A rainy Monday couldn’t keep hundreds of greenspace experts and aficionados from joining in the 24th annual Parks and Greenspace Conference on March 24, themed “Connecting on Common Ground.”
With over 500 annual attendees, It’s the largest parks and greenspace conference in the southeast. Local nonprofit Park Pride hosts the day-long event at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens with dozens of panels on topics like forest restoration, water equity, youth leadership and skateboarding.
This year’s conference was themed “Connecting on Common Ground.” Some panelists took the theme literally. At the TRAILS ATL Master Plan, Atlanta Department of Transportation Commissioner and Atlanta Parks and Recreation Commissioner Justin Cutler talked about plans to connect the city with a trail system.
“One of the critical points of our vision is how do we connect those spaces, both within their own network, and also how do we connect into the broader Beltline system,” Cutler said.
The master plan describes existing trail conditions and upcoming projects around the city, then proposes trail alignments to knit together the existing multimodal paths. From there, Trails ATL will lay out a 10-year implementation plan.
But other speakers and panels took more creative approaches to “connecting” people. Several sessions looked at unseen park elements, including public toilets, skateparks and “tactical urbanism” to supplement city issues.
Keynote speaker Hannah S. Palmer delivered a talk called “Who Gets to Enjoy Urban Waters,” where she focused on the importance of public toilet accessibility as water access for all. She said toilets are the unglamorous, unspoken part of park projects.
‘We have eradicated public toilets from the city,’ Palmer said.
She recognized they’re hard to maintain and fund, but are necessary for people who need to use the bathroom and aren’t able to buy something from a local restaurant.
“This shouldn’t be radical, but that’s the landscape we find ourselves in,” Palmer said. “In a world where toilets have been eradicated, where basic necessities are for the privileged few, it is an act of radical inclusion to build toilet center parks and not just build them, maintain them, fund them, care for them.”
Palmer pushed the crowd to think beyond their typical standards for a park. The thread continued with the breakout session “Atlanta Hates Us: How Skateboarding Connects Communities.”
Skateboarder and builder Pat McClain chose the provocative name to emphasize the city’s lack of skating spaces and attention to the community. Atlanta has two skateparks, but The Skatepark Project said one skatepark is needed for every 50,000 people.
By those standards, the city should have at least 10 parks. But McClain said the lack of spaces has forced the skate community to build parks on their own. The parks are often destroyed by the city and developers.
“I think that we should reenvision how we get skate parks built, how we’re building them and how we incorporate them into our communities, to integrate all types of extreme sports interests and pedestrians alike,” McClain said. “So like I just said, how can we work together to integrate our skate areas and provide for each community’s individual needs?”
Closing speaker and “The Happy Urbanist’ content creator Jon Jon Wesolowski proposed a radical option to connect new ideas with slow-moving systems: tactical urbanism. It’s a grassroots, low-cost and temporary approach to solving city issues like walking paths, lack of benches or unsafe streets.
“The best way to just define this is do what you can now with what you have now,” Wesolowski said.
He lauded projects like the skate parks built in secret by McClain as a way to show the public something different. They’re not perfect, but they are something that changes the existing land. For Wesolowski, that’s vital.
“The next section I want to talk about is going from guerrilla to government,” Wesolowski said. “How can we transition, and how can we use these actions as a catalyst?”
That’s where official city organizations come in. He encouraged Atlanta and beyond to solidify the temporary solutions with a more permanent process.
“I don’t think that the goal is for one day a government to have full funding and full clarity on what they should do all the time,” Wesolowski said. “I think the goal is to have this bottom-up feedback loop where the people who need it most are participating in designing it and implementing it.”
Park Pride President and CEO Michael Halicki said Wesolowski’s speech helped look at “our common ground with a fresh pair of eyes.” He lauded the do-it-yourself ethos of tactical urbanism and the idea of getting communities more involved in parks.
“You take all of the different things that people think of, and then think of all the reasons they shouldn’t do them,” Halicki said. “I feel like you’re looking at this idea of what would happen if we just said yes.”
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