Urban Open Space

 Leverage the Open Space System to Unify the City and Save the Environment. 

 THE IDEA OF AN “URBAN OPEN SPACE” SYSTEM. 

Character towns have extensive areas and lands devoted to parks and open spaces; sometimes these are organized into systems. When systematically organized, the collection of parks and open lands becomes a holistic, integrated system with all public use land and water in the city devoted to parks, plazas, urban school grounds, stormwater ponds, protected wetlands, lakes, streams and landscaped spaces visually supplemented by private lawns and gardens. 

If you want to go crazy, think of the entire city as a “park” with passive and active spaces linked together with trails and streams. Boston’s Emerald Necklace and many other “systems” of parks and open spaces throughout America use their open space system to define their towns as character places. Publicly accessible and connected open space is a community asset too precious to be ignored or squandered or segregated.