The original note, as written at the time
GREEN PRIVATE PARK IN THE CITY. I imagine owning a green park in the middle of a city like Kampala where every drink and grab is standard price or below. Nature is everywhere and if a person wants isolation they can very quickly get it with no hustle. A hub for intellectual discourse and prime social destination for all persons with no regard for social class. The only rules are: respect the nature, respect the fellow man.
Ongoing development
Owning a green park in the middle of a city like Kampala, where every drink and every snack is standard price or below.
Nature is everywhere, and if a person wants isolation they can find it quickly without a struggle. A hub for intellectual discourse, and a prime social destination for everybody, with no regard for social class. The only rules are: respect the nature, respect the fellow man.
The economics are the interesting part. A park with below-market drinks is not a hospitality business, it is a subsidy, and the subsidy is the product. Everything in a normal park is priced to extract from a captive audience, which is why the drinks cost what they cost and why the seats are shaped to make you leave. Set the price at cost and the park stops being a place you pass through and becomes a place you stay.
The two rules are doing the work that a hundred bylaws usually do badly. Respect the nature and respect your neighbour are enforceable by the users themselves, because they are unambiguous and they are about conduct rather than category. Most park rules fail because they forbid people rather than behaviour.
The hard part is the class claim. A park that is free to enter and cheap to use still selects for people who have the afternoon, and the ones who most need somewhere to sit are the ones working. So the honest version has to be sited where the working day already pauses — near a market, a bus park, a hospital — rather than where the land is cheap and beautiful.
Isolation within a crowd is the design problem, and it is solved with planting, level changes and distance rather than walls.