October 2016 - Parks & Recreation - 80

D E S I G N I N G P A R K S F O R H E A LT H

staff understood the significant history
and potential of parks. William Lyman
Phillips, a young associate from Olmsted Brothers, worked with the Civilian
Conservation Corps to create parks in
discarded areas like the former quarry, as
well as the county's most beautiful shorelines. As much as was accomplished,
however, the network of parks remained
auto-centric and destination oriented.
At the opening of the 21st century, the
Miami-Dade Parks, Recreation and Open
Spaces (MDPROS) leadership engaged
in an open planning process to imagine
a new future with a connected system of
greenways and blueways, neighborhood
parks, transit-oriented parks and development that would provide a resilient
network for ecological and population
health. The original team, led by Maria
Nardi, now assistant director of planning and design excellence at MDPROS,
outcomes - cancer, diabetes, heart disease and a host of related ailments -
focused more specifically on the built
environment and its impact on physical
activity.
By now, however, parks had followed
the same settlement pattern of sprawl as
new parks were placed in drivable, rather
than walkable, distances from neighborhoods. And, just as buildings stopped
serving many simultaneous and diverse
uses, parks followed the same trend with
a focus on single-use spaces - a baseball diamond, a tennis court. So, just as
single-use buildings stood empty in their
off-hours, single-use parks were usually
depopulated outside of game time.
The result of these kinds of physical and functional separations could be
seen in the vast expansion of driveways
and parking lots, and the diminishment
of places that had once served as lively
neighborhood centers. In the process of
this radical post-WWII spatial experiment in which towns and cities became
adjunct to highways and roads, and life
moved off the streets and sidewalks and
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The separation of life into pods of single-uses enforced a
pattern of commuting from place to place, which further
limited the capacity of parks to provide social interaction
and physical activity essential to health and well-being.
into cars, parks became use-specific destinations instead of the lifeblood of daily
infrastructure. The separation of life into
pods of single-uses enforced a pattern of
commuting from place to place, which
further limited the capacity of parks
to provide the social interaction and
physical activity essential to health and
well-being.
Florida's Miami-Dade County is an exemplar of this settlement pattern. Its first
parks evolved as plantings along roadsides. One of its earliest, and now iconic,
parks was built on a site that had been
mined for its oolitic limestone and was
dotted with leftover mining equipment.
Fortunately, the early parks department

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conducted extensive community engagement sessions to develop a vision that
represented the aspirations of residents,
as well as advances in park and urban
planning strategies that put people first.
As Nardi and the MDPROS professionals worked with national and local
landscape, park and urban designers to
develop the new masterplan, the need
for impact accountability for the various
strategies became increasingly evident.
This marked the beginning of an ongoing collaboration with the University of
Miami's Built Environment, Behavior
and Health Research Group. The linking
of community health outcomes and the
new masterplan can be seen, for exam-
October 2016 - Parks & Recreation

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