park – Things Are Good

In Vienna Anyone Can Build a Park

A picture of an urban small public garden / sitting space. Grätzloasen

To make Central Park in New York City they rated entire neighbourhoods and forcibly moved people, today in Vienna you don’t need to push anybody out of the way or destroy anything to get a park. Vienna, like most cities, has a lot of room for new playgrounds, patios, performance, and whatever else you can use open space for. To make use of this space the city has opened up the ability to make a parkette to anyone, so if you want a new park in your area just go ahead and do it (ok, after you fill out some forms). These new small-scale parks even get a weird name: Grätzloasen.

This is a great initiative and I hope that other cities take the same approach.

“While we were building it, I remember there were a few people looking at it very weirdly. A few days later, we had neighbours say: ‘Why would you take away a parking space?’” Jana says.

But they seem to have come around. This spring the grätzloase saw more construction as they installed a retractable sunroof. “We had a weekend of building together. Everybody that walked by said: ‘Oh! This is so nice.’”
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Building parklets could be one way of warming people up to the idea. Sabrina Halkic, the managing director of Local Agenda 21, describes them as an example of “tactical urbanism” – low-cost, often citizen-led improvements to the built environment. She sees the grätzloasen as a gateway to further changes.

Urban Ecology Cools Building, Cities, and Helps Biodiversity

Modern cities are full of biodiversity, you just need to know where to look .Urban ecology is a relatively new field of study that examines how isolated urban green infrastructure relates to one another to form an ecological understanding of our cities. This infrastructure includes green roofs, parks, water catchments, and private spaces like yards and balconies.

Cities can help cool their local area by encouraging green infrastructure, and given the heat wave the west coast is currently experience we need to invest in as much green infrastructure as possible.

The addition and maintenance of green infrastructure is now central to urban planning in most cities. This includes planting trees and bushes, naturalizing parks, restoring wetlands and promoting other forms of green infrastructure such as green roofs. Some cities, including Edmonton, have launched goat programs to control noxious weeds.

A complicating factor is that much of the urban greenspace is found in privately owned gardens. Depending on the city, gardens can make up between 16 and 40 per cent of the total urban land cover, and between 35 and 86 per cent of the total greenspace. Governments have little influence over these areas, leaving it up to individual people to make the right decisions.

30 Minutes in Your Local Park is Perfect

Urban parks are great and now some Aussie researchers have found another reason to create more of them: it’s really good for your health. We’ve known for years that spending time in nature is good for people but his research augments that knowledge with a timeframe. It takes only 30 minutes of being in an a park to see benefits to one’s health. Which means that you can get enough nature on your lunch break (you should get more though).

â€œIf everyone visited their local parks for half an hour each week there would be seven per cent fewer cases of depression and nine percent fewer cases of high blood pressure,â€ she said.

â€œGiven that the societal costs of depression alone in Australia are estimated at $A12.6 billion a year, savings to public health budgets across all health outcomes could be immense,â€ she said.

UQ CEED researcher Associate Professor Richard Fuller said the research could transform the way people viewed urban parks.

â€œWeâ€™ve known for a long time that visiting parks is good for our health, but we are now beginning to establish exactly how much time we need to spend in parks to gain these benefits,â€ he said.

Parks Make Kids Smarter and Reduce Health Inequality

Urban parks can greatly improve the quality of a neighbourhood and it can improve the wellbeing of all people in the area. Of all the users of a park kids may benefit the most. A park in a city gives kids a place to play and it helps them mentally too.

The study authors suggest that green spaces may have a positive effect both directly and indirectly. â€œGreen spaces provide children with opportunities to develop mental skills such as discovery and creativity,â€ says co-author Payam Dadvand, a physician and researcher at the Center for Research in Environmental Epidemiology in Barcelona. More indirectly, green spaces may help by reducing exposure to air pollution and noise, increasing physical activity, and enriching microbial input from the environment, all of which have been associated with improved mental development, he says. When the researchers measured and factored in traffic-related air pollution, which is higher in places with fewer plants and trees, they found that it accounted for 20 to 65 percent of the observed association between greenness and cognitive development. Air pollution has been shown to have neurotoxic effects, Dadvand says.

Doctors Prescribing Nature

Doctor Robert Zarr prescribes walking in parks to his patients. Regular readers already know that the exposure to nature is beneficial in multiple ways for our physical and mental health. Doctors have also taken note of this and realize that prescribing walks and exposure to nature can reduce obesity rates while also being proactive in stemming other health problems.

Zarr doesn’t think prescribing parks is a radical step, though it may require a little getting used to. “Once you get over the conceptual hurdle of prescribing park, and you believe the scientific literature that clearly says being outside is good for health, then all it takes is to push a button on a computer. They have to do that anyway,” he says.

Zarr now hopes to develop a mobile app, and perhaps get the “have you been outside recently?” question included in patients’ pre-interviews alongside other vital signs queries.