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Outdoor Schooling: With the coronavirus still tearing through the United States, the usual excitement of the new school year has been replaced with dread. Virtual instruction has not worked well for teachers, students, or parents, and experts worry that reopening the same old school buildings, even with precautions, could cause a spike in new cases.
Once again, outdoor public spaces could help break this impasse. During a tuberculosis outbreak at the beginning of the twentieth century, doctors helped schools in New York City and elsewhere to move their classes outdoors or into open-sided buildings to reduce the spread of the disease—even in the wintertime (New York Times).
Likewise, today a handful of schools like the private Painted Oak Nature School in Hopewell, NJ, expect to reopen without a hitch, because they already use the nearby natural environment as their classroom every day (Next City). It would be no easy task to move entire public school systems outdoors, but given the alternatives, it may be the best option for some communities.
The Many Layers of Park Equity: The factors that make a park system equitable are multifaceted. To start, as many have observed during the current pandemic, low-income neighborhoods often lack access to public green space (New York Times).
However, access is only the beginning. As Alissa Walker observes, mainstream efforts to provide additional park access, like the well-known BeltLine in Atlanta, GA, can displace and disrupt adjacent communities of color (Curbed). The public officials and professionals responsible for creating and sustaining parks, argues Colby Takeda, can do better by moving toward a co-design approach, both during the pandemic and beyond (NRPA).
In order to better serve people without shelter who often spend the most time in our public spaces, place management organizations can also pursue creative partnerships with social services organizations. In Atlanta's Woodruff Park, for example, Project for Public Spaces has had the pleasure of working with Janika Robinson, a full-time case worker dedicated solely to the park and the people in it, through a partnership between the Atlanta Downtown Improvement District and HOPE Atlanta (Next City).
This is not anywhere near an exhaustive list of park equity strategies, but even this sampling reveals the many layers of thinking and action the task demands.
The Americans with Disabilities Act at 30: While great strides have been made since the adoption of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990, especially in the public realm, there is still much more work to do (Smart Cities Dive). In particular, as Steve Wright argues, designers often do not apply the same creativity and thoughtfulness to accessibility that they do to other details. "If the professional’s attitude is anti-ADA," he writes, "their designs come out complicated, costly, confounding and non-compliant." We hope that placemakers with design chops will take up this challenge, and ensure their creative community-based practice includes people of all abilities.
Two Kinds of Community Engagement: As urban planner James Rojas has tried to reconcile his formal education with his lived experience as a Gay Chicano throughout his career, he came to the conclusion that there are two main types of community engagement (Common Edge).
"Information sharing is the most common," writes Rojas. "Agencies, municipal governments, planning firms, and advocacy groups use it to inform the public about issues, programs, plans, and sometimes get feedback. We’re all familiar with transactional engagement. It’s what the planning profession specializes in; it’s what I was taught to practice at MIT. "
"Knowledge producing is a deeper form of engagement that taps into people’s lived experience, emotions, and imagination. ... It is only by exploring our feelings and confronting the inequities that pertain to race, class, gender roles, sexual orientation, age, immigration status, and ethnic identity that we can uncover knowledge, create a unified voice, encourage self-determination, and begin the planning process. "
Placemaking Playbook: Finally, here's a roundup of 18 recent innovative placemaking projects and ideas making headlines:
- The dozens of cities that have declared racism a public health crisis (CityLab)
- A socially distanced park clean-up in Toronto, ON (Park People)
- A reform in Berkeley, CA, to remove police from traffic stops (New York Times)
- A report highlighting park trends, challenges, and leading practices in 27 Canadian cities (Park People)
- The coexistence of a community garden and a tent city in Vancouver, BC (News 1130)
- A guide to socially distant walking meetings (Washingtonian)
- The invention of the police (The New Yorker)
- An interview with Anthony Taylor on using the outdoors to fight for racial justice in Minneapolis, MN (Men's Journal)
- The uncertain fate of swap meets in South Central Los Angeles (L.A. Taco)
- Awe-inspiring photos of New York's biggest, hidden public space: the subway system (New York Times)
- A statue of a Black Lives Matter protestor in Bristol, UK, that was erected and taken down within 24 hours (The Guardian)
- A marketplace in Portland, OR, for indigenous vendors (Next City)
- A guide on how to start a parks-on-wheels program (NRPA)
- Six stories of neighborhood pandemic problem-solvers from around the world (NPR)
- Lessons in micro-mobility, courtesy of the late Segway (CityLab)
- An international coalition to build the 15-minute city (CityLab)
- The struggle for the urban soundscape (The Atlantic)
- The problem with solutions (Places Journal)
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