Ten recommendations for transforming your urban green spaces
Ten recommendations for transforming your urban green spaces from our Future Parks places at the Naturally Thriving Conference.
As part of the Naturally Thriving Conference, we rounded up our top ten tips for how to transform urban green space. These distilled three years of work across the Future Parks Accelerator into ten clear and actionable goals, which can be used by others who are keen to embark on an urban green transformation journey.
These recommendations have been co-designed by the Future Parks Accelerator (FPA) cohort, with peers in different Local Authorities and urban settings in mind. Working across different settings, the cohort of 8 different local authorities have trialled ideas and shared learning which has highlighted similarities across varied contexts, forming the backbone of these top ten recommendations.
Let us explain our tips…
1. It is important to get familiar with your green estate. We recommend investigating and analysing the extent, condition, connectivity, use, income and expenditure of your green spaces. This baseline information can act as an essential foundation, helping you to understand the current condition as well as the future potential of your green spaces for people, climate and nature.
2. We encourage you to be ambitious for environmental justice. You can use environmental and socio-economic data to map and index local urban environmental quality. This can then be used to identify what the most needed systemic improvements to your green space are and where investment for ‘growth’ should be targeted to improve quality of life for everyone. You can find out more with our Environmental Justice resource hub.
3. To ensure green space is central to local community life, you need to think about what your communities need and how they want to be involved. We recommend that you ask communities and VCSE sector what they need from green spaces and how they can contribute to activate and animate them to increase benefit. Find out more through our communities resource hub.
4. We urge you to put health at the heart of green space strategy and plans. You can do this by working with Partner Health, Social Care and VCSE sectors to upgrade your green estate as health infrastructure and co-create health service delivery in green spaces, including green social prescribing. Learn about more about health in parks.
5. Grow your urban nature network to improve the benefit nature can bring to people and place, and not least to climate resilience. To do this, audit the ecosystem services provided by urban natural infrastructure in your place. You should engage stakeholders and the public along the way, identifying solutions and improvements with them. Growing the network in this way will enhance quality, connectivity and accessibility. Find our more in our Urban Nature Networks resource hub.
6. Attract and retain significant philanthropic funding and grant income by making parks and green spaces a popular cause locally. Create opportunities for people to connect with nature and each other; provide valuable respite from our busy urban lives; and use parks and green spaces to make the city a better place to live, work and visit. Create the capacity to act with charitable purpose, either directly, through a foundation, or in partnership with VCSE sector.
7. Be socially entrepreneurial. With your communities, local businesses, and social enterprises, explore and prioritise income generation and job creation opportunities from improved experiences of green spaces. Learn more from our Commercial and Business Development Consultant, Mollie Dodd.
8. How can you make the case to invest in your green/ blue network? Well… you can calculate the real economic value of your green estate (not just the maintenance cost, or income generated) to demonstrate the ‘high benefit to cost ratio’, and you can use this to promote green space as valuable natural infrastructure.
9. How can you attract new sources of long-term dedicated investment for your green spaces? Explore your green finance potential, and to do this, we suggest you start by setting-up a habitat bank. Find out more about habitat banking through our resource hub.
10. Last, but definitely not least, it is so important to nurture your green team and wider ‘family’. You need to ensure that the capacity, capability and shared purpose of the team can meet the significant challenges and opportunities the 21st century presents. To do this, invest in your teams to build skills, confidence and capacity of staff and volunteers and tap into the leadership potential across your council and wider city network.
So there you have them, our co-produced top ten, our pearls of wisdom from three years of dedicated partnership work in urban greenspaces from eight towns and cities across the UK. You can dive in deeper to find out more about the journeys our eight places have been on that have lead them to these recommendations through our resources hub.
By Georgina Harvey, November 2022