Parks are essential green infrastructure, Tim Beatley, founder and executive director of the Biophilic Cities Network, said during a webinar on innovative parks last week. They help cities address climate change by providing shade and cooling, showing the benefits of transforming parks into critical climate infrastructure for urban resilience. They provide habitat for birds and other biodiversity. And they serve as social infrastructure for residents. Parks and other green spaces are entering into a golden era of design, he said.

“There’s so much creative work, so many new ideas about parks out there,” Beatley said, regarding the work of transforming parks. Webinar panelists outlined the benefits urban park projects are bringing to their cities. Here are five takeaways about transforming parks into critical urban infrastructure.

To Transform Parks, Try New Governance and Funding Models

Innovative governance and funding models make ambitious parks possible, the panelists said about transforming parks.

The Presidio, a national park on a former Army base at the foot of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, is an early example of a self-sustaining funding model that doesn’t rely on city budgets. Four years after the site became a national park in 1994, the Presidio Trust was created to generate revenue that would help pay for long-deferred maintenance on the park’s historic buildings, said Lewis Stringer, Presidio Trust’s associate director of natural resources. The trust initially used federal appropriations to restore the buildings, and now rental income from them supports the park. In 2024, that rent generated $182 million in revenue, Stringer said about transforming parks.

Raleigh, North Carolina’s Dix Park is being developed through a public-private partnership on 308 acres near downtown. The city owns and operates the park, and the nonprofit Dix Park Conservancy raises funds to support it financially, said Kate Pearce, the conservancy’s president and CEO. The conservancy raised a third of the $70 million needed to create a play plaza, which opened last June with more than 110,000 new plants, she said. The remaining funding came from a city bond for parks and a lead gift from private donors, according to the project website dedicated to transforming parks.

Read the full article about transforming parks by Robyn Griggs Lawrence at Smart Cities Dive.