Parks as Infrastructure: Why the Lowline will grow to be more than a path

By Courtney Olson, Executive Director, Friends of the Lowline, edited for length using AI

I've been sitting with something since Greater & Greener last month, specifically since I heard Eric Klinenberg's keynote. He's the sociologist who wrote Palaces for the People, and his argument has been living rent free in my head for weeks now. Parks, libraries, community centers: he refers to them as social infrastructure, and his case is that none of it is a nice extra sitting on top of a functioning city. It's load bearing.

Months ago, my old friend, Emily Isenberg, founder of Isenberg Projects in Boston, posted something by Klinenberg I came back to after I returned from Austin. His research institute at NYU just published a year-long study with Gehl Studio, surveying more than a thousand people across three New York communities. More than eight in ten said these spaces gave them a real sense of belonging. More than six in ten said the space made them feel less alone.

Then just last week I read about people in Paris sleeping in parks right now, blankets and hammocks strung between trees, because a brutal heat wave has made their apartments unsafe to sleep in. People are deciding a bench under a tree is safer than their own bedroom!!

I know we live in a time where our feeds are being curated, but I'm surprised how much evidence is showing up in mine that supports the arguments for parks as critical infrastructure in our growing cities.

A new report from the U.S. Chamber of Connection puts a number on something a lot of us have started to feel: just over half of American adults now fall into an at-risk or vulnerable range for social connection, tied directly to how much access they have to relationships, support, and shared places to gather. Rails to Trails Conservancy, the trail advocacy group, just built an entire national webinar around the phrase "Trails as Social Infrastructure."

During the webinar, Toronto's Bentway, a park built under an elevated highway not unlike our own corridor tucked within I-26, talked about actually measuring what happened when people used their public space. Most visitors reported feeling healthier for it, in body and in mind, and a majority said the time there strengthened their sense of belonging and connection to the people around them. None of that happened by accident. It happened because the space gave people somewhere to sit, greenery to be around, and a reason to come back more than once. That's exactly the kind of thinking behind the benches, the plantings, and the gathering spaces DesignWorks has worked into our own corridor plan. We're not just trying to make the Lowline pretty. We're trying to make it a place people actually use, together, again and again.

Back to the study from NYU and Gehl researchers- they broke down what makes social infrastructure work into three levels: what people need day to day, a place to rest, create, learn, play, in a social setting; what a single site needs to function well, real design, real programming, real upkeep; and what a neighborhood needs to actually connect outward instead of staying self contained. That third one, what they call Neighborhood Needs, is the piece I think about most for us and the Lowline. A diverse mix of high-quality, accessible spaces expands the opportunities for the kind of connections that make a whole region more resilient, not just one corner of it.

A pocket park down the street can meet a lot of those first two needs. It gives you somewhere to rest, somewhere for your kid to play, somewhere to run into a familiar face. But it was never built to do more than that. A 1.7-mile corridor running through East Central, North Central to Cannonborough-Elliottborough, Radcliffeborough, back up towards the East Side to the West Side is a different kind of infrastructure entirely. These are neighborhoods that have not shared much more than a zip code since the original rail line went in back in the 1820s, and even less since I-26 cut through in 1969. The Lowline gives someone from North Central and someone from the West Side an actual, walkable reason to end up in the same place, on the same afternoon, doing the same ordinary things. 

Want to talk through any of this in person? Come find us at the Peninsula Plan Open Studios at the Civic Design Center at the end of this month, or reach out directly at courtney.olson@friendsofthelowline.org.

Reimagining Public Spaces, Together.