Urban Parks
Parks in New York City:
Who gets funding? Who gets nothing?
Come along the ride with us, follow our site, and talk to our group. We’ll have you looking at Central Park in a whole new way by the time we’re done here.
What is the purpose of this project?
Everyone loves parks. They’re aesthetically pleasing, promote recreation, and indirectly boost real estate values. However, not every park is created equal. Areas with wealthier, more educated residents receive the cream of the park funding crop. Two recently built parks, the Highline and Brooklyn Bridge Park, are prime examples of such favoritism. Wealthy donors and government funding turned these “brown areas” into park masterpieces. Meanwhile parks in less wealthy, lower educated, and ethnic areas have received limited funding and are poorly maintained, if at all.
When looking at social sustainability in a city, parks should be considered and studied. They make up a complex aspect of the way a neighborhood functions. Does everyone have equal access to a park, or are some favored over others?
The view from New York's beautiful Battery Park.
Questions to focus on include: Which neighborhoods receive funding for parks? Who, demographically, does the park benefit? Does the park affect real estate in the area, or does real estate and its developers affect the park?
A brief explanation of the whole story:
In the pursuit of this thesis, we have investigated government funding of urban parks at the municipal level. For the sake of brevity, we focused our attention on New York City. Throughout the course of this investigation, we discovered certain flaws in the city’s funding policies. Most notably, for a city claiming to offer equal access to parks and recreation to all of its citizens, New York is doing a very poor job of attempting to provide realistic and safe parks for citizens in typically ‘undesirable’ areas, such as those with low incomes or new immigrant residents. Can you describe a logical explanation for this imbalance?
New York City: The City of Dreams
In his comprehensive plan for New York City’s future calls PLANYC 2030: Mayor Bloomberg has made one of his goals to have every citizen of New York City within a ten-minute walk of a park. The following is a paragraph from PLANYC 2030’s official website:
Although we’ve added more than 300 acres of parks in the last five years, more than two million New Yorkers live more than ten minutes from a park. This shortage of open space threatens our environment, our health, and our quality of life. That’s why we will invest in new recreational facilities across every borough, opening hundreds of schoolyards as local playgrounds, reclaiming undeveloped sites that were designated as parks but never finished, and expanding usable hours at existing fields by installing lights and turf fields. We will re-imagine our streets and sidewalks by adding new greenstreets and public piazzas in every community as part of our strategy to create a more inviting public ream.
Clearly, Mayor Bloomberg has an idea of how important parks and greenspaces are to New York.
But, does quantity equal quality?
