December 2020 - Parks & Recreation - 47

PHOTO COURTESY DENVER PARKS AND RECREATION

Interventions like this street closure
on 21st Street in Denver have taken
place all over the country, providing
opportunities to integrate popup parks
in neighborhoods lacking access to
parks and open spaces.

cific situation; Don't let operational
costs be an afterthought - bring operational people in at the beginning
of the design process when a nontraditional green infrastructure
system will become their responsibility to maintain; Be mindful of
market realities - if a sustainable
community development proposal
is outside the attainability of most
residents, it is not practical; and
Create tools to alleviate process bottlenecks - such as Edmonton's Wildlife Passage Engineering Design
Guidelines, which have been utilized to build 37 wildlife passages.

Implementation

Making Biodiversity a
Collective Priority

In the spirit of 'roll up your sleeves'
solutions during this messy time of
responding to the pandemic, adapting new ideas into how improvements within the public realm are
typically done can be embraced.
How do we create a tailwind of
support for biodiversity and urban
greening initiatives? Dig Studio
held an Urban Greening and Biodiversity Forum offering perspectives on this topic from a panel
of national speakers. One of the
presenters, Grant Pearsell, urban
biodiversity strategist and retired
urban planner, city of Edmonton,
Alberta, Canada, shared implementation lessons learned over
the past two decades from city-led
initiatives to become a biophilic
city. Many of these lessons can be
informative elsewhere: Don't let regulation stifle innovation - city regulations must be adapted to the spe-

In the words of urban resilience
expert Michael Berkowitz (tinyurl.
com/y5u4jfvw), " To build resilience, the trick is linking different
goals together. " When thinking
about economic development,
how can we also better protect for
floods? When thinking about mobility, how can we increase biodiversity or reduce exposure to extreme heat? Simply put, how can
one intervention strengthen a city
across a variety of areas?
Often following a crisis there
is an enhanced trend of goodwill
and community spirit. This opens
unprecedented opportunity for a
collective commitment to urban
greening and biodiversity measures.
People will live with our choices today for generations to come. Let's
seize this opportunity to align the
lens of public health and equity
with biodiversity in projects involv-

PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA CREATIVE COMMONS

two decades, many cities share
the problem of having a shortage
of per capita open space or having accessible open space within
a 10- to 15-minute walk. This often complicates the challenge of
extending open space equitably
among neighborhoods. Creative
interventions are making national headlines, highlighting projects
that utilize parking lots, medians
or underpasses for parks. And,
parks don't necessarily have to be
the large swaths we may be accustomed to, but may be smaller
areas more focused on providing relevant amenities for a given neighborhood. As an example, the eight-acre Chicano Park
(tinyurl.com/y5qjnvvy) in San
Diego, California, establishes a
point system that values park features, instead of solely focusing
on park acreage.

Chicano Park was created from
reclaimed land beneath the San
Diego-Coronado Bridge. The park
hosts the country's largest collection of
outdoor murals.

ing flood control, open space and
economic development. Let's include health within our discussions
about climate change and resiliency. Let's explore and share creative
ideas about urban greening. Now is
our time to think strategically about
urban greening and biodiversity as
our collective priority for the future
of public and environmental health.
Tune in to the December bonus episode of Open Space Radio to hear more
from LaDonna Baertlein and Laurel
Raines, a senior principal at Dig Studio, about health and biodiversity at
nrpa.org/DecemberBonusEpisode.
LaDonna Baertlein is Director of Business Development
at Dig Studio (ladonna@digstudio.com).

PA R K S A N D R E C R E AT I O N .O R G | D E C E M B E R 2 02 0 |

Parks & Recreation

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December 2020 - Parks & Recreation

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of December 2020 - Parks & Recreation
