Parks and Mixed Use Development - Back To the (Community Engaged) Future (November 15, 2023)
... Community social actors as experts
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! Finally, my reflections are not neutral using a community focussed perspective. Any practitioner or researcher 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: Parks & Mixed Use Development - Back to the (Community Engaged) Future
There is much discussion today about how to transition low density residential urban landscapes into multi-use forms of urban development. My perspective is that while dense multi-use neighbourhoods is a responsible outcome, the road to get there has been fundamentally flawed by its focus on land use and property redevelopment. The good news is that there are solutions close at hand. Lets start with some definitions.
Mixed Use Definition
Wikipedia provides a working definition of the term mixed use.
Mixed use is a type of urban development, urban design, urban planning and/or a zoning classification that blends multiple uses, such as residential, commercial, cultural, institutional, or entertainment, into one space, where those functions are to some degree physically and functionally integrated, and that provides pedestrian connections. Mixed-use development may be applied to a single building, a block or neighborhood, or in zoning policy across an entire city or other administrative unit. These projects may be completed by a private developer, (quasi-) governmental agency, or a combination thereof. A mixed-use development may be a new construction, reuse of an existing building or brownfield site, or a combination.
Interestingly but not surprisingly (as a parks planner), parks are not even mentioned as a land use. Now a bit of land use history in Edmonton.
Edmontons Urban Development (Non-History) with Mixed Use Development
Prior to 1960, homes were located near employment, shopping and limited play spaces. Homes were relatively small on small lots. Play spaces were small on with limited equipment, if any (see Gyro Park in Tipton neighbourhood). Recreational activities were dominated by unstructured activities (i.e., grassy areas) with some ball fields for a fairly non-diverse population base. Our national game was played largely outdoors. Early park spaces did not include retention of natural landscapes. Schools were located on their own properties purchased by the local boards separated from municipal parks. Children walked to school with their friends.
The discovery of oil and post WWII period was seen as an era of peace, growth and prosperity, but also came with significant changes to municipal governance. Municipalities were required to produce high level policy plans (i.e., general municipal plans), park master plans, etc. Strategic and policy plans took a humanist approach, particularly with respect to parks. However, land uses were physically separated by type in Area Plans, relying on ever expanding roadway systems and ever expanding number and sizes of sizes of vehicles and trucks. Residential properties were larger than before dominated by low density single family residential development that created car dominated landscapes.
The post 1960 legacy forms of (mal)development retrospectively called urban sprawl was a market driven design approach promoted by economic institutions, aided and abetted by land use planners and elected officials in growing measure since the early 80s. (FWIW…My practice, which started in the 80s, was unwittingly complicit🧐, at least until later in my tenure when I began to realize the seen and unseen privileging of economic interests in our land use change processes.)
Community Engaged Multi-Use Development and Services in Parks
There was an outlier to this management trend: parks and schools planning since the 1960s. There was a political, community and policy driven approach that saw multiple recreation, leisure and educational land uses co-located, co-developed adjacent to residential land uses, the source of its users, limiting the park footprints that would have been needed otherwise. We conjoined multiple public uses on a single site, for the collective benefit of the community. Not only was the parks approach administratively efficient, it was prescient - ecological, educational, recreational and leisure needs would expand and diversify as our population diversified dramatically since that time, beyond simply servicing more people. A birds eye view is shown below of the Kennilworth School and Park site.
This is a typical school and park site of the post 1960 period that facilitates year round indoor and outdoor structured and unstructured, active and passive educational, recreational, and leisure uses.
Two schools are located on a single site with a community league facility, as well as green landscaping. The community run league offers a hall for community gatherings of all kinds (weddings, special events, etc), an outdoor skating rink that can be dog off leash area in the summer. The community league has co-funded outdoor playground equipment and park development with walkways and shelters. The green space includes fields for soccer and baseball, whose programs are run by community volunteers. In the winter, the league has created an outdoor skating trail flooded by volunteers. The site provides structured and unstructured recreational activities, both active and passive. The City maintains the greenspaces. The schools maintain spaces within 50 ft of the building. The community league does the same within the lease area. The schools use the fields and playgrounds during the school term, and have access to indoor Kennilworth arena.
Construction and operation of the site, buildings and amenities provided jobs, materials, food services and other economic benefits. Properties adjacent to parks have a higher value, and therefore increased taxes for the City.
There is a rich literature that documents the social and health and wellness benefits of the above activities including stress relief, connection to nature and their neighbours. Schools provide community gymnasium spaces, outdoor hardsurface areas for outdoor basketball, and parking lots for use in the evening, on weekends and in the summer. The green space including trees and grassy areas provide ecological goods and services (i.e., carbon sequestration, storm water management, removal of pollutants, reduction of urban heat islands). This development and operational agreement are formerly established in multiple legal, policy agreements and funding programs (i.e., School Boards/Joint Use Agreement, Tri-Partite Lease Agreement, Surplus School Policy, City/Community League working relationships, Neighbourhood Park Development Program). The city relies on the community to help fund changes to the site as community demographics and needs evolve over time. The development of this approach reflects what I have called the Parks Institution comprised of administrative and community actors with elected officials to provide services at substantially reduced costs to the municipality. The outcome of this institution - Community social actors transform “spaces” created in land use processes into “places.”
My Take - Revisiting Land Use Change Processes
Park management and service approach described at Kennilworth School and Park site was a deliberate long term community engaged approach to muncipal service delivery, that both started and ended with the community. What are the tenents of that approach? Community stakeholders are “the” partners in community development, and are resident experts (pardon the pun) of the lived experiences of the community. Community engaged processes take a problem to the community for joint problem solving, not a solution handed to them. Community engaged problem solving requires full transparency, accurate knowledge sharing, and takes time not limited by arbitrary deadlines. Community engaged problem solving processes takes place on their turf, not sterile public offices, and my spin-off afterwards into other municipal processes (i.e., land use change or budget processes). Community based problem solving is not characterized by the creation of multiple expert consultant written studies of best practices elsewhere, listed on a web site, often written in planner speak or legalese. (As an aside, community engaged processes require an administrative structure focussed on service service function, not siloed into professional task delivery (i.e., planning, construction, operations, finance)….but I digress… 🙃.)
As we create denser communities with multi-use development as a feature, we need to prioritize engagement with community focussed partners: geographical communities (i.e., neighbourhoods), and communities of interest (i.e., Homeward Trust, CVIDA, Pathways for People, Edmonton Federation of Community Leagues, Environmental NGOs), as well as other public partners (i.e., provincial and federal government partners). Lets Go Back to the Future absent the Dorlean Time Machine starting and ending with community engaged approaches similar to those developed by park managers focussing on community benefits, not land use change per se. Come to the community with a problem to be jointly solved, not the solution handed to them. Engage with the community on their own turf, not in sterile downtown offices. Transparency is integral to any partnership arrangement, but particularly with the community.
Economic interests are integral to providing the necessary infrastructure (i.e., roads, utilities, home building, shopping, etc.) with a reasonable expectation of profit. Partnerships between the developers, city and community should be explored that save each entity money, and provide base level recreation and leisure development earlier in the lifecycle of a neighbourhood. Economic interests have an integral role to support community interests, beyond their financial bottom line, in ways that make multi-use development accessible and affordable to all, and in ways that support the benefits derived from our public spaces.