San Francisco’s Baker Beach to Alcatraz. Washington, D.C.’s
Anacostia River, once a forgotten, crime-ridden excuse for sewage,
now hosts Friday Night Fishing for families and canoe trips for
schoolchildren. But try topping this: Wellington, New Zealand, offers
a public snorkel trail. Such places exemplify, said Beatley, “cities of
awe.” But the challenge remains to make “blue space,” whether
awesome or merely restorative, accessible to everyone.
We still have a long way to go. You can see poverty from space.
My own city, D.C., has a clear “tree line” that can be seen in satellite
photos analyzed by the Washington Post. To the west of that line, in
the affluent Northwest quadrant, the streets glow green from above.
To the east, where 40 percent of residents live in low-income
neighborhoods, the area looks flat and gray. The picture is hardly
unique, and this inequality is our essential conundrum as we move
toward increasingly urban habitats.
Olmsted understood that throughout history—from the ancient
Persians to the English gentry, whose manicured hunting grounds first
inspired city parks—the rich always got to enjoy restful glades and
pastures. Olmsted wanted to break that pattern fundamentally. Not
only did he want people to heal in parks; he wanted all people to have
the chance. In the 1870s, he actually posted notices in tenements and
sent circulars to all the doctors in New York City with directions to
Central Park and Prospect Park; the posters included a description of
natural destinations to aid convalescents.
Why shouldn’t doctors prescribe time outside to their patients?
It’s taken nearly 150 years for Olmsted’s idea to gain some
traction. There aren’t many doctors sending their urban patients to the
park, but there are a few. Nooshin Razani, a pediatrician at Children’s
Hospital in Oakland, California, has forged a partnership with local
parks so inner-city kids can get to them more easily and more often.
Like Razani, Robert Zarr, a pediatrician at Unity Healthcare in
Washington, D.C., saw that conventional approaches weren’t serving