Parks support overall well-being and provide opportunities for connection; yet long-time community members have cited these same green spaces for playing a role in gentrification and displacement.
What does it look like when public parks become the foundation for more healthy, equitable, and inclusive communities? In this panel, speakers will present several examples of parks in Los Angeles and San Francisco neighborhoods where equitable development, climate resilience, and cultural rooting has been fostered through partnerships between agencies and non-profits.
In Los Angeles, Clockshop, an arts and culture nonprofit and a California State Parks Cooperative Association, has been working with California State Parks and The Nature Conservancy for over a decade on a parcel of a former railyard called the Bowtie. To think about the future of the Bowtie, Clockshop has created a collective history and cultural mapping project of four neighborhoods along the river called Take Me To Your River. This collective history will provide the foundation for forming a steering committee that will guide programming and a vision for the future park.
In San Francisco at India Basin Waterfront Park, the City is partnering with three mission-aligned non-profits in an audacious plan to develop a 10-acre waterfront park in one of the city’s most overlooked and underserved communities. Through a community process, the partnership developed an Equitable Development Plan (EDP) which works to ensure that the promise of the new park reverses decades of environmental injustice, establishes resilience to sea level rise and creates economic opportunity for community members.
Attendees will learn how the EDP’s six pillars—Arts, Culture & Identity; Workforce & Business Development; Transportation, Access & Connectivity; Healthy Communities & Ecology; Youth Opportunities; and Housing Security— have been operationalized through robust community engagement, interim activation, and culturally responsive programming. With more than 50 community meetings, a pop-up Tech Hub launched during the pandemic, and a multi-phase roadmap for accountability, the EDP offers a replicable model for equitable park development nationwide.
