Assessing Recreation and Leisure Need - Part I Using Descriptive Writing (free vlog) February 16, 2024
Its about the "Feels"
Vlog Overview
The "Parks Are Like Icebergs" vlog is a comprehensive exploration of urban parks, including urban parks planning, design, construction, programming and maintenance. The vlog marries the creator's extensive experience as a parks practitioner for over 30 years with their recently completed PhD in parks planning decision-making using institutional theory. The vlog's intended audience is quite diverse and includes elected officials, planning professionals, landscape architects, community engagement practitioners, recreationists, academics, and community social actors. Please feel free to subscribe to review 35+ past vlogs and each new one as they arrive!
The vlog shares underlying park planning and park service operationalization factors whose visibility is seen (e.g., park furniture, playgrounds), obscured or opaque. Visibility can be limited by accident, by circumstance or by design for well intended reasons or ill intended purposes by administrators, elected officials or the community.
Finally, my reflections are not neutral, and most often take a community focussed perspective (vs economic development focus). Any practitioner who tells you they are truly agnostic are consciously or unconsciously misleading themselves or others. My vlog strategy is to contextualize the perspectives of my own and others. Also, I like to have fun… hence my inclusion of memes and doggo pictures! Happy reading!!!
Todays Ice Sculpture: Assessing Recreational and Leisure Need - Part I
We most often think of recreation and leisure in terms of activities: soccer, baseball, hockey, bird watching, reading, suntanning, etc. The list is almost as long as long as the number of people we ask. Your personal list and mine will sometimes overlap, sometimes not. In planner world, the collective outcomes are articulated in urban land allocations, including land for residential, commerical, industrial, roads, utilities and parks. Each park site has a particular size, configuration and location negotiated in area plans, plans of subdivision and zoning. Those elements are based on planned activity needs. But this is a bit too superficial for need assessment purposes.
Janet Fitch, the author of White Oleander and Chimes of a Lost Cathedral uses a descriptive approach to her writing focusing on senses to embody the story protagonist experiences. It allows the reader to take in the experience in more meaningful and nuanced ways. Descriptive writing forces the writer to “show” rather than “describe.” In an effort to create fully formed characters, plots and experiences, you focus on details. A focus on details is ultimately what my entire vlog is about, as described in the second paragraph of this vlog overview.
This has relevance for recreation and leisure studies and practice in terms of a fuller understanding of the nuances of recretional and leisure needs, lived experiences and place making. To that end, I propose a thought experiment of recreation or leisure experience for you, followed by one of my own. I will conclude in key takeaways with how and why a focus on details should pre-configure recreational and leisure assessment. Listen below to a brief (6 minute) description to give you some context.
A Thought Experiment
Think about a favourite recreation or leisure experience. Tell me all about it. Write it down. Go ahead, take your time. No rush, but Taschia is kind of impatient.
What kind of words did you use? Did you describe what you see? Did you use verbs and adjectives?
Now describe it to me in terms of your senses. Don’t tell me what the activity is, show me, using your (five) senses…what you see, hear, smell, taste, touch. Dig deep in your experiences, like Taschia on a dog beach! To illustrate, here is what I mean.
My Sensory Thought Experiment in Mill Creek Ravine
A long time favourite activity of mine is running in the river valley, particularly in the fall on an indulating serpentine 4 metre linear asphalt bike and pedestrian trail in Mill Creek Ravine through a treed area from Conners Road further south to Mill Creek Pool.
When I think about the same activity but described using my senses, an embodied or lived perspective of the participant can be described. In the poem below, created by yours truly. It speaks to harder-to-measure elements that are nonetheless real, and need to be explore in need assessment. (My first poem ever … indulge me, will ya’).
Immersed in the Mill Creek Cathedral
The sound of my swirling chair and my phone garishly disintegrating in my hand explodes across the room. I reach for an ejection button wishing to be thrust away, a pilot leaving a disabled plane. The accumulated demons are nothing but multple tabs open in my brain that feel like anvils clouding my mind. I shed my costume and armour, and take my escape at a pace allowed by my quivering insides. But at least for now I am away....
The rhythmic jarring of my body is a metronome, situating the sights, aromas, and sounds that collide like jazz musics’ complex chords, polyrhythems and improvisations. My escape begins…
Sharp, abrupt and roaring metallic tones reverberate around me, receding as I enter a more serene place. Noxious clatter is replaced sometimes by complete silence, by short and long melodic soliloquies, angry sounding chucking sounds, sometimes all at the same time. I fear I am interrupting a conversation in a language I don’t understand. This inspirational music floats into and out of my consciousness like waves on a beach, repairing my soul.
This concave shaped sun drenched cathedral enclosed by tall pillars adorned in multiple hues, much like that must have inspired Antonio Gaudi in the La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. My skin is warmed from aloft, whose energy is transformed into drops of fluid flowing running down my back, pooling at the bottom of my spine pressing against my skin. Paint ships fall from the sky, resting randomly around me as I approach. The violent stamping of my feet crush the yellow, reds, green chips, reverberating as a brusque musical instrument along the undulating and winding circuit. My quivering intestines settle, and my pace quickens, as I refuel while in-flight.
Familiar and unfamiliar faces of all ages appear and disappear using a more familiar idiom. We smile, nod and wave on our individual pilgrimages inside this beautiful cathedral, in our craniums and in our community. My stubborn demonic brain tabs begin to close, fade into memory, at least temporarily.
My breathing becomes laboured about the same time sharp childrens’ excited and happy squeals and laughs emanate from beyond the green screen, mixed with a pungent odour of invasive chlorine. A hieroglyph tells me I have arrived at Mill Creek Pool while simultaneously confirming my physical limits. As I rest, my love for this place washes over me.
After a brief stay on a woody perch, I reactivate my metronome. The collaboration of the pounding, glimpses, echoes and scents of the performance repeat with similar but different lyrics, from which I never tire. My escape has recentred me, recharged my spirit, allowing me re-engage with my community in a different studio with an energy and peace that had been appropriated earlier. My escape into the Mill Creek Cathedral blessed my soul at least for another day, not to mention arriving a bit fitter and healthier!
This version describes the “feels” … the psychological, physical and social impact and outcomes during the activity. Such outcomes are the raison d’etre of parks, in addition to the frequently described and documented ecological goods and services and economic benefits.
Key Takeaways
The purpose of the sensory description was not to present it as a tool, but instead a lens or a roadmap to the depth of information you need to understand when considering land use change. The sensory description also is consistent with the good work of recreation and leisure researchers that describe in detail the benefits and outcomes of recreation and leisure activity.
Property titles and maps are not blank canvasses for change. Property titles and maps are static snap shots that do not reflect the past in the present. By there nature, maps and titles they are quantitative information often translated into economic measures (i.e., land values). This information says nothing about use and benefits or connection to the community (i.e., qualitative measures). A more in-depth understanding of the uses of the site and its users will provide a more informed decision about potential land use changes.
Part II of this vlog will delve into more detailed elements of recreation and lesiure need assessment. It will also speak to process.