Urban Parks: Why and Wherefore?

I am re-reading Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" (it rings as true today page by page as it ever has--this is one wise book) and I am struck by her insistence that urban parks must be designed and maintained for a specific purpose: " to intensify and knit together" the network of city streets within a neighborhood, and not "to island off different uses from each other." Jacobs argues that the urban street must be lively and interesting so that from their casual interactions urban residents will provide the emergent and self-organizing care for their own neighborhood safety and stability that nobody else can provide. At the same time, she argues that the urban "district" must provide the political power to deal with threats from the outside. Finally, parks must serve to knit streets together into a neighborhood fabric.

This week, from the revered British medical journal the Lancet comes a reminder that urban green space is also critically linked to public health. A Scottish research team found that access to parks and other green space eases health disparities for poor communities. The study found that "low income was associated with an increased incidence of all-cause mortality of 93% of areas with the fewest forests, parks and playing fields but only 43% in the greenest areas."

Taken together, Jane Jacobs and the Lancet study suggest that urban green space design is a delicate balancing act--that well designed spaces can dramatically improve the lives of poor communities in cities, assuming that those green spaces attract residents and do not contribute to the fragmentation of the urban neighborhood fabric.