Where are the parks?

When I was a 7 years old, my parents gave me a brand new red BMX bicycle for my birthday. I was ecstatic, and immediately got on my new bike to race of to the nearest public park. The park was where all of the neighbourhood kids got together. Here we would play until it was dark and time to go back home for supper. The park was our sanctuary, where all the kids could come and play. Our parents would gladly allow us to go to the park alone, just to get us out of their hair. The park was always more attractive than our own backyard. It was a key component of the neighbourhood layout. 

Today, I am a parent, and I go to the park much less than when I was a 7 year old boy. That's the case with most parents in my neighbourhood. Most parents still don't go to the park, just like how it was when I was a child. The park was designed to be a place for the neighbourhood kids to play, and would have the occasional adult with their dog, or child that is too young to go to the park themselves. But that's not what changed. Where are the children? I know that if my children are old enough to ride a bicycle and get home by themselves, I still won't allow them to go to the park by themselves. But why? What has changed?

Today with the way that we are connected to the world, we hear about everything that is wrong and unsafe about it much easier than before. As a result, we start building small forts in which we can protect ourselves and family. Our children are guarded and kept on a much shorter leash. Our outdoor lifestyle has become limited to areas where there is security and limited access. We have to pay to play. The neighbourhood park that we use to know, is no more.

When you drive through the neighbourhoods, you can still see the parks. In some areas parks have disappeared thanks to developers hijacking the space for a block of flats or a shopping center, but not all the neighbourhood parks are gone. Seeing a park now, however, does not ignite the joy and excitement that I use to experience when seeing a park in my childhood. There are no longer any neighbourhood children that are all playing away on the swings and roundabout. There isn't a heap of bicycles lying to one side while their owners are engaged with each other in some sort of game. There aren't even any dog owners walking their dogs or teaching their dog a new trick. The parks are there, but can now be better described as overgrown open fields with broken playground equipment and scattered rubbish all over the area. Parks have become an eyesore. A place where nobody goes to relax, but rather avoid. Its become a hub for crime and malicious activities. Now if you see someone in the park, you wonder what they are up to. 

Sure, not all parks are as bad as I am describing it to be. There are still some parks that attract the community to come and interact and relax, but these parks are few, and every year becoming fewer. So what do we do about it. Do we remove these open spaces because they do not serve their purpose anymore? If we do, then we will be removing a vital component of a community. Communities need to interact, relax, recreate, and converse together. We know that neighbourhood parks have lost their impact, but it is not too late to bring them back to their former glory. 

Like many elements in society that had to adapt due to issues arising, maybe they way public parks are set out will need to adapt. Can we redesign the way we build and design our parks? It certainly is something we need to look into. I believe that public parks can be resurrected to their formal glory. The issues and factors we are facing with public parks today can be analysed and addressed. Rather that giving in to the realization of parks not being vibrant anymore, I have decided to become an advocate for revitalizing these open spaces and making them important and useful to the community again. 

What's the Story with Parks?

Green spaces that include public parks, open recreational spaces and urban forests are essential elements of urban built environment. They contribute greatly to urban livability and vitality of the cities and can be significant contributors to their sustainable development. According to several scholars, organized open green spaces offer a multi-fold of benefits to cities in various perspectives including physical, environmental, economical, and social aspects. Open green spaces supply ecosystem services ranging from maintenance of biodiversity to the regulation of urban climate in the cities. Public parks can reduce energy use in cooling the buildings, and largely decrease the levels of noise in over crowded cities depending on their quantity, quality and the distance from the source of noise pollution. They also offer facilities for various outdoor activities, provide respite from the crowded and busy city life where people can have contact with nature, and also accommodate daily pedestrian traffic. Availability of organized open green spaces to a large extent is crucial for the creation of an attractive image of a city. Attractive open green spaces can complement the architectural articulation of the surrounding built environment, improve the value and desirability of the surrounding residential areas and create a space for people to orientate themselves with the greater part of the city. In this context, a general argument has emerged that good quality organized open green spaces constitute positive environment that increase the value of the surrounding built environment.   For example, sustainable open green spaces in cities foster a creative image, engender socio-economic benefits, create comfortable environment and ensue a healthy lifestyle among the people.  Public parks in residential areas are essential elements of urban built environment and can be significant contributors to sustainable development of urban areas. Public parks and recreational spaces have more significance for the development of sustainable cities because they contribute greatly to livability and vitality of the cities. Therefore, the studies of public parks have become an integral part of the sustainability analysis of the cities. Properly planned and designed open green spaces greatly add to the aesthetic quality, bring greater satisfaction to the inhabitants of surroundings residential areas, and create a restorative environment which cannot be neglected as they influence the well-being and health of inhabitants.Influential attributes of public parks at the local residential areas are essential elements towards the vibrancy of parks and are dependent on several demographic, physical, spatial, and local transportation (traffic) attributes.  An organization called Project for Public Spaces (PPS) evaluated thousands of public spaces around the  world and found that sustainable and successful organized open green spaces (public parks and recreational facilities) have four key attributes. The attributes include a good image of the open green space that offer comfort and attractiveness;  accessibility and linkages; activities for people to get engaged with; and sociable places where inhabitants meet or take their visitors. The vitality, viability, and judgment of the place as being good or bad are determined by availability and functions of elements available in the open green space. For this purpose a PLACE diagram developed by PPS, illustrates inter-linkage and coordination various attributes and elements of open green spaces in hierarchical manner of, which could contribute to the sustainability and success of the public spaces such as public parks. According to the Place diagram, the center element (identified as “PLACE” in the diagram) can be identified as a specific place, such as a street corner, a playground, a public field or a park outside a building or in a neighbourhood. This place can then be evaluated according to the four criteria namely access and linkage, comfort and image, uses and activities, and sociability located in the ring adjacent to the central ring. An examination of the place diagram further revealed that in the ring outside these main criteria are a number of intuitive or qualitative aspects by which a place is judged. The next outer ring shows the quantitative aspects that can be measured by statistics or research. All these attributes may play a pivotal role in offering experiences and benefits depending their level of availability, yet the sustainability of the space is influenced by their overall contributions and therefore all the elements need to be interlinked, integrated and purposeful. The possible attributive areas that aids in creating sustainable and vibrant public parks are to certain extent known and plausible, yet how much and to what degree each attributive area contributes is not adequately known and should be investigated further. Also, the evidences of such studies in developing countries and particularly in cities of South Africa are scarce.  Therefore, this blog will seek to explore how sustainable public parks can be engendered by considering the major control attributes that include engineering infrastructure, activities, sociability, and image, comfort and environment particularly in the context of cities of South Africa.