Parks can bring outdoor power

Do parks build community power?

Parks and green spaces that enable community engagement and organizing are often overlooked interventions for building community power. Parks have enormous unrealized potential to serve a critical function for the nation: social infrastructure.

Why do we need parks & public spaces?

Envisioning, planning, creating, and stewarding a park exemplifies social infrastructure, enabling communities to address social issues on their terms and replace despair and frustration with hope and action. To respond to the times, parks and public spaces must become not just passive spaces but catalysts in forming a healthy polity.

Why are public outdoor spaces important?

Public outdoor spaces are profoundly important to our cities. They bridge cultural divides, drive economic growth, and significantly contribute to mental and physical well-being.

Do public outdoor spaces make a significant impact on urban livability?

Public outdoor spaces, from pocket parks to playgrounds to regenerative landscape design, make a significant impact on urban livability, community, and environmental health. METROPOLIS gathers its top articles that explore this impact.

How do parks and public spaces respond to the times?

To respond to the times, parks and public spaces must become not just passive spaces but catalysts in forming a healthy polity. In caring for the commons of parks and green spaces, we nurture social solidarity, civic engagement, and a thriving democracy.

Why are parks important?

Communities, like individuals, embody multiple identities; a great strength of parks is that they facilitate place-based identity that cuts across and can unite other dimensions of a person’s identity. Power perpetuates itself in a virtuous cycle; by contrast, the absence of community power can breed mistrust, distress, and poor health.