The Green Flag for parks scheme has been bubbling under the surface for several years now. Mark Davis, the National Projects Officer of the Pesticides Trust came up with the concept of creating a public award for good practice in urban parks whilst working with local authorities to reduce their use of pesticides in park maintenance. At the time, in the early 1990s widespread concern about a crisis in urban parks reached a peak and broke out in the national media with newspaper headlines lamenting decline with "the once-glorious municipal park languishes on death row." Organisations such as the Garden History Society, the Landscape Institute and the GMB union published pamphlets drawing attention to the neglect of urban parks. In 1995, the independent research group Comedia/Demos published Park Life: Urban Parks and Social Renewal a study which examined the reasons for park decline and put forward an approach to put parks at the centre of concerns about public space in cities.
A loss of
confidence
This body of research
made clear the effect wrought on urban parks by
decades of political and social change. Local
authority re-organisation, the transition from
past models of municipal provision (with in-house
nurseries, full-time park keepers and surplus
budgets) to delivering a parks service based on
writing and managing maintenance contracts, in a
climate of budget cuts, has had a profound impact
upon the psyche of local authority parks
provision all over the country. As local
authorities changed, parks managers have had to
make a transition to a different model or models
of parks provision.
The emergence of a commercial
leisure industry; the growth of 'indoor leisure
centres' since the 1970s; greater public access
to the countryside and the increase in
countryside parks with their more naturalised
landscapes based on the concept of 'stewardship'
have contributed to the marginalisation of
traditional city parks. The response of many
local authorities was to cut budgets and struggle
on. The Victorian inspired model of parks service
was simply cut back to its bones and became
barely recognisable. The grass was still shorn,
but less frequently, more crudely and more
mechanistically (the tractor mowers). The bedding
plants were still displayed, but tokenistically
(with plant varieties reduced). Park keepers were
removed and replaced by the fleeting presence of
mobile parks security teams driving through parks
in vans, often adding to an atmosphere of
distrust and uncertainty. Horticultural
excellence moved from the public realm of the
urban park to the private realm of the commercial
garden centre.
There is no doubt that the
confidence of many parks departments has been
severely shaken. Public confidence also took a
blow. Just about all the parks surveys carried
out in recent years show that people regret the
loss of park keepers and that concern about
safety in urban parks, particularly for children
is uppermost. As the Green Flag idea was being
formulated it was clear that parks management
needed some radical rethinking.
Back to the future?
One clear response of
decline has come from the Heritage Lottery Fund
(HLF) which set up the 'urban parks programme' in
1995, making parks the subject of a lottery
funding stream. Earlier this year Lord
Rothschild, Chairman of HLF announced a first set
of grants worth £57 million for 48 parks. This
is the largest investment in urban open space for
years and it reflects the need for investment in
the basic infrastructure and landscape form of
hundreds of parks. But it comes at a time when
the parks profession is caught between looking
back at the traditional formal Victorian city
park and forward to creating more open-minded
places that reflect environmental concerns and
different ways of actively involving people in
parks.
The Green Flag Award is an
independent award giving voice to public
expectation about what parks can offer their
users. It aims to set standards which take
account and promote the value of a park as a
social meeting place as well as places for
walking, for play, for recreational sports and
contact with the natural world. The Green Flag
Award is also caught between the traditional view
of a formal kind of multi-purpose recreational
park and new opportunities for encouraging
different types of urban open space. The jury is
still out on the question of whether all this can
be provided in one park, but the range of
different parks that have been awarded a Flag
this year demonstrate that good 'parks' can be
delivered in very different kinds of landscape
forms.
Mark Davis's initial interest
in reducing pesticide use and encouraging
environmentally sound maintenance became a
cornerstone criteria for the award. But he
realised that environmental maintenance alone
says little about the overall use and value of a
park to its locality. A site may well be
environmentally pure but unloved and avoided by
residents. The environmental focus was opened up
with a wider set of criteria about what makes a
good park.
Green Flag Criteria
The process of
arriving at the criteria for a Green Flag Park
was tortuous. Long and sometimes unresolved
debates amongst the steering group finally
produced a set of criteria that was discussed
with more than 40 representative groups outside
of the immediate parks world with interests in,
for example, safety, community health, dog
ownership, play, conservation, community networks
and sports.
Applications for the award
submitted by park authorities were initially
assessed on the basis of desk research. Parks
were then visited by a pair of judges (from an
especially recruited panel of judges) who
discussed the park with the management team. A
second 'mystery' visit was made by a second pair
of judges. The two sets of assessments were
compared and taking account of the written
submissions, a decision taken.
The award is not about
encouraging an identikit park model. It is not
about tying park management down to a bland set
of quality management criteria. It is not about
denying conflict and the competing interests
amongst park users, residents and other lobby
groups. It is not about defining a consumer
approach that fixes the park user in the role of
customer and complainant rather than active
participant. The Green Flag Park award is about
encouraging environmental management and the
environmental role a park might play in its wider
location. It is about recognising the value of
parks to their users and commending places that
have created effective and satisfying ways of
involving residents, users and other interest
groups who want to play a part in the care of the
park. It is about rewarding management of a
landscape that gives full reign to aesthetic
assets and finds subtle ways of being inclusive
in offering opportunity for quiet enjoyment as
well as active recreation and for combining
natural and historic features. It is also about
encouraging effective approaches to improving
public safety and the cleanliness of parks.
Who can apply?
The award is issued as
a challenge as much as a commendation. It is open
to community groups as well as to park managers
to apply. It invites people who use and visit a
park to discuss and report where a park meets or
falls short of the criteria. It will raise
expectations about standards and provides an
external independent perspective. An award which
is made for one year only, can be withdrawn, if
it is shown that standards have declined and a
fresh application and assessment is made for
subsequent years. It is clear that park managers
found the criteria tough and demanding, although
as one manager said, "none of the criteria
is unachievable and it helps us to have something
to aim for". The award also provided an
opportunity for different groups (Friends Groups,
Nature Conservation, Sports Groups) to come
together and support the parks management in
their application. It is not, as one manager
suggested, the sometimes false impression of
public unity required to win funding but a
genuine opportunity for groups to back a park
because they think it deserves an award.
Promoting high
standards
The Green Flag Award
is intended as a spur to the profession. One of
the Award Judges made clear how surprised she was
by how much a manager's personal philosophy of
how a park should work, affected the quality, use
and atmosphere of a park. A manager active in
eliciting community support was also, in her
view, more successful in meeting all the criteria
for the scheme. This does highlight the need for
a wide range of new skills now required in
successful management of public space. The Green
Flag Award may help to clarify what is needed and
several parks managers have suggested that it may
help to give shape to the agenda of 'value for
money' now emerging from the DoE. A less
instrumental approach than contract management
and a more rounded appreciation of what public
parks offer and how it might be delivered (with
greater partnership, more flexibility in use of
contracts, volunteer input) may help to define a
new model of parks provision.
One of the most obvious
precedents for Green Flag for Parks is the Blue
Flag Beaches award born out of a European Bathing
Water Directive in the late 1970s. In this scheme
beach managers pay a fee to enter for an award.
The beach is then tested and assessed and beach
managers receive advice and recommendations for
improvement and if successful, good publicity for
the beach. The beach is visited several times
during a season to ensure standards are
maintained. If something is wrong and is not put
right than the flag can be removed. The Blue Flag
scheme is now publicly respected and provides
very basic independent verification of the
quality of the beach. A similar process has been
followed for Green Flags.
This is the first year for the
Green Flag for Parks Award, the standards are
high, if they are maintained and respected and
properly promoted, then in time the award will
become established as a meaningful and credible
measure of a good city park.
[This
article first appeared in Pesticides News No. 37,
September 1997, pages 12-13]