May 2020 - Parks & Recreation - 41

tions that you could think about.
And, this can apply also to other city
building or city-maintaining professionals - design, management and
programming. Who designs our
spaces? Who manages these spaces?
And, who programs these spaces?
If your organization doesn't look
like the community it serves, are
you legitimate? Going forward, are
you going to be trusted? Are you effective? Can you get funding? I want
to give a shout out to the Dudley
Street Neighborhood Initiative in
Boston, which in the early 1980s,
before they set up the organization,
they did a demographic survey of
the neighborhood and constituted
their board of directors to look like
the community. Forty years on, the
DSNI is going strong. The funders
love them, they've developed hundreds of affordable homes, they've
developed the Dudley Commons,
and they're part of the Dudley
Food Hub. And, they participated
in the Article 89 rezoning in Boston, which allowed two of their
community land, trust lands, to
become farms.
The success of this organization
is palpable, and I attribute a lot of
it to the fact that they look like the
communities, so there is trust. I
mean...do your park professionals
feel that they represent or look like
communities in which they're serving? In this world where belonging
is becoming increasingly denied in
urban spaces, how do we get to the
point where our professionals do reflect the communities in which they
serve? [This applies to] design professionals who design these public
spaces and parks, [along with] the
managers of these spaces and the
programmers of these spaces.
I want to propose something
that I'm increasingly interested in, [which] is the idea of co-

production. Co-production breaks
down the barrier between provider
and user, or manager and user. One
very simple example is from my
own personal experience. When I
first came to Cambridge about 20
years ago, the city was doing some
street tree planting. And, they leafleted the neighborhood. They honestly said, " Look, we can't be watering these every week in the summer.
Would you pledge to throw a bucket
of water over it once a week? " And
I said, " Absolutely! " And now, I
can go to that tree, look at it and
say, " I co-produced you! You are
a co-production between me and
Cambridge City Council. " That's
the simplest level. And, we've done
it for a long time.
Here's a charge I could put out to
you [park professionals]. In what
ways could the design, management and programming functions
of parks be seen as a co-production
effort with local communities?
Now, I want to lay out straight from
the beginning that I don't see this
as cheap labor. Some people say:
" Oh my God, Julian, come on! You
know this is cheap labor. This is
parks. We know where the budgets
get slashed first. It's always parks. "
I was on the Stewardship Council of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and we looked at state
parks and everything. We were
always getting our budget slashed,
but this isn't that. This is a new way
of thinking. This is a very distributed form of governance, and this
is a way to make people feel they
belong. This gets to the belonging
piece, and if we look after the belonging piece, the becoming piece
will take care of itself.
Stratton: How do you see
planning and policy inﬂuencing
positive outcomes that help

reinforce this idea of just
sustainabilities?
Agyeman: One thing that I'm increasingly interested in is the role
of leadership. When I look around
the world - where very positive,
pro equity, pro justice things have
happened in cities - there's always a strong leader. Go back
to Curitiba (Brazil) and Jaime
Lerner who basically went out
and looked at his city and said,
" How do we get people to move
around so that they can gain access? How can we design a more
equitable system? " He didn't design a more green system; that
wasn't his primary goal. It was
a more equitable system. The result, though, was an increasingly
green transport system, which
people still go to Curitiba to see.

In what ways could the design,
management and programming
functions of parks be seen as a
co-production eﬀort with local
communities?
Belo Horizonte, Brazil, is a city
that Frances Moore Lappé calls
" the city that abolished hunger, "
because a mayor in the early '90s,
who himself had come from a background of food insecurity, designed
a civic directorate of the city that
looked at food security in terms of
the city fixing certain prices of certain foods for people on benefits.
The private-sector retailers
could sell at whatever price they
want to [for] other people. But for
people on benefits, they [must]
sell it at certain prices. They also
started giving unemployed people
plots of city land and resources to
help train people to do things. The
result was a city of 3 to 4 million

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May 2020 - Parks & Recreation

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