2016 Was A Great Year For Urban Parks In America

This has been a great year for new parks in cities all around America—but is that good news for all citizens?

- Aaron Betsky

Big surprise: Parks are now for yuppies. Some of us might still have an image of green and open public spaces as being places where people of all incomes, races, backgrounds, and interests can mingle, freeing themselves from a system of which the city grid is the very embodiment. There is a long history of landscape architects designing and municipalities decreeing parks to be not just places where those with means could enjoy their leisure, but also artificial Edens where the working class could escape from their grim places of working and living. The latter option is becoming more and more difficult to find.

To a large extent, that is because parks are in the hands of private or semiprivate entities. Since the emergence of business improvement districts in the 1970s (the first one was formed in 1970 in Toronto, and the first U.S. one in New Orleans in 1974), and the creation of public-private partnerships to help improve and even manage parks—the Central Park Conservancy, founded in 1980, has been doing this since 1998—it has become clear that the purpose of open spaces is to provide clean, safe environments where people who work around them can engage in activities that are seen to not tax the swards of green too much. No loud music, sex, or active team sports are allowed there.