By Peter Harnik

Peter Harnik has had a 30-year career in conservation advocacy and environmental protection, including co-founding the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy. Harnik has worked to create parks and trails at both the national and local levels. In 1995, he became a consultant on urban park issues to the Trust for Public Land. A 1970 graduate of The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Harnik now lives with his wife in Arlington, Virginia.

Once upon a time, America had compact cities surrounded by vast, pastoral areas of fields, streams, and forests. Today, America has enormous cities surrounded by even more colossal metropolitan regions. As a result, most city dwellers now principally experience nature-or even simple open spaces-through their city's park systems.

City parks are not as famous as national parks, and most of them are not kept up as well. They don't have geysers, or underground caverns, or snowcapped mountaintops but, acre for acre and hour for hour, city parks are the places where Americans most often enjoy open space and outdoor recreation.

Which comes first, the healthy city or the healthy park? Not long ago the question itself would have been laughable, since both cities and parks seemed in terminally failing health. Today, both are recovering and the question has real relevance. Attractive, safe, and usable parks bolster neighborhoods, but cities need a strong economic base to fix (or create) those parks in the first place. That economic base is hard to attain without middle-class taxpayers, who often will not live somewhere that lacks decent parks.

Olmstead's Ideas

More than a century ago, Frederick Law Olmstead, the great park designer and city planner known as the father of landscape architecture, found this very issue to be central to his work when he pointed out that a "park exercises a very different and much greater influence upon the progress of a city in its general structure than any other ordinary public work." In other words, parks give a city a survival advantage. Every city, after all, is in competition with every other city, not to mention every other suburb and small town. By performing all the miraculous functions that people appreciate-cleaning the air, giving cooling shade, providing space for recreation and play, offering attractive vistas, and furnishing outdoor environmental classrooms-parks improve the quality of life in a city. Each amenity, from the job market to the housing stock to cultural opportunities to even the weather, is part of the equation people use to decide where to live. A great park system can positively tip the balance.

Parks and Cities

Are you interested in seeing how parks can help shape the growth of a city? Look at Chicago, Denver, and Kansas City. Intrigued by public/private partnerships? Consider Atlanta, Houston, New York, and St. Louis. Seeking excellent neighborhood-based planning? Study Minneapolis and Seattle. Turning run-down riverfronts into cultural and recreational promenades? Read about Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. Converting ugly highways into parkland and using the amenity to redevelop neighborhoods? Boston, Portland, and San Francisco. Ecologically based planning? Phoenix. Community gardens? Philadelphia. Greenways and rail trails? Baltimore, Dallas and Indianapolis. Parks as stimulators of tourism? San Diego. The list goes on and on. Cities face overarching problems yet tackle and solve them in unique and instructive ways.

Many of our biggest cities now have leadership, from either the mayor's office, the citizen sector, or the corporate community, and sometimes from all three. There is a "followership" as well. Most big cities have hundreds or thousands of volunteers, who are demonstrating their deep commitment to parks by doing physical labor, donating money or other goods, or giving their time and personal skills to beautify and improve one park or the entire system. As a result of this rejuvenation, parks in some cities are taking on the physical, spiritual, and economic roles that they have been unable to assume since before World War II.

The New Urban Vision

The new urban vision is also playing a role on the other side of the equation-far out in the suburbs. There, some residents are beginning to recognize that large-lot, autodependent living has its own set of drawbacks, and as higher-income families with a variety of lifestyle choices realize that there is more than one American dream, the attraction of "green cities" is helping to provide an alternative to urban sprawl and lack of investment in city centers.

Almost exactly 100 years ago, the United States was in the midst of the City Beautiful movement, a great emotional outpouring of enthusiasm for architectural and urban planning that shaped and reshaped many of our cities-clearing tenements, opening up broad avenues and vistas, generating huge increases in parkland, and yielding monumental signature buildings. After centuries of ever-more cramped and unhealthy conditions in urban agglomerations, the awesome economic power of cities had finally produced enough personal wealth to allow some people to dream of a life-a city life-that was both beautiful and urbane. The movement was potentially transforming, but it was nipped in the bud by growth of the automobile culture and by suburbs, which dominated most of what happened for the rest of the century.

The City Revival Movement

Now, 100 years later, we are in the midst of a new movement, a City Revival movement. As one indicator, the park departments themselves are trying to revive and revitalize what they have. For Americans, who are generally reluctant to spend money fixing old things when they would prefer to throw them out and buy new ones, that's an impressive development.

The suburbs are by no means passé, but the pendulum is swinging back. With this trend comes a renewed appreciation of the physical location, shape, and design of our big cities-and of the parks that are so instrumental to that design. To understand where each of our big cities is going, we must know where each has come from.

Some of the facts are impressive, some are bleak. Some of the stories are heartwarming, some infuriating. Taken together, the information should help all Americans-including urban planners, park professionals, park advocates, and just plain park users-to gain new insights into the workings of the devilishly complicated public spaces called urban parks.

This article is excerpted from Peter Harnik, Inside City Parks, published in 2000 by the Urban Land Institute (www.uli.org/indexJS.htm or 1-800-321-5011).