Community greenspaces, such as gardens and pocket parks, provide vital social, public health, ecological, and economic benefits to surrounding neighborhoods, but few marginalized neighborhoods have access to them. This is true of present-day Louisville, Kentucky and was once true of Chicago, Illinois. How did Chicago improve greenspace provision in marginalized communities? By creating a non-profit land trust organization (NeighborSpace) with the mission and authority to acquire vacant lots from multiple city agencies and transfer their governance to communities. This solution uses thoughtful multistakeholder collaboration to break a vicious cycle of disenfranchisement and disinvestment, which has trapped numerous city governments and citizens worldwide. Can Louisville replicate this solution to empower marginalized neighborhoods in the West End? We discuss our recent and ongoing efforts to partner with NeighborSpace, city officials, and community organizers in Louisville to do just that. This collaborative effort emerged from a research project investigating potential design principles for effective decentralization and democracy in society, and has since grown into an active dialogue and partnership among scientists, practitioners, policymakers, and community members. The current presentation shares the design principles we have discovered, and key lessons learned in partnering with key stakeholders to bring those principles into reality in Louisville.
Results/Conclusions
Through interviews with leaders, government officials, and community organizers we identified that collaborative solutions like NeighborSpace succeed thanks to crucial design principles: legal authority (legislation created and empowered NeighborSpace’s mission), legal responsibility (this legislation required tangible community empowerment), multidirectional accountability, government financial sponsorship and fiscal self-sufficiency, and well-balanced mechanisms for stability and flexibility (e.g., 20-year agreement with routine review). Government agencies and citizens must also be motivated to share power, guided by rigorous research and practical (practitioner) knowledge. The path to partnership in Chicago was not linear—it emerged from crisis. Key city agencies recognized that business-as-usual failed, then collaborated with others to find a mutually beneficial solution. Louisville is entering a similar moment in its history, marked by a crisis of rampant vacant properties clustered in West End Neighborhoods, during a period of increased West End activism, city-sponsored redevelopment, urban heat-island effect, and a growing but unmet demand for urban agriculture and community greenspace. Conditions are ripe for community-empowered greenspace governance in Louisville. Current obstacles include the city’s lack of a comprehensive sustainability plan that includes neighborhood greenspace, robust protections for community greenspace (e.g., non-profit land trust), and recognition that community governance is not only feasible but also essential.