Urban Parks as Critical Infrastructure: Equity and Access during Covid-19
By Zef Egan, Zbigniew Grabowski, Timon McPhearson, Christopher Kennedy and Bianca Lopez
As people across the United States deal with the intersecting crises of racism and Covid-19, we need a clear strategy for addressing long standing issues of health disparities in cities. Health inequities result from long running issues of environmental justice, ongoing crises of public health, uneven distributions of pre-existing conditions, labor and housing precarity, and inequities in access to outdoor spaces that allow for appropriate physical distancing and exercise. While the pandemic exposes systemic flaws in the public health infrastructure of the United States it also exposes stark inequities in access to healthy environments, and how people are policed within what open spaces are available to them. Addressing health disparities in cities requires a more equitable parks policy. To support this goal, the health benefits of parks need to be considered alongside the critical infrastructure services they provide, services increasingly important under climatic and social instability.
Parks and Public Health and Safety
Parks provide numerous environmental and health benefits critical to wellbeing. For example, researchers at Chiba University in Japan have found that parks help people focus and improve mood and cognitive function. Parks also reduce anxiety, help people recover from stress, can contribute to building social skills for young people, and may contribute to community resilience. Forests and large parks have even been found to improve immune function. Now more than ever we are rediscovering the manifold uses of urban parks and green spaces.
Urban parks and green spaces also encourage bicycling, walking and jogging and improve overall health. Promoting physical activity is paramount to confronting crises in public health. According to the CDC, 46% of Americans are not meeting minimum aerobic physical activity guidelines. A quarter of Americans engage in no leisure-time physical activity at all. Researchers at New York University found that comorbidities significantly increase the likelihood of patients requiring hospitalization. Obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, all of which are tied to malnutrition and sedentary lifestyles, were leading comorbidities contributing to COVID-19 fatality. Exercise can treat and reduce the prevalence of many of the comorbidities associated with vulnerability to COVID-19.
Parks as Critical Infrastructure
The numerous public health benefits of parks clearly demonstrate their role as critical infrastructure. The department of homeland security defines critical infrastructure as:
“Critical infrastructure describes the physical and cyber systems and assets that are so vital to the United States that their incapacity or destruction would have a debilitating impact on our physical or economic security or public health or safety. The nation’s critical infrastructure provides the essential services that underpin American society”
Aside from public health, parks can be integrated into citywide infrastructure systems that provide other critical services such as transportation, flood protection, protection from lethal heat waves, support local and regional economic activity, and form part of the education system. Parks have the added benefit of being multi-functional infrastructure systems, in that a single park, and parks linked through other green and grey infrastructure elements, can provide many functions at the same time.
A central mechanism for realizing the multi-functionality of park systems is through the green corridor concept. Green corridors normally involve some combination of greenery, bike and pedestrian lanes, and open air seating. They promote ecological and social connectivity and can provide dense urban neighborhoods with green spaces that also lead to other hubs like parks and waterfronts, promoting cycling, jogging and walking. In the summer, green and blue spaces can provide invaluable cooling. Researchers at Oxford and the University of British Columbia found that opening a greenway doubled the likelihood of achieving 20 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity. The odds of being sedentary for more than 9 hours declined by 54%. According to researchers at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University: “Greenways with dense residences, mixed land-use, advanced street network and large parks yielded positive effects on supporting physical activities, and advanced public transportation further improved activity diversity.” These researchers recommend that novel greenways connect dense urban populations to local parks and waterfronts. They found that greenways in very dense neighborhoods without access to parks were more likely to be used if they led to large urban parks or other open spaces like waterfronts, where they can be especially useful for flood protection. Well designed parks can also address inland and river flooding while providing public health services. Additionally, parks and green corridors, cool and clear the air, and can save thousands of lives during heat waves. Not only do parks and green spaces provide many infrastructure services, they can do so at a fraction of the economic costs and greenhouse gas emissions of grey infrastructure systems.
Inequity in Park Access and Use
COVID-19 has inspired a collective reimagining of urban life, and combined with widespread uprisings against police violence, centers the need for justice in these collective visions. Seemingly ordinary and everyday practices of hopping on the subways or buses are no longer seen as safe for the majority of urban residents, which was already a reality for many marginalized peoples. In many cases sidewalks are not wide enough to safely social distance. Urban transportation networks need to be rethought to promote public health and social justice.
Overall, accessibility to green space and safe alternative transit is extremely unequal. According to the Trust for Public Land, 100 million Americans including 27 million children do not have access to green spaces. And poor people and people of color are more likely to lack access to green space and to face disinvestment in local parks, which often do not include basic amenities like bathrooms or basketball courts. Closing smaller parks, like playgrounds and basketball courts, deprives people far from large urban parks of open space and fresh air. As environmental justice reporter Nina Lakhani points out in the Guardian, “the places with least per-capita park access include Morris Park in the Bronx and Corona in Queens — which are both predominantly black and brown neighborhoods where coronavirus has hit hard.” Moreover, the murder of Ahmaud Arbery (who was jogging in his neighborhood as he often did) and the profiling and harassment of Christian Cooper (an avid Central Park birder, and board member of the New York Audubon Society) painfully remind us that equal “access” is not enough. For open and green spaces in cities to fully serve diverse communities urban planners and policy makers must consider and address the very real concerns of communities of color, including embracing culturally diverse uses of parks, and putting in place policies to safeguard the lives of people of color in all public spaces including public parks.
Approaches for Equitable Green Networks
How can we create equitable green spaces? How can we ensure that green spaces serve the needs of diverse urban communities? Linking large and small urban parks to dense urban neighborhoods through green corridors encourages equitable use of parks and generally increases use of green corridors by city dwellers. By networking parks and green corridors, and focusing on improving streetscapes in areas without parks where alternative transit connections are lacking, cities may maximize benefits to public health and help address issues of unequal access to parks. However, many such efforts have been part of larger scale redevelopment efforts tied to rapid gentrification. In response, many cities like Atlanta, GA, and Portland, OR, are actively seeking mechanisms of urban greening that protect housing access and community ownership of land.
Smaller green spaces provide a range of social and ecological benefits as well, and may be integrated into the urban fabric in a less transformative manner. Creating pocket parks, and greener and more multi-functional streetscapes encourages people to exercise and get fresh air while practicing social distancing. These types of initiatives can be found around the globe, with cities in the United States and Europe opening streets to restaurants and bars and expanding pedestrianized areas. Calls to liberate golf courses, like the 120 acres course in the Bronx, for public use, or to host “Shakespeare in the Parking Lot” reimagine already existing spaces for multifunctional uses that involve diverse communities. Cities may empower neighborhoods to develop green spaces through community block grants, and through even simpler measures like providing a patch of soil and having the gardeners who happen to live there grow what they feel is right. Parks departments in some cities like Miami, already acknowledge that surrounding communities are the ones who should set what uses of parks are culturally appropriate and allowable. Participatory planning of green space could give urbanites, renters included, a feeling of investment and belonging. Current autonomous zones in some US cities like Seattle, could be made permanent, as could other means of participatory and deeply democratic governance of urban space.
Ongoing Research to Support Equity of The Critical Services of Parks
Researchers at the Urban System Lab have been asking these questions and proposing more equitable strategies for acknowledging the socio-cultural and environmental benefits of urban green spaces long before the coronavirus pandemic. The current moment clarifies the ways in which parks and green spaces are critical infrastructure as well as calling upon city dwellers to reimagine what green spaces could look like and who green spaces serve.
Bianca Lopez, a postdoctoral fellow at the Urban Systems Lab who studies biodiversity in urban ecosystems and how people use urban green spaces and interact with nature in cities, told us more about the purpose of the survey: “We are specifically focusing the survey on how people are using parks during COVID-19 and how the ability to access parks may influence mental health during this time. We are also asking questions about people’s concerns about visiting parks (including ability to social distance, police presence, and other factors) and what features of parks are important to people. We’re hoping the results of this survey will inform budgeting and other policies around parks to help people get the access and features they want and need.” Lopez added that “More research is needed about how different communities use urban parks (since different people have different needs and uses for public spaces) and who feels safe in parks — since we’ve recently seen examples of how dangerous it can be to birdwatch, jog, or otherwise use parks while Black.”
Learn more about the results of our survey in our pre-print article: Parks are Critical Urban Infrastructure: Perception and Use of Urban Green Spaces in NYC During COVID-19.
Project partners: Building Healthy Communities NYC, The New York State Health Foundation, and The Nature Conservancy.
Zef Egan is an environmental educator and writer. He is pursuing a masters focused on Environmental and Social Justice at the Graduate Center. @EganZef
Zbigniew Grabowski’s research focuses on the social, ecological, and technological relationships driving landscape scale patterns of human well being and ecological health with an emphasis on hydrological systems. He is a Research Fellow at the Urban Systems Lab and the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. @zjgrabowski
Timon McPhearson is the Director of the Urban Systems Lab and Associate Professor of Urban Ecology at the New School. He investigates the ecology in, of, and for cities and teaches urban resilience, systems thinking, and urban ecology. @timonmcphearson
Christopher Kennedy is the Assistant Director at the Urban Systems Lab and a Lecturer in the Parsons School of Design. His work focuses on understanding the socio-ecological benefits of spontaneous urban plant communities in NYC, and the role of civic engagement in developing new approaches to environmental stewardship and nature-based resilience. @chrisleekennedy
Bianca Lopez is a postdoctoral research fellow in urban ecology at the Urban Systems Lab and The New School Environmental Studies Program. Lopez is an ecologist who studies the effects of urban development on biodiversity (especially plants) and interactions between people and nature in cities. She is also interested in collaboration between artists and scientists, and how art can inspire people to conserve the environment.
