How to make a successful urban park

This Saturday, June 12, organizers will be showing the U.S.-England World Cup game at 2:30pm in Dupont Circle. Dupont Circle is an ideal location for a locally-oriented public gathering because it’s our region’s most celebrated small urban park. While most Washingtonians recognize Dupont Circle as a celebrated park, its current venerated status is the result of many factors, and was far from inevitable.

Just like successful urban stadiums, successful urban parks possess fundamental common elements, whether iconic representations of their city and region like Dupont Circle or just beloved by their local neighborhood like Woodmont Triangle in Bethesda.

Pedestrian-friendly complete streets. Highways create barriers to pedestrians. Similarly, large suburban arterial-style roads separate urban parks from their surroundings. Small urban parks work best when they are a center of place and a casual meeting point for their place in the urban fabric. Small urban parks don’t have car parking facilities like wilderness parks or hyper-structured suburban parks. They are only successful if they are populated with people who got there on foot, transit, or bicycle. Large roads that are adjacent to parks diminish pedestrian accessibility.

Human-scaled size. A small urban park can be too big to be successful. That’s right, too big. When talking about urban parks, it is important to note that Rock Creek Park in DC and Montgomery County, Fort Dupont Park in DC and Central Park in New York City are large wilderness parks that have more in common with Yellowstone National Park in terms of how they interact with human settlements than Logan Circle or Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square.

The wilderness parks are attractions themselves. They are valued for their place outside the urban fabric rather than their interaction with it. On the other hand, small urban parks are valued for their symbiotic interactions with their surroundings. If a small urban park is too big, it starts to disconnect from its surroundings. It then becomes stuck in limbo: too big to interact with its surroundings but too small to offer that sense of escape that a wilderness park offers. Poplar Point in its current state is an example of a park that is neither fish nor fowl.

Vibrant surrounding urban area. The now-extinct Turf in downtown Silver Spring was an unintentionally brilliant example of a successful small urban park. The Ellsworth Drive development has been a rousing success from its opening. It attracts a consistent, vibrant pedestrian atmosphere. Many Washingtonians discovered and rediscovered Silver Spring in the 2000’s as a result of the increased social standing and amenities brought on by Fenton Street’s proximate transit access, mixture of eateries, retailers, and activities. It only makes sense that people walking around enjoying the amenities would want to sit down and take in the vibrant atmosphere.

The Turf was an empty space at the corner of Ellsworth and Fenton Avenue that was being held in limbo while it was decided what would be built there. In the interim, artificial turf was put down over the ground. A new park was born. The success of the Turf even caused some concern in landscape architecture circles.

A vibrant surrounding area doesn’t have to be a commercial and nightlife district like in Silver Spring or Dupont Circle to have a successful small urban park. Logan Circle and Lincoln Square are surrounded by quiet rowhouse neighborhoods and are both successful centers of place.

Eyes on the street. My office is proximate to McPherson and Franklin Squares. My older co-workers have told me stories about how back in the 1980’s and early ‘90s, there was crime in Franklin Square on weekdays in broad daylight. While I don’t know the exact statistics, the area did have a seedy reputation at the time.

The historic downtown DC (the part centered on Metro Center) was in a depressed state with lots of office vacancies. There were not many people walking around near Franklin Square compared to today. Regardless of whether there actually was seedy activity, it was much easier for it occur without a large public presence. Similarly, a lack of eyes on the street gives the impression that there is seedy activity, regardless of whether such a reputation is deserved.

It is also very hard to have enough eyes on the street if the surrounding neighborhood isn’t dense enough. Logan Circle works well as a neighborhood park because it has enough neighbors in walking distance. If you grew up in a car-dependent subdivision, contrast the vibrance of Logan Circle to how much use the little hyper-programmed park in your subdivision got. The most pedestrian-friendly road infrastructure won’t make a vibrant, successful urban park if there are too few people nearby to enjoy it and deter seedy activities.

Because of the largely low-density car-dependent land uses in Wards 7 and 8, many of the parks east of the Anacostia do not have enough eyes on the street to prevent the development of unfavorable reputations. Similarly, the woods between Garrett Park and White Flint Mall don’t have enough density around them to be used as a celebrated park, despite the location between a residential area and a major retail destination. (The new White Flint Sector Plan will address some of the connectivity issues with a small park and connections to the new street grid.)

During the 2000s, we started to re-learn many fundamental principles about how to revitalize and build celebrated sustainable, human-scale traditional towns and cities. During the post-war period, we collectively forgot how to build parks that didn’t involve large access roads, acres of surface parking, and hyper-structured activity spaces. Let’s use the lessons we’ve learned in the revitalization of the small urban parks in Northwest DC and Capitol Hill, along with the construction of new small urban parks in Silver Spring and Bethesda, to make our existing and new walkable urban places even greater.