A New Normal for City Parks..?

In the midst of Covid there are thousands of people out enjoying their local greenspace, discovering new paths, spending time together with nature. But at the same time there’s tension in public space as public transport is avoided, cafes and bars are asking for outside space, and people queuing for shops need social distancing space.

So, what to do about all this? In a recent YouGov poll only 9% of us wanted to return to life as normal. So how can we help people keep what they’re valuing?

Future Parks Accelerator is helping 9 local authorities (including Edinburgh) to find long term solutions to managing parks and greenspaces. There’s £6million of National Lottery Heritage Fund and government funding, plus £5m-worth of advice and support from National Trust experts in conservation, fundraising, volunteering and green space management. www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/our-vision-for-the-future-of-parks

As a response to Covid we’re Crowdsourcing what residents and groups could do in the next 3 months to support their council to improve and maintain greenspaces.

What do people think?

• 63% of us think protecting and enhancing green spaces should be a higher priority after the lockdown
• 57% felt they were more aware of the importance of such green spaces to mental health and wellbeing
• 54% agree that people are doing more to help their communities

What have people done?

• Within three weeks people had set up 4,208 Covid-19 Mutual Aid groups, with 2.5 million members
• More than a million people registered to volunteer for the NHS and lots for council Covid hub
• People who have never been involved in their communities are becoming active, including the 20% of population who are facing lockdown alone.

But council budgets are worse than ever, and many voluntary sector organisations have lost all their income, so where is the response to this going to come?

Some suggestions so far have been:

• 1.       massively increase the number of friends-of groups and make it easy to join them online.
• 2.       Have an ‘adopt plot type scheme’ in local areas where road closures are happening so we have loads more pocket parks: https://sfpublicworks.org/streetparks
• 3.       Increase the volunteering offer including evenings, weekends and for families
• 4.       Help people do more on their own including dropping off tools, giving people permission to work alone and helping people understand the parks work
• 5.       Crowdsource options and action for every bit of greenspace, woodland, cut through and have a rapid action plan
• 6.       Set up new online groups to coordinate green spaces like www.incredibleedible.org.uk
• 7.       Set up citizen juries etc to look at alternatives to metal play parks via Crowdsourced maps, zoom conversations and hub and spoke coordination through open data hubs
• Alongside this will be a volunteering and fundraising campaign for those who can help. 

Thoughts, suggestions..??