PHILADELPHIA—During a lull in official proceedings, park formula directors, conservationists and urban park advocates followed a Benjamin Franklin Parkway tour consultant past the iconic Philadelphia Museum of Art and into the city’s former Boathouse Row, where gingerbread pavilions anchor one of the nation’s most important landmarks. maximum colorful rowing communities.
As the non-profit City Parks Alliance on Climate Equity and Resilience at its biennial Grand Conference
Two seniors sent through Biden’s management to serve as keynote speakers in Greater
Landrieu and Haaland touted the administration’s America the Beautiful initiative, a plan to conserve 30 percent of the country’s land and water by 2030 through public-personal partnerships. Haaland noted that the plan represented the first national conservation goal. Landrieu, now Biden’s chairman’ senior adviser on infrastructure coordination, touted a billion-dollar bid to encourage conservation partnerships involving governments at all levels, nonprofits and the personal sector. “Parks are the most democratic things that exist in the United States of America,” he said.
Landrieu, who was in New Orleans for Hurricanes Katrina and Ida, said he had learned a lot about rebuilding communities and asked convention attendees to perceive the role of infrastructure in the climate crisis. to allow us to get what goes in and what comes out,” he said. “New Orleans parks are now being used as retention ponds because of this great concept we had that you literally can’t beat Mother Nature. The water will get away with you.
That,” he said, we will have the Dutch to thank. ” This is the great concept that the Dutch taught us,” he said. Doing that will create another way of thinking about things, because the design of parks, the design of streets, the design of neighborhoods reflect the way other people interact with each other. You see, the design is the thing. it is designed next to the point, it will produce a result next to the point.
By assembling a bipartisan coalition for his $1. 2 trillion infrastructure bill to build roads and bridges, Landrieu said, the president also sought to “make sure that each and every child in America has access to high-speed internet. “
Internet access was at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Landrieu said, adding: “Knowledge is the wonderful equalizer in America and the president and vice president need to point to the game box and make sure everyone has access to it, not only in urban areas, but also in rural areas.
However, Landrieu said he needs all children to have more than just wisdom and believes it is for young children to have public spaces and public parks, as he grew up spending every day in the two New Orleans parks designed by Frederick Law Olmstead. One of them, City Park, is 50% larger than New York’s Central Park, which Olmsted also designed.
Earlier this year, the Yale School of the Environment announced that it had partnered with the Central Park Conservancy and Natural Areas Conservancy to manage and mitigate the effects of climate substitution on parks. The partnership plans to create the Central Park Climate Lab to evaluate practices with park systems across the country. Fifty-five percent of the world’s population now lives in urban areas, and there are more than one million acres of urban parks in the United States vulnerable to climate substitution.
While dating between parks and updating the climate is crucial, Landrieu said parks need to be controlled fairly:
“How do we live and paint together? He asked, “Is each and every one invited to the park?Are the parks in each and every neighborhood, so that each and every child can have an equivalent opportunity?Once the park is built, does each and every one have the opportunity to be safe and fair and informed of what they want to be informed?Is there enough for each and every one?Does it nourish and integrate the rest of its public space so that the people begin to breathe?
Interior Secretary Haaland began her remarks by introducing herself as a member of the Pueblo de Laguna in New Mexico, the daughter of veterans and “proud single mother of a queer boy. “
As the first Native American to serve as a closet secretary, Haaland reflected on her reporting in the wild as a child and said everyone in America had something to contribute to conservation.
“Breeders and farmers have a strong conservation effect,” he said. “Other indigenous people have millennia of classical wisdom to contribute, other people who love city parks can join the effort. Anyone can be a component of it. Local governments can and do leverage their skills and experience to cope with the moment provided. And Interior is here to help.
Haaland said he had lived paycheck to paycheck, suffering to pay rent and food, for much of his adult life. “I know how much the city’s resources can affect families like mine, families with limited resources, who need to make sure their children grow up in healthy communities,” Haaland said.
Haaland said Philadelphia is a “suitable” host city for Greater.
Haaland said he recently met with an organization of young people from the San Diego National Wildlife Refuge, who were getting to know the ecosystems. the earth.
“As they grow up and live their lives, they won’t forget this fun and it will help them care about this place,” Haaland said. “These young people are likely to be guilty stewards of the land because they have the opportunity to delight in it firsthand. “
Lena Chan, biodiversity of the National Parks Board of Singapore, spoke in Greater
Chan said that for many people, biodiversity in cities is an oxymoron. But since the majority of the world’s population now lives in cities, he said, the strain to replace climate and develop biodiversity now lies with cities.
Singapore thrives on coastal and terrestrial ecosystems, Chan said. The small island country of another 5. 7 million people in Southeast Asia has created ecosystems where educational activities attract pedestrian traffic to parks and grassy areas. Chan noted that Singapore has also reintroduced freshwater swamps and said those and other urban parks play a role in climate adaptation.
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A vital way to liven up park activity is to create pedestrian links, with larger sidewalks coming with those plants and trees, Chan said. Singapore has even created an eco-friendly room for park lovers that crosses an eight-lane road.
“100 percent of the population will be within 10 minutes of an herb park,” Chan said. “These projects depend on the generation of digitalization and the administration of the network. We will all have to dedicate ourselves to this change. To be successful, we want to be engaged, passionate and apply the generation.
Kathryn Ott Lovell, Philadelphia’s commissioner of arts and recreation, said she feels compelled to review all new park progress and improvement projects from a fair perspective, especially when the city’s citizens revel in a 25 percent poverty rate in many neighborhoods, a weapon that threatens the epidemic. of violence, the opioid crisis and homelessness.
Not far from Boathouse Row, the park convention tour, park officials and advocates visited West Fairmount Park, where the city, through its own local infrastructure program, had relocated a “disc golf course” where millennials enjoy playing frisbee with several youth soccer fields. The Parks and Recreation Department built the grounds, he said, because an organization of seven other soccer organizations in that network hadn’t had a position to play in years.
“I have a special position at my center for our youth soccer groups in Philadelphia because they’re historic, and I’d say 90 percent of other blacks run and serve black kids,” Lovell said. fully support this existing use, but we want to be open to new uses, and especially to new uses that constitute a network that lives here. “
She said the floor area just for the city’s youth is a factor that has been ignored for more than 30 years.
By contrast, Thoai Nguyen, executive director of the Southeast Asian Mutual Assistance Association Coalition (SEAMAAC) in Philadelphia, described equity tensions in a city park in a community populated by new refugees and immigrants.
“My circle of relatives migrated there to Philadelphia when I was 10 years old,” he said. White execution elegance network, living east of it, which Asian refugees ruined the park.
Tensions there arose from the fact that the refugee and immigrant communities that grew up around the park began to use it in their own way,” Nguyen said. For example, food vendors surrounded the park and volleyball nets were set up next door. Basketball courts, as there is a common game in Southeast Asia called Sepak that is played with a volleyball net.
“When we were tasked with seeking to revitalize, rebuild and rebuild this park, what we learned was that to continually be the park that serves everyone, you have to have those things that came out organically,” Nguyen said.
In terms of park equity, Nguyen said the most important thing you can do is make sure everyone’s voice is heard and that each and every culture surrounding the park is represented. He said he conducted 15 teams concentrated in a dozen languages and conducted surveys of more than 1,000 families in surrounding communities.
Sue Mobley approached the fairness and accessibility of parks from an even more challenging attitude created by the presence of Confederate monuments in many parks. Mobley, director of studies at Monument Lab, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit, said the removal of some statues was deemed racist or in commemoration of the Confederacy is causing tension when some supporters of the monument explicitly oppose the proposed removal. But there’s no doubt, he said, that the removal would have a big impact on the park’s equity for African Americans.
For park administrators, he said, “it can be difficult to hear other voices” when those opposed to the removal of monuments “are so determined to be heard. “
But now is the time to stand up for justice, he said. “These constituents have shaped our public life, our public spaces in our cities, our laws, our country for 250 years, and it’s time for them to avoid talking like that. “we can hear other voices,” Mobley said.
Over the past two years, Monument Lab has recalled 37 parks, plazas, and streets that officially carried the call of the Confederates. In Mobley’s role as Director of Research, she co-led an audit of national monuments. His team tested about 50,000 national monuments, and about 88 of them were white men, and 33 of them were about war.
For Mobley, the park’s fairness means everyone feels welcome in public spaces. But monuments that reflect violence and don’t reflect all members of the community, he said, don’t make everyone feel welcome.
In 2017, while mayor of New Orleans, Landrieu delivered a speech announced through national commentators explaining why he removed 4 monuments to the lost cause of the Confederacy and added statues in Robert E’s city park. Lee, Jefferson Davis and P. G. T. Beauregard.
Final comments on Greater
So, Landrieu said, “When you think about park design, when you think about park service, if you design something wrong, the result will be mediocre. And if you design something right, the result can be just glorious. “.
Daelin Brown is an environmental justice researcher at Philadelphia-based Inside Climate News. She graduated from Hampton University in Journalism with a minor in Creative Writing. In the fall, she will attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to earn her master’s degree in science writing.
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