Bright Green cyberpunk parks

Derelict cities like Flint Michigan are seizing the downturn opportunity to re size their cities and create new park spaces and coherent neighborhoods. The LA River Project has made bike paths and aquifers that have enlivened the local citizens spaces. Examining the next steps we need to take in our suburbs and urban spaces there is more possible as we can depave huge areas of pavement and build PRT on rails above swaths of green cisterns that can bring waste water back into the stream of use and speed us to our destinations.

Imagination is not an obstacle it is something to be brought into play. As we recreate our activity spaces and build common spaces in the real world how can we have them reflect the effective common spaces that have been built into our now thickly woven internet experience?

How can we create commons that allow us to build while we play, and direct our common energies into sustaining activities?

Can we make our parks like wikis? or perhaps actually integrated with media that includes video and music and writing and active play. Can our victory gardens teach us about our bright green options?

Historically parks have been botanical repositories as well as open green public spaces. Here in the woods in my collection of specimens that I have in pots around the cabin I have several mock orange trees that were grown from seeds gathered in the panhandle park in San Francisco. I also have a passionflower vine which I have about twelve versions of all from the same fruit of a vine in Hollywood gleaned outside of American Photography.

For me the parks are the extension of a tendency to be a bit of a naturalist adventurer. In the bush I am always searching out useful plants. One of my passions is heirloom seed saving and the indigenous landscaping movement always has had a big place in my heart . I know personally several of the local nurseries that specialize in native plants...we have often traded specimens. This interrelationship which I have enjoyed with the land has been enlivened by the internet for many years as my primary resources for the gathering activity shifted from whole earth catalog and foxfire books to various seed resources on the internet (of course I still have most of my trusty old paper based references). My own park experience has been augmented in dimension for some time now.

If a park is connected in some way to information streams and ecologies it gains dimension and it creates a sustaining activity. Our lives need a stronger connection to sustaining activities. It seems natural that parks should deepen the connection between sustainability and our own ability to participate in the process of renewal of the shared spaces of the human social colony.

If we play through the course of difficult obstacles we might even immediately consider the parks as opportunities for embedded Bright Green play spaces. The same way that specific activity equipment suggests a sort of subset of play activities, like climbing and sliding on a slide, we can create specific embedded environments that can be assumed as crystallization points for a certain kinds of Bright Green play and learning.

Of course the first step is to observe and connect the water systems in the potential park spaces and link them to information services. The same place where people are able to get a drink of water, or use a restroom is the same place they should be able to get online and reach a vast array of information services. In some parks this may mean information kiosks, in others this might mean connectivity stations. The water systems and information systems need to flow together.

Bright Green means finding solutions through case by case scenarios, scanning the entire available set of options including very high tech options and even simple low tech options. Somehow we need to gather a vast subset of information about the sorts of systems that people commonly live in and the problems we are facing. We also need to coherently present a set of possible choices to address the sorts of decisions they commonly need to make to create sustaining activities and spaces, and make it available as a play space where people can literally wander and play with options.

We can possibly use embedded QR codes in the landscape and corresponding information and phone interplay that can bring a space alive, our parks can be more like museums in their ability to connect us to human history, and the creation of a human future which is as diverse as possible. In our existing parks often the plantings have a vast story to tell about human migration mosaics and the symbiotic interplay between the human social colony and the rest of the natural world.

It may be that after a certain age the physical park play equipment is not really meant for adult activity, however the common play space of the park has the potential of sparking the imagination of all of us. We can all play. That ubiquitous play can become a powerful engine of change if we can dream and create a whole new way of having parks interact with the people that use them. We can combine recreation and greening for ecological purposes, we can create bioremediation areas that also give us play spaces to inhabit and learn from. Using ocean arks techniques we can create spaces that also teach us about the loops and structures that create our water systems while literally cleaning and bioremediating our waste stream before our eyes in natural cycles we share. Our parks can become part of our educational systems providing important botanical identification on site as well as potential demonstration centers of various use management strategies similar to our Interpretive Center, marsh and park in here in Arcata California.

This is a Bright Green call to think beyond simple demonstration areas and signs which tell about local wildlife and habitat: this is a call for a cyberpunk park that has elements of fun and sociability we have barely envisioned yet. We can imagine a new park that combines the power of technology with the generative capacity of nature into a dynamic new human space for interaction, a Bright Green play space.