At City Parks Alliance, we believe excellent urban park systems are critical infrastructure for equitable, resilient, and thriving cities. We focus on the design, funding, building, programming, operations, and stewardship of parks and how they support related urban systems and public policy goals.
Parks today are not just a collection of disparate assets in a city’s portfolio. As a multi-faceted, connected system of physical spaces (land and water, trails, and buildings) with multi-skilled staff, they can help city leaders meet broader challenges, from health to transportation to stormwater management. They are a platform for cultural expression and recreational activity that strengthens community identity and cohesion and a catalyst for city-wide and regional economic vibrancy. They are places where we exercise our First Amendment rights. Parks reflect our values, contain our history, and help us respond to pressing social needs and environmental threats.
Over the past half-century, as the complexity of park design and function has grown but municipal funding has not kept up, we’ve seen new approaches to governing and managing parks through an array of partnerships between public, private, and non-profit entities, from neighborhoods to downtown spaces. More recently, shifting federal funding, disruptive macroeconomic trends, and a growing reliance on philanthropic support are requiring us to rethink the way we pay for our parks—offering a chance to reimagine how we build a sustainable investment structure to meet future needs. By blending resources from different sectors, advocating for more robust public budgets, taking a more entrepreneurial approach, and improving efficiency, park leaders and supporters are leaning into all potential funding opportunities.
Sustaining Park Funding in Turbulent Times will be one of four key themes at our Greater & Greener conference in Austin this June. Greater & Greener is the only conference dedicated to exploring the full potential of parks as city-building tools. It’s a conference for doers from government, nonprofits, and communities who are utilizing the power of parks to create more sustainable, vibrant, and equitable cities.
Collaborative cross-sector approaches will help us face our future challenges. We’re all experiencing how climate change is upending weather patterns, making cities wetter, drier, hotter, or colder. Forward-thinking city leaders are deploying parks as nature-based solutions, using green space to capture floodwaters, mitigate extreme heat, and provide shoreline protection. At Greater & Greener, we’ll explore how parks serve as resilient infrastructure and essential spaces for community-led disaster response, respite, and healing.
Indeed, the COVID pandemic underscored the vital role of parks in supporting physical and mental health and social connection, yet parks remain an underutilized part of our community health systems. To realize this potential, we need to transform the built environment from one that is car-centric to human- and nature-centric, integrating green space and recreation to improve everyday life and work more closely with public health partners. We’ll see and hear examples at Greater & Greener of parks’ roles in healthy and inclusive communities underway: how degraded and polluted sites are being converted to biodiversity hot spots; institutional partnerships are making medical campuses more parklike for patients and their caregivers, close to home natural play spaces are spurring children’s curiosity, and arts-based programs are bringing neighbors together to honor the past and inspire future generations.
Cities are investing to support community and economic development. But investment must be paired with intention. As we boost local economies through park development, we must ensure inclusive growth that benefits existing residents without driving displacement. We will tackle the hard questions in Austin: How do we balance the need for affordable housing with the need for green space? How can shared space bring about shared prosperity in cities of all sizes? How can we create the jobs of the future through park investments? Greater & Greener is the place where we explore not just the mechanics of multi-agency policies but also the stories of trust-building, trial and error, and new ways of working together for the greatest impact.
Attendees tell us that what inspires them most about the conference is the chance to explore with their peers—indoors and out—how parks are bringing hope to people’s lives and inspiring positive change in the surrounding community and beyond. Fifty years ago, transformative spaces like the Atlanta Beltline, Chicago’s Millennium Park, Greenville’s Unity Park, and Tulsa’s Gathering Place didn’t exist. The potential for parks in all of our cities grows with each city story shared. We hope you’ll join us in Austin to be part of the conversation shaping the future of city parks.
