The promotion of SMART GROWTH.

A foot and light-hearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

- Walt Whitman Song of the Open Road

In Boston, an underground rapid-transit line is topped with a 5-mile-long linear park complete with hiking and biking trails, 10 community gardens, and more than 20 children's play areas. In Chicago, workers scrape away the pavement in local schoolyards to create hybrid playgrounds and community parks. Denver is recycling a former airport into parkland. And Louisville, Ky., is proposing a riverside recreational greenway system that offers flood protection during the high-water season.

At no time in the nation's history have so many communities worked to create so many parks in so many creative ways. Spawned by rising demand, new trends in recreation, and the pressure of suburban sprawl in an era of tight budgets and soaring land values, today's parks are born of imagination, vision, community involvement, creative land use, and innovative financing.

Several factors are fueling the upsurge in new parks. The nation's population continues to grow, and more people demand more parks. Cities are working to bring new parks to long-underserved populations and attract new residents, businesses, and investment. And spreading suburbs are creating parks to preserve recreation and access to the outdoors in the face of urban sprawl. Cities and suburbs alike are building parks to support the quality of life that attracts middle-class residents and today's information- and technology-based businesses.

Everywhere recognition is growing that parks and open space play an important role in communities' economies. A new report by the Trust for Public Land, The Economic Benefits of Parks and Open Space: How Land Conservation Helps Communities Grow Smart and Protect the Bottom Line, cites examples of how parks can stabilize and revitalize neighborhoods, attract businesses, generate investment, support tourism, raise taxable property values, and produce other economic benefits.

New Kinds of Parks, New Kinds of Land

Changes in recreation habits are generating interest in new kinds of parks, and busy Americans' desire for parks close to home is driving interest in new community parks. The popularity of fitness activities such as walking and biking continues to spur the development of greenways, waterfront trails, and other linear parks. Chattanooga, Tenn.; Indianapolis; Phoenix; Atlanta; Providence, R.I.; and Los Angeles are a few of the dozens of communities forging recreational greenways.

In older cities, recreational greenspace is being created on land "retired" from former industrial or residential use. Across the nation, urban abandonment associated with urban sprawl has left behind tens of thousands of such "brownfield" properties -- from single-house lots to former industrial sites of hundreds of acres.

Some of these sites are along rivers or waterfronts, ideal locations for parks and greenways. Planted with gardens, outfitted with baseball diamonds, or threaded with bike trails, these remnants of properties are becoming the parks around which cities are finding new life.

Chicago has begun to convert some of its 55,000 vacant lots into community gardens and passive parks in park-poor neighborhoods. Denver will gain 1,450 acres of new park and recreation land as part of the redevelopment of the abandoned Stapleton Airport, and will create a 200-acre park on part of the now-defunct Lowery Air Force Base. In the heart of Denver, a 29-acre commons is rising on a former railyard.

Boston has become particularly adept at creating parks on recycled land. The 5-mile Southwest Corridor Park sits on land originally cleared for a highway. Bostonians convinced the federal government that the $1.4 billion in highway funds should go for transit instead, then buried the subway and train tracks and built the park on top. In Boston's financial district, an unsightly concrete parking garage has been replaced by the Park at Post Office Square, supported through a unique private funding scheme by fees from the new parking structure, which was built beneath the park. In east Boston, a park is growing on a long-abandoned waterfront. And in a strikingly ambitious effort, the city is now relocating its major downtown freeway underground, to be replaced by $200 million worth of parks, boulevards, walkways, and gardens between downtown and the harbor.

Increasingly, recreation will take place on land protected for multiple uses. In Chicago and other cities, schoolyards are being restyled to double as parks in neighborhoods that desperately need them. Farther away from urban neighborhoods, but still within reach by car or public transportation, sizable properties are being protected as watershed, or for flood control, wildlife habitat, or other purposes that do not necessarily rule out recreational use.

The Trust for Public Land recently helped protect 17,000-acre Sterling Forest, on the New York-New Jersey border, a crucial watershed that will be open for recreation and is within a 90-minute drive of one in 10 Americans. Louisville is working on a recreational greenway system that will double as a flood holding area in times of high water. In booming San Diego, an innovative effort to protect endangered species is setting aside thousands of acres that will also be available for recreation.

Funds for Land Protection

The population growth and sprawl development that fuel the need for parks also force up land prices, making parks harder to acquire. As demand has outstripped available funding over the past several years, state and local voters have shown impressive willingness to approve new taxes and bonds to acquire conservation and recreation lands. In November 1998 alone, voters approved 72 percent of more than 240 state and local bond issues concerning parks, land conservation, and smarter growth. Many of these were funding measures that will trigger, directly or indirectly, more than $7.5 billion in state and local funding, much of it for parkland acquisition and improvement.

One of these victories came in rapidly growing Florida, where voters authorized a legislative extension of the Preservation 2000 land acquisition program, which has protected 1 million acres, mostly for wildlife, over the past decade. Following the voters' lead, Florida legislators passed the new $3 billion funding measure this spring. Notably, the new measure, known as Florida Forever, earmarks 24 percent of funds for urban parks and recreation land.

The willingness of states and localities to pay for parks and recreation lands is directly related to the threat of uncontrolled growth and urban sprawl. It is no accident that the nation's most densely populated state has led the charge in land protection funding. New Jersey voters, who had approved $1.4 billion for parks and open space acquisition between 1961 and 1995, added another $1.5 billion to the kitty in 1998. New Jersey's Green Acres program also provides matching grants for communities that have authorized their own open space funding. Voters in 16 of 21 New Jersey counties and dozens of cities and towns have approved such measures, generating $100 million a year in local park and open space funds.

TPL's Public Finance Program, which helps communities plan and promote public finance measures for parks and open space, predicts that interest in such comprehensive funding measures will grow as the population of other states swells in the coming decades. As part of its recently announced Greenprint for Growth campaign to help communities protect land threatened by sprawl, TPL will help communities raise as much as $20 billion over the next five years to be used for park, conservation, and recreation lands.

But this money will never take the place of comprehensive federal funding. Through much of the past two decades, Congress has appropriated only a fraction of the money available for land acquisition in the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund and has eliminated funding for state and community projects. Current budgets and legislative proposals promise more LWCF money. Other federal programs also have recently added to recreation funding, most notably recent transportation acts, which have offered funding for walking and bike trails.

It is too soon to say whether the recent promises of increased funding will mature into what is really needed: dependable annual appropriations structured in a way that encourage states and communities to raise their own funds and that keep control of projects in the communities, where the need is best understood.

The Need for Partnerships

With land prices on the rise and the increasing complexity of. today's ambitious park plans, it is safe to say that more and more parks and greenways will grow not from single-agency energy and funding, but from partnerships between agencies, community advocacy groups, private stakeholders, foundations, and nonprofit real-estate experts.

In and around Atlanta, for example, a complex of partners is working to protect land along the Chattahoochee River with the goal of eventually creating a river greenway through one of the nation's more rapidly developing regions. Money for the project is coming from the federal LWCF, to add land to the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area; from the state government, to protect riverfront land as parks above and below Atlanta; from the Environmental Protection Agency's clean water fund and the city of Atlanta, to protect shoreline within the city limits; and from private foundations, which are supporting TPL's efforts to acquire land that cannot be acquired in any other way.

Such elaborate efforts will increasingly become the rule as communities strive not simply to protect enough land for recreation, but to tie that protection to other goals, including economic development, environmental protection, neighborhood stabilization, and the shaping of long-term growth.

Will Rogers is president of the Trust for Public Land, which recently launched its Greenprint for Growth campaign to help communities protect land threatened by urban sprawl. TPL's report, The Economic Benefits of Parks and Open Space: How Land Conservation Helps Communities Grow Smart and Protect the Bottom Line, is available on the Web at www.tpl.org.

PARK PROJECT CHATTANOOGA

STATE: Tennessee

PARK: Coolidge Park

VALUE: This waterfront park includes a refurbished 19th-century carousel, interactive children's fountain, and picnic pavilion.

PARK PROJECT PROVIDENCE

STATE: Rhode Island 

PARK: Waterplace Park

VALUE: Venice-inspired automobile- and footbridges and an amphitheater for summer concerts.

PARK PROJECT ATLANTA

STATE: Georgia

PARK: Piedmont Park 

VALUE: Atlanta's year-round favorite offers places to jog, picnic, and listen to live music.

PARK PROJECT DENVER

STATE: Colorado

PARK: Washington Park 

VALUE: The Mile High City's crown jewel includes 2.5 miles of biking and running trails, a stocked lake for anglers, and an early-20th-century boathouse.

PARK PROJECT PORTLAND

STATE: Oregon

PARK: Japanese Gardens

VALUE: Winding over 5.5 acres of woodland, five traditional garden forms converge to provide a breathtaking view of downtown Portland.

PARK PROJECT LOUISVILLE

STATE: Kentucky

PARK: Waterfront Park

VALUE: Multiphase reclamation project has produced a children's play area, scenic 13-mile river walk, and the 11-acre Great Lawn.

PARK PROJECT SAN ANTONIO 

STATE: Texas

PARK: River Walk

VALUE: Quiet, contemplative stretches complement sidewalk cafes, boutiques, nightclubs, and eateries.