A conservation agency creates inner-city "natural parks" in Los Angeles

In its earlier years, SMMC concentrated on acquiring and managing land in the Santa Monica Mountains, but also provided free outings to its mountain parks for inner-city school and neighborhood groups, and worked on revitalizing sections of rivers that flow through inner-city neighborhoods.

In the mid-1990s, then-Los Angeles City Councilmember Rita Walters brought an idea to SMMC. Walters represented a council district that included low-income areas of South Los Angeles as well as downtown. Her South Los Angeles constituents could look up at the Santa Monica Mountains, but few of them ever went there. Large amounts of public money had gone into preserving those mountains; couldn’t SMMC do something for her people on the flatlands? Couldn’t it bring nature and beauty to their neighborhoods?

In fact, SMMC’s leadership had long been bothered by the inaccessibility of nature to people living in the inner city. With Walters’ help, the agency soon identified a 3.5-hectare municipal site used to store discarded water pipes. The city leased the site to SMMC for a nominal fee, and contributed part of the funds needed to clean up the site and create and operate a new park.

The Augustus F. Hawkins Natural Park, named in honor of the first African-American elected to the United States Congress from California, opened in December 2001. It is not quite like any other park in the region.

First of all, the Natural Park is situated in a run-down neighborhood that has high levels of unemployment and crime. The few small parks that exist tend to be magnets for drug dealers and street gangs.

Second, the park was designed in consultation with the people who live in the area, rather than imposed on them. Originally a middle-class African-American neighborhood, its population is now predominantly of Latin American origin and includes many recent immigrants from Central American countries. The park designers soon realized public involvement had to go well beyond the usual public meetings, because few people came to them. Door-to-door visits, another common method of soliciting opinions, were met with suspicion. What finally did work was setting up a table in the local supermarket where hundreds of people came up to talk to members of the planning team. It became clear that, although the neighbors definitely wanted a connection with nature, their first priority was a safe haven. The planning team agreed to build a strong steel fence around the park, and house a ranger onsite, as on other major SMMC properties (Sorvig 2002, 69-70).

Third, the Natural Park is not a restoration, but rather a "reflection" of the natural ecosystems of the region. In many other places, creating a "natural park" would be seen as an opportunity to restore the original vegetation. In this case, however, the original landscape was an alluvial plain thinly covered with shrubs and grasses. At such a small scale, this plant life would be uninteresting. Instead, it was decided to recreate several plant communities found in the nearby mountains, including riparian forest, oak woodland, freshwater marsh, and chaparral (a dense growth of various species of evergreen, hard-leaved shrubs typical of much of California). But even though it is not a restoration, nature in some ways is taking its course. For example, because the plant species are native to the region, they have created habitat for native birds rarely seen in urban settings.

Fourth, the park includes a large lawn with shade trees, "blending the groomed and the wild," as SMMC Chief Landscape Architect Stephanie Landregan (2005) puts it. This provides a "comfort zone" for urban people unaccustomed to nature. (The same technique has been used in several of SMMC’s portal parks at the wildland-urban interface in the mountains.)

Other parks in Los Angeles can claim some of these attributes, but probably none can claim all.

The Natural Park has a visitor center conforming to the high design standards SMMC applies to all its projects. The park sponsors free camping trips and day outings to mountain and beach parks. It has programs for visiting school groups on such subjects as mammals, water, and Native American cultures. It sponsors after-school and youth leadership programs. It is a popular place for family picnics, especially on Sunday afternoons. In the quiet morning hours throughout the week it is common to see elderly couples walking hand-in-hand and young mothers pushing baby-strollers.

The park has become the centerpiece of the neighborhood and local residents are highly protective of it. Perhaps the best indicator of this is that the Natural Park is one of the few projects of any kind in South Los Angeles that has not been vandalized.

In the larger Southern California community the park is now widely viewed as a great success, although Landregan, who shepherded the project, notes that initially "there were lots of naysayers who said ‘why are you giving that to those people?’ (Sorvig 2002, 66)." (Operations of the park were transferred to the City of Los Angeles in March 2005.)

Among its strategic objectives, SMMC now lists: "Expand efforts to integrate nature into the urban environment." Among other things, this includes: "Acquire or create parkland in urban areas that lack open space or acquire natural parks"; and "Link and integrate new natural parks into existing park systems – literally via transportation and physical linkages, thematically via programs and events."

There are plans to replicate the Hawkins Natural Park elsewhere in the inner city of Los Angeles. The most innovative of these plans is for a 4-hectare natural park on the grounds of a new secondary school. The school will be divided into several specialized "academies," and there is a proposal to make one of these a "Conservancy Academy" devoted to education in natural resource management.

When SMMC Executive Director Joseph T. Edmiston described the Natural Park in The Urban Imperative workshop at the World Parks Congress, several participants questioned the wisdom of a protected area agency creating "simulations" of nature in cities. Others wondered where to draw the line in serving disadvantaged populations. "We can’t become social service agencies," one park manager said.

Edmiston responded: "Even if you can’t restore the ecosystem, you can restore the aesthetics. Environmentalists often write off urban ecosystems, but you can’t write off people."

The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy has done two things unusual for a mainstream protected area agency:

(1) It has successfully intervened in the inner city. With local residents actively involved, it has created a place of beauty and safety, an anchor to the land for people who have had little connection to it.

(2) It has not been restrained by conventional ideas about the role of protected area agencies in promoting nature. It responded to a special situation with a special solution: "natural parks."

An obvious question is: Can’t this sort of work be done just as well by local park agencies? The answer, at least from California’s experience, is: Not in most cases. Although there are exceptions, local park agencies’ priorities and expertise have to do with conventional city parks: lawns, shade trees, swimming pools, fields for team sports, and children’s playgrounds.

However, there could be synergy in both kinds of agencies working in tandem to create and manage inner-city oases. Most likely this is already happening somewhere in the world. In any case, it is an idea worth exploring.

Census. 2002. "Census 2000 Urbanized Area and Urban Cluster Information." U.S. Census Bureau, http:// www.census.gov.

Hise, Greg, and William Deverell. 2000. Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Landregan, Stephanie. 2005. Personal communication.

SCAG. 2005. "Forecasting and Policy Analysis." Southern California Association of Governments, http://www.scag.ca.gov.

Sorvig, Kim. 2002. The wilds of South Central. Landscape Architecture 92 (4): 66-75.

Trzyna, Ted. 2001. California’s urban protected areas: Progress despite daunting pressures. Parks 11 (3): 4-15. Posted at

http://www.InterEnvironment.org/cipa/urban.htm.

Villaraigosa, Antonio. 2005. "Plan for a City of Parks and Greenways." http://www.antonio2005.com.