Achieve minimum levels of city green space and maximize the percent within a ten-minute walk of community members.
Best Practice of this action
Rating Guideline
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There exist at least 7 acres of municipal park land per 1000 residents; report your ParkScore. |
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At least 20% of total city land area is in protected green infrastructure (parks and protected natural resource areas, trails, publicly accessible school green space). |
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90% or more of residents are within a 10-minute walk, or within one-half mile of, a park or other protected green/blue space; create inclusive, safe, and welcoming spaces for all residents and visitors. |
Resources
Data:
- The Trust for Public Land's ParkServe calculates what percentage of your city's residents are within a 10-minute walk of a park. For the country's 100 most populated cities, the ParkScore features a national rating system based equally on three factors: park access, park size, and services and investment
Quality and Access:
- How Minnesotans Feel About Local Parks and Other Outdoor Recreation Areas (APM Research Lab, 2021)
- Anti Racism in the Outdoors: Resources related to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion of Black, Indigenous and People of Color in parks and greenspaces (The Joy Trip Project, 2021) is a resource guide for faculty, staff, students, extension educators, outdoor advocates, volunteers, and community leaders as allies of BIPOC.
- Five Ways to Make the Outdoors More Inclusive (The Atlantic, 2018) include: Teach the full history of the American outdoors, Make all visitors feel welcome and secure, Create underlying policies on diversity and fairness, Increase economic accessibility to create more access points for all, Make open spaces more representative, culturally relevant, and cool.
- See concepts for shared parks in urban blocks, variously referred to as community greens, backyard commons, urban commons and pocket parks.
Order Number
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