U.S. Mayors Agree that Everyone Needs a Great Park Within a 10-Minute Walk: Non-profits, 134 Mayors Launch National 10-Minute Walk to a Park Campaign

by Adrian Benepe, Children and Nature Network: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/us-mayors-agree-everyone-needs-a-great-park-within_us_59dbb212e4b0a1bb90b83001

JENNA STAMM

Children play in a schoolyard converted to a community playground in Philadelphia.

At a time when Americans are fractured by politics and policies, there is one thing
most of us agree on and which has broad, bi-partisan support—convenient access
to a high quality park.

Today, The Trust for Public Land (TPL), the National Recreation and Park Association (NRPA), and the Urban Land Institute (ULI) launched the
10-Minute Walk to a Park Campaign with the support of 134 mayors from cities 
across America and from both sides of the political aisle. These mayors signed on during the past year, endorsing the goal of providing every neighborhood with a 
quality park that improves life for city residents, serves as a safe place for people to gather, and adds to the beauty of the city.

Great parks are one of the anchors of healthy, sustainable communities and vibrant American cities. Today, more than 85 percent of the US population lives either in a
city or a suburb, and the research is clear that close-to-home parks boost the
wellbeing of entire neighborhoods. Parks play vital roles in enhancing
environmental sustainability, absorbing carbon and other air pollutants, lowering temperatures, and capturing storm water runoff. They are also crucial to public 
health—data show that when people live near parks they exercise more. Parks also enhance property values, and create community cohesion by bringing diverse
people together in social settings. Cities that invest in parks and open spaces are directly benefiting local residents and their physical and mental health by creating
life-enhancing ways to get outdoors and be active.

In cities across America, mayors and park directors are working with other elected officials, citizens, and non-profit partners to come up with visionary ways to pay for
new parks, and improve existing parks.

For example, the city of Houston has made a bold and ambitious goal to increase
the number of residents who live within a 10-minute walk of a park from 48 percent
to 75 percent by 2040. To do this, they have made improved access part of its
official park master plan. Working with a non-profit partner known as Spark Parks,
city officials are identifying scores of schoolyards that could be converted into community parks. Likewise, in hundreds of cities across the country, underused schoolyards represent the “low-hanging fruit”—land already owned by the city,
possibly not even needing major improvement—just the stroke of a policy pen to
make them “joint-use’ facilities and creating more nearby outdoor spaces for tens of millions of Americans.

SPARK SCHOOL PARK PROGRAN

Matthys Elementary School Park in Houston, newly renovated and opened to the community through the SPARK Parks program.

In Los Angeles County last year, residents approved Measure A, which will
generate at least $1.8 billion—$100 million a year, indefinitely—for new and
improved parks across the county. In Boston, voters also last year approved a
Community Preservation Act measure that will generate $20 million for the same 
cause, and New York City has allocated $300 million to renovate 70 small parks and playgrounds in under-served areas. In Minneapolis and San Francisco (which 
recently became the first city in America where 100 percent of its residents have a 
park within 10-minute walk), park leaders worked with community residents and 
local leaders to solve equity problems, and to make sure everyone, regardless of income or race, has access to high quality parks. Both cities have set aside large amounts of funding to ensure equitable park quality.

ALEX RANDOLPH

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee announces that his city is the first to have 100% of its residents within a 10-minute walk of a park at an event in Hilltop Park.

So, where did the “10-minute walk” idea come from? For several decades, city
planners and social scientists have measured distances people will travel on foot to basic services such as shopping, schools, or transit. They concluded that half a
mile is about as far as people will reasonably walk. Though walking speeds vary,
the U.S Department of Transportation agrees that most people can walk a half-mile
in 10 minutes.

Nearly 17 years ago, at an all-staff gathering of The Trust for Public Land, Will
Rogers, who still serves as the organization’s President, talked about headlines he hoped to see in the next decade. One of those headlines was his prediction that the NRPA and US Conference of Mayors would join TPL in working to ensure that no
one lived “more than a 10-minute stroller ride from a park or playground.” A few
years later, in an article penned for the American Planning Association Journal in
2004, Peter Harnik documented cities that had standards for how far residents 
should have to walk to get to a nearby park. Harnik, then Director of The Trust for 
Public Land’s Center for City Park Excellence, found that most cities had no 
standards, and those that did ranged from a tenth of a mile to a mile, with about half having a half-mile as the standard.

A year later, Jack T. Linn, Assistant Commissioner in the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, developed a new standard for the ideal walking distance to a 
park. He determined that it should be measured in time, not distance, and proposed
that every New Yorker should have a park or playground within a 10-minute walk.

That standard was adopted two years later in PlaNYC—the sustainable 
development plan for New York City under Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

As a centerpiece of PlaNYC’s park and environment program, the Mayor called for converting 250 part-time, asphalt schoolyards into full-time community playgrounds,
used by schools during school hours but available to neighborhood residents after school and on weekends. That move, accompanied by $150 million to improve the playgrounds, led to a 15 percent increase in the number of New Yorkers who had a
park or playground within a 10-minute walk.

NOMI ELLENSON

The old asphalt schoolyard at La Cima Charter School in Brooklyn, NY was converted by The Trust for Public Land to a green community playground that also captures stormwater runoff.

Last June, the US Conference of Mayors (USCM) validated Will Rogers’ prediction
by officially endorsing the 10-Minute walk in a resolution introduced at its national gathering. The USCM resolution said, in part “that the United States Conference of Mayors supports the goal for cities to increase the number of people in urban
America who live within a 10-minute walk of a high-quality park; that the [USCM] will celebrate mayors that make quality parks and access to them a first-tier solution to
their municipal challenges; and that the [USCM] supports investments in parks and
open spaces with the goal for everyone in urban American to live within a 10-minute walk of a high-quality park.”

There was another major challenge for the 10-Minute Walk partners when they
launched the campaign nearly three years ago: How could they know how many
people had 10-minute walk access to a park in the 14,000 communities within the
3,000 areas defined as “urban” by the U.S. Census Bureau? The answer came in
TPL’s award-wining Geographic Information Systems (GIS) unit, which created ParkServe, an effort to find and map all the parks in those 14,000
communities, and then to figure out how many lived within or outside of the
10-minute walk “service areas” of those parks. Working with the help of Esri, the
world’s leading GIS mapping company, and using their Network Analyst software,
they are tracing the street network to determine if and how someone could walk to a park—without encountering barriers such as freeways, rivers and canals, or railroad tracks.

ParkServe, now underway for two and a half years, has already surveyed 7,600 of
the 14,000 communities, encompassing 67 percent of the U.S. population. Based
on preliminary analysis, they estimate that as many as 150 million Americans may
not have a park within a 10-minute walk. ParkServe is also generating the nation’s
first-ever database of urban parks and providing tools that city officials and citizens
alike can use to help identify park deserts and the best ways to add green oases.

So now that the campaign is officially launched, and is supported by 134 mayors,
how do we close that gap for so many Americans?

First, the three partners, TPL, NRPA, and ULI, working with other non-profit organizations, will engage with mayors and cities to deploy tools and strategies to
help them increase access to new parks and improve existing parks, building on successful models and strategies already in place. TPL and ULI experts in
conservation and urban park finance are working with cities to identify both
traditional and new sources of funding for park creation and improvement, from
voter measures and bonds to tax-increment financing and social impact bonds. ULI
will use its 51 regional councils to work with local leaders and deploy advisory
panels representing developers, planners, financiers, economists, and public
officials to provide practical and objective advice to cities.

The campaign soon will launch a competitive grant program, challenging cities to
come up with innovative approaches to adding and improving parks. This program
will build on traditional NRPA strengths in research on best practices, case studies,
and comprehensive data, including its Safe Routes to Parks program, to help make
the case for expanded park funding.

So, with all this effort and energy, Americans in cities and suburbs across the
country may soon have close-to-home access to the aspect of city life that may
best define quality of life: a high-quality, green, and safe park for all to enjoy.

Don’t Be Scared About the End of Capitalism: Be Excited to Build What Comes Next

by Jason Hickel and Martin Kirk, Fast Company: https://www.fastcompany.com/40454254/dont-be-scared-about-the-end-of-capitalism-be-excited-to-build-what-comes-next

When have we humans ever accepted the idea that change for the better is a thing of the past? [Image: Ket4up/iStock]

These are fast-changing times. Old certainties are collapsing around us and people are scrambling for new ways of being in the world. As we pointed out in a recent article, 51% of young people in the United States no longer support the system of capitalism. And a solid 55% of Americans of all ages believe that capitalism is fundamentally unfair.

But question capitalism in public and you’re likely to get some angry responses. People immediately assume that you want to see socialism or communism instead. They tell you to go and live in Venezuela, the current flogging-horse for socialism, or they hit you with dreary images of Soviet Russia with all its violence, dysfunction, and grey conformity. They don’t consider that you might want something beyond caricatures and old dogmas.

These old ‘isms’ lurk in the shadows of any discussion on capitalism. The cyber-punk author William Gibson has a term for this effect: “semiotic ghosts”; one concept that haunts another, regardless of any useful or intended connection.

There’s no good reason to remain captive to these old ghosts. All they do is stop us having a clear-headed conversation about the future. Soviet Russia was an unmitigated social and economic disaster; that’s easy to dispel. But, of course, not all experiments with socialist principles have gone so horribly wrong. Take the social democracies of Sweden and Finland, for example, or even post-war Britain and the New Deal in the U.S. There are many systems that have effectively harnessed the economy to deliver shared prosperity.

But here’s the thing. While these systems clearly produce more positive social outcomes than laissez-faire systems do (think about the record high levels of health, education and well-being in Scandinavian countries, for example), even the best of them don’t offer the solutions we so urgently need right now, in an era of climate change and ecological collapse. Right now we are overshooting Earth’s carrying capacity by a crushing 64% each year, in terms of our resource use and greenhouse gas emissions.

The socialism that exists in the world today, on its own, has nothing much to say about this. Just like capitalism, it relies on endless, indeed exponential GDP growth, ever-increasing levels of extraction and production and consumption. The two systems may disagree about how best to distribute the yields of a plundered earth, but they do not question the process of plunder itself.

Fortunately, there is already a wealth of language and ideas out there that stretch well beyond these dusty old binaries. They are driven by a hugely diverse community of thinkers, innovators, and practitioners. There are organizations like the P2P (Peer to Peer) Foundation, Evonomics, The Next System Project, and the Institute for New Economic Thinking reimagining the global economy. The proposed models are even more varied: from
complexity, to post-growth, de-growth, land-based, regenerative, circular, and even the deliciously named donut economics.

Then, there are the many communities of practice, from the Zapatistas in Mexico to the barter economies of Detroit, from the global Transition Network, to Bhutan, with its Gross National Happiness index. There are even serious economists and writers, from Jeremy Rifkin to David Flemingto Paul Mason, making a spirited case that the evolution beyond capitalism is well underway and unstoppable, thanks to already active ecological feedback loops and/or the arrival of the near zero-marginal cost products and services.This list barely scratches the surface.

The thinking is rich and varied, but all of these approaches share the virtue of being informed by up-to-date science and the reality of today’s big problems. They move beyond the reductionist dogmas of orthodox economics and embrace complexity; they focus on regenerating rather than simply using-up our planet’s resources; they think more holistically about how to live well within ecological boundaries; some of them draw on indigenous knowledge and lore about how to stay in balance with nature; others confront the contradictions of endless growth head on.

Not all would necessarily describe themselves as anti- or even post-capitalist, but they are all, in one way or another, breaking through the dry seals of neoclassical economic theory upon which capitalism rests.
Still, resistance to innovation is strong. One reason is surely that our culture has been stewed in capitalist logic for so long that it feels impregnable. Our instinct is now to see it as natural; some even go so far as to deem it divine. The notion that we should prioritize the production of capital over all other things has become a kind of common sense; the way humans must organize.

To question capitalism can trigger a visceral reaction; it can feel like an attack not just on common sense but on our personal identities. [Image: Ket4up/iStock]

Another reason, clearly linked, is the blindness of much of the academic world. Take, for example, the University of Manchester, where a group of economics students asked for their syllabus to be upgraded to account for the realities of a post-crash world. Joe Earle, one of the organizers of what The Guardian described as a “quiet revolution against orthodox free-market teaching” told the newspaper: “[Neoclassical economics] is given such a dominant position in our modules that many students aren’t even aware that there are other distinct theories out there that question the assumptions, methodologies and conclusions of the economics we are taught.”

In much the same way as House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, rebuffed college student Trevor Hill when he asked whether the Democratic Party would consider any alternatives to capitalism, Manchester University’s response was a flat no. Their economics course, they said, “focuses on mainstream approaches, reflecting the current state of the discipline”. Mainstream, current, anything but fresh. Such attitudes have spawned a global student movement, Rethinking Economics, with chapters as far afield as Ecuador, Uganda, and China.

Capitalism has become a dogma, and dogmas die very slowly and very reluctantly. It is a system that has co-evolved with modernity, so it has the full force of social and institutional norms behind it. Its essential logic is even woven into most of our worldviews, which is to say, our brains. To question it can trigger a visceral reaction; it can feel like an attack not just on common sense but on our personal identities.

But even if you believe it was once the best system ever, you can still see that today it has become necrotic and dangerous. This is demonstrated most starkly by two facts: The first is that the system is doing little now to improve the lives of the majority of humans: by some estimates, 4.3 billion of us are living in poverty, and that number has risen significantly over the past few decades. The ghostly responses to this tend to be either unimaginative–“If you think it’s bad, try living in Zimbabwe”–or zealous: “Well, that’s because there’s not enough capitalism. Let it loose with more deregulation, or give it time and it will raise their incomes too.”

One of the many problems with this last argument is the second fact: with just half of us living above the poverty line, capitalism’s endless need for resources is already driving us over the cliff-edge of climate change and ecological collapse. This ranges from those that are both finite and dangerous to use, like fossil fuels, to those that are being used so fast that they don’t have time to regenerate, like fish stocks and the soil in which we grow our food. Those 4.3 billion more people living ‘successful’ hyper-consumption lifestyles? The laws of physics would need to change. Even Elon Musk can’t do that.

The path to a better future will be cut by regular people being curious and open enough to challenge the wisdom received from our schools, our parents, and our governments. [Image: Ket4up/iStock]

It would be a sad and defeated world that simply accepted the prebaked assumption that capitalism (or socialism, or communism) represents the last stage of human thought; our ingenuity exhausted. Capitalism’s fundamental rules–like the necessity for endless GDP growth, which requires treating our planet as an infinite pit of value and damage to it as an “externality”– can be upgraded. Of course they can. There are plenty of options on the table. When have we humans ever accepted the idea that change for the better is a thing of the past?

Of course, transcending capitalism might feel impossible right now. The political mainstream has its feet firmly planted and deeply rooted in that soil. But with the pace of events today, the unimaginable can become the possible, and even the inevitable with remarkable speed. The path to a better future will be cut by regular people being curious and open enough to challenge the wisdom received from our schools, our parents, and our governments, and look at the world with fresh eyes.

We can let the ghosts go. We can allow ourselves the freedom to do what humans do best: innovate.