There are plenty of reasons to welcome green space in urban environments, from boosting local agriculture to protecting habitats to reducing a city’s heat-island temperature rise. Scientists from Canada and the United States are adding a new one: City parks serve as community hubs in a time of crisis, and they should be integrated into a systemic approach when planning for earthquakes and other emergencies.
Research conducted through the University of Guelph, University of Alberta and Texas A&M began with a review of existing literature on disaster planning. The findings, recently published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, are based on how often people gather in parks, plazas and other public venues when confronted with crisis.
It’s in parks that people recovering from an earthquake – the hazard on which the researchers focused – will gather to sleep outdoors. It’s also there that they’ll build tent cities after losing homes to wildfire or flood, and where disaster victims seek to access food, medical and other assistance.
So in a changing world, where climate and other catastrophes befall entire communities, it may make sense for urban planners and landscape architects to design park settings with a dual purpose in mind.
“The lack of large, open space in the urban environment can lead to an increase in injury and death following an earthquake,” said Texas A&M landscape architecture professor Robert Brown, who worked with the three Canadian researchers to look at the role of parks in disaster resilience.
“Immediate needs such as evacuation, medical assistance, communication, social gathering, shelter and distribution of food and water are often addressed in a city’s open space,” Brown said.
The need for such spaces is increasing, and there’s a growing demand for design techniques and guidelines to keep pace. Yet there are no clear industry standards to ensure that the same open spaces that give a city its identity, and that community members love, are aligned to facilitate the response and recovery when catastrophe strikes.
What Brown and the other researchers hope is that those standards will be developed. That can mean careful attention to how pedestrian walkways and city streets connect to green spaces for recovery as well as recreation. It can also mean designing public spaces – fountains or amphitheaters or gardens – with an eye toward how the same assets could be deployed to help humans in crisis.
The authors conclude that at the very least, parks and public spaces should be designed to ensure food, water and other basics can be efficiently and humanely distributed through them.
One key component to success is community engagement, coupled with programming and education, they said. Community members need to be a core part of the effort to understand where parks are or need to be, what kind of existing resources they provide and what the underlying patterns are for how they’re used.
It’s also neighbors, businesses and their elected officials who are poised to understand what unique challenges their cities will face in the event of an earthquake or similar disaster. Including their insights when planning for that day will improve the investment in parks and public squares and, quite likely, save lives.
