(upbeat music) - Hi, Reza, how are you? - Hi, Shay, I'm doing good, how are you doing? - I am good, I am good. Welcome to episode 10 of "Future Forward." - Double digits, Shay. - Double digits, fantastic, fantastic. And Reza, what is the topic for today? - Yeah, so today we're gonna talk about parks and public places, you know, with a little subtitle, "The Green Heart of Sustainable Cities." - I love it. - Yeah, so before we jump in, Shay, tell our listeners what "Future Forward" is about. - Yes, welcome to our new listeners and for our long-time listeners, we truly appreciate you coming back. Future Forward is a conversation Reza and I have been having for years now about strategic foresides, about cities, where our cities come from, the history of cities, the current state of our cities and the things we can learn from the historic past that can inform the building of sustainable thriving cities for all people. So welcome to episode 10. - Yeah, so Shay, this is a topic that I feel very passionate about and I'm gonna do more of the talking on this and you're gonna play the role of Reza on this one. - I'm excited, I'm really excited, yeah. - And the reason why I'm so passionate about parks is because when I came to Austin in the early '90s, one of the things that struck me about Austin was the amazing parks that the city had. I grew up in Mumbai, India where parks were like little pocket urban parks and any access to nice public places were not public. They were private places like clubs and when I came to Austin, I was so surprised there were parks for everyone, for the public. And one of those parks is Zilka Park and it's one of these places that has been a touchstone in my life in Austin. I've always lived not very far within a five mile radius of Zilka Park all the time that I've lived in Austin. And just to give you an example, the end of last week, weeks over, it's Friday evening and it's been a stressful week and what did I do? I rode my bike down to Zilka Park and the heart of Zilka Park is what we would consider like the soul of Austin, which is bark and springs. This beautiful spring fed natural swimming pool that's more than a quarter mile long on a three acre area that is fed by a natural spring, 32 million gallons of spring fed water from the Edwards Aquifer that runs through it. A constant 68 degrees all through the year and on a summer day, beautiful place to be. And so I went there and just my stress just melted away. I was with all the people. It was great to see people from all walks of life enjoying it as I enjoyed it too. And then the next day on Saturday, I do what I normally do on Saturdays, which is go for a run with my friend, Ed, on the Barton Creek Greenbelt that also starts in Zilka Park but runs for 12 and a half miles. You know, it's a protected Greenbelt area in the middle of the city. It's just, it blew me away that Austin had something like this. And I think this is so critical for cities to understand how important public places are. So that's kind of where I want to start as to why I feel so passionate about this topic. I've had a lot of involvement with parks. I was part of a nonprofit called Friends of Deep Betty. Deep Betty is another beautiful historic pool in Austin. So it's, I think it's an important one for us to talk about. - It is, it is. And I'll just chime in and share recently in Chicago. The thing I, Chicago is a phenomenal city in the summer. And the thing I love about the parks in Chicago, Grant Park, Millennium Park, these green spaces with both natural and man-made opportunities to engage with the park is that a thing I love is you meet both tourists and residents of a city in some of these parks. You get to experience the city the same way the people who live in the city like yourself as the example you just gave. Any tourists who come to Austin will experience Austin through the parks like you do. We experience Chicago through the parks like the residents of Chicago do. And I think very few spaces and places in cities afford the opportunity on a regular day for visitors and residents alike to truly experience the heart of a city. - Yeah, yeah, that's a great example. I also remember traveling to Chicago and going to Millennial Park and just enjoying Millennium Park, just enjoying the ability to experience the city in a way by being outdoors, beautiful city, beautiful park. And so a great example. So we'll do what we always do. Shae, we'll talk a little bit about historical context. We'll sort of bring up the current situation. I have some good sort of a deep dive into Austin as an example of the current situation. And then we'll talk about our two of our 20 laws of sustainable cities, we'll apply them to what we're talking about and then we'll sort of project forward into the future. So with a little bit of historical context, green spaces started even when civilization started with the Hane Gardens of Babylon. All of us have probably heard of that. The Greek civilization had green spaces, agoras. Medieval Europe had practice of monastery gardens and for monasteries, town commons in the middle of towns and so medieval Europe as it civilization developed had these concepts and had these spaces. The Industrial Revolution really drove the rise of public parks. And that was in response to urban overcrowding, poor health. And a big case study there is Central Park in New York City which was formed around 1857. - Iconic, yeah. - Yeah, iconic. One of those that everyone recognizes. In the 20th century, there was a Garden City movement by Ebenezer Howard. And then there was a lot of thinking with architects like Lake Kubice, he had this idea of towers in the park concept. I'm not sure if it was the best one, but he had, he's very modern, which is good. And it's like good different ideas about what to do with parks. And then the late 20th century, of course, with the start of environmental movements and urban ecology, parks became even more central and important to, there was also the rise of community gardens and the public actually participating in the planning of parks, so a lot more involvement. So it's been an interesting, as civilization has grown, as cities have grown, public spaces and parks have become an important part of it. And our two laws, when we talk about it, it will really touch on this. So yeah, that's the history, Shay, what do you think? - It fascinates in, I truly appreciate that you've sort of brought the historical intent of parks. Why did we start building parks in cities? And you touched on Luca Bocier's towers in the park, which, and again, I always love that you say, "Hey, we need lots of ideas here." But what ideas really start to benefit the people and consequently, the hope is that those ideas that benefit the people are the ones that continue to grow and thrive. Because the utilitarian approach of Luca Bocier was going to be expressed in the towers in the park as well. We won't dive into that, but again, just this constant assessment of the movement, the development of specific benefits to people in cities as expressed through parks, in this case, with Central Park maintaining its iconic status. I'm so glad you shared about history with us, otherwise, we just live in cities and we experience parks without realizing there was intention behind the development. - Yeah, yeah. So if we bring it to today in the role of parks in modern cities and you mentioned one of them, there are these physical and mental health benefits of having parks and those have been studied and proven out. You and I also realize that parks create social, social cohesion and community building, because all of us can be in parks. I mean, that's, you know, when I go to Barton Springs, I see people from all parts of Austin at Barton Springs, no matter what. And it does help with environmental, you know, environmental benefits, whether it's helping regulate temperature or, you know, lots of trees for the air. So parks are good for that too. There have been innovative approaches with parks, you know, in the last decade or two, you know, temporary and pop-up parks. New York has some very innovative things that they're doing with what they call New York's parking day. You have different types of parks and the High Line in New York is an example of a linear park where they converted railroad tracks into a park and, you know, when I was in New York City, we walked all the way up and down the High Line a couple times. I found it fascinating, just like a different experience of how to be outside, how to hide and experience in the city in different ways. These different vistas, you know, you go a little ways and you see, like, the Empire State or the this building or that building, it's just a lot of very interesting approach to a park. And there's also this integration of blue and green infrastructure, you know, things that can make, you know, cities better. But there are challenges, Shay, there's land scarcity in dense urban areas where it's difficult to get parks in. There are budget constraints for maintenance and development. Cities are constantly trying to prioritize what they spend money on and, you know, you know, public safety of courses at the top, infrastructures at the top, parks, usually parks and arts and those kinds of things fall to the bottom. And so it makes it difficult for those parks to be maintained well or new ones to be built. And then balancing the diverse user needs and activities that each park has. Zilker Park has flag football and soccer and ultimate frisbee and sand volleyball and there's a Zilker Hillside Theater. There's, you know, other community spaces. And so it makes it really difficult. And here I want to sort of give a very specific example of a challenge that Austin faced. They had what was called the Zilker Vision Plan, the city put forward this Zilker Vision Plan to really rethink Zilker and take it forward into the, you know, take it forward in what future needs were for the Zilker Park. But the big problem with that Zilker Vision Plan was it was driven by nonprofits that wanted to use the park for their needs. And this is where things sort of went off track. And my good friend Mark, I ride bikes with him and add every Sunday. And there were many, many, many weeks, in fact months where we kept talking about the Zilker Vision Plan and the work that he was doing to oppose it. So he's one of those true activists that don't just like something on Facebook and send out an email, but he was actually there at City Council at the commission meetings pushing back on, you know, what he calls the park, the park's industrial complex. These nonprofits that want to use public spaces for their own purposes. And some of those purposes are good. But the problem with these nonprofits is that their incentives are not aligned with the public. They have different stakeholders. They have endowments to keep. They have executives to pay. And Shae, you'll be shocked by hearing that one of the executives at one of these nonprofits has paid $300,000. - It's crazy. - Right? - This is, you know, this is, you know, the challenge with some of this public-private partnership is contravenes what communities actually need. These nonprofits, unlike cities, don't have transparency. They're not subject to open records or, you know, public information requests. So they can choose to do what they want. And the community and the citizens don't get to challenge that and understand what they're doing. And he's been digging into, like, he goes through their contracts. He goes through their mark has been really digging in to get the city to pay attention to some of these nonprofits that are taking advantage of Austin's park for their own needs and not for the community. - It's such a fantastic point. And it's not surprising to me. Thank you so much for sharing that. It's not surprising to me that that same problem you just highlighted about Zilco Park and the vision for Zilco Park for the future, which if allowed to be taken over but by certain entities will not serve the communities, the same thing is playing out in Chicago. It's the version of the Chicago High Line, which is called the 606. And I believe the original name for that. Anyway, the original name is not important now. It's the 606, 2.7 miles of elevated park and trail that runs, again, converted rail lines. But it's now running through the, what I guess you'd call the hippest parts of the city of Chicago. Wicca Park, Bucktown, Logan Square, which used to traditionally for minority communities. In fact, Logan Square specifically was what you would have considered the Latino neighborhood in Chicago. Homes in these places have skyrocketed and consequently the folk who could live in those parts of the city no longer can. And for that reason, they no longer have access to the 606, or they would have to drive from the suburbs where they now live because they couldn't afford in the city to come walk on the 606. And who does that? But again, it became a business essentially for some entities and cyclists ride across the 606, but you have to rent a bike, run by, I believe a private entity working with the city to ride a bike on the line. Layers upon layers of exclusion, essentially. So we always need to, what is this? I'll go back to the line you always share. How is this benefiting the community as it was intended to? - Yeah, and that's exactly what, that was Mark's question, which is how is the Zilka Vision Plan benefiting the community? I mean, here's another thing. The Zilka Park is hosts Austin City Limits Music Festival. - Yes. - One of the, one of the, it's-- - Iconic again. - It's the premier iconic music festivals in the US, and it's on Zilka Park and the organizer of that festival see, I would say it doesn't pay enough for doing it. And gets to take advantage of this beautiful park, for two weekends out of the year where the public can't use it. So only if you pay, you go to, I mean, the festival's a great festival, but is the city getting the benefit from it in a way? Like, yeah, we have businesses around, absolutely there's economic benefit from it. - Absolutely. - But I think there, C3 is probably not paying the true value of it to the city, for the city to maintain Zilka, as well as expand parks to others. And the other point that you're bringing up, Shae, which I think is the challenge that we're gonna explore in every one of these episodes, is, you know, some of the things that you do have these unintended consequences and putting arcs like 606 causes gentrification that creates exclusion. - Absolutely. - So how do we, how do we do things that are good for the community that do not exclude? You know, yes, like, we'll probably do an episode in the future about art in public places. - Yes. - And public art is actually a really good way of improving an area, but it gentrifies, it also creates gentrification. So there's all these unintended consequences, but Shae, what I'd like to do is to go back to our 20 laws, - Yeah. - And there were two we have in there that I'd like to touch on and see how it applies to this. - No, yes, introduce these laws last week or last episode. There are specifically two laws and that touched directly on this idea of the future of parks and public spaces. And the first one is what we've termed law eight, which is that public spaces foster social cohesion. And the frame in here is that accessible, world design, public spaces are essential, essential for fostering community interactions, civic engagement and social cohesion in cities. And this comes from the research of white, et al, 1980, I believe it came out, which is titled The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. This was the specific one we pulled this law from. And in it, they demonstrated the importance of public space design to ensure, to your point all the time, it benefits the communities in which the spaces exist, it increases the sense of community because they have a place that is essentially theirs because they pay taxes, if you wanna think about it that way, but they can also come, relax, enjoy, and feel a sense of belonging. But once you either take that away or make it inaccessible or feel to maintain it to the standards that it's supposed to, you start to see the opposite effect, a decreased sense of belonging in the community, increasing crime because this fracturing of the community leads to people not feeling like they belong to a group that they need to maintain, trust and community with. And the social interaction, the reduction of social interactions that happen as a result of flattening this law is what we experience when the parks and public spaces are not built or designed to foster social cohesion, yeah. - Yeah, that's a great one. - Yeah, I mean, I think everything we're talking about, like even the Silver Vision Plan, the Chicago 606, all these topics really, like me and my experience go to Barton Springs, social cohesion, so important to us, sustainable and thriving city. What's the next one, Shay? There's one more. - Yeah, law nine, law number nine, which is urban greening enhances resilience. And the idea here being just green spaces, urban vegetation improves both the quality of residents well-being, but also environmental quality, resilience to climate issues, 'cause it will come as no surprise to, I hope most of our listeners, these public spaces, urban parks, vegetation prevents flooding because the soil is held together and consequently absorbs water during rain and floods. And when you lose those, when you have concrete cities, essentially, you run off, happens and the effects of flooding negatively impact the residents of the city. So when we green our urban spaces, we increase the resilience of our cities and sort of pivotal research came from Walsh in 2014, which tied urban greening, urban green spaces to the benefits we gain in terms of sustainability and public health. And again, the opposite when you reduce the biodiversity in your city and the green spaces, you increase the heat island effect, your city will be a hotter city because there are no plants and greenery to absorb the heat and your residents who do not have spaces, green spaces to go experience nature, start to suffer from mental and physical health consequences. There's this thing that goes around online when someone is acting kind of wild or crazy on say Twitter, for example, people will say, go out and touch grass. It is absolutely true, it works. And so when we don't green our spaces in cities or find green public parks and spaces to, and we flout low number, we end up with adverse effects on both health, wellness, physical and resilience of both the people and the city. - Yeah, I think that's a great, like the analogy that I make, you know, as you talked about, you know, being on Twitter and, you know, this touch, touch grass, go touch grass, it's almost like grounding yourself. Like, I mean, it's almost like connect your mind with your body, right, your body feels emotion, your mind sort of can disconnect from it and just get like, you know, get in loops. And so, you know, parks are like the body of the city that helps keep everyone grounded in, because artificial spaces can just make you forget that we belong to nature, we come from nature, and that's what parks do, which is something that the thing is so important that we should not forget. - So these are great, and so I want to explore is five trends for the future of parks. And the first one is just as you touched on the law urban greening enhances resilience, the first one is climate resilience, you know, designing parks as flood retention areas, using permeable surfaces and rain gardens, urban forests for carbon sequestration and cooling. I think you've given an example of Singapore City and a garden approach to increasing green cover from 36% in 1986 to 47% in 2016, despite their rapid urbanization. And that's a great example of how they're using that approach to help that city with, you know, which basically just all it is as a city. The second one is biodiversity hubs. And so there's their movements to, you know, find can we create wildlife corridors through urban areas, because urban areas continue to sort of take away from what was, you know, habitated by wildlife. And, you know, it's important to maintain that diversity, that ecosystem, you know, there's an attempt to reintroduce native species and the habitat highlight as an example of how, you know, the way that it started was that there were these tracks and they had been abandoned. And native grasses and things just started growing there. And birds started coming and, you know, that was the instigation for, hey, maybe we need to make this into a park. So it's fascinating to see that parks can introduce this biodiversity, bring us back to sort of native things, because there's so much artificial stuff that we have in cities. - Yes. - The third one is vertical and rooftop garden. So if there's lack of space, can we take a different approach to having gardens? Can you have green facades and living walls? Can you do rooftop parks and Salesforce Park in San Francisco as an example of that? Kind of integrate urban agriculture and community gardens, you know, in towers, you know, you see some of those vertical agricultural spaces that are being explored. The third trend that's occurring, which I'm very curious to see if it's sort of maybe a better approach than Lake Cabicier's tower in a park, but, you know, it's something that actually benefits the community. - Yeah, less utilitarian. - Less utilitarian, more actually serving the community. The fourth one is engaging the community even more in the co-creation of these parks, you know, participatory budgeting for parks improvements, like involving the citizens and helping do that. Community led design workshops and charrettes. And I was part of that when we renovated the Deep Eddy Bath House. It was a historic bath house built in, you know, the 30s and 40s with the, you know, where was that federal government had all those works, progress, projects, and the bath house was built in that time and it had fallen apart. And so we, the, you know, the friends of Deep Eddy got together to, we did these little fundraisers to raise half the money and the city put in the other half of the money, so half a million. We raised the city put in a half a million and we renovated that place. But we did it with the architects. Like they involved us and the swimmers at Deep Eddy to design what the bath house was gonna be. And, and we made some different decisions about the women's restroom actually serving the women in there, not just a copy of the men's restroom. - Wow. - So that's a good example of, you know, involving the community and designing these spaces. - And there's adopt-a-park programs and volunteer stewardship. You know, it already exists now, but I think there's a drive to involve the community in that sense. And then the last, the fifth one, the fifth trend here is multi-functional spaces. So integrating renewable energy, you know, solar pavements, wind sculptures into the park itself, stormwater management through constructed wetlands. So actually building wetlands as part of the park to help with stormwater. So artificially created, but important to, you know, make that a stormwater runoff space. And then creating flexible spaces for markets, performances, emergency response, like all, you know, really rethinking the park to serve other purposes as well. Like Zilka Park is a great example. It has a hillside theater where every summer, you know, different community groups put on, you know, plays, musicals. In fact, the musical that I, that I saw that, that was playing on Friday night was legally blonde. And you know, the whole, you know, the whole community was out there sitting on their, you know, sitting on blankets and with their picnics and, you know, enjoying this show. So more of that trend is a way of really bringing the public out for different reasons. And maybe those people wouldn't come to Zilka Park or to Barton Springs, but they're musical fans. And so they come out and they experience the park in a different way. - Oh, no, that's so, so good. Thanks for sharing those five. And again, I'll touch quickly on something, a friend of ours we met with in Chicago. Just shared this weekend, the whole community will be having a, it's in the Oak Park River Forest area, just outside of Chicago. They will be having quote unquote, block parties happening in the parks. There's a beautiful park right outside of what is the residential. It's sort of the divide between the residential parts of the town or city River Forest and Oak Park. And you start to see the stores and the businesses almost on the other side of the park. But in that park area this weekend, everyone is going to be out there. Bring some food, bring some blankets. And tell me you will not have social cohesion when people feel like they are part of this community as expressed through their time together on a park. - Yeah, yeah. That's a great example. So I think the way that I'd like to close is how crucial parks are for sustainable cities and thriving communities. And how important it is for us to continue these innovative approaches that involve the community in forming these parks. And so my call to action before our listeners is to find a way, if you go to a park, involve yourself, ask questions, ask your city about it, ask, form a group, try to make that park something that everyone can enjoy because it's gonna make your city better. - That is so good. That is as clear a call to actions. I think we've had so far this year. So I'm so glad you shared that. It's been such an interesting, slightly sort of different from the hard infrastructure or energy topics, but critical because of the additional layer of these laws that we're now looking at. And one of them is around just the social infrastructure of cities being as important as the physical infrastructure. And nothing expresses that social fabric, social infrastructure as much as parks, libraries maybe, but parks and nature in cities. So thank you for making sure we covered this topic, Reza. - Yeah, yeah. Well, Shay, it was good chatting. Do we have a mailbag this week? - We do, we do. - And I'll shout out to Tyson, a friend of mine. And he's listened to every single episode. It's phenomenal and he enjoys it. He's the fascinating part about this is, Tyson is an amazingly thoughtful guy who isn't working in cities in any way. In fact, his work is in the tax and accounting space. So totally different from what you would expect, but deeply cares about community cities. And he is thoroughly enjoying the podcast and suggested that we should probably figure out a way. And this is, I think, the crux of his mailbag. Figure out a way to have a discussion board because he says after every episode, he really just wants to jump on somewhere and have a conversation. Synchronous or synchronous with other people who are listening so that he can share his ideas, ask questions and really engage. So that gave me a lot of things to think about, whether we should do that, how we'd handle that. So thank you so much for the mailbag, Tyson. - Yeah, Tyson, that was great. I love the idea. I think that's the whole thing that we're trying to invite our listeners to participate. And maybe that would be one way of participating. But great mailbag, it was fun. It was so fun doing this episode. It was fun doing every episode, but this one is very near and dear my heart. So I really enjoyed it. So yeah, thank you, Shay. - Fantastic. And so we come to the end of the episode. Thanks for listening. Like, share, subscribe if you haven't. And you're just listening. But as we always say, share with one friend so that we can continue to have this conversation with more people. And until next time, thank you. - Yeah. Thanks, everyone. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [MUSIC PLAYING] [BLANK_AUDIO]
