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Jenn Recinos, a resident of Providence, Rhode Island, grew up across the street from Donigian Park. She has fond memories of spending time with her family there.
“[My parents] are from Guatemala, so they’re used to being outdoors. I think this was a place that reminded them of home,” Recinos says.
She also talks about how parks played a role in her childhood in a city where backyards are scarce.
“We didn’t have a backyard. In a lot of these houses in Providence, the yards are parking lots, so the only green spaces we really saw were at parks...,” Recinos explains. She adds that her family didn’t own a house. “Growing up, I felt like I needed to go somewhere else to experience what a yard was like. I remember being frustrated as a kid [and wondering], ‘where do I use my bike, my soccer ball, my basketball, my scooter?; where can I use these things?’ My parents had to physically take me to a park to enjoy a gift I might have gotten,” she says.
Providence is a small but diverse city of 300,000 residents. Over the past few decades, many residential neighborhoods in the city saw their front and backyards paved over to accommodate cars. With more than 30 percent of residents born outside the United States, many coming from places where spending time outdoors is a regular part of life, renters and homeowners alike have used their city’s parks as their backyards.
Recognizing the need for public access to green spaces, Providence has invested more than $27 million in capital improvements to parks over a five-year period that will expand equitable access across the city. “To most of our kids throughout the city, our public parks are their backyards, so we want to make sure that they have beautiful backyards where they can spread their wings,” says Mayor Jorge Elorza. “We’ve made an effort throughout the city to improve our parks. We have about 120 parks and when I took office, the vast majority of parks hadn’t been touched significantly since the 1970s. So, we decided that we were going to prioritize our parks, and of those 120, we’ve significantly rehabbed over 100 of them. Now we have beautiful parks like this in every part of the city.”
As a champion of parks and equity, Mayor Elorza committed to expanding access to parks by signing onto The Trust for Public Land’s 10-Minute Walk Program in 2017. The work Providence has done to improve access to open spaces is predicated on the knowledge that public spaces are places where communities can gather and recreate, and provide a wealth of co-benefits related to health, climate and community. Yet, access to space is not equally shared across our nation, and the 10-Minute Walk Program is working to promote a more equitable future in hopes that cities like Providence prioritize close-to-home parks.
“We have big infrastructure challenges as a city, as so many cities do, and we can’t do everything, but we said, ‘let’s go broad and deep with our parks,’ understanding that we still have roads and sidewalks that we still need to get to, but let’s start with our parks,” says Mayor Elorza.
Eliza Lawson, Associate Director, Partnership and Outreach, 10-Minute Walk Program, The Trust for Public Land