Public Gardens and Livable Cities

Partnerships Connecting People, Plants, and Place

Donald A. Rakow, Meghan Z. Gough, Sharon A. Lee

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501751776
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Horticulture
• Index: Biological Sciences

Public Gardens and Livable Cities changes the paradigm for how we conceive of the role of urban public gardens. Donald A. Rakow, Meghan Z. Gough, and Sharon A. Lee advocate for public gardens as community outreach agents that can, and should, partner with local organizations to support positive local agendas.

Safe neighborhoods, quality science education, access to fresh and healthy foods, substantial training opportunities, and environmental health are the key initiative areas the authors explore as they highlight model successes and instructive failures that can guide future practices. Public Gardens and Livable Cities uses a prescriptive approach to synthesize a range of public, private, and nonprofit initiatives from municipalities throughout the country. In doing so, the authors examine the initiatives from a practical perspective to identify how they were implemented, their sustainability, the obstacles they encountered, the impact of the initiatives on their populations, and how they dealt with the communities' underlying social problems.

By emphasizing the knowledge and skills that public gardens can bring to partnerships seeking to improve the quality of life in cities, this book offers a deeper understanding of the urban public garden as a key resource for sustainable community development.

1

Promoting Neighborhood Safety and Well-Being

Many cities across the United States are responding to residents’ demands for more livable neighborhoods by investing in public spaces that are open and accessible to people, such as sidewalks, parks, and plazas. Placemaking, a strategy mentioned in the introduction, uses public spaces to promote social interaction, stimulate investment in distressed places, rejuvenate structures and streetscapes, and create a safe, well-maintained, and welcoming environment for all users.¹ Placemaking efforts frequently use natural amenities, such as trees and plantings, as tools to attract and engage people in an urban setting. Landscaping and maintenance of public spaces are not just tools to beautify an area; they also promote a sense of safety and reduce crime by signaling that neighbors are actively involved in community spaces.² Placemaking increases the perception that there are “eyes on the street,”³ which acts to deter crime and increase a sense of neighborhood safety.

Placemaking emphasizes the importance and potential of a particular type of community asset: partnerships.⁴ Creative interdisciplinary partnerships between residents, local schools and universities, artists, civic leaders, and professionals in fields such as park planning and community and economic development are transforming underutilized public spaces.⁵ This chapter examines the approach, process, and outcomes of placemaking partnerships formed with public gardens to promote a sense of safety and well-being at the neighborhood scale. Cases in this chapter emphasize the intentional use of urban greening as a tool to empower residents to actively contribute to positive change, to elevate diverse cultures sharing common spaces, and to capitalize on existing assets in the community to manage vacant land.

The Greening of Brooklyn

In the early twentieth century, New York City was already on its way to becoming the dense cityscape that it is today. The availability of manufacturing jobs and the waves of immigration into the city contributed to its exponential population growth. Innovations in transportation, including bridges, trolley lines, and the first subway line, extended development from Manhattan into the more rural borough of Brooklyn.⁶ Brooklyn had always been a diverse borough, attracting residents from cultures with strong ties to gardening. Today, only 54 percent of Brooklyn residents speak English at home as their primary language, followed closely by Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and Yiddish.⁷

Over the past century, Brooklyn has gained over 1 million new residents, many of them immigrants who account for at least 30 percent of the city’s population.⁸ Brooklyn is now the most populous borough in New York City, with an estimated 2.6 million residents.⁹ How does an urban area with such a strong history of concentrated growth and changing demographics sustain a livable community?

Establishing a public garden in the heart of Brooklyn in 1910 was one way to ensure that open and green space was preserved in the face of rapid urban growth. Over its first several decades, Brooklyn Botanic Garden (BBG) invested in the landscape design of its fifty-two-acre site and focused its mission on “the advancement and diffusion of a knowledge and a love of plants” through display gardens, scientific collections, and the first-of-its-kind children’s garden.¹⁰ The Children’s Garden, which opened in 1914, gave city children from all income groups the opportunity to grow their own food and in the process to learn about the aesthetic, economic, and nutritional value of plants. In a 1922 reflection on the Children’s Garden, BBG’s curator of elementary education said, “We have tried from the beginning to establish in the minds of the public this fact: That our educational work is not for the poor alone, nor for the rich alone, nor for the middle class, but for all classes and conditions.”¹¹

The success of the Children’s Garden, ostensibly the first “community outreach” effort of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and outreach to local public schools helped establish the garden as a community-facing institution.¹² For decades, BBG built relationships with gardeners throughout the region by informally advising community and home gardeners, and for nearly forty years it celebrated the kickoff of the spring gardening season with an annual Making Brooklyn Bloom event.

In the 1980s, Brooklyn was struggling to become a destination for living and working, but the borough—like the rest of New York City—faced the challenges posed by disinvestment, a spiking crime rate, derelict buildings, poor housing conditions, and racial tension, many of which were captured in Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing. In response to those challenges, New York City adopted a “broken window” approach to policing, which assumes that small crimes and disorder (e.g., graffiti or littering) establish a climate for serious crimes (e.g., robbery or murder).¹³ The logic of this now-controversial theory is that if one “window” is broken and not repaired and maintained, it signals that no one cares, and encourages more broken “windows.”¹⁴ In practice, this approach resulted in the overpolicing of minority communities, fractured relationships between law enforcement and minorities, distrust among residents, and eventually calls for policing reform.¹⁵

BBG’s GreenBridge

Partly in response to this situation and its negative impact on the borough’s quality of life, Brooklyn Botanic Garden in 1993 expanded its outreach efforts and founded an ambitious community horticulture and urban greening program, which it named GreenBridge. The overall goals of GreenBridge were to match BBG’s horticultural skills and resources to community-identified needs and to build a network of people and resources dedicated to making Brooklyn a greener, more livable place. Led by Judith Zuk, BBG’s president at the time, BBG saw GreenBridge as a commitment to expand access to horticulture and urban greening to the wider community. GreenBridge would use urban greening as the tool to “bridge” cultural differences, and to heal and build new relationships between neighbors working together on neighborhood beautification projects.¹⁶ BBG was poised to use its relationships, reputation, and technical skills to create new connections between the many segments of the Brooklyn community.

GreenBridge operated as a community-based environmental horticulture program promoting urban greening through education, conservation, and creative partnerships.¹⁷ BBG’s location between some of the borough’s most affluent areas near Prospect Park and some of the poorest neighborhoods enabled it to use horticulture as a common shared value to facilitate community discussions with diverse groups.

BBG recently rebranded its greening efforts under the umbrella of Community Greening, instead of GreenBridge, but the programs remain consistent and include five initiatives, each with a distinct role in promoting urban greening in Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Urban Gardener is an eleven-session train-the-trainer certificate program that instructs participants on basics in urban gardening and community organizing. The Community Garden Alliance is a network of gardeners and provides educational workshops and an annual free plant giveaway as well as social events around sustainable horticulture. The Street Tree Stewards initiative teaches residents to care for street trees. Making Brooklyn Bloom is the long-running annual event to kick off spring planting season, comprising a free daylong program of workshops, speakers, and exhibits about sustainable horticulture. Finally, the Greenest Block in Brooklyn contest promotes sustainable streetscape improvements and community building through annual competitions between blocks and civic groups.

Notably, the Greenest Block in Brooklyn contest was designed in response to a community-identified need. Years before the contest was created, local gardeners started friendly gardening competitions on their blocks. These local home gardeners reached out to BBG for technical advice and eventually requested that someone at the garden act as the judge for their block competitions.¹⁸ Because of its potential to build “bridges” between residents from different backgrounds, the Greenest Block contest is an instructive model of how a public garden can connect people through placemaking.

Building Bridges through Urban Greening Contests

Designed to help Brooklyn residents feel safer and more comfortable by encouraging neighbors to work together to re-green their neighborhoods, the Greenest Block contest promotes and rewards streetscape gardening, tree stewardship, and community-building activities through a friendly, albeit spirited, competition between different blocks or merchant associations. The contest also empowers residents by respecting their neighborhood knowledge and by providing them with the training and resources to implement their ideas for urban greening.

To get the program off the ground, BBG embraced the assets of the borough’s diverse cultures and learned how current residents were doing urban greening. “As I traveled around the borough,” explained Ellen Kirby, the program’s first director, “I saw people living in lower-wealth areas who already knew how to do urban greening and gardening, and I wanted to showcase to others what these neighborhoods could do.” After more than twenty growing seasons, Greenest Block can boast that it has influenced greening activities on an estimated 1,600 blocks across the borough and has involved over six hundred thousand Brooklynites in beautification and greening efforts.¹⁹

The notion of a contest to foster participation and excitement around urban greening is simple, yet an analysis of the nuts and bolts of Greenest Block reveals a strategic and well-orchestrated program. “The block associations in Brooklyn have always been central to the sociopolitical landscape; you can’t ignore them,” explained Nina Browne, community program manager at BBG.²⁰ The success of this program is rooted in BBG’s decision to use block associations as organizing agents and partners, and in its relationship with influential actors in the Brooklyn area who can serve as contest judges and attract additional support for urban greening initiatives.

Anchored by Block and Civic Associations

From the start, the contest operated as a partnership with block and merchant associations, facilitated through the Office of the Brooklyn Borough President, which is known for its strong relationship with block associations and has helped cultivate the ascendency of blocks as powerful forces for change.²¹ Brooklyn’s history of strong block associations stems from common resident concerns such as crime, historic preservation, and unscrupulous landlords.²² “The key to making the connection between community and horticulture was to first determine the scale at which the community could be focused and organized,” reflected Ellen Kirby.²³ Neighborhood blocks were selected as the scale of focus for this initiative because block associations typically possess a level of organizational capacity as well as the potential to build stronger relationships between residents.

As opposed to a competition built around individual front yards, the model for Greenest Block requires that people work together to landscape their block, and it only accepts entries from civic organizations such as official or ad hoc residential block associations, civic groups, or neighborhood organizations. Residential blocks are judged from corner to corner and on both sides of the street, whereas commercial entries (e.g., merchant associations, development corporations, business improvement districts, or nonprofit business associations) are judged on one side of the street.

FIGURE 1.1. Greening the block in Brooklyn.

Photo by Michelle Gluck.

In addition to criteria such as variety and suitability of plants, maintenance and total visual effect, and soil stewardship, the contest is...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Introduction: Livable Cities and Public Gardens
• 1. Promoting Neighborhood Safety and Well-Being
• 2. Improving the Quality of Science Education
• 3. Access to Healthy Food and Promoting Healthy Lives
• 4. Training and Employment Programs
• 5. Initiatives to Promote Ecosystem and Human Health
• 6. Strategies for the Development of Successful Partnerships
• Epilogue: A Look at the Future of Public Gardens
• Appendix A: Public Gardens Featured in Case Studies
• Appendix B: Case Study Garden Initiatives and Partnering Organizations
• Appendix C: National and International Organizations Aligned with Public Gardens
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index