Tag: green spaces

Cleveland’s Parks and Rec Master Plan Leans Into 15-Minute City Concept

click to enlarge

Mark Oprea

Michael Zone Rec Center, where the city’s massive 15-year parks plan was debuted to the public, on Tuesday.

A big heap of city projects in the past two years have turned increasingly to a type of planning reliant on what could be called data questions: What do we have? Where do we have it? And where could better things be?

What’s at the data-driven heart of the 15-minute city concept — loosely defined as building a city where most of residents’ needs can be met within a short walk, bicycle or transit ride from their house — was seen at City Hall’s debut to the public of its behemoth Parks and Rec Master Plan, displayed in a sweltering hot room at the Michael Zone Rec Center in Ohio City on Tuesday.

In a wall-to-wall display of the plan, culled together by the Mayor’s Office of Capital Projects and the Philadelphia-based OLIN Studio, residents got to see a relatively brainy idea ready for deployment—that Cleveland, over the next 15 years, should spend money to fix and/or install parks, or pickleball courts and splashpads, with a highly-specific walking radius in mind.

“It’s not just about putting a Public Square everywhere in Cleveland,” Andrew Dobshinsky, an associate for OLIN Studio, told Scene at the presentation. “It’s about what amenities do we need? And where do we need them?”

Since January, when MOCAP released its needs assessment, a culmination of 1,500 survey takers and their parks critiques, City Hall’s been working with OLIN and a slew of other consultants, from ThirdSpace to OHM Advisors, to convert Clevelanders’ feedback into a doable (and fundable) framework.

Hence the rule of the walking radius: OLIN’s team found that, in an ideal context, Clevelanders should live within a ten-minute walk of playgrounds and basketball hoops; and a twenty-minute walk of swimming pools, baseball diamonds, rec centers, community gardens and a dog park. And yes, a pickleball court.

Every single one of Cleveland’s 159 parks would be recategorized into one of six “proposed classifications”—as a regional park, a special facility, a civic space, etc.—which would, in turn, determine what exact amenity or improvement that park would need. That is to say, more bike racks, or paved loop trails, or permanent restrooms, or clear connections to a nearby RTA stop.

More importantly, according to both to survey takers and to those present on Tuesday, parks would first of all need to be brought up to par.

“So right here it is: ‘Facilities are not well maintained,’” Jay Rauschenbach, the city’s Parks & Recreation planning manager, said reading a placard citing January’s survey. (About half of Clevelanders think that the city’s parks are in rough shape.)

“That’s why people aren’t going there,” he added. “People just want nice things. They don’t want to go to a basketball court that has no nets. Or go to a playground with a swing’s not working. They just want the most basic things—and be able to use them.”

click to enlarge

Mark Oprea

Heavy focus is being placed on upgrading and maintaining the parks Cleveland already struggles to keep up to par.

To Rauschenbach’s point, the world of park maintenance could evolve nicely if the Parks and Rec plan is impliemented in the near future. For decades, MOCAP has had a staff of a few dozen to maintain both parks and vacant lots across Cleveland, a fact that Rauschenbach said has led to a deep backlog of deferred park repairs.

It’s also a balancing act with funding: Cleveland gets roughly $15 million a year, cash majorly from general obligation bonds (bonds issued by the city), to infuse into new parks, like Clark Field in Tremont, or to brush up those begging for new paint jobs or 21st century seating.

Funding that goes, Rauschenbach said, quite fast.

“I mean, it’s usually like a million dollars to do one single park,” he said. “That’s fully taking everything out, putting something new right back in.

Rauschenbach looked out a south-facing window of the rec center. “If you want to replace that playground with, like, a brand new playground, that in itself is $300,000 to $600,000 just for one playground. Then, there’s the parking lot, the trails, the trees, the tennis court. It’s a lot.”

All of which begs the question heard ad infinitum after any Cleveland study: How are 15 years of massive overhauls to hundreds of city parks going to be paid for?

Dobshinsky said that OLIN and MOCAP will explore a wider range of funding models in the third phase of the parks plan. But ideas seem to be endless—Cleveland could tap into a plethora of sponsors, of donations from nonprofits, even source dollars garnered from the Shore-to-Core-to-Shore tax increment financing program that City Council passed last month.

As long as, Councilwoman Jenny Spencer said, park refurbishing isn’t solely reliant on Council dollars.

“That’s a very slow process, right?” Spencer said at the meeting. Because of the city’s bonding capacity, it takes a long time to cycle through all the different facilities and green spaces. Our budget will continue to be an essential tool—but is there something more?”

Especially, she said, calling on her Ward 15 residents’ thoughts on their own neighborhood parks. “Things as simple as the condition of a locker room can change your experience of coming and using your own rec center,” she said.

Or outside where baseball diamonds sat in need of work, or rusted soccer posts in need of nets.

Or, say, a small room in the Michael Zone Rec Center, which was so balmy that several attendees had to fan their faces with brochures.

“Yep, this place needs a new A/C system,” Dobshinsky said, smiling. “That’s what we’re talking about.”

Subscribe to Cleveland Scene newsletters.

Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Or sign up for our RSS Feed

Mark Oprea

Source link

May 16, 2024
Time Spent in Nature Appears to Slow Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s

By Alan Mozes

HealthDay Reporter

TUESDAY, Dec. 27, 2022 (HealthDay News) — Living in an area with easy access to parks and rivers appears to slow the progression of devastating neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

That’s the conclusion of a new study based on more than a decade and a half tracking disease risk among nearly 62 million Americans 65 years old and up.

“Prior research showed that natural environments — such as forests, parks and rivers — can help to reduce stress and restore attention,” noted lead author Jochem Klompmaker, a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. “In addition, natural environments provide settings for physical activity and social interactions, and may reduce exposure to air pollution, extreme heat and traffic noise.”

To build on such observations, his and his colleagues looked at hospital admissions for Alzheimer’s and related dementia, as well as Parkinson’s disease.

By focusing on hospital admission, Klompmaker stressed that his team was not assessing the initial risk for developing either disease. Instead, researchers wanted to know if increased exposure to nature lowered the odds that either disease would progress quickly.

And on that front, Klompmaker said, researchers observed significant protective links: The greener an older individual’s surrounding environment, the lower their risk of hospitalization for either neurological illness.

The finding could have bearing on millions of Americans, given that Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are among the most common neurological diseases in the United States.

To explore the potential protective benefit of nature, researchers focused on seniors on Medicare living in the U.S. mainland between 2000 and 2016.

About 55% were women, and about 84% were white people. All were 65 to 74 years of age when they entered the study pool.

Over the study’s 16 years, nearly 7.7 million were hospitalized for Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia, and nearly 1.2 million were hospitalized for Parkinson’s.

Throughout, researchers stacked each patient’s ZIP code up against several types of geological survey data that collectively tallied a region’s overall “greenness.” That data included the amount of vegetation present, as well as the percentage of land devoted to parks and waterways.

In the end, the green number-crunching yielded mixed results.

On one hand, the team found no evidence that patients living in areas with more parks and waterways had lower risk for being hospitalized with Alzheimer’s.

But the risk of hospitalization did fall among those who lived in areas with more vegetation overall.

Results were even more positive with respect to the movement disorder Parkinson’s: By all measures studied, living in a greener environment meant a lower risk for hospitalization.

For every increase of 16% in park coverage the risk for hospitalization due to Parkinson’s fell by 3%, for example. And living in a ZIP code in which 1% or more of the studied space was water, the risk of Parkinson’s hospitalization fell 3% relative to those in ZIP codes with fewer water bodies.

As to why a greener environment might lower such neurological risk, Klompmaker said that the study did not look for a specific reason for these links.

“Living in or around green and blue spaces may have many beneficial health impacts,” he added, including less pollution, stress and noise.

Pablo Navarrete-Hernandez is a lecturer in landscape architecture at the University of Sheffield in England, who reviewed the findings.

His own work has indicated that people whose homes are filled with lots of natural light tend to be happier. He seconded the notion that the health benefits of nature should not be underestimated.

“Research shows that green spaces trigger people’s positive emotions, such as happiness, and reduce negative emotions such as anger, all related to lower stress levels,” Navarrete-Hernandez said. “Laboratory experiments also show that exposure to nature after stressful events helps reduce the body’s stress responses,” including levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

That, he said, may have a direct bearing on Alzheimer’s development. Prior studies have indicated that high levels of cortisol reduce volume of the hippocampus, a brain area critical to controlling the body’s stress response and executing essential memory functions.

On the Parkinson’s front, Navarrete-Hernandez noted that people who live in greener spaces tend to be more physically active. That could matter when it comes to disease progression, he said, given that physical activity has been shown to play a part in long-term preservation of motor function.

The findings were published Dec. 20 in JAMA Network Open.

More information

There’s more about the broad link between nature and improved health at the University of Minnesota.

SOURCES: Jochem Klompmaker, PhD, postdoctoral research fellow, Department of Environmental Health, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston; Pablo Navarrete-Hernandez, PhD, lecturer, Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Sheffield, U.K.; JAMA Network Open, Dec. 20, 2022

Source link

December 27, 2022
Exposure to ‘Blue Spaces’ Linked to Better Mental Health

Oct. 14, 2022 — Spending time in “blue spaces” — such as beaches, rivers, and lakes — as a child can have significant and lasting benefits for wellbeing throughout life, according to a new study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology.

When exposed to blue spaces in childhood, people are more likely to revisit bodies of water in adulthood and appreciate the time spent in natural settings.

“Learning to swim and appreciate the dangers in terms of rip currents, cold temperatures, etc., is of course primary,” Mathew White, one of the study authors and a senior scientist at the University of Vienna, told The Guardian.

“But the message we are trying to get across is that to only teach children about the dangers of water settings may make them overly afraid of, and ill-equipped to benefit from, places that can also be hugely beneficial to their health and wellbeing as they grow up,” he said. “The vast majority of blue space visits — both for adults and children — do not involve getting wet, so there are also many advantages from spending time near water, not just in it.”

Researchers from the U.S. and a dozen other countries analyzed data from the BlueHealth International Survey for more than 15,000 people across 18 countries, examining the links between childhood exposure to blue spaces and adult wellbeing.

Participants recalled their experiences up to age 16, noting how often they visited blue spaces, how local they were, and how comfortable their parents or guardians were about allowing them to swim and play. They also discussed their recent contact with blue spaces and green spaces during the previous four weeks, as well as their mental health status during the previous two weeks.

Researchers found that more childhood exposure to blue spaces was associated with better adult wellbeing. They noted the results were consistent across all countries and regions.

Adults also had familiarity with and confidence around coasts, rivers, and lakes, as well as higher levels of joy around bodies of water and a greater propensity to spend recreational time in nature during adulthood. In turn, this lifted their mood and wellbeing.

“We recognize that both green and blue spaces have a positive impact on people’s mental and physical health,” Valeria Vitale, one of the study authors and a doctoral candidate at Sapienza University of Rome, told The Guardian.

In recent years, a growing number of studies have noted the benefits of spending time in nature, including both blue spaces and green spaces such as forests, parks, and gardens. The natural settings can increase people’s physical activity levels, boost mood and wellbeing, and lower stress and anxiety.

Vitale and colleagues noted that blue spaces, in particular, have unique sensory qualities such as wave sounds and light reflections that can improve mood, as well as leisure activities such as swimming, fishing, and water sports.

“We believe our findings are particularly relevant to practitioners and policymakers because of the nationally representative nature of the samples,” she said. “First, our findings reinforce the need to protect and invest in natural spaces in order to optimize the potential benefits to subjective wellbeing. Second, our research suggests that policies and initiatives encouraging greater contact with blue spaces during childhood may support better mental health in later life.”

Source link

October 14, 2022