Community Green

by Chuck Miller, Doty and Miller Architects

A golden rule of successful communities is the provision of opportunities in everyday life to experience a series of both planned and unplanned encounters. Community green spaces provide some of the best locations for these encounters. Most prominent of all is the traditional civic center, the village common, the community green. A large central green space, intended for public presentations, celebrations and entertainment is ideally located adjacent to symbolic civic institutions such as the school, city hall, library or museum. This is the open outdoor living room for the community at large. It expresses the local civic values in its quality of materials, design and maintenance of both built and natural features. Natural green space provides color and softness to the harder architectural edges of the built environment. But more than decoration, it provides the fabric that merges the civic center with the rest of the community.

Beyond the civic center, natural landscaping ought to seamlessly flow along the walking path to workplace and residential areas of the surrounding neighborhoods. Within workplace and residential areas, smaller parks are a natural extension of life beyond indoor sheltered isolation. There is richness in the variety of these smaller parks as they mesh with the identity of each neighborhood. They could be part of the food or entertainment after-work district, or the toddler playground under the watchful eye of parents and grandparents. In any case, the parks offer planned and unplanned occasions to see old friends and meet new ones. The shade of a tree, comfortable seating, a gurgling fountain and a visible location can combine to create a special sense of place.

At the urban edge and even cutting through the urban fabric, unaltered natural terrain along a sloping ravine or a wooded hillside provides a cherished natural contrast to paved and mowed surfaces. This rugged attraction can be a temptation to explore in the hope of finding the hidden stream or mountaintop view. Wild places are perhaps the most threatened of all urban green places. If they are not cut, filled and flattened for development, they are convenient dumping ground for all of our disposables. Little by little these losses remove natural habitat and removes us from contact with the natural world. But we also need to be vigilant about loss of green space in our community parks and civic centers. The increased dependency on an auto oriented society and management efficiency has moved many communities in the direction of large centralized big-box recreation centers surrounded by large paved parking lots. The high construction cost of these facilities and higher labor costs to maintain park areas has left many community parks overgrown and uninviting. Urban communities would do well to recognize the value of maintaining a sense of place at diverse locations throughout the community through preservation and maintenance of parks and natural areas. The contribution to the quality of life and identity is essential to the future of these important neighborhoods.