The original note, as written at the time
We identify a number of plots in strategic areas within our city. We get a developer. It could be private property that the developer identifies. It could be public land that the government is persuaded to lease out for a specified period. The developer takes on the land and creates these beautiful well thought out parks for the city. On completion access is through paid membership only. I think this is a very viable business model for our city before things get too bad. Spaxzyte could do the design and overall project oversight.
Ongoing development
Wednesday, 6th September 2023.
We identify a number of plots in strategic areas within our city. We find a developer. It could be private property the developer identifies, or it could be public land that the government is persuaded to lease out for a specified period. The developer takes the land and creates these beautiful, well thought out parks for the city. On completion, access is through paid membership only.
I know how that reads. A park behind a membership is not a park, it is a garden with a turnstile, and there is a real objection to be answered: the people who most need open space are the people who cannot pay for it. That objection should not be waved away.
But look at what we actually produce when we insist on the pure public route. We produce very few parks, and the ones we produce are under-maintained because the budget that built them has no budget to keep them, and within five years the grass is a dust patch and the benches are broken and the paths are unlit, and nobody goes there in the evening anyway. The pure public park, in our conditions, has mostly failed on maintenance rather than on principle.
The commercial model is an attempt to answer the maintenance question honestly. A membership is a recurring revenue line tied to a specific place, and recurring revenue is what keeps grass cut. It also creates the strange effect that the park must remain good, because the moment it stops being good the membership stops paying, and the leverage sits with the users rather than with a contractor.
The design and the oversight should sit with a practice that understands space — this is precisely the kind of work we are built for. What matters is that the arrangement is transparent: how long the lease runs, what happens to the land at the end of it, what proportion of the park is open without membership, and what happens to the price if the neighbourhood changes. Without those terms written down and enforced, the membership is only a way of saying that the land has been handed over.
I think this is a viable business model for our city, adopted now, before things get too bad. It is not the ideal. It is a way of getting real parks built while we still have the land to put them on, and it is worth being honest that the alternative we are defending is not a park either.