Public Space as a Solution: Four Lessons from Lexington
Our recent visit to Kentucky shows how thoughtful and sustained investments in public space can address social, economic and environmental challenges
Lexington is the second largest city in the Commonwealth of Kentucky and is located in the famed Bluegrass region, a geography that has helped the city earn a reputation as the “Horse Capital of the World.” As one of the most recent cities to join the Reimagining the Civic Commons network, Lexington hosted Civic Commons Studio #8 in October. Our studios gather practitioners, as well as national thought leaders, for three days of on-the-ground tours and conversations on the opportunities and challenges of public space work. The goal: foster the capacity of practitioners and leaders in our network to make innovative investments of time and money in public space, to drive transformative change across the nation.
In Lexington, we saw a notable amount of innovative public space work, both completed and moving through the pipeline.
This work includes the newly built Town Branch Commons and the nature-inspired and community-supported water feature Splash! at Charles Young Park. We also reviewed plans for the upcoming transformation of acres of asphalt into the future Town Branch Park, visited Isaac Murphy Memorial Art Garden and discussed the coming complete redesign of Phoenix Park in the heart of downtown. In reviewing the work on the ground, it became clear that during the last decade, Lexington has grown support for more investment in public space, investing nearly one quarter of the community’s federal American Rescue Plan (ARPA) dollars in parks and public spaces.
Yet the Lexington Civic Commons team, with the support of local leaders, residents and community groups, is not stopping to revel in their success at capital improvements. Instead, the community, through a new 20-year Comprehensive Plan and other local efforts, is laying the groundwork for more walkable neighborhoods, strengthening park and greenspace access and improving economic mobility for residents. Local parks advocates are thinking about how to fund parks and greenspaces over the long term, and others are working to create a system that stewards these spaces well into the future. In short, investments in civic infrastructure are being leveraged to foster a more engaged, equitable and environmentally and economically resilient place.
Studio participants saw the potential of what a dense, walkable, bikeable, nature-rich public realm can do in a place where culture and history favor single-family homes and lots of driving. This culture and development pattern in Lexington, combined with the city’s steady population growth creates an unsustainable path over time; thus the Civic Commons work is both an invitation for Lexingtonians to connect in public space and a demonstration of what happens when a community invests in high quality civic infrastructure as a path to a more connected, equitable and sustainable future.
“A developer’s job is to make a particular development work for them, not to do what is good for the community. That’s our job. You need policies and incentives to ensure that development equitably and sustainably meets community goals.”
— Lexington Vice Mayor and Council Member Dan Wu
Public space as a solution
As an organization, Reimagining the Civic Commons is constantly exploring how public space can address the pressing social, environmental and economic problems facing our nation. Research and experience tells us that public space has a key role in solving many of the challenges faced by cities — including growing social isolation, incidents of racism and intolerance, accelerating climate change, and economic segregation. At our 8th Studio, we delved into seeing how both Lexington and other places approach these challenges, and how public space can be a bigger piece of a community’s solutions.
Moving from loneliness to connection. Across the whole set of Lexington’s public spaces, we saw the Civic Commons team and partners working to connect Lexingtonians to each other at a time when loneliness is invoked as a national epidemic by the U.S. Surgeon General. From the family-friendly design and programming of downtown parks, to the invitation inherent in the Town Branch Commons (and connected Town Branch and Legacy trails) to visit new neighborhoods and connected public spaces by bike or foot, Lexington is offering everyone a glimpse into public space efforts to combat the American tendency towards a privatized, disconnected, car-centric lifestyle.
“The Town Branch Commons has started to catalyze and connect neighborhoods that were previously separated by infrastructure.” — Kate Orff, founder of SCAPE Landscape Architecture
Turning distrust into collaboration. Prior to 2014, local children visited the fountain in Thoroughbred Park for water play, though the water was untreated and the fountain structure unsuitable. In 2014, the city announced plans to install a new interactive water play area at nearby Charles Young Park. But residents who lived near the park located in downtown’s historic Black neighborhood (the East End) were opposed to the project. They had not been included in the planning and decision making, and they expressed concern that the city would erase the history of the park’s namesake Brig. Gen. Charles Young — West Point’s first Black graduate and a Kentucky resident.
So the city, along with partners the Blue Grass Community Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, reimagined their approach to engaging neighbors, prioritizing public life, relationships and building trust. Through a 2-year pilot and an active design process, they got the community, including local kids, meaningfully involved as co-creators of the park’s transformation. Today Charles Young Park has a new playground and interactive water feature — and has become a key anchor for diverse public life as it is now the number one most visited park in downtown Lexington.
Building climate resilience. Town Branch Commons is central to Lexington’s civic commons approach, and is a 2.5 mile public-private park and trail system that traces the historic Town Branch Creek through downtown. It links the city’s two major trails, Town Branch Trail and the Legacy Trail, providing 22 miles of uninterrupted pathways that connect downtown to Lexington’s world-famous rural landscape.
Designed by the noted landscape architect Kate Orff from SCAPE, in partnership with local design firm Gresham Smith, the corridor system includes continuous bike and walking paths, a lush green band of Bluegrass through downtown and offers a connection between new and existing parks, as well as improved water quality. Stormwater management is at the heart of Town Branch Commons, and it includes bioswales and rain gardens of native greenery that collect and filter stormwater runoff while mitigating urban flooding. More than 300 trees were planted along the greenway to provide shade and counter urban heat island effect, trees which have tripled downtown’s existing tree canopy.
Catalyzing equitable economic development. Research shows that investing in “quality of life and place” including things like trails, parks, green spaces and other natural and outdoor amenities, is more effective at attracting people, families and follow-on economic growth than many traditional economic development policies. Research also confirms that people living in communities with more economic connectedness — places where interactions across economic diversity are more common — have significantly more upward economic mobility. Thus investments in public spaces can play a key role in a more equitable local economy, aiding communities in attracting people and businesses and fostering vital cross-class interactions that can improve individual economic circumstances.
In Lexington, investments in public space in Charles Young Park, Town Branch Commons, the Legacy Trail and Isaac Murphy Memorial Art Garden — named for the famous Black jockey who was an East End resident and whose home stood at the Garden’s site — exemplify these principles in action. These transformative public spaces have catalyzed development in the East End, including the creation of The MET, a mixed-use residential and commercial development located adjacent to the Isaac Murphy Memorial Art Garden which serves as the trailhead for the Legacy Trail. The East End is now home to small businesses and organizations that benefit the neighborhood, including the Artists’ Studios, affordable work studios for local artists; DV8 Kitchen, a popular restaurant that focuses on “second chance employment” for formerly incarcerated and formerly addicted residents; and the Artists’ Village, which offers affordable live-work space to artists and other creative entrepreneurs who want to own their own homes. Most importantly, the investments in high quality public space have begun to reconnect the East End neighborhood to other parts of the city, including downtown, acting as conduits to the cross-class human interactions that fuel more equitable outcomes.
Big ideas to take home
In our time together at the Studio, we delved deeper into the ideas and innovative strategies of national thought leaders who see public space as a solution.
Harvard Professor Danielle Allen, the founder and director of nonprofit Partners in Democracy, spoke to Studio attendees about her project of “democracy renovation” in an era of wealth inequality, rising suicide rates, political polarization and mass incarceration — an era she described as the “great pulling apart.” Allen encouraged the practitioners and community leaders at our Studio to consider both the hard infrastructure of public space (like parks and libraries) as well as the soft “relationship infrastructure” that connects people to one another.
“The health of our democracy in the 21st century will depend upon whether we can reactivate public space as a solution to the challenges in front of us.”
— Danielle Allen, President, Partners in Democracy
At an all-star panel composed of landscape architect Kate Orff (a recipient of the 2017 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant”); urban and climate innovation champion Chante Harris and Resilient Cities Network’s Ron Harris (who is also running for U.S. Congress), the discussion turned to how public space could deliver environmental justice in communities. Environmental justice and economic justice are currently being considered in siloes, Chante Harris reminded us, but they should be connected.
“We have an opportunity to look at greenhouse gas emissions reductions as a way of investing in community, and we can explore co-ownership models with community. In 10 years, we could have communities where there’s both renewable energy and a better quality of life.”
— Chante Harris, urban and climate innovation champion
By the end of the Studio, it was clear that within transformative public space are some of the solutions we desperately need. Our shared civic commons can be places of human connection, drawing people back into public life and improving our health and wellbeing. Our civic commons can become places for celebrating diversity, creating common ground for belonging and joyful moments shared across differences in ways that are critical to our democracy. Our civic commons can be places of resilience, the green lungs of our cities that absorb pollution and excess stormwater while cooling neighborhoods. And, our civic commons can be an equitable economic development strategy that catalyzes additional investment so all can thrive.
Reimagining the Civic Commons is a collaboration of The JPB Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, William Penn Foundation, and local partners.
