In a recent piece about the City’s general plan, Emerging Themes of Long Beach 2030, I touched upon the scope of the city’s vision for its future in the next twenty years. While it includes land use, mobility, economic development, historic preservation, urban design, and sustainability, noticeably absent from the plan is an agenda to open space. The reason for this absence is that planning had already updated open space in 2002 as a separate exercise. But there is nothing particularly visionary in that 2002 report: it includes only items such as a call to establish shared-use arrangements with the school district for recess areas, to transform the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers into “Emerald Necklace” parklands, and to create greater access to the city’s waterfront.

 

The problem is that one would be hard-pressed to discuss any aspect of the new plan, Long Beach 2030, without bringing up the question of open space. In fact, during the public discussions leading up to the plan, community members continually raised open-space issues: increasing access to parks and expanding the amount of park space were two dominant themes. Rather than relying on the tired truisms of the 2002 report, the open-space element of the general plan should be updated to respond to these community needs. Incorporating issues of open space should take place early in the process, so as to avoid piecemeal changes to the open space element that would end up watering down the general plan’s effectiveness.

 

At issue is not the process of public discussion, but rather getting the public’s input into the plan. The public process has already generated a significant amount of input in regard to questions of nature and parks; that input is likely enough to start creating the framework plan for open space. The scope of work for the consultant team of EDAW-AECOM may need to be expanded, but it would be a worthwhile investment.

 

All of the prior work done in planning for the city’s park network, including the 2002 update, should be reviewed for applicability. City planning staff and the consultant team should study the bold open space plan for the Los Angeles region created in the early part of the 20th century by the influential landscape architecture and urban planning firm Olmsted Brothers and Bartholomew and Associates. “Parks, Playgrounds, and Beaches for the Los Angeles Region,” created in 1930, was a grand vision for creating an expansive open space network across a large part of Los Angeles County. Unfortunately, this bold plan has met the fate of many like it: the plan has sat on a shelf, collecting nearly a century’s worth of dust.

 

It would not be feasible or effective to try and implement the 1930 Los Angeles Olmsted Plan in 2008, but we can learn from the plan’s ambition to connect an entire population to nature and recreation. For instance, the plan envisioned the current location of the Long Beach airport and much of Signal Hall serving as a regional park (many contemporary residents of Bixby Knolls and the East side of Long Beach would certainly find that idea attractive). The foundation of the Olmsted plan was the goal of creating access to nature and recreational opportunities for all residents of the region. Long Beach currently lacks such balanced accessibility; every one of the four largest parks in the city lies east of Redondo Avenue, where less than a quarter of the population resides. Some of the densest portions of the city are the most underserved by open space.

 

The city is doing what it can to address the inequality of park space coverage, acquiring what land it can with its limited financial resources. Several new parks are being created in central and north Long Beach as the city’s Redevelopment Agency acquires properties that become available. However, there needs to be a grander vision for expanding access to open space beyond acquiring random empty lots, abandoned buildings, and county-owned properties. It is hard to argue with the quick win of creating a pocket park on a formerly blighted parcel in an impacted community, but one must also ask: what is this open space’s role in the larger context?

 

There is no shortage of vision to create a grand open space network for Long Beach. In 2003, a group of Cal. Poly Pomona graduate students developed a comprehensive open space plan for the western portion of the city. The Long Beach Riverlink would transform under-utilized spaces along the Los Angeles River into a network of community parks. In a prior column I described an opportunity to connect portions of Long Beach north and south of the Interstate 405 freeway with a deck park linking it to a proposed sports park. Countless people have been advocating for the restoration of the wetlands on the eastside. More needs to done, from incorporating the proposed open space of Douglas Park to re-imagining the hundreds miles of streets that crisscross this city.

 

With these grassroots efforts, in combination with the comprehensive planning exercise that Long Beach 2030 represents, there is no reason why a truly visionary open space network could not be created for the city. The plan is only the first step; we then must forge the shared political will to keep this plan from collecting dust on some back shelf.