The Outdoor Citizen. John Judge
Читать онлайн книгу.
car owners, and cars that “drive themselves” around all day instead of sitting in parking spaces.38
As we reduce the number of cars on the road, we need to repurpose the land devoted to parking spaces. It can be used for housing and retail, but Outdoor Cities will prioritize turning parking spaces into green spaces—replacing cars and concrete with parks and trees that absorb pollutants and odors, provide oxygen, clear air through carbon absorption, boost resiliency in the face of extreme weather, control greenhouse gases to combat climate change, and cool city streets.39 It’s a healthier future for our bodies and our planet.
Greenbelts
Wrapping around the Greater Boston area between interstate highways Route 495 and Route 95/128 is the Bay Circuit Trail (BCT), a 230-mile trail that passes through fifty-seven communities. The trail mostly winds through wooded areas, but it also cuts through parks, conservation land, and other green spaces. For the nearly four million people who live in the Boston metropolitan area, it offers a close-to-home path to walk, hike, cycle, or horseback ride. The communities along the way comprise all economic classes. Connected by the trail are some of Greater Boston’s most affluent communities and some of its struggling ones.
Conceived of in 1929, the BCT was the brainchild of Benton MacKaye, a forester, planner, and conservationist who, earlier that same decade, conceived of the Appalachian Trail, which was the AMC’s biggest urban trail effort. MacKaye envisioned a ring of greenery, an “outer emerald necklace,” circling the densely populated Boston area.40 The Great Depression and residential and commercial developments delayed the realization of much of MacKaye’s original vision, but interest in the project was renewed in the 1980s. In 1990, the Bay Circuit Alliance (BCA) formed and it saw the BCT through to completion.
Alan French was chair of the BCA through 2016. A former selectman and sporting goods store owner in Andover, Massachusetts, Alan made it his mission to see that MacKaye’s vision was carried out. MacKaye saw the potential the greenbelt held to draw urbanites to the outdoors and serve as a catalyst for economic development, and Alan carried these goals with him as he traveled to the fifty-seven BCT communities along the greenbelt and sold them all on the idea of building it. In November 2016, with great respect and appreciation for Alan’s work, the Appalachian Mountain Club took over the leadership of the BCA. Today the AMC leads dozens of groups on trails through the BCT and works daily to move closer to MacKaye’s ideal. The AMC has also raised more than two million dollars to fund trail work, policy efforts, land acquisition, and trail signage. The funds come from local supporters, and we have thousands of volunteers. The BCT is better utilized than we could have imagined, and we’re proud of the work.
Across the Atlantic, Sheffield, England, was one of the first cities to begin planning a greenbelt, which it did 1938, and the UK continues to value them today. The UK’s national Green Belt policy set out in its Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government’s 2012 National Planning Policy Framework describes the intention of creating greenbelts. It reads:
The government attaches great importance to Green Belts. The fundamental aim of Green Belt policy is to prevent urban sprawl by keeping land permanently open; the essential characteristics of Green Belts are their openness and their permanence.41
The policy identifies five purposes for greenbelts:
1 to check the unrestricted sprawl of large built-up areas;
2 to prevent neighboring towns from merging into one another;
3 to assist in safeguarding the countryside from encroachment;
4 to preserve the setting and special character of historic towns; and
5 to assist in urban regeneration, by encouraging the recycling of derelict and other urban land.42
According to the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE), the fourteen greenbelts England has today “cover more than 6,000 square miles (15,500 square kilometres) of land, around . . . [its] largest, most historic towns and cities.” England’s greenbelts showcase the country’s work to combat unbridled sprawl while underpinning the sustainable vision of a compact city.43 They have permanent protection, but still face constant threats from developers emboldened by the introduction of a new National Planning Policy Framework in 2012 that allows local municipalities to redesignate greenbelt land and remove conservation restrictions.44 A 2018 report from the CPRE states that nearly 12,000 acres of greenbelt have been lost—“the equivalent of around 5,000 football pitches”—since 2012.45
Other greenbelts around the world include the thriving and beautiful Congo Nile Trail in Rwanda, Milford Track in New Zealand, and the Île-de-France greenbelt just outside Paris. Where greenbelts have been developed, they’ve flourished and proven sustainable catalysts for communities to spend more time outdoors.
It’s not necessary to be a Benton MacKaye or an Alan French to bring a greenbelt to one’s community. Outdoor Citizens should speak with their local municipality leaders, conservation nonprofits, urban agriculture groups, potential funders, and others, and begin sketching what the greenbelt could look like. A grassroots effort and substantial interaction with local leaders are the keys to success.
Staffing an Outdoor City
We need to rise to face significant and shifting needs. The outdoors requires champions to carry the flag of stewardship and innovation and pursue a bold outdoor-centric agenda. But while there should be a movement of Outdoor Citizenship, there also needs to be a representative at the municipal level who can liaise with city officials to set an outdoor strategy and initiatives, and help secure funding. The person would be appointed the city’s Outdoor Officer (or OO)—a role I’ve long thought needs to exist.
In my opinion, a city needs an OO just as much as it needs a director of public works or director of economic development. It is insufficient to simply have Departments of Parks and Recreation or Departments of Natural Resources. There needs to be a specific position that oversees a city’s broad outdoor strategy. Municipalities need on-the-ground leaders who intimately know the communities they serve. The role is tantamount to the prioritization of a city’s long-term outdoor strategy, and the OO would champion and spearhead outdoor-centric initiatives. An Outdoor City’s success can be contingent on having the right OO.
My time in government gave me perspective on how some people survive in government roles for decades, despite stressful red tape and bureaucracy. What I realized is that for many longtime government employees, bureaucratic exhaustion has set in. They have endured the government’s version of whack-a-mole—offering new ideas, new approaches, and innovation only to be shot down (whacked) time and again—for so long that they have gotten used to it, and have often given up proposing new ideas. It is a culture of rejection that incites a risk aversion—something not tolerated in a high-performing organization, but pervasive in other places, like government. The OO will need to be indefatigable and savvy enough to break through bureaucracy, no matter how insurmountable it may seem.
The OO will also need to have Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals (BHAGs)—a wonderful term for a strategic vision plan coined by James Collins and Jerry Porras46—and a concrete plan to achieve them. The OO’s plan should galvanize the entire machinery of government, the private and nonprofit sectors, and the broader citizenry, and the OO should work closely with a diverse team of designers, engineers, influencers, community organizers, and advocates to push his or her outdoor agenda to its full potential. The officer should also guarantee that no new construction or other change negatively affects existing green spaces or human access to them.
The OO position could be realized in several different ways. It could be incorporated into the current Parks and Recreation Department director’s role, so the director takes a broader, more dynamic role in planning the city’s outdoor strategies, or it could be a newly developed senior executive position, with the person on the mayor’s board of senior advisors. Alternatively, it could be a “budget-positive” fellow, with the person’s salary privately funded and not pulled from the city’s budget, or funded through a combination of public and private resources. But even if there’s private funding, the OO needs to be a senior advisor to the mayor, so he or she has the clout to sit with the mayor, city manager,