento social. Han usado el espacio público para acceder a servicios esenciales y realizar protestas y manifestaciones. La pandemia elevó el valor de los parques y los lugares abiertos, y acentuó los beneficios que pueden obtener las ciudades si incrementan el espacio público y crean accesos más equitativos a ellos. También puso de relieve dificultades importantes; por ejemplo, cómo pagar los parques frente a una inminente crisis fiscal.

En muchas ciudades, la pandemia urgió a los dirigentes a implementar soluciones alternativas en vecindarios sin acceso a parques. El éxito de algunos proyectos flexibles, como ampliar las aceras y bicisendas o cerrar calles al tráfico, alentó a las ciudades a seguir pensando de forma creativa para el largo plazo. La COVID también suscitó debates sobre cómo la reinvención del espacio público y la creación de nuevas colaboraciones entre organismos públicos puede ayudar a los dirigentes de las ciudades a acercarse a objetivos urbanos clave, como promover opciones más seguras de movilidad activa, ampliar el acceso a oportunidades en barrios desatendidos, convertir tierras vacantes o infrautilizadas para uso público y desarrollar una mayor resiliencia ante el cambio climático. Por debajo de todo esto, continúa la presión por crear y mantener parques tradicionales, y garantizar el acceso equitativo a ellos.

“La pandemia demostró que los parques son una infraestructura esencial”, dice Adrian Benepe, quien hasta hace poco era vicepresidente sénior y director de programas nacionales en Trust for Public Land (TPL), y fue comisionado de parques en la ciudad de Nueva York entre 2002 y 2012. “Es una gran paradoja que nunca se hayan usado o valorado más que ahora. Todo lo demás se cerró, y los parques fueron un último refugio”.

Incluso antes de la COVID, se había identificado que los parques y el esparcimiento eran una prioridad cada vez mayor en las ciudades de todas las regiones de los Estados Unidos. Según un análisis de 2019 realizado por la Liga Nacional de Ciudades, cerca del 63 por ciento de los alcaldes había esbozado planes u objetivos específicos relacionados con parques y esparcimiento en discursos recientes sobre el “estado de la ciudad”, en comparación con 2017, cuando apenas se llegó al 28 por ciento (Yadavalli 2019).

A medida que la pandemia continúa, muchos dirigentes de ciudades se hacen preguntas clave:

• ¿Qué aprendimos de los parques públicos y los espacios abiertos durante la pandemia?
• ¿Cuáles son las buenas prácticas para ofrecer acceso a los espacios públicos y expandirlos?
• ¿Cómo accedemos a todas las comunidades y escuchamos sus necesidades con relación a los espacios abiertos?
• ¿Cómo podemos cambiar la forma de pensar sobre los recursos espaciales de la ciudad? Y, quizás más importante, ¿dónde encontramos las tierras y los recursos financieros para desarrollar nuevos espacios?

Parques, salud pública y recuperación económica

En todo el país, hasta el 30 por ciento del territorio urbano suele estar ocupado por calles pavimentadas y estacionamientos. En contraste, los parques y los espacios abiertos ocupan apenas el 15 por ciento del suelo urbano. Pero una encuesta nacional que se realizó en mayo para la coalición 10 Minute Walk, que incluye a TPL, el Instituto de Suelo Urbano y la Asociación Nacional de Esparcimiento y Parques (NRPA, por sus siglas en inglés), confirmó el papel crucial que tienen los parques y los espacios verdes locales para mantener la salud física y mental y ayudar a las comunidades en el camino hacia la recuperación. Cerca del 81 por ciento de los 1.000 encuestados dijo que un mejor acceso a parques y espacios verdes locales podría ayudar a la gente a disfrutar del aire libre de forma segura cuando los estados se reabrieran (10 Minute Walk 2020). Dos tercios coincidieron en que los parques fueron importantes para mantener la salud física y mental, que el acceso a los parques locales se hizo más importante durante la crisis, y que su calidad de vida podría mejorar si tuvieran una mayor facilidad para acceder a un parque o un espacio verde cerca de su casa. Los encuestados que viven en ciudades mostraron más propensión a valorar los espacios verdes cercanos.

Estos puntos de datos tienen el respaldo de años de investigaciones que indican que los parques y los espacios abiertos ofrecen muchos “beneficios colaterales” en las áreas urbanas, donde vive el 80 por ciento de la población de los Estados Unidos. Según los estudios, un parque puede reducir el riesgo de estrés, obesidad, problemas respiratorios, cáncer y diabetes. Además, una mayor exposición a espacios verdes se ha asociado a más habilidades cognitivas, menos conductas agresivas y un mayor sentido de comunidad.

“Los datos son claros: los parques y los espacios verdes nos tranquilizan y nos consuelan, nos relajan y nos ayudan a recuperarnos, reducen la ansiedad, la depresión y el estrés”, dice el Dr. Howard Frumkin, médico y epidemiólogo, en Parks and the Pandemic (Parques y la pandemia), un informe especial de TPL (TPL 2020b). Frumkin es profesor emérito en la Facultad de Salud Pública de la Universidad de Washington, y sugirió: “En esta pandemia y en las futuras, queremos combinar el distanciamiento físico y otras medidas de control de contagio con acceso universal a parques y espacios verdes, para ayudar a todas las personas a superar los malos momentos de la forma más segura posible”.

Además de los beneficios relacionados con la salud pública, los parques y espacios abiertos son muy valiosos como impulsores económicos. En una encuesta de la NRPA de 2019, el 85 por ciento de los encuestados dijeron que buscan parques y servicios de esparcimiento de alta calidad cuando eligen un lugar para vivir (NRPA 2019). Un sondeo de la NRPA de marzo de 2020 reveló que el 94 por ciento de los encuestados reconocen la importancia de que los gobiernos inviertan en infraestructura que fomente la actividad económica, como parques y senderos (NRPA 2020).

La cercanía a parques aumenta hasta un 20 por ciento el valor de las propiedades, lo cual a su vez aumenta la renta impositiva local. Además, los parques públicos y los espacios abiertos de buena calidad atraen a nuevas empresas y visitantes a las ciudades. En Detroit, la inauguración del parque Campus Martius, de US$ 19 millones y una hectárea, en 2004, atrajo a nuevas empresas y redesarrollo en el centro. En los últimos años atrajo a más de 2 millones de visitantes al año y ayudó a catalizar más de US$ 1.000 millones en inversiones inmobiliarias alrededor del parque, y se estiman miles de millones más para desarrollo en un proceso que también generará miles de empleos.

Las áreas urbanas también obtienen múltiples beneficios medioambientales de los parques y los espacios verdes. Los árboles absorben la contaminación y ahorran miles de millones de dólares al limpiar el aire; la sombra ayuda a reducir el efecto de isla de calor porque disminuye las temperaturas urbanas. La capacidad de los parques de absorber agua es cada vez más valiosa, no solo en zonas costeras y comunidades ribereñas, sino también para las ciudades que intentan controlar el agua pluvial con infraestructura verde. Como parte del programa Ciudad Verde, Agua Limpia de Filadelfia, que tiene un costo de US$ 4.500 millones y un plazo de 25 años (se trata de una colaboración entre los departamentos de Parques y Esparcimiento y de Agua que pretende capturar el 85 por ciento de la escorrentía de agua pluvial), la ciudad garantizó que incorporará 200 hectáreas de parques y espacios verdes en vecindarios desatendidos. Otras iniciativas locales, como el plan GreenFutures del Distrito Escolar de Filadelfia, la iniciativa Rebuild y el programa Parques para la Gente de TPL, contribuyen a la labor de expandir el acceso a los espacios verdes públicos en la ciudad.

Garantizar el acceso para todos

En los últimos años, las ciudades han explorado nuevas formas de crear más parques urbanos y espacios abiertos, pero “lo que es especial ahora es que la gente al fin se da cuenta de las desigualdades en el acceso a los parques y la necesidad urgente de que haya parques públicos cerca de donde las personas viven”, dice Alyia Gaskins, vicedirectora de programas de salud en el Centro para la Inversión Comunitaria (CCI, por sus siglas en inglés) del Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo. En el contexto de las recientes manifestaciones y debates sobre raza y racismo, dice: “la gente se está dando cuenta de que las comunidades negras y morenas no solo tienen más riesgo de contagiarse de COVID-19, sino que además suelen estar excluidas de los beneficios a la salud que ofrecen los parques”.

En todo el país, más de 100 millones de personas carecen de acceso seguro y fácil a parques que estén a menos de dos kilómetros de su casa, dice TPL. Ese número representa cerca del 28 por ciento de la población de los Estados Unidos, e incluye a 28 millones de niños. En las 100 ciudades más grandes de la nación, 11,2 millones de personas carecen de un acceso sencillo a estos espacios. La organización dice que, para garantizar que todas las personas de esas ciudades tengan un parque cerca, habría que sumar 8.300 parques a los 23.000 que ya existen.

Incluso si hay parques disponibles, existen desigualdades. Un estudio de TLP publicado en agosto evidenció que, en todo el país, el tamaño de los parques destinados a poblaciones de mayoría no blanca equivale a la mitad del de aquellos destinados a poblaciones de mayoría blanca, y la densidad de población es cinco veces mayor. En promedio, los parques destinados a hogares con mayoría de ingresos bajos tienen un cuarto del tamaño de los destinados a hogares con mayoría de ingresos altos, y la densidad de población es cuatro veces mayor (TPL 2020a).

Durante la pandemia, el modo en que los estados y las ciudades abordan la temática de parques y espacios abiertos ha variado mucho. Algunas ciudades cerraron las riberas y limitaron el acceso a los parques. Otras intentaron gestionar las muchedumbres mediante la implementación de controles, como ingreso cronometrado o letreros de sentido único. En el famoso sendero Katy Trail, en Dallas, en una sola de las entradas se observó un aumento de 22.834 visitantes a principios de marzo a 34.366 a fines de marzo. Los funcionarios instauraron un sistema voluntario que permitía el acceso en días alternados según la primera letra del apellido del visitante. Algunas ciudades prohibieron estacionar en parques atestados, lo cual suscitó cuestionamientos sobre igualdad a favor de las personas que no estaban cerca o no podían ir a pie o en bicicleta.

Para atender la creciente demanda de parques, otras ciudades convirtieron calles en espacios aptos para peatones. Durante los primeros meses del confinamiento, “los parques se convirtieron en el recurso más valioso de la ciudad”, dice J. Nicholas Williams, director del departamento de Parques, Esparcimiento y Desarrollo Joven de Oakland. Para ofrecer espacio de entretenimiento en barrios en que los parques estaban atestados o no existían, en abril Oakland cerró 120 kilómetros de calles a todo el tráfico, salvo vehículos de emergencia y tráfico local. La ciudad se basó en una red de calles que se habían identificado para un plan de bicicletas en 2019, que se había desarrollado con la participación de 3.500 residentes.

El programa Calles Lentas (del cual se replicaron algunas versiones desde Tucson, Arizona, hasta Providence, Rhode Island) fue bien recibido entre muchos residentes de Oakland, pero también recibió críticas porque el enfoque inicial se dio en vecindarios de mayoría blanca. Mediante un trabajo en conjunto con residentes y grupos comunitarios en zonas de mayor diversidad racial y económica, como el este de Oakland, Calles Lentas se expandió a nuevos barrios y se lanzó “Calles Lentas: Lugares Esenciales”, que mejoró la seguridad de los peatones en trayectos hacia servicios esenciales como tiendas de comestibles, sitios de distribución de alimentos y sitios de pruebas de COVID-19.

El programa Calles Lentas continúa, pero Williams dice que Oakland, cuya población creció un 10 por ciento en la última década y llegó a los 433.000 habitantes, se enfrenta a una necesidad mayor: “Oakland sigue creciendo . . . debemos apartar más tierras para parques y mejorar la equidad en el acceso a parques y espacios abiertos”.

Planificación de parques equitativos

“Los parques urbanos son el núcleo de las ciudades resilientes y equitativas”, dice Catherine Nagel, directora ejecutiva de City Parks Alliance (CPA), una organización nacional independiente que ha trabajado con alcaldes para aprovechar más de US$ 190 millones y construir parques urbanos en comunidades desatendidas. “Nuestra investigación muestra algunas formas en que las ciudades pueden aumentar los beneficios en igualdad, salud y medioambiente: identificar nuevas fuentes de financiación, nuevas asociaciones que compartan costos y nuevas [fuentes de] apoyo”.

Las ciudades están financiando parques junto a sectores adyacentes, y recurren a departamentos de agua, vivienda y salud, o se asocian con ellos, para “buscar el respaldo de ámbitos que tradicionalmente no se vinculan con el mundo de los parques”, dice Nagel. Los desarrolladores inmobiliarios están construyendo parques públicos, y las ciudades se están asociando con distritos de mejora comercial y organizaciones sin fines de lucro para asumir las responsabilidades de programación y gestión. “Los parques son más complejos de lo que la gente cree”, dice Nagel. “Requieren trabajos intensivos de programación y mantenimiento, flujos de renta continuos y la capacidad de interactuar con las necesidades comunitarias locales y de los usuarios, y reflejarlas”.

Con el apoyo de la Fundación Robert Wood Johnson, CPA trabajó en iniciativas que analizan la manera en que las ciudades están reasignando dinero para tratar problemas de igualdad, hacen uso de fondos de sectores adyacentes, e innovan para mejorar la igualdad y obtener financiación. Equitable Park Funding Hub, de CPA, es una base de datos interactiva en línea que se lanzará en los próximos meses y presentará oportunidades para financiar parques relacionadas con terrenos abandonados, desarrollo comunitario y de mano de obra, conservación, mitigación del cambio climático e infraestructura verde e hídrica.

En Reclaiming Brownfields (Recuperar terrenos abandonados), la red Groundwork USA comparte ejemplos de proyectos de infraestructura verde y de parques que se centran en la posesión comunitaria y en mejoras en la igualdad en la salud para residentes vitalicios (Groundwork USA 2017). En un proyecto, Groundwork Denver ayudó a visualizar, planificar y obtener los fondos para transformar un terreno abandonado de 2,2 hectáreas en el Espacio Abierto Platte Farm, para el vecindario Globeville, en el norte de Denver. En el barrio latino, rodeado de antiguas plantas industriales y atravesado por vías interestatales, los residentes, en su mayoría de bajos ingresos, lograron que el proyecto restaure praderas nativas de césped corto e instale un jardín polinizador y senderos pavimentados para peatones y bicicletas. Con un subsidio de US$ 550.000 otorgado por el Departamento de Salud Pública y Medioambiente de Colorado, se pagó la construcción y el mantenimiento, que realizarán los departamentos de Parques y Esparcimiento y Transporte e Infraestructura, de la ciudad y el condado de Denver.

El proyecto de Denver es un claro ejemplo de cómo las ciudades pueden reconcebir los recursos actuales. Si bien casi ninguna tiene grandes trayectos de suelo vacante, dice Benepe, de TPL, podrían usar la creatividad para modernizar terrenos o sitios industriales abandonados, vertederos sanitarios o vados de tren o de servicios públicos en proyectos de alto perfil, como demostraron serlo High Line, en Nueva York, o el parque Millennium, en Chicago. Benepe dice que todas las ciudades deberían analizar la igualdad en sus sistemas de parques e identificar potenciales sitios para parques y espacios abiertos en barrios desatendidos.

Gaskins, del CCI, dice que el primer paso para planificar un parque equitativo es “conversar con las comunidades para conocer su visión de lo que esperan para estos espacios, ya sea la construcción de parques nuevos o el rediseño de los que ya existen”. Dice que la cercanía y el acceso son importantes, pero “también hay que considerar la calidad del parque y si la gente se siente bienvenida y segura”, tanto en el parque como en el camino para llegar a él.

Gaskins dice que, en particular en vecindarios afectados por el aburguesamiento, los residentes vitalicios suelen sentir que los servicios que se introducen con los nuevos desarrollos, como los parques, no están hechos para ellos. Para las iniciativas nuevas, los planificadores y otros funcionarios de las ciudades deberían procurar que exista un proceso sólido que involucre a la comunidad. “Los parques son más que infraestructura”, dice. “Ofrecen acceso a programas y servicios, espacios de reunión y oportunidades de empleo que también son importantes para fomentar la igualdad en la salud”.

Pagar los parques en tiempos de austeridad

Luego del colapso financiero de 2008, los presupuestos para parques fueron de los primeros en sufrir recortes y de los últimos puntos presupuestarios municipales en recuperarse. Entre 2009 y 2013, el gasto en parques cayó un 21,2 por ciento, dice la NRPA; y para 2013, los parques y el esparcimiento conformaban apenas el 1,9 por ciento de los gastos gubernamentales locales. En muchas ciudades grandes, el mantenimiento diferido de parques se calculó en miles de millones de dólares.

¿Los presupuestos de parques sufrirán el mismo destino en la era de la COVID? Una encuesta de la NRPA realizada a fines de junio a más de 400 dirigentes de parques y esparcimiento demostró que dos tercios de los organismos debieron reducir el gasto operativo del año fiscal entre un 10 y un 20 por ciento a partir del 1 de julio, y el 57 por ciento se enfrentaba a una disminución de entre el 50 y el 59 por ciento en la mediana de inversión en bienes de capital. Una de cada cinco de las personas encuestadas informó que su presupuesto de capital se había eliminado por completo (Roth 2020).

Los defensores de los parques advierten que los sistemas de parques de las ciudades llegaron a un punto de inflexión crítico: el uso intensivo y los recortes de presupuesto relacionados con la COVID presentan un riesgo de daños irreversibles en 2020 y en el futuro. Algunas personas dicen que es fundamental priorizar la financiación del mantenimiento, para garantizar que los parques y los espacios libres sean seguros y atractivos y se usen, mientras que otras dicen que las inversiones en nuevos proyectos capitales podrían ayudar más a estimular la economía para recuperarse de la COVID.

Rachel Banner, directora de acceso a parques de la NRPA, destaca que, probablemente, los presupuestos para parques, que dependen más de impuestos a la propiedad inmobiliaria, que se mantuvieron estables durante la pandemia, estén en mejor forma que aquellos que dependen, en su mayor parte, de la renta por impuestos a las ventas. “Es importante que haya diversidad en los flujos de renta”, dice Banner. “Hay que pensar en qué es lo mejor para adquirir capacidad de resistencia en una recesión económica, como recurrir a una variedad de fuentes”.

Una estrategia que según la NRPA tiene buenos resultados es asignar una proporción estándar de los fondos generales a parques y espacios abiertos, “en particular hoy, que son totalmente esenciales”. Banner dice que, para abordar la igualdad de parques en el presupuesto de capital, algunas ciudades usan criterios de priorización relacionados con factores como la calidad de los espacios parquizados, la antigüedad del equipo, el cumplimiento de la Ley sobre Estadounidenses con Discapacidades (ADA) y los datos demográficos del barrio, como ingresos, raza, resultados en salud y posesión de vehículos.

En muchas ciudades y condados, algunas campañas de impuestos exclusivos lograron obtener una porción importante de los fondos para parques y espacios abiertos. En marzo, los votantes de Oakland aprobaron Ballot Measure Q para crear un impuesto a 20 años, de cuya renta el 64 por ciento se destinará a parques, mantenimiento de paisajes y servicios recreativos, a partir del año fiscal 2020–2021. El triunfo de Measure Q demostró que los residentes de la ciudad “cambiaron la forma de reconocer el valor de los parques y los espacios abiertos”, dice Williams, director de parques de Oakland. Si bien Measure Q no ofrece financiamiento para espacios nuevos, dice, sí aborda la igualdad porque brinda fondos para mantener y programar parques comunitarios e individuales más pequeños. Según Williams, se estima que la medida obtendrá US$ 13,4 millones para los parques en el año fiscal 2020–2021, cifra que no se modificó con la revisión de presupuesto de mitad de ciclo en la ciudad que se realizó en los últimos meses, pero se seguirá evaluando.

Otra iniciativa definida por plebiscito que tuvo buenos resultados fue Measure 2A, en Denver, aprobada en 2018 y conocida como Parks Legacy Fund. Entre 2012 y 2017, la población de la ciudad creció un 11 por ciento, pero el espacio parquizado creció solo un 5 por ciento; además, los fondos para el mantenimiento de los parques de la ciudad, por el valor de US$ 130 millones, se aplazaron. En combinación con los fondos generales, se estimó que Parks Legacy Fund producirá US$ 37,5 millones al año para renovar parques, adquirir tierras y construir parques, senderos y espacios abiertos nuevos, priorizando a las comunidades más necesitadas. La ciudad pretende revisar el presupuesto para reflejar los impactos relacionados con la COVID en los próximos meses.

El año pasado, una medida definida por plebiscito en Nueva Orleans generó cientos de millones de dólares para parques en un lapso de 20 años, que priorizará zonas de bajos ingresos, según indica Bill Lee, vicepresidente sénior de políticas, defensa y relaciones gubernamentales de TPL. A pesar del impacto de la COVID en las economías locales, Lee es optimista sobre otras propuestas de financiación relacionadas con plebiscitos: “Más de tres cuartas partes de estas medidas se aprueban en momentos económicos buenos y malos, en estados de mayoría republicana y demócrata, porque la gente ve el valor de los parques y los espacios abiertos”.

La ciudad de Oklahoma da fe de esto. En noviembre de 2019, la ciudad abrió una sección de 14,5 hectáreas del parque Scissortail, en el núcleo de la ciudad, ubicada en tierras donde antes había edificios abandonados y basureros. Esta primera etapa del proyecto de US$ 132 millones incluye servicios como un parque de juegos, fuentes interactivas, una pista de patinaje, un café, un escenario, un lago con espacio para barcos y botes de alquiler, jardines demostrativos, un mercado de productos rurales, césped y ramblas, y casi 1.000 árboles.

El parque Scissortail está cerca del nuevo centro de convenciones de la ciudad y de la biblioteca, el estadio, la cancha de béisbol y el tranvía del centro; todos estos proyectos recibieron fondos del impuesto Proyectos del Área Metropolitana (MAPS), un impuesto a la venta en oferta aprobado por los votantes y creado en 1993 para pagar sin financiamiento proyectos de revitalización del centro y mejora de la calidad de vida de la ciudad. El parque es fruto de una asociación entre el sector público y el privado, y también recibió millones de dólares en donaciones. Además, obtiene ingresos por eventos y alquiler de equipos, patrocinios, concesionarios de alimentos y bebidas, membresías y subsidios. Luego de diez años de planificación y construcción, para 2022 incluirá 13,7 hectáreas más, que se extenderán hasta el río Oklahoma, con campos deportivos y zonas naturales, a los que se podrá acceder por un puente que cruzará la interestatal 40.

El parque Scissortail recibió una asignación fundamental en la tercera vuelta de fondos de MAPS; en diciembre de 2019, los votantes aprobaron una cuarta vuelta de MAPS, de la cual US$ 140 millones se destinarán a la transformación del barrio de la ciudad, parques comunitarios e instalaciones deportivas. Esto forma parte de una medida definida por plebiscito para barrios y servicios humanos, por US$ 978 millones.

“Scissortail es nuestro espacio común cultural en el centro”, dijo Maureen Heffernan, directora ejecutiva y presidenta de la Fundación Scissortail Park, que gestiona el parque y lo mantuvo abierto durante la pandemia con eventos y programas limitados. Muchas personas expresaron su gratitud por el parque Scissortail y los jardines botánicos Myriad de la ciudad, que están cerca y que también gestiona Heffernan. “En los últimos meses, y más que nunca, los espacios verdes bien mantenidos de zonas urbanas han sido un recurso esencial para que la gente disfrute y se relaje”, dice. Los parques urbanos “son algo que todos quieren y quieren financiar, y son transformadores”, destaca Heffernan, y añade que a la ciudad de Oklahoma “en general no le gusta aumentar los impuestos, pero los residentes aprobaron el MAPS porque estos proyectos palpables marcan una diferencia drástica en la calidad de vida de la gente de aquí”.

Los defensores del parque también acuden a la legislación federal para obtener financiación. La Ley de Espacios Abiertos, que entró en vigencia en agosto, incluye financiación permanente de costos de petróleo y gas de otros países para el Fondo de Conservación de Tierras y Agua (LWCF, por sus siglas en inglés), lo cual pone a disposición US$ 900 millones al año para tierras públicas, como parques y senderos urbanos. El programa Outdoor Recreation Legacy Partnership (ORLP) del LWCF es una fuente de subsidios anuales para zonas urbanas con más de 50.000 residentes; el año pasado, otorgó subsidios por US$ 25 millones, que variaron entre US$ 300.000 y US$ 1 millón, y se priorizaron proyectos en zonas de bajos ingresos sin oportunidades de esparcimiento al aire libre.

Los defensores de parques también tienen el ojo puesto en potenciales fondos federales de estímulo. En mayo, 100 organizaciones, entre ellas TPL, CPA, la NRPA, la Asociación Estadounidense de Planificación y la Conferencia de Alcaldes de los Estados Unidos le pidieron al Congreso que incluya US$ 500 millones para empleos relacionados con la construcción o la renovación de parques en zonas urbanas de bajos ingresos, como parte de un futuro paquete de estímulo ante el coronavirus.

Asociaciones públicas y privadas

En algunos casos, las colaboraciones con organizaciones sin fines de lucro posibilitan la creación de parques. Western Reserve Land Conservancy (WRLC), una organización sin fines de lucro con base en Cleveland, conservó más de 24.000 hectáreas y creó más de 155 parques y reservas en la región desde fines de la década de 1990. WRLC recaudó más de US$ 400 millones para ayudar a bancos de tierras a demoler 40.000 propiedades abandonadas o vacantes en todo Ohio, y protegió tierras para comunidades de bajos ingresos hasta que se puedan convertir en parques, espacios verdes o sitios para viviendas asequibles y otros destinos.

Mediante su programa Reforestar nuestra Ciudad, plantó más de 10.000 árboles en Cleveland; compró un basural en un sitio junto al zoológico, limpió la contaminación y desarrolló el parque Brighton, de 10 hectáreas, que posee un sendero para peatones y bicicletas. El parque de US$ 1 millón se encuentra en una zona de alta densidad, y la inauguración se programó para octubre. El año que viene, se plantarán 1.000 árboles, y la gestión estará a cargo de Metroparks District, según indica Jim Rokakis, vicepresidente de WRLC y coautor de The Land Bank Revolution (La revolución de los bancos de tierras, Rokakis 2020). Además, WRLC está creando seis parques en el barrio Mount Pleasant de Cleveland, que serán de su propiedad o estarán bajo su gestión.

Otras ciudades dependen de empresas y apoyo filantrópico para financiar parques. Cerca del 90 por ciento del costo de US$ 19 millones del parque Campus Martius de Detroit y la infraestructura circundante fue financiado por corporaciones y fundaciones de la ciudad. La gestión del parque, que pertenece a la ciudad, está a cargo de Downtown Detroit Partnership. El Sendero Cultural de Indianápolis, un sendero para peatones y bicicletas de casi 13 kilómetros que conecta ocho distritos culturales en el centro de Indianápolis, se someterá a una expansión por el valor de US$ 30 millones, de los cuales US$ 20 millones son de Lilly Endowment, Inc., US$ 5 millones de la ciudad y US$ 1 millón de la Fundación Anthem.

Además, las ciudades se están asociando con desarrolladores privados para construir y operar nuevos parques y espacios abiertos. Desde 1993, la zonificación de la ribera en la ciudad de Nueva York exige a los desarrolladores que ofrezcan acceso público a esta. Esta zonificación provocó el redesarrollo de sitios industriales para convertirlos en diversos parques, que permiten el acceso público y aportan a la resiliencia ante el cambio climático.

El parque Domino, en East River, Brooklyn, de 2,4 hectáreas, se inauguró en 2018 y es parte de un sitio de 4,4 hectáreas que incluirá una adaptación para reutilizar la histórica refinería Domino Sugar, y 30 hectáreas de desarrollos de uso mixto, con 2.200 unidades de vivienda, de las cuales 700 serán asequibles. El desarrollador Two Trees Management, con base en Brooklyn, que invirtió US$ 50 millones para construir el parque y destina US$ 2 millones al año para su funcionamiento, trabajó en conjunto con la comunidad para identificar necesidades, como una calle de rápido acceso para que el parque se considere público de verdad. El parque, diseñado por James Corner Field Operations, incluye un malecón junto al río, instalaciones de esparcimiento, fuentes interactivas, un paseo de cinco cuadras con maquinaria fabril rescatada y 175 árboles. Ofrece acceso público a la ribera por primera vez en 160 años.

Otra opción prometedora de financiamiento es la devolución de valor territorial, un mecanismo mediante el cual las ciudades recuperan los aumentos en el valor de las propiedades ocasionados por la rezonificación o por las inversiones en infraestructura. Esta herramienta se conoce también como captura de valor territorial, y “será una manera efectiva de que las ciudades conviertan espacios infrautilizados en parques y espacios abiertos”, dice Enrique Silva, director de iniciativas internacionales del Instituto Lincoln.

Silva dice que las ciudades pueden recuperar aumentos de valor territorial relacionados con la zonificación para hacerse de tierras y pagar el desarrollo de parques. Además, pueden recuperar el valor mediante tasaciones más elevadas en el impuesto a la propiedad inmobiliaria, que generan una renta impositiva municipal mayor. Indica que los sitios vacantes que pertenecen a las ciudades y están destinados a edificios que, por ahora, estas no pueden construir también pueden convertirse en parques temporales o permanentes, y pueden generar nuevas oportunidades de captura de valor territorial. Algunas herramientas de planificación municipal, como tasaciones especiales y derechos de desarrollo transferibles, también pueden ayudar a financiar parques, espacios abiertos y mejoras en la infraestructura.

Los parques y los espacios abiertos pueden aumentar el valor en forma de resiliencia ante el cambio climático, y ahora, con la COVID, se considerarán un valor social agregado, dice Silva. “La sensación de que vale la pena invertir en parques y espacios abiertos como infraestructura pública es cada vez más fuerte. Este tipo de inversión adquirirá mayor relevancia a medida que se necesiten más espacios públicos”, dice Silva. “En la medida en que la COVID está obligando a todas las personas a reconsiderar el espacio público, y los lugares abiertos en las ciudades se valorizan cada vez más”, dice, ciertos pasos, como convertir calles para uso peatonal y establecer nuevos parques y espacios al aire libre, marcaran “el nuevo camino de la planificación”.

Encuesta sobre la pandemia y el espacio público

Una encuesta global realizada por Gehl, la empresa de diseño y planificación con base en Copenhague que rediseñó Times Square para peatones y ciclistas en la ciudad de Nueva York, revela la importancia del espacio público durante la pandemia. Se encuestó a cerca de 2.000 personas de 40 estados de los Estados Unidos, 68 países y casi todos los continentes, de las cuales unos dos tercios habitan en zonas urbanas. Las siguientes son algunas de las visiones que compartieron acerca del espacio público en sus vidas diarias:

• El 66 por ciento usa espacios públicos cercanos al menos una vez al día, y el 16 por ciento los usa varias veces al día.
• Algunos de los destinos del espacio público que más citaron son las calles y las aceras del barrio (87 por ciento), lugares esenciales como tiendas de comestibles (72 por ciento), parques del barrio (67 por ciento) y escaleras, patios o jardines (59 por ciento).
• Dos tercios informaron que caminan más durante la pandemia; entre los propietarios de autos, la cifra fue del 69 por ciento.

Estas son algunas sugerencias de Gehl para mejorar el acceso y reducir la aglomeración de gente en parques y espacios abiertos:

• Redistribuir los espacios para que se pueda caminar y andar en bicicleta y patines con mayor distanciamiento físico, mediante extensiones de las aceras, cierre de carriles de estacionamiento o cierre de calles en una cuadra o en varias cuadras.
• Priorizar las medidas de redistribución de espacios en vecindarios sin acceso a pie (en menos de 15 minutos) a parques y servicios esenciales.
• Expandir la cantidad de entradas o designar puertas exclusivas de entrada o salida para gestionar el flujo a los espacios públicos más congestionados.
• Para apoyar a personas mayores y otras poblaciones vulnerables, procurar que los espacios públicos nuevos ofrezcan la posibilidad de sentarse a distancia segura y no solo de pasar por allí.

Fuente: Gehl (https://gehlpeople.com/blog/public-space-plays-vital-role-in-pandemic).

Kathleen McCormick, directora de Fountainhead Communications en Boulder, Colorado, escribe con frecuencia sobre comunidades saludables, sostenibles y con capacidad de recuperación.

Referencias

10 Minute Walk. n.d. “Our Research.” https://10minutewalk.org/#Our-research.

Groundwork USA. 2017. Reclaiming Brownfields: Highlights from the Groundwork USA Network.Yonkers, NY: Groundwork USA. https://groundworkusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/GWUSA-Brownfields-Highlights-2017.pdf.

NRPA (Asociación Nacional de Esparcimiento y Parques). 2020. The Economic Impact of Parks: An Examination of the Economic Impacts of Operations and Capital Spending by Local Park and Recreation Agencies on the U.S. Economy. Ashburn, VA: Asociación Nacional de Esparcimiento y Parques. https://www.nrpa.org/siteassets/research/economic-impact-study-summary-2020.pdf.

———. 2019. 2019 Engagement with Parks Report. Ashburn, VA: Asociación Nacional de Esparcimiento y Parques. Septiembre. https://www.nrpa.org/globalassets/engagement-survey-report-2019.pdf.

Rokakis, James, y Gus Frangos. 2020. The Land Bank Revolution: How Ohio’s Communities Fought Back Against the Foreclosure Crisis. Cleveland, Ohio: Parafine Press.

Roth, Kevin. 2020. “NRPA Parks Snapshot: June 24–26 Survey Results.” Open Space (blog), Asociación Nacional de Esparcimiento y Parques. 26 de junio. https://www.nrpa.org/blog/nrpa-parks-snapshot-june-24-26-survey-results/.

TPL (Trust for Public Land). 2020a. The Heat Is On: With Temperatures Rising and Quality Parks Too Few and Far Between, Communities of Color Face a Dangerous Disparity. San Francisco, CA: Trust for Public Land. https://www.tpl.org/sites/default/files/The-Heat-is-on_A-Trust-for-Public-Land_special-report.pdf.

———. 2020b. Parks and the Pandemic: A Trust for Public Land Special Report. San Francisco, CA: Trust for Public Land. https://www.tpl.org/parks-and-the-pandemic.

Yadavalli, Anita, Rose Kim, Christiana K. McFarland y Brooks Rainwater. 2019. State of the Cities 2019. Washington, DC: Liga Nacional de Ciudades. https://www.nlc.org/resource/state-of-the-cities-2019.

The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy today launched a new enterprise to expand the use of advanced technology for land and water conservation—The Center for Geospatial Solutions (CGS). The center will give people and organizations the tools they need to manage land and water resources with precision, at the scale required to confront pressing challenges such as climate change, loss of habitat, and water scarcity.

The center will provide data, conduct analysis, and perform specialized consulting services that enable organizations of all sizes in the nonprofit, public, and private sectors to deploy geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, and other geospatial technologies. The center will help practitioners to overcome barriers such as a lack of staffing, resources, or expertise, which have hindered the adoption of geospatial technology, especially in the nonprofit sector.

“If land and water managers, conservationists, and governments are to meet rapidly accelerating social, economic, and environmental challenges, including climate change, they need to work together at larger scales and make use of every possible tool,” said Anne Scott, executive director for the Center for Geospatial Solutions. “The Center for Geospatial Solutions will enhance collective access to better data and analysis, so that practitioners and decisionmakers can act collaboratively on the best information available.”

The center will deliver services directly to nonprofit organizations, foundations, governments, and businesses, and will also work with funders to guide and administer grants. The center will also use the resources and expertise of the Lincoln Institute, which is organized around the achievement of six goals: sustainably managed land and water resources, low-carbon, climate-resilient communities and regions, efficient and equitable tax systems, reduced poverty and spatial inequality, fiscally healthy communities and regions, and functional land markets and reduced informality.

“My wife, Laura, and I developed Esri to help people make better decisions for our world, and that is what the Center for Geospatial Solutions is accomplishing,” said Jack Dangermond, President and CEO of Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri). “The Center for Geospatial Solutions will move the global environmental field over the next decade to meet goals set forth by scientists to save and restore our planet. The center’s combination of partnerships, shared resources, advanced data science and analysis fills an important niche to bring geospatial technology solutions to environmental organizations worldwide.”

The center will prioritize access to technology for people and communities that have been historically marginalized, governments in the developing world, under-resourced nonprofit organizations, startups, and businesses operating in developing or restricted economies. The center will build customized tools that can be tailored to fit the size and capacity of any organization.

“These are unprecedented times, which require broad vision combined with the practical implementation of innovative solutions,” said Breece Robertson, director of partnerships and strategy for the Center for Geospatial Solutions. “We can’t address global challenges like climate change and inequity without access to data, science and technologies that enable everyone to act effectively.”

The potential for geospatial technology to improve conservation is well demonstrated. In one powerful application, regional planners in Tucson, Arizona, worked with nonprofit partners, including the Lincoln Institute’s Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy, to map the tree canopy, surface temperatures, and other data to help communities to better-manage stormwater, and to prioritize where to plant trees. In another case, Denver’s regional planning agency is using high-resolution maps to classify land cover into eight categories for a wide range of possible uses, including to understand habitat connectivity and quality to guide investment in green infrastructure.

In addition to advancing land and water conservation, geospatial technology can inform decisions in urban contexts. Its applications include analyzing cities’ carbon footprints, exploring the conservation potential of brownfield sites, revealing local variations in air quality, and mapping parks, open spaces, and urban corridors for wildlife.

“Some organizations are already using geospatial technology to understand what is happening on the ground with greater and greater precision,” said Jeffrey Allenby, director of geospatial technology for the Center for Geospatial Solutions. “The center will bring this capability to organizations of all sizes and scales by building customized tools that are easy to use for all staff, even those with no background or training in technology.”

“The center builds on the Lincoln Institute’s long track record of pioneering ideas that have transformed land policy,” Lincoln Institute President and CEO George W. “Mac” McCarthy wrote in an essay in Land Lines, the magazine of the Lincoln Institute. “The Center for Geospatial Solutions represents another transformational idea—by making land, water, and mapping technology universal, we can enable people and organizations to collaborate and achieve impact that is orders-of-magnitude greater than what they can accomplish today. Like lifting a fog, applying geospatial technology will enable anyone to see what is happening anywhere on the Earth. It will make the planet feel that much smaller, and the solutions to humanity’s toughest problems that much easier to grasp.”

For more information, visit cgs.earth or email cgs@lincolninst.edu.

Leadership of the Center for Geospatial Solutions

Anne Scott, Executive Director

Anne brings leadership experience in public and community health and international development, and she is particularly passionate about achieving cost-effective outcomes that can be replicated and scaled. She has lived and worked in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East on the implementation and evaluation of large-scale health and environmental programs funded by the U.S. and European governments, and philanthropic foundations. Anne has held executive positions at the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation in London, the Charlottesville (Virginia) Area Community Foundation and, most recently, Boston-based Pathfinder International. She is a prior board chair of the Chesapeake Conservancy. Anne has a Ph.D. in medical anthropology and an MBA in finance, as well as post-doctoral qualifications in science and diplomacy, and health and child survival.

Jeffrey Allenby, Director of Geospatial Technology.

Jeff brings a wealth of experience developing systems-focused solutions at the intersection of technology and the natural world. Prior to joining the Lincoln Institute, Jeff was the director of conservation technology at the Chesapeake Conservancy and cofounder of the Conservancy’s Conservation Innovation Center, building it from scratch into a globally recognized pioneer in the application of technology to improve environmental decision making in the Chesapeake Bay and across the world. Jeff worked previously for the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources on projects to support local climate change adaptation. Jeff has a M.E.M. and a certificate in geospatial analysis from Duke University and a B.S. from the University of Richmond. Jeff also serves as a member of the advisory board for the Internet of Water.

Breece Robertson, Director of Partnerships and Strategy

Breece has more than 18 years of experience leading collaborative and strategic initiatives that leverage data-driven platforms, GIS, research, and planning for the park and conservation fields. Breece combines geospatial technology and storytelling to inspire, activate, educate, and engage. During her career at The Trust for Public Land, she led geospatial innovations that supported the protection of 3,000+ places, over 2+ million acres of land, provided park access to over 9 million people, and achieved $74 billion in voter-approved funding for parks and conservation. She is a skilled leader, collaborator, implementer, and creative visionary with a legacy of building award-winning teams and community-driven GIS approaches for strategic conservation and park creation. Esri, the world’s leader in geographic information system (GIS) technology, twice has honored Robertson for innovation in helping communities meet park and conservation goals. In 2006, she was awarded the Esri Special Achievement in GIS award and in 2012, the “Making a Difference” award – a prestigious presidential award.

About the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy

The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy seeks to improve quality of life through the effective use, taxation, and stewardship of land. A nonprofit private operating foundation whose origins date to 1946, the Lincoln Institute researches and recommends creative approaches to land as a solution to economic, social, and environmental challenges. Through education, training, publications, and events, we integrate theory and practice to inform public policy decisions worldwide.

Will Jason is director of communications at the Lincoln Institute.

Image: NOAA Data Enterprise (NDE) VIIRS daily global active fire detections, UMD Geographical Sciences VIIRS Active Fire site, http://viirsfire.geog.umd.edu/pages/mapsData.php.

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The onset of the pandemic led the International Land Conservation Network (ILCN) to recast plans for a global conservation congress earlier this year, shifting from an in-person gathering for 300 people in Barcelona to a series of virtual webinars. Like many organizations, ILCN saw a surprising benefit emerge from this unexpected change of plans: its webinar series received more than 1,100 registrations from conservation practitioners in 83 countries, and targeted sharing of series recordings in countries including China has expanded that reach into the thousands.

That experience led ILCN to recognize an opportunity: combining targeted, regional outreach with the global reach enabled by virtual tools and strategies could help strengthen engagement throughout the land conservation community. This fall, the organization appointed regional representatives on six continents. “By bringing on this core group of experienced regional representatives, we’re hoping to encourage a more robust exchange of expertise and ideas,” said Chandni Navalkha, program manager for Land Conservation at the Lincoln Institute.

The newly appointed representatives will utilize their deep experience in private and civic land conservation to build upon existing relationships in each region — through meetings and conversations held in person or virtually as the evolving global context allows — and forge new connections with leading practitioners and experts. They will bring their expertise to the broader ILCN community through webinars, newsletter articles, and other channels and, in turn, share resources, news, and strategies related to private and civic land conservation in other geographies with key stakeholders in the region they are representing. In China, for example, regional representative Shenmin Liu will join the steering committee of the China Civic Land Conservation Alliance (CCLCA), where she will share the evolving strategies and policies through which civic conservation efforts will be included in the planning for a new Chinese national park system.

“We are honored to have recruited such a diverse and accomplished group of conservationists to serve as our regional ambassadors,” noted Jim Levitt, director of the ILCN. In early October, Levitt hosted a virtual meet and greet that provided a forum for the representatives to introduce themselves to each other and to members of the ILCN network from around the world. The representatives each spoke for a few minutes about their work, as well as the challenges and opportunities ahead:

• Europe: Tilmann Disselhoff. Disselhoff manages the European Land Conservation Network (ELCN), an EU-wide network of organizations active in private land conservation that “wouldn’t have been possible without the help of ILCN,” he said. Disselhoff spoke about the power of collaboration and about plans for expanding the work of ELCN.
• Australasia: Cecilia Riebl. A policy advisor for Australia’s Trust for Nature, Riebl spoke about obstacles and progress in the region: “This sector has a profound and compelling cause: it is absolutely critical to addressing the global biodiversity crisis, and increasingly will need to do this in dynamic ways, by introducing new actors to conservation and finding creative ways to finance it.”
• Latin America: Hernan Mladinic. Mladinic, of Chile, has worked in conservation for more than 30 years and recently concluded a 10-year stint as executive director of Tompkins Conservation, which promotes landscape-scale conservation in South America. In the context of COVID and climate change, Mladinic said, “conservation will have to strategically link social, environmental, and economic issues.”
• Asia: Shenmin Liu. A research analyst at the Lincoln Institute who grew up in Beijing, Liu described China’s conservation efforts and the tension between conservation and economic growth in developing countries in Asia. Liu sees a “huge need for multidirectional knowledge exchange” and will work with regional NGOs ahead of the meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP-15) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)in Kunming, China, in May 2021.
• North America: Shawn Johnson. As managing director of the Center for Natural Resources and Environmental Policy at the University of Montana, Johnson was instrumental in helping to launch the Lincoln Institute’s Large Landscape Peer Learning Initiative. “We think about land conservation as something we do on the side,” he said. “But conservation is critical to the health and well being of our society . . . how do we create the connections that will help us heal as we move forward?”
• Africa: Kiragu Mwangi. Mwangi, a senior capacity development manager for BirdLife International who is currently based in the United Kingdom, grew up in Kenya and says stronger collaboration is needed between land conservation groups in Africa and elsewhere. “Partnerships are made even more rich when we collaborate and partner with people from different backgrounds,” he said, “for it is in diversity that we draw on the great wealth of knowledge and experiences to help achieve greater impacts with our work.”

Citing the urgency of advancing innovation in land conservation in light of the upcoming Convention on Biological Diversity COP-15 meeting in China, as well as the growing momentum behind the global campaign to protect 30 percent of the earth’s surface by 2030 (30×30), Levitt said the virtual gathering, and the promise of an increasingly connected and collaborative approach to conservation, gave him hope. “It’s not only humbling to be in this group, I hope it’s also emboldening,” Levitt said at the conclusion of the meet and greet. “To know there is a group of people all over the world with the courage and strength and intelligence to prepare a world our great-grandchildren can enjoy . . . . The more connections we make now, the more connections we will make going forward.”

Katharine Wroth is the editor of Land Lines.

Photograph: Aerial View over Okavango Delta in Botswana. Credit: Gfed/Getty Images Plus.

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In communities across the country, parks and open space have seen dramatic increases in use this year as people sought refuge and respite from the COVID-19 pandemic. With public health guidelines recommending staying close to home, urban residents have been using public spaces in unprecedented numbers as places to exercise, be closer to nature, and socialize, dine, or shop at social distances. They have used public spaces to access essential services and to hold protests and demonstrations. The pandemic has elevated the value of parks and open space and has underscored the benefits for cities of creating more public spaces and more equitable access to them. It also has highlighted significant challenges, including how to pay for parks in the face of a looming fiscal crisis.

In many cities, the pandemic prompted city leaders to implement workarounds in neighborhoods without access to parks. The success of adaptive projects like widening sidewalks and bike lanes or closing streets to traffic has encouraged cities to continue to think creatively for the long term. COVID has also prompted discussions about how reimagining public space and creating new collaborations between public agencies could help city leaders make progress toward key urban goals, such as encouraging safer active-mobility options, expanding access to opportunity in underserved neighborhoods, converting vacant or underused land for public use, and developing greater climate resilience. Underlying all of this, the push for creating and maintaining traditional parks—and ensuring equitable access to them—continues.

“The pandemic has proven that parks are essential infrastructure,” says Adrian Benepe, who served until this fall as senior vice president and director of national programs for the Trust for Public Land (TPL) and was parks commissioner for the city of New York from 2002 to 2012. “It’s a great paradox that parks have never been more used or appreciated than now. Everything else was shut down, and parks were a last refuge.”

Even before COVID, parks and recreation had been identified as a growing priority for cities in every region of the United States. According to a 2019 analysis conducted by the National League of Cities, some 63 percent of mayors had outlined specific plans or goals related to parks and recreation in recent “state of the city” speeches, compared to just 28 percent in 2017 (Yadavalli 2019).

As the pandemic continues, many city leaders are asking themselves key questions:

• What have we learned about public parks and open space during the pandemic?

• What are the best practices for providing access to and expansion of public spaces?

• How do we reach out and listen to all communities about their open space needs?

• How can we think differently about our city’s spatial assets, and—perhaps most important—where do we find the land and financial resources to develop new ones?

Parks, Public Health, and Economic Recovery

Across the country, up to 30 percent of urban land typically is occupied by paved streets and parking lots. Parks and open space, by contrast, occupy only 15 percent of urban land. But a national survey conducted in May for the 10 Minute Walk coalition, which includes TPL, the Urban Land Institute, and the National Recreation and Park Association (NRPA), confirmed the crucial role of local parks and green spaces in maintaining physical and mental health and helping communities navigate toward recovery. Some 81 percent of the 1,000 survey respondents said increasing access to local parks and green spaces would help people enjoy the outdoors safely as states reopened (10 Minute Walk 2020). Two-thirds agreed that parks were important in maintaining physical and mental health, that access to local parks had become more important during the crisis, and that their quality of life would improve with better access to a park or green space near home. Urban respondents were most likely to value nearby green space.

These data points are backed up by years of research indicating that parks and open space provide many “cobenefits” for urban areas, where 80 percent of the U.S. population lives. Studies show that park use can lower the risk of stress, obesity, respiratory problems, cancer, and diabetes. Increased exposure to green space has also been linked to higher cognitive abilities, reductions in aggressive behaviors, and a stronger sense of community.

“The data are clear: Parks and green space soothe and console us, relax and restore us, reduce our anxiety, depression, and stress,” says physician and epidemiologist Dr. Howard Frumkin in Parks and the Pandemic, a TPL special report (TPL 2020b). Frumkin, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington School of Public Health, advised: “In this and in future pandemics, we’ll want to combine physical distancing and other infection-control measures with universal access to parks and green space, to help everyone get through hard times as safely as possible.”

In addition to public health benefits, parks and open space are highly valued as economic drivers. In a 2019 NRPA survey, 85 percent of respondents said they seek high-quality parks and recreation amenities when choosing a place to live (NRPA 2019). A March 2020 NRPA poll revealed that 94 percent of respondents recognize the importance of governments investing in infrastructure that promotes economic activity, including parks and trails (NRPA 2020). Proximity to parks increases property values as much as 20 percent, which in turn increases local tax revenues. High-quality public parks and open space also draw new businesses and visitors to cities. In Detroit, the $19 million, 2.5-acre Campus Martius Park helped attract new companies and redevelopment to downtown after it opened in 2004. In recent years, it has attracted over 2 million visitors annually and has helped catalyze more than $1 billion in real estate investments around the park, with billions more development dollars projected in a pipeline that would also lead to thousands of jobs.

Urban areas also derive multiple environmental benefits from parks and green space. Trees absorb pollution, producing billions of dollars in savings from cleaner air; their shade helps reduce the heat island effect by lowering urban temperatures. The ability of parks to absorb water is increasingly valuable, not just in coastal areas and riverfront communities, but also in cities seeking to control stormwater through green infrastructure. As part of Philadelphia’s $4.5 billion, 25-year Green City, Clean Waters program—a collaboration between the Parks and Recreation and Water departments that aims to capture 85 percent of the city’s stormwater runoff—the city pledged to add 500 acres of parks and green spaces in underserved neighborhoods.

Other local initiatives, including the School District of Philadelphia’s GreenFutures plan, the Rebuild Initiative, and TPL’s Parks for People Program, are contributing to the effort to expand access to public green space in the city.

Ensuring Access for All

In recent years, cities have been exploring ways to create more urban parks and open space, but “what’s unique at this moment is people are finally noticing inequities in park access and the urgent need for public parks close to where people live,” says Alyia Gaskins, assistant director of health programs for the Center for Community Investment (CCI) at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. In the context of recent demonstrations and discussions about race and racism, she says, “people are noticing that Black and brown communities are not only at greater risk from COVID-19, but also frequently excluded from the very health benefits parks provide.”

Across the country, more than 100 million people lack safe and easy access to parks within a half-mile of home, says TPL. That number represents about 28 percent of the U.S. population, including 28 million children. In the nation’s 100 largest cities, 11.2 million people lack easy access. The organization says ensuring everyone in those cities has a nearby park would require adding 8,300 parks to the 23,000 that exist. Even where parks are available, inequities exist. A TPL study released in August reported that across the United States, parks serving primarily nonwhite populations are half the size of parks that serve majority white populations and five times more crowded. Parks serving majority low-income households are, on average, a quarter the size of parks that serve majority high-income households, and four times more crowded (TPL 2020a).

During the pandemic, states and cities have varied widely in their approaches to parks and open space. Some cities closed waterfronts and limited park access. Others sought to manage crowds by implementing controls such as timed entries or one-way signs. At the popular Katy Trail in Dallas, where visitors at a single entrance increased from 22,834 in early March to 34,366 by late March, officials instituted a voluntary system that allowed access on alternate days based on the first letter of a visitor’s last name. Some cities prohibited parking at packed parks, prompting equity questions on behalf of people who did not have the proximity or ability to walk or bike there. Other cities addressed the surge in demand for parks by converting streets into pedestrian-friendly spaces. During the initial months of the shutdown, “parks became the most valuable resource in the city,” says J. Nicholas Williams, director of the Oakland Parks, Recreation, and Youth Development Department.

To offer room for recreation in neighborhoods where parks were overcrowded or nonexistent, Oakland closed 74 miles of streets to all but emergency vehicles and local traffic in April. The city relied on a network of streets identified in a 2019 bicycle plan that had been developed with the participation of 3,500 residents.

The Slow Streets program—some version of which has been enacted in cities from Tucson, Arizona, to Providence, Rhode Island—was well received by many Oakland residents, but was also criticized for its initial focus on predominantly white neighborhoods. Working with residents and community groups in more racially and economically diverse areas such as East Oakland, Slow Streets expanded into new neighborhoods and launched “Slow Streets: Essential Places,” which improved pedestrian safety along routes to essential services such as grocery stores, food distribution sites, and COVID-19 test sites.

The Slow Streets program continues, but Williams says Oakland, whose population grew 10 percent in the past decade to 433,000, faces a greater need: “Oakland continues to grow . . . we have to set aside more park land and more equitable access to parks and open space.”

Equitable Park Planning

“City parks are at the center of resilient and equitable cities,” says Catherine Nagel, executive director of City Parks Alliance (CPA), an independent nationwide organization that has worked with mayors to leverage more than $190 million to build urban parks in underserved communities. “Our research shows some of the ways cities can leverage the equity, health, and environmental benefits of parks are to identify new sources of funding, new cost-sharing partnerships, and new [sources of] support.”

Cities are funding parks with adjacent sectors, drawing on or partnering with water, housing, and health departments, and “leveraging outside of the traditional park world,” Nagel says. Property developers are building public parks, and cities are partnering with business improvement districts and nonprofit organizations for programming and management responsibilities. “Parks are more complex than people think,” Nagel says. “They need intensive programming and maintenance, ongoing revenue streams, and the ability to interface with and reflect community user and local needs.”

With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, CPA has worked on initiatives that analyze how cities are reallocating money to address equity concerns, how they’re leveraging funding from adjacent sectors, and how they’re innovating for equity and sourcing funding. CPA’s Equitable Park Funding Hub, an interactive online database set to launch this fall, will feature park funding opportunities related to brownfields, workforce development, community development, conservation, climate mitigation, and water and green infrastructure.

The Groundwork USA Network shares examples of park and green infrastructure projects that focus on community ownership and health equity gains for long-term residents in Reclaiming Brownfields (Groundwork USA 2017). In one project, Groundwork Denver helped with visioning, planning, and fundraising to transform a 5.5-acre brownfield site into the Platte Farm Open Space for the Globeville neighborhood in North Denver. Residents of the predominantly low-income Latinx neighborhood, which is surrounded by former industrial sites and bisected by interstates, led the project to restore native shortgrass prairie and install a pollinator garden and paved walking and biking trails. A $550,000 grant from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment paid for construction and maintenance, which will be completed by the City and County of Denver Departments of Parks and Recreation and Transportation and Infrastructure.

The Denver project illustrates how cities can reimagine current assets. While most don’t have large tracts of vacant land, says Benepe of TPL, they could creatively retrofit brownfields, abandoned industrial sites, sanitary landfills, or railroad and utility rights of way, as high-profile projects like the High Line in New York and Millennium Park in Chicago have shown. Benepe says every city should analyze the equity of its park system and identify potential park and open space sites in underserved neighborhoods.

CCI’s Gaskins says the first step in equitable park planning is to “be in conversation with communities to get their vision for what they want parks to be, whether that’s building new parks or reimagining existing spaces.” Proximity and access are important, she says, “but it’s also the quality of the park and whether people feel welcomed and safe”—both in the park and en route to it.

Particularly in neighborhoods affected by gentrification, longtime residents often don’t feel like amenities such as parks that are introduced with new development are intended for them, Gaskins says. With new development, planners and other city officials should ensure a robust community engagement process. “Parks are more than infrastructure,” she says. “They offer access to programs and services, gathering spaces, and job opportunities that are also important for advancing health equity.”

Paying for Parks in Lean Times

Following the 2008 financial collapse, parks budgets were cut early and were among the last municipal budget items to recover. From 2009 to 2013, park spending dropped 21.2 percent, says NRPA, and by 2013, parks and recreation represented only 1.9 percent of local government expenditures. Deferred park maintenance for many large cities has been estimated in the billions of dollars.

Will parks budgets meet the same fate in the age of COVID? A late-June NRPA survey of more than 400 parks and recreation leaders found that two-thirds of their agencies had been asked to reduce operations spending between 10 to 20 percent for the fiscal year in effect on July 1, and 57 percent were facing 50 to 59 percent median reductions in capital spending. One in five reported their capital budgets had been zeroed out (Roth 2020).

Park advocates warn that city park systems have reached a critical tipping point, with heavy use and COVID-related budget cuts risking irreversible damage in 2020 and beyond. Some say priority funding for maintenance is critical to ensure that parks and green spaces are safe, attractive, and used, while others say investments in new capital projects would do more to help stimulate the economy for COVID recovery. Rachel Banner, NRPA director of park access, notes that park budgets that rely more on property taxes, which have been stable during the pandemic, may be in better shape than those that rely primarily on sales tax revenues. “Diversity in revenue streams is important,” says Banner. “Think about what’s important for resiliency in an economic downturn, like drawing from a variety of sources.”

One successful strategy NRPA has seen is to allocate a standard proportion of the general fund to parks and open space, “especially now that they are absolutely essential.” To address park equity in the capital budget, Banner says, some cities use prioritization criteria related to factors such as the quality of park space, age of equipment, ADA compliance, and neighborhood demographics including income, race, health outcomes, and car ownership.

In many cities and counties, dedicated tax campaigns have shown success in generating a significant portion of parks and open space funding. In March, Oakland voters passed Ballot Measure Q to create a 20-year tax, with 64 percent of the resulting revenues directed for parks, landscape maintenance, and recreational services beginning in FY 2020–2021. The success of Measure Q demonstrated that city residents have “turned a corner in recognizing the value of parks and open space,” says Oakland parks director Williams. While Measure Q doesn’t provide funding for new parks and open space, he says, it does address equity by providing funds to maintain and program smaller community and pocket parks. The measure was projected to bring in $13.4 million for parks in FY 20–21, a figure that hadn’t changed as of the city’s mid-cycle budget review this summer but will continue to be reviewed, Williams says.

Other successful ballot efforts include Denver’s Measure 2A, passed in 2018 and known as the Parks Legacy Fund. Between 2012 and 2017, the city’s population grew 11 percent, but park space increased by only 5 percent; the city also faced $130 million in deferred park maintenance. Combined with general funds, the Parks Legacy Fund was projected to produce $37.5 million a year to renovate parks, acquire land, and build new parks, trails, and open spaces, prioritizing high-need communities. The city expects to revise its budget to reflect COVID-related impacts this fall.

Last year, a ballot measure in New Orleans created hundreds of millions of dollars for parks over 20 years, with a priority for lower-income areas, says Bill Lee, TPL senior vice president of policy, advocacy, and government relations. Despite COVID’s impact on local economies, Lee is optimistic about other ballot-related funding prospects: “More than three-quarters of these measures pass in good and bad economic times, in red and blue states, because people see the value of parks and open space.”

Oklahoma City can attest. In November 2019, the city opened a 36-acre portion of Scissortail Park in the downtown core, on brownfield land that formerly featured abandoned buildings and junkyards. This first phase of the $132 million project features amenities such as a playground, interactive fountains, roller rink, café, performance stage, lake with boathouse and boat rentals, demonstration gardens, farmers’ market, lawn and promenade, and nearly 1,000 trees.

Scissortail Park is located next to the city’s new convention center and near the downtown library, arena, ballpark, and streetcar, all of which received funding from the Metropolitan Area Projects (MAPS) tax, a voter-approved penny sales tax created in 1993 to pay debt-free for projects to revitalize downtown and improve the city’s quality of life. A public-private partnership, the park also has benefitted from millions of dollars in donations, and it earns income from event and equipment rentals, sponsorships, food and beverage concessions, memberships, and grants. Ten years in planning and construction, the park by 2022 will include another 34 acres that will extend to the Oklahoma River with sports fields and natural areas, accessed by a bridge across Interstate 40.

Scissortail Park received a key allocation from the third round of MAPS funding; in December 2019, voters approved a fourth MAPS round, with $140 million dedicated to transforming the city’s neighborhood and community parks and sports facilities, part of a $978 million neighborhood and human services ballot measure.

“Scissortail is our cultural commons for downtown,” says Maureen Heffernan, CEO and president of the Scissortail Park Foundation, which manages the park and has kept it open with limited events and programming during the pandemic. Many people have expressed gratitude for Scissortail Park and the city’s nearby Myriad Botanical Gardens, which Heffernan also manages. “More than ever, beautifully maintained green space in urban areas has been a critical resource for people to enjoy and destress over the last few months,” she says. Urban parks “are something everyone wants and wants to fund, and they’re transformative,” Heffernan notes, adding that Oklahoma City “does not normally like to raise taxes, but residents have approved this MAPS tax because these tangible projects make a dramatic difference in people’s quality of life here.”

Park advocates also are looking to federal legislation for funding. The Great American Outdoors Act, signed into law in August, includes permanent funding from offshore oil and gas fees for the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), making $900 million per year available for public lands, including city parks and trails. LWCF’s Outdoor Recreation Legacy Partnership (ORLP) program is a source for annual grants for urban areas with more than 50,000 residents, providing $25 million last year in grants ranging from $300,000 to $1 million, with priority given to projects in low-income areas that lack outdoor recreation opportunities.

Parks advocates also have their eye on potential federal stimulus funds. In May, 100 organizations, including TPL, CPA, NRPA, the American Planning Association, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors, asked Congress to include $500 million for jobs related to building or renovating parks in low-income urban areas as part of a future coronavirus stimulus package.

Public-Private Partnerships

In some cases, partnerships with nonprofits make the creation of parks possible. The Western Reserve Land Conservancy (WRLC), a Cleveland-based nonprofit, has conserved over 60,000 acres and created over 155 parks and preserves in the region since the late 1990s. WRLC has raised over $400 million to help land banks demolish 40,000 abandoned or vacant properties throughout Ohio, securing land for low-income communities until it can be redeveloped into parks, green spaces, or sites for affordable housing and other purposes.

Through its Reforest our City program, WRLC has planted more than 10,000 trees in Cleveland; WRLC bought a landfill on a linear site next to the zoo, cleaned up contamination, and developed the 25-acre Brighton Park with a walking/biking trail. Located in a densely populated area, the $1 million park, due to open in October, will be planted with 1,000 trees next year, and will be managed by the Metroparks District, says Jim Rokakis, WRLC vice president and coauthor of The Land Bank Revolution (Rokakis 2020). WRLC is also creating six neighborhood parks in Cleveland’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood that it will own or manage.

Other cities rely on business and philanthropic support to fund parks. About 90 percent of the $19 million cost for Detroit’s Campus Martius Park and surrounding infrastructure was funded by Detroit corporations and foundations. Owned by the city, the park is managed by the Downtown Detroit Partnership. The Indianapolis Cultural Trail, an eight-mile pedestrian and bike trail connecting eight cultural districts in downtown Indianapolis, is undergoing a $30 million expansion with $20 million from the Lilly Endowment, Inc., $5 million from the city, and $1 million from the Anthem Foundation. Cities are also partnering with private developers to build and operate new parks and open space. Since 1993, New York City’s waterfront zoning has required developers to provide public access to the waterfront. The zoning has led to the redevelopment of industrial sites into multiple parks that provide public access and build climate resilience.

The six-acre Domino Park on Brooklyn’s East River, opened in 2018, is part of an 11-acre site that will include the adaptive reuse of the historic Domino Sugar refinery and 3.3 million square feet of mixed-use development with 2,200 housing units, 700 of them affordable. Brooklyn-based developer Two Trees Management, which invested $50 million to build the park and spends $2 million annually on operations, worked closely with the community to identify needs such as a short access road to make the park feel truly public. The park, designed by James Corner Field Operations, includes a waterfront esplanade, recreation facilities, interactive fountains, a five-block artifact walk of salvaged factory machinery, and 175 trees. It provides public waterfront access for the first time in 160 years.

Another promising financing option is land value return, a mechanism through which cities recover the increases in property value triggered by rezoning or by investments in infrastructure. Also known as land value capture, this tool “will be an effective way for cities to convert underutilized spaces into parks and open space,” says Enrique Silva, the Lincoln Institute’s director of international initiatives.

Silva says cities could recover zoning-related increases in land value to secure land and pay for park development. Cities also can recover value through higher property tax assessments that lead to higher municipal tax revenues. City-owned vacant sites intended for buildings the cities can’t currently afford to build could also become temporary or permanent parks and lead to additional land value capture opportunities, he says. Municipal planning tools such as special assessments and transferable development rights also can help fund parks, open space, and infrastructure improvements.

Parks and open space can increase value in the form of climate resilience and now, with COVID, will be viewed as adding social value, says Silva. “There’s increasingly a sense that an investment in parks and open space as public infrastructure is an investment worth making, one that will have increased relevance as more public space is needed,” says Silva. “To the extent that COVID is forcing everyone to rethink public space and there’s a premium on open space in cities,” he says, steps including converting streets for pedestrian use and establishing new parks and open spaces are “where planning is going to lead.”

Survey on Pandemic and Public Spaces

A global survey conducted by Gehl, the Copenhagen-based design and planning firm that reimagined Times Square in New York City for pedestrians and bicyclists, reveals the importance of public space during the pandemic. Some 2,000 respondents from 40 U.S. states, 68 countries, and nearly every continent, about two-thirds of whom hailed from urban areas, shared views on the value of public space in their daily lives:

• 66 percent used nearby public spaces at least once a day, and 16 percent used them several times a day.

• Top public space destinations included the neighborhood street and sidewalk (87 percent), essential places like grocery stores (72 percent), neighborhood parks (67 percent), and stoops, yards, or courtyards (59 percent).

• Two thirds reported walking more during the pandemic; among car owners, that figure was 69 percent. 

Gehl’s suggestions for improving access and reducing overcrowding of parks and open spaces include:

• Reallocate space to allow for more physically distant walking, biking, and rolling through sidewalk extensions, parking lane closures, or street closures at the block or multiblock level.

• Prioritize space reallocation measures in neighborhoods without walkable (less than 15-minute) access to parks and essential services.

• Manage flow into more congested public spaces by expanding the number of entrances or by designating gateways as entry-only or exit-only.

• To support seniors and other vulnerable populations, ensure new public spaces create opportunities for sitting at safe distances, not just moving through.

Source: Gehl (https://gehlpeople.com/blog/public-space-playsvital-role-in-pandemic).

Kathleen McCormick, principal of Fountainhead Communications in Boulder, Colorado, writes frequently about healthy, sustainable, and resilient communities.

Lead Image: According to the Trust for Public Land, more than 100 million people—including 28 million children–lack safe and easy access to parks in the United States. Credit: portishead1/iStock.

References

10 Minute Walk. n.d. “Our Research.” https://10minutewalk.org/#Our-research.

Groundwork USA. 2017. Reclaiming Brownfields: Highlights from the Groundwork USA Network. Yonkers, NY: Groundwork USA. https://groundworkusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/GWUSABrownfields-Highlights-2017.pdf.

NRPA (National Recreation and Park Association). 2020. The Economic Impact of Parks: An Examination of the Economic Impacts of Operations and Capital Spending by Local Park and Recreation Agencies on the U.S. Economy. Ashburn, VA: National Recreation and Park Association. https://www.nrpa.org/siteassets/research/economic-impact-study-summary-2020.pdf.

———. 2019. 2019 Engagement with Parks Report. Ashburn, VA: National Recreation and Park Association. September. https://www.nrpa.org/globalassets/engagement-survey-report-2019.pdf.

Rokakis, James, and Gus Frangos. 2020. The Land Bank Revolution: How Ohio’s Communities Fought Back Against the Foreclosure Crisis. Cleveland, Ohio: Parafine Press.

Roth, Kevin. 2020. “NRPA Parks Snapshot: June 24–26 Survey Results.” Open Space (blog), National Recreation and Park Association. June 26. https://www.nrpa.org/blog/nrpa-parks-snapshot-june-24-26-survey-results/.

TPL (Trust for Public Land). 2020a. The Heat Is On: With Temperatures Rising and Quality Parks Too Few and Far Between, Communities of Color Face a Dangerous Disparity. San Francisco, CA: The Trust for Public Land. https://www.tpl.org/sites/default/files/The-Heat-is-on_A-Trust-for-Public-Land_special-report.pdf.

———. 2020b. Parks and the Pandemic: A Trust for Public Land Special Report. San Francisco, CA: The Trust for Public Land. https://www.tpl.org/parks-and-the-pandemic.

Fernando Lloveras San Miguel, executive director of the Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico, has been named the new Kingsbury Browne Fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the recipient of the Kingsbury Browne Conservation Leadership Award from the Land Trust Alliance (LTA).

For the past 17 years, Lloveras has led the Trust, which manages and protects Puerto Rico’s natural areas, runs habitat and species restoration initiatives, and implements coordinated public awareness campaigns, among other activities. Under his leadership, the Trust has received the Seal of the Land Trust Accreditation Commission and been accepted into the International Union for Conservation of Nature, becoming the only organization in Puerto Rico to receive this distinction. Since 2012, Lloveras has also served as president of Para la Naturaleza, a unit of the Trust which aims to protect 33 percent of natural ecosystems in Puerto Rico by 2033. He served on the board of the Land Trust Alliance from 2011 to 2020 and will serve on the board of the National Trust for Historic Preservation through November 2020.

Prior to joining the Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico, Lloveras cofounded Microjuris.com, which provides digital legal and legislative information and tools to users in Puerto Rico, Chile, Argentina, and Venezuela. He holds a B.A. in Economics from Dartmouth College, an M.P.P. from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and a J.D. from the University of Puerto Rico.

“Fernando Lloveras is both a great practitioner of land conservation in Puerto Rico and an outstanding international ambassador for the idea that land and biodiversity conservation is a global enterprise to which we can all contribute,” said Jim Levitt, who leads the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s land conservation efforts. “He is personable, very bright, and has a deep passion for the land. We are proud to have the chance to work with him over the coming year as the new Kingsbury Browne Fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.”

The Kingsbury Browne fellowship and award, given since 2006, are named for Kingsbury Browne, a Boston tax lawyer and conservationist who served as a Lincoln Fellow in 1980 and helped to form the LTA in 1982. Lloveras San Miguel was officially recognized at Rally 2020, LTA’s annual gathering of land conservation professionals, which this year attracted over 3,700 virtual attendees. During 2020–2021, Lloveras will engage in research, writing, and mentoring at the Lincoln Institute.

Previous recipients of the fellowship include Jane Difley, who led the society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests for 23 years; Michael Whitfield, executive director of the Heart of the Rockies Initiative, who has built partnerships among landowners, civic leaders, government officials, and scientists to protect iconic landscapes in the Rocky Mountain West; Will Rogers, head of The Trust for Public Land; David Hartwell, an environmental leader who has helped mobilize billions of dollars for conservation projects across Minnesota; Steve Small, a legal pioneer who paved the way to make conservation easements tax-deductible in the U.S.; Jean Hocker, a former president of the LTA and longtime board member at the Lincoln Institute; Larry Kueter, a Denver attorney specializing in agricultural and ranchland easements in the West; Peter Stein, managing director of Lyme Timber Company; Audrey C. Rust, president emeritus of the Peninsula Open Space Trust based in Palo Alto, California; Jay Espy, executive director of the Elmina B. Sewall Foundation; Jamie Williams, president of The Wilderness Society; Laurie A. Wayburn, cofounder of the Pacific Forest Trust; Mark Ackelson, president of the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation; and Darby Bradley, president of the Vermont Land Trust.

About the Lincoln Institute

The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy seeks to improve quality of life through the effective use, taxation, and stewardship of land. A nonprofit private operating foundation whose origins date to 1946, the Lincoln Institute researches and recommends creative approaches to land as a solution to economic, social, and environmental challenges. Through education, training, publications, and events, we integrate theory and practice to inform public policy decisions worldwide.

About the Land Trust Alliance

Founded in 1982, the Land Trust Alliance is a national land conservation organization that works to save the places people need and love by strengthening land conservation across America. The Alliance represents 1,000 member land trusts supported by more than 200,000 volunteers and 4.6 million members nationwide. The Alliance is based in Washington, D.C., and operates several regional offices. More information about the Alliance is available at www.landtrustalliance.org.

Photograph courtesy of Para La Naturaleza.

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Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared on the Columbia University Press blog.

COVID-19 has presented new challenges for leaders at all levels, forcing many to reconsider their emergency management processes. What are the impacts of the current public health crisis on disaster preparedness and community planning, and what will it take to build a more equitable and resilient future? We sat down with Laurie Johnson and Robert Olshansky, authors of the Lincoln Institute book After Great Disasters: An In-Depth Analysis of How Six Countries Managed Community Recovery and companion Policy Focus Report to discuss the pandemic and the path forward. Johnson, an internationally recognized urban planner specializing in disaster recovery and catastrophe risk management, has advised local governments and others following earthquakes, landslides, floods, hurricanes, and human-made disasters around the world. Olshansky is Professor Emeritus of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and has published extensively on post-disaster recovery planning, policy for earthquake risks, hillside planning and landslide policy, and environmental impact assessment. Olshansky and Johnson also coauthored Clear as Mud: Planning for the Rebuilding of New Orleans, a book informed by their years on the ground after Hurricane Katrina.

Emma Zehner: What lessons from disaster recovery are most relevant to this pandemic? How is this public health emergency different from natural disasters you have dealt with in the past?

Robert Olshansky: With many disasters, we think about external factors, but the way this disaster manifests itself is in people. The threat, instead of a hurricane or earthquake, is every person we encounter, which sets up a different dynamic. The other unique aspect is the time delay and the exponential nature of the spread. These are counter to our normal cognitive processes. Masks seem to reduce the exponential factor, but the time delay is still there. So, yes, we have the ability to control things and in principal have the ability to change the trajectory of the disaster, but some of that is an illusion because the situation is so unusual.

Laurie Johnson: Yes, time is one of the four factors that governments can control. The others are money, information, and collaboration. This case is slightly different. With sudden onset disasters like earthquakes, you come to the disaster scene and begin to act. Right now, we can actually act while the pandemic disaster is unfolding and try to control how impactful it will be. This is also unusual because it is impacting all of the United States and most of the world at the same time. Historically, disaster management in the United States and many other countries has been built on the concept of mutual aid. We don’t have all of the fire trucks to fight all fires in California, so we rely on supplies from elsewhere. In the case of emergency management in the pandemic, we haven’t been as able to use these mutual aid principles. In every state and every city, supply chains have been impacted.

This has called for a different kind of collaboration. Most of the needed action is actually inaction, social distancing, which is counter to the idea of collaborative governance in the sense of empowering people to rebuild. Instead we are trying to empower people to do nothing, which is hard for leaders to get their head around.

It has also been interesting to note how public officials have defined essential services. To flatten the curve and keep people sustained, we had to consider and maintain a wider set of services than what we normally think about for natural disasters, in which essential services focuses primarily on mass care and shelter, water, and other basic infrastructure. In the pandemic, essential also included access (even if limited) to exercise and outdoor recreation, farmers’ markets and restaurant take-out services, for example.

EZ: To what extent has the pandemic prompted a questioning of standard disaster preparedness and management practices, especially spatial/territorial ones?

LJ: This pandemic has underscored the idea of local primacy in disasters and the importance of leadership at the local level. California is depending on county and city public health officials and others to really make things happen. I think it will be the same in terms of recovery. The civil protests have also pushed local leaders on how limited resources should be reallocated at the local level. So the pandemic has raised some good questions about the mutual aid management model, and reinforced the need for local primacy.

RO: It has become clear that the model of local primacy with resources from above is really the way that we need to do it. Now what is missing is a lot of the resources from above. One of those resources is technical guidance, which is the role that the CDC should play. Others include federal coordination, communication, funding to make social distancing feasible, funding to ensure that economic impacts are equitable, regulatory actions to scale up testing, and policy changes to spur production of needed supplies.

LJ: Also, during this pandemic, there is a whole structure of public health management that is not typically as dominant in natural disaster management. You have different leaders: the National Institutes of Health and the CDC, and state and local public health departments. On top of that, you have political leaders setting up their own task forces. It is definitely not as lean and efficient as when you have clear lines of authority through the emergency declaration process, but I think that a ton of learning has occurred.

EZ: Has the response to the pandemic provided new tools and ways of thinking for disaster planning? What responses do you point to as examples?

LJ: It was an aha moment for me to realize that we can be so much more deliberate in mitigating the impacts while we are in disasters that unfold with time (even wildfires and hurricanes in which the disaster event can last several days). We typically talk about resilience in terms of engineering, such as building barriers for floods, and adaptation. Those both typically happen either before disaster strikes or during the recovery stage. We don’t talk as much about resilience during the event. The decisions we make during the crisis can really affect our recovery trajectories differently. The same is true of wildfires and hurricanes, even though the event timeframe is more limited. Mass evacuation in real time can protect lives and also allow first responders to focus on managing the hazard, like firefighting, instead of evacuating people during the disaster. The evacuation process can really help set the recovery up. As we note in After Great Disasters, in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, people were evacuated all over the country, but there are things we don’t really know: How many got back and when? How many were able to establish productive and happy roots elsewhere? I now see that we do have more ways to design a good recovery in real-time with the decisions and actions we take as the disaster is unfolding. Another example is sea level rise, which has a slow onset with sudden shocks in the form of storms. We actually have ways we can mitigate the impacts of sea level rise so that those sudden shocks of storms aren’t as impactful.

RO: The pandemic has reinforced a lot of things for us, but it has also stretched our thinking a bit. It is hard to say we are doing well, but in some ways we have done a lot—such as the initial shutdown that saved our healthcare system from collapse, federal funding to lessen economic impacts, growing capabilities for testing and contact tracing, and unprecedented development of treatments and vaccines–and I think this can increase our self-confidence that we have the capacity to deal with huge events like this in the future.

LJ: In terms of notable responses, the response where I live in Marin County (California) has been very good even with some major challenges and setbacks. The county public health officials produce a video nearly every day that walks you through the decisions the county is making. Their data provides a lot of demographic and geographic details and regularly updated progress indicators give them a dashboard of information to use in determining when to back off with the next [phase of] opening. The whole process has been pretty transparent and helped people to better understand what the tradeoffs and risks are.

New Zealand, one of the countries we studied in our book, has also been very transparent. People understood where they were with that system. Their response has also been led by the national health officials and not by the formal emergency management structure. They defined different alert levels right away and set a framework of guidance and restrictions for people to follow before moving to the next level. There was clear communication from national leaders and health officials daily and restrictions on movement were strictly enforced. Perhaps it’s easier for a country that size. Nonetheless, I do believe we have much to learn from their and many other countries’ approaches.

EZ: What could we be doing better?

RO: Some of our favorite governance models are various kinds of councils and committees that were set up after these large disasters. Part of what we are missing now is transparency, communication, and explanation. Counties in the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, all have dashboards of key pandemic indicators. Now they need to address how they are making policy decisions based on the data. I would like to see highly visible, explicitly defined councils at state and regional levels, so it is clear they have representation from all of the different stakeholders, are carefully listening to their views, and are making well-reasoned decisions based on multiple tradeoffs.

EZ: As we begin the COVID recovery, what can planning directors do to prepare for the next pandemic?

LJ: I am starting work on a local general plan update process now, and I think one of the things everyone has been rushing to deal with is how to work in a digital environment. How do you do both the day-to-day planning processes and the long-term planning, both of which need to involve the community? There are also big issues around equity that have been laid bare by the pandemic and we, as planners, need to understand which parts of our communities are successfully using online meeting platforms and other civic engagement tools and which are not because they don’t have access to smartphones or broadband. This is a good experience to help us strengthen and develop the tools that we need to do planning in a more expedited, online way. We are finding new efficiencies and it helps us in thinking about how we can streamline bureaucracy after disasters.

I do think some of our ongoing resilience work before the pandemic to protect against hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters is actually benefiting us right now. We have this pretty stable infrastructure that is supporting us in spite of all the demands that are being placed on the grid and on the internet in particular.

RO: Planners are very good at stakeholder involvement. In the pandemic, we need even more inclusive systems of broader stakeholder involvement, using various means of communication. We need those all the time after every disaster. Right now, I am able to attend a lot of meetings that I couldn’t attend before. We can use some of these tools that we have developed to expand the ability of a broader variety of stakeholders to communicate after all disasters. In the pandemic, all of these things have worked relatively well. In the case of an earthquake or hurricane, though, we expect to have physical infrastructure damage that can disrupt communication systems, so we need to continue to prepare to use multiple communication modes. As a result of this pandemic, we also appreciate even more the need to stay connected, and we should make sure our communications systems are going to be able to survive the earthquake and the hurricane as well.

LJ: I think planners are capable of seeing spatially and seeing systems: we are taught to think holistically. I would appeal to planners, as things come back online, to think about some of the problems that we had before this happened (congestion, traffic, etc.) and what policies we can put in place that will reduce some of those negative factors in our communities before the next disaster—but still not erode the economic and social vitality of our communities. To some extent, the civil protests are raising these questions. We don’t want to come back online without addressing the social injustice that we had long before the disaster. What did we learn during this pandemic that can be useful to this conversation? As planners, we are always studying the daily rates of this and the daily uptake of that, and we need to be providing that kind of information to the pandemic response and reopening conversations. How can we come back but reduce some of these negative daily things we know exist in our communities?

Emma Zehner is communications and publications editor at the Lincoln Institute.

Image: Map showing cases of COVID-19 per 100,000 people from September 7 to September 21, 2020. Credit: Big Local News and Pitch Interactive COVID-19 Case Mapper.

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Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared on the Columbia University Press blog.

The American botanist Paul Sears called ecology “the subversive science.” Once we start to see the interconnections all around, our view of everything in the world changes. We begin to understand, and cannot avoid seeing, Aldo Leopold’s “wounds of the world,” the many deleterious effects than humanity has had on Planet Earth.

As the coronavirus was just beginning its deadly march across the United States, the 50th anniversary of Earth Day was celebrated here and abroad. Pioneers in environmentalism, like Sears and Leopold and Rachel Carson and Lady Bird Johnson, were honored. Carson, of course, gave us Silent Spring, her remarkable account of other interconnections that proved deadly. Soon after the arrival of the pandemic in the U.S., someone pondered publicly if we were living in “a silent spring.” But living in quarantine, I, like so many others, realized I was seeing, hearing, and smelling nature more intently. The noises of the city had changed but the city was hardly silent. As Toni Morrison observed, “at some point in life, the world’s beauty becomes enough.”

At my first Earth Day, the one 50 years ago, I first encountered the work of Carson and Leopold along with Ian McHarg, who had just published his manifesto Design with Nature. McHarg’s basic premise was that we should use ecology, the subversive science, as the foundation for design and planning. His influence was substantial but incomplete. To recognize the golden anniversary of the manifesto, and not only celebrate but extend his achievement, we published Design with Nature Now.

In editing the book, Richard Weller, Karen M’Closkey, Billy Fleming, and I emphasized the relevance of McHarg’s ideas for today. We invited people who knew him personally to reflect on his legacy and then collected twenty-five 21st-Century projects from around the world that exemplify “design with nature now.” The projects are organized around five themes. “Big Wilds” includes large-scale conservation endeavors, such as the Yellowstone to Yukon Initiative in North America and Africa’s continent-spanning Great Green Wall. “Urban Futures” features bold growth management programs, such as those for Oregon’s Willamette River Valley and the State of Utah. “Rising Tides” surveys adaptation and mitigation projects that take on sea-level changes as a result of global warming, such as proposals for New York City and the North Sea. “Fresh Waters” addresses ensuring safe drinking water for the planet’s growing population, such as plans for the Great Lakes and a wetland park in China. “Toxic Lands” considers how to transform highly polluted sites into useful areas for people and wildlife, with examples from the Ruhr Valley in Germany and London’s Olympic Park in London.

Large-scale landscape protection, metropolitan regional planning, coastline conservation, water quality management, and restoring polluted lands call on humans to adapt to change and plot better futures, and this work is all the more urgent as we face a warming planet. We humans are a resilient species, so the examples in Design with Nature Now are largely success stories. Perhaps now, more than ever, we need hopeful examples of design and planning.

As is now painfully evident, the coronavirus spreads largely through human contact; it takes advantage of our connectedness, our human ecology. It has laid bare many wounds in the world, as Leopold would say, from vulnerabilities associated with race, age, and poverty to inadequacies in our political leadership (hence the failure to act responsibly despite guidance from science). But design is an optimistic pursuit grounded in the belief we can do better, and ecology offers a framework for understanding natural and cultural systems. We need to be guided in our actions by a deep understanding of these systems. We have learned, and are continuing to learn, a lot from this pandemic. We should reflect on the wisdom we have gained from this experience and put it to productive use.

Frederick Steiner is dean and Paley Professor for the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design.

Photograph: Repurposing industrial ruins, Emscher Landscape Park in Ruhr Valley, Germany, features a green corridor and pedestrian pathways and spans 177 square miles and 20 municipalities. The evolving park reflects regional planners’ years of work connecting existing green spaces to reinvigorate a landscape formerly polluted by decades of coal mining and steel manufacturing. This project was featured in Design with Nature Now. Credit: Emscher Landscape Park. Landscape Park Duisburg Nord. Photo © Michael Schwarze-Rodrian, Essen.