Work

Partnerships and Community Building as Collaborative Assistance: Insights on Goal Presence, Hierarchy, and Integration from Urban Park Plans

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Urban parks provide areas for human wellbeing and green space benefits in densely populated landscapes but cannot accomplish all their goals in isolation. They require assistance from collaborations to address challenges. The need for these collaborations is often codified in planning documents. We assisted Rock Creek Park (National Park Service, Washington, D.C.) in their considerations of where to place “partnerships” in their strategic plan by sourcing and summarizing goal topics, hierarchies, and relationships from peer park plans. Using textual coding and network analysis approaches, we examined strategic planning documents from park system entities across the 20 largest urban areas in the United States. We found that, topically, Rock Creek Park’s five initial strategic planning goal topics—safety, access, stewardship, community engagement, and employee engagement—were common and both inward and outward-facing goals. Hierarchically, “partnerships” was routinely considered as a primary goal (a stand-alone topic) and as an integrated secondary goal (supportive within other topics). Additionally, we identified “community building” as an important, outward facing “assistance” goal, differentiated from “partnerships” in audience and encompassing how a park shows up for the urban community and demonstrates its value to the region. We discuss these findings toward urban park planning processes.

Source: Urban Science

DOI: 10.3390/urbansci9030064

Authors: Elizabeth E. Perry, Ellie A. Schiappa, Allison McCurdy

Institution: Michigan State University

Language: English

Topic: Local Governance and Planning

Subfield: Geography, Planning and Development

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Sustainable cities and communities

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $1,930