Who doesn’t love spending a sunny Saturday at their neighborhood park?
We all know and love our local parks as places to go for recreation and mindfulness, but as critical community assets, they can also be leveraged to spur community development. In this sense, parks serve as dual-purpose infrastructure, functioning not just as places for basketball games and dog walks, but as platforms for climate resilience, connectivity, workforce training, and economic opportunity. In efforts to make parks more meaningful community spaces, innovative park stewards and systems across the country are making deliberate investments in programming and infrastructure that uplift surrounding neighborhoods. The strategies below demonstrate the most meaningful ways parks are driving broader community development.
Climate Mitigation & Adaptation Infrastructure
As the frequency and intensity of severe weather events increase and summers in urban areas get hotter, parks can provide much-needed reprieve from harsh conditions while also helping cities build long-term resilience. As such, new park construction increasingly includes climate mitigation and adaptation infrastructure, helping make communities greener, more comfortable, and safer. The Solar Strand at the University of Buffalo is a best-in-class example of what mitigation looks like on a park scale: a quarter-mile-long array of solar panels that doubles as a walkable campus destination and generates enough renewable energy to power 700 on-campus apartments. The Solar Strand is not only a beautiful and interactive campus destination where visitors can walk right up to the panels, but it also helps meet the University’s ambitious 2030 carbon-neutral goal by saving hundreds of thousands in electricity costs and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 400 tons annually. On the adaptation side, Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park in New York City demonstrates how thoughtful park design can serve as flood infrastructure, and it proved itself during the 2012 Hurricane Sandy. The 11-acre park acts as the first line of defense for the 30-acre mixed-use neighborhood behind it, intercepting 73 percent of average annual rainfall, adding 558,000 gallons of flood storage capacity, and withstanding up to 6 feet of storm surge. These examples show how parks can move beyond passive green space to active climate infrastructure that protects entire communities.
Internet Connectivity Offerings
Parks are not just places for physical connection; they are becoming homes to critical broadband infrastructure that increases digital opportunity. The Atlanta Beltline is among the most ambitious examples of this as Atlanta Beltline, Inc. laid 16 miles of dark fiber-optic cables beneath the trail path to help bridge the connectivity gap for the 25–33% of residents along the Beltline without fixed broadband at threshold speeds and the infrastructure. The fiber has not only supported residents, but attracted small and local businesses and Fortune 500 companies to the corridor. Atlanta Beltline, Inc. is now building on that infrastructure to install public Wi-Fi benches in partnership with Google, ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup Games in Atlanta. Meanwhile, in 2024, the City of Chicago launched its Citywide Broadband and Digital Equity Initiative, installing public and free Wi-Fi in 60 parks across the South and West Side neighborhoods that will expand access to educational resources and employment opportunities to underserved neighborhoods . Parks can not only serve as critical offline spaces, but also online spaces that can provide economic effects beyond their borders.
Workforce Development
Park systems are also finding creative ways to build agricultural and environmental talent pipelines through workforce training programs. New York City’s park system has developed a successful earn-and-learn program for this, the Parks Opportunity Program (POP) that hires unemployed New Yorkers to clean and green parks, playgrounds, and other facilities citywide. Over the course of six months of employment with the Parks Department, POP workers receive on-the-job training and career coaching with opportunities to achieve CDL and horticulture licensure while making $19/hour. Similar successful models taken root nationwide, including The Detroit Conservation Corps at Greening of Detroit, the Outdoor Youth Corps at the Missouri Botanical Garden, and apprenticeships at the Morris Arboretum (one of Philadelphia’s local arboretums!), are all building pathways to get young or underemployed people into nature-based careers. By treating park construction and maintenance as workforce opportunity, these programs convert our beloved parks into jobs and training.
Small Business Support
Parks are also becoming unexpected launchpads for small businesses. Programming beyond typical once-a-week farmers’ markets, inventive park operators are creating regular, lower-cost storefronts to give entrepreneurs opportunities. Another Atlanta Beltline, Inc. program, the MarketPlace, is hailed as a gold standard example of this. Prioritizing small and local retail businesses, the Beltline has seven retrofitted shipping containers available for low-cost leases along the trail loop. Public park systems in Chicago, Seattle, Philadelphia, and Austin have taken complementary approaches, offering low-cost vending licenses to local and minority-owned businesses and activating underused spaces, such as recreation centers in less-visited parks, to both generate retail opportunities and drive new visitation. Leveraging underutilized space, and in some cases high visitation, to support small businesses has proven to be a low-lift, high-reward strategy for economic opportunity.
These world-class examples demonstrate how parks can provide even more value to our local communities beyond recreation. From making communities more climate resilient to spurring economic opportunity and training the next generation of the nature workforce, park systems are key players in community development ecosystems. At ESI, we work with park systems, conservancies, and civic organizations to translate this kind of ambition into actionable strategy and thoughtful impact. ESI is expert at translating quantitative and qualitative metrics into compelling impact studies, from the robust Capital Trails Network in Washington D.C., metro area and new waterfront parks in Montgomery, Alabama to Philadelphia’s own Dilworth Park. The parks doing the most for their communities are not doing it by accident. They are doing it with intentional planning, and we can help.
Amelia Marcantonio-Fields | [email protected]
Amelia Marcantonio-Fields is a senior analyst at ESI and advises public and private organizations on the planning and implementation of economic development policies and projects. She is highly skilled in analyses that inform the development of innovative strategies to help communities across the country achieve their goals and is passionate about creating an inclusive, resilient, and vibrant society. Amelia provides actionable guidance through client services, including strategic planning for nonprofits, creating workforce development strategies, quantifying the public benefit of green space, and drafting downtown revitalization plans.