infrastructure – Scene & Herd

Last year, I participated in a provoking thought exercise with my counterparts from other states. We attempted to develop an alternate term for “recreation and parks.”

Schuylkill River Trail. credit: Visit Philadelphia

Because recreation and parks means something different to practically every person, and carries unwanted baggage of being regarded as trivial, even laughable, and less worthy than more “important” things, we wanted to explore what single term could encompass all its comprehensive benefits.

Eleanor Warmack, CEO of the Florida Recreation and Park Association, declares, “If our industry was a corporation, we would have rebranded ourselves 20 times by now. This profession has evolved—we cannot keep using terminology from 100 years ago to limit what the public thinks of our value, nor to allow our profession to be defined by three words.”

Such a new term could indeed rebrand our entire industry and lead to universal recognition of its value! But whatever the word is, it must express all its connections to health and wellness, environmental sustainability, social equity, economic stimulation, infrastructure and resiliency, people development, community livability, and, of course, recreation and leisure services! (See Recreation & Parks’ Internet of Things, 50 Ways Parks and Recreation Pay Out Every Day, and Are We Building People—or Just Running Programs?)

Now hold that thought.

In the book The Blue Zones of Happiness, author Dan Buettner cites research from 141 countries to distill what contributes most to life satisfaction all over the world, and offers practical lessons to making happiness a personal lifestyle.

It’s fairly easy to be happy in any particular moment, of course. The challenge is to sustain an ongoing pursuit of what he calls the three P’s—purpose, pleasure, and pride—the universal keys to life fulfillment, regardless of culture or personality. And while personal discipline can go only so far, Buettner advocates “for strategies that make changes to our surroundings…that constantly nudge us into doing the right things so we don’t have to remember them on our own.”

Our governments, communities, and workplaces; our social networks, homes, and finances; and even our inner lives can be “happier by design,” he asserts. Each of his designing blueprints for happiness enumerates specific action steps for advancing our personal and collective purpose, pleasure, and pride.

In the book’s foreword, Ed Diener summarizes, “We now know that happiness is an essential part of functioning well, and that it gives a boost in well-being not only to individuals, but also to those around them, their communities, and their societies. Rather than being a luxury to be pursued only after we take care of the more important things in life, happiness is beneficial to everything else we desire: It aids our health and helps us live longer; it aids our social functioning and makes us better citizens; it helps us perform better at work; and it builds up our resilience, which enables us to bounce back after setbacks or when bad events occur in our lives. The happier we are, the better we are for our friends and family, our workplaces, our communities, and our society as a whole.”

Doesn’t this passage sound like what we strive for in providing recreation and park services?

Now back to the rebranding term for recreation and parks.

Our creative thought exercise was tough. We identified what we wanted the new phrase to embody. We noted that some park and recreation agencies are transitioning to alternate terms, like the Community Enrichment Department in St. Petersburg, Florida. We tried out new phrases. We even enlisted ChatGPT to invent a new word, which came up with such disastrous results as “recrarks,” “culturisure,” “leisureplex,” and “communivital.” Our discussion was quite stimulating, but so far, we’ve failed to invent anything that conveys so much so concisely.

But—doesn’t the above description of happiness come so very close? There might be a case for it. After all, its pursuit is singled out as an important tenet in one of our nation’s founding documents. And as everyone knows, it’s one of the inalienable rights of “We the People!”

What do you think? All comments and suggestions are welcome!

My daughter strongly recommended I read the bestselling book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, by Caroline Criado Perez. She helpfully loaned me her electronic copy, and I learned so much from it I bought my own copy. And in turn, I recommend it to you.

Invisible Women, by Caroline Criado Perez

In its pages, the author argues that the gender gap is both a cause and a consequence of the type of unthinking that conceives of humanity as almost exclusively male. It was surprising to me (being exclusively male since birth), how widely and how often this bias crops up, and how it distorts the supposedly objective data that increasingly governs our lives.

She covers a lot of territory. The book’s six parts cover Daily Life, The Workplace, Design, Going to the Doctor, Public Life, and When it Goes Wrong; and includes such intriguing chapters as Can Snow-Clearing be Sexist, Gender Neutral With Urinals, and One-Size-Fits Men.

Of particular interest to park and recreation professionals is a section addressing city and park planning and use. She cites a 2016 article in The Guardian that asked why we aren’t designing places “that work for women, not just men” and cautions that the limited datasets that track and trend data on gender make it hard to develop programs and infrastructure that factor in and meet women’s needs.

For example, planners in Vienna found that the presence of girls in parks and public playgrounds decreased after the age of 10. They subsequently found, through collecting pertinent data, that single large open spaces were the problem, because they forced girls to compete with boys for space—who largely chose not to. But when the developers subdivided the parks into smaller areas, the female dropoff was reversed.

They also addressed the park’s sport facilities. “Originally these spaces were encased in wire fencing on all sides, with only a single entrance area—around which groups of boys would congregate. And the girls, unwilling to run the gauntlet, simply weren’t going in.” The simple solution? More and wider entrances. They also subdivided the open areas and sport courts. Formal sports like basketball were kept intact, but they also provided space for more informal activities, in which girls were more likely to engage.

In another example, Malmos, Sweden, discovered a similar male bias in the way they’d traditionally been planning urban recreation for youth. “The usual procedure was to create spaces for skating, climbing and painting graffiti. The trouble was, it wasn’t ‘youth’ as a whole that was participating… It was almost exclusively boys, with girls making up only 10-20 percent of those who used the city’s youth-directed leisure spaces and facilities.” So they began asking what the girls wanted—and the resultant new areas are well-lit and split into a range of different-sized spaces on different levels.

Such a gender-equitable approach doesn’t just benefit females alone, but extends to the economy. When sports funding goes mainly to organized sports, which is dominated by boys, that which was meant to benefit everyone equally, simply doesn’t. Sometimes girls’ sports aren’t provided for at all, which means girls must pay for them privately, or not participate at all. Such detrimental consequences then ripple into the present and future health of half the population, and the overall economy. One study concluded that a certain increase in the city’s support for girls’ sports could “lead to a 14 percent reduction in future fractures due to osteoporosis, and the investment will have paid for itself.”

Perez concludes that when planners, developers and programmers “fail to account for gender, public spaces become male spaces by default.” This is not a niche concern: “if public spaces are truly to be for everyone, we have to start accounting for the lives of the other half of the world.” It’s not just a matter of justice: it’s also a matter of personal health, welcoming placemaking, social equity, and simple economics. And it starts with collecting meaningful gender-sensitive data.

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