City Commission Declines to Decide on Flamingo Tennis Facilities

At its meeting on Wednesday, April 14, 2010, the City Commission was unable to decide upon the configuration of Tennis Courts and Tennis Facilities.  The existing plan calls for 17 clay courts at Flamingo Park, was adopted by the Commission on September 9, 2009, and also approved by the CMB Historic Preservation Board.   Community advocates have called for 5 hard courts at Flamingo or at some other facility. 

The position of the Flamingo Park Association is Seventeen is ENOUGH.  One of the best presentations of this viewpoint was prepared by Steve Mouzon.  His blog may be accessed at ---

http://www.originalgreen.org/OG/Blog/Entries/2010/4/13_Parks_vs._Recreation_Centers.html

The article is also presented as follows:

The Original Green


Parks vs Recreation Centers

Parks are essential elements of vibrant and sustainable neighborhoods, while recreation centers get most of their DNA from super-sizing and sprawl. Both parks and recreation centers foster fitness activities, but there are several differences crucial to the health of the neighborhood and the greenness of the city.

Parks are places where people can enjoy countless outdoor activities. See the patch of grass the people above are sitting on? Earlier that morning, it might have been used for a pick-up softball game. After these people leave, a few kids might kick around a soccer ball. Later in the day, you might see a couple young lovers on a stroll along the shadows at the edge of the field. Most activities are relatively unplanned. Most often, park recreation planning goes something like “hey, let’s go down to the park and see if anyone wants to play ball,” like the guys in the picture below. You don’t have to pay admission or get permission to go to the park.



Recreation centers, other than the fact that they also involve physical activity, are quite the opposite. Recreation centers have extensive facilities for certain organized sports: a swimming pool, baseball diamonds, soccer fields, tennis courts, basketball courts, etc.



Because recreation centers require major investments, they often have to charge admission of some sort to help pay back that investment. You also may need to be a member of the recreation center’s association to gain access. As a result, many of the activities in recreation centers occur behind walls or chain-link fences.



Once, a basketball court or two, a baseball diamond, a couple tennis courts, or even a soccer field were often tucked around the edges of many parks. More recently, however, our penchant for super-sizing everything, plus our deference to major sporting events that might happen only once or twice a year have resulted in the need to expand one or two of everything to dozens of everything. Two tennis courts are now no longer good enough... gotta have a couple dozen in order to possibly host a city-wide tournament at some point in the future. One baseball diamond? Forget it... gotta have eight so you can host a tournament there, too. There are several hidden problems with these super-sized recreation centers:







You can’t walk your dog on the tennis courts. Or in the swimming pool. Or on the basketball court. A tennis-focused recreation center, for example, is only useful to people who play tennis. Because recreation centers focus on single-use recreational uses (like sprawl does with land use in general,) they eliminate fields for dog-walking, tossing a frisbee, pick-up games of whatever you want to play, or just laying in the sun or sitting on the park bench watching the world go by.



Do we need specific-use recreational facilities like tennis courts, swimming pools, etc.? Of course. It’s just a question of proportion.



Here’s one of the problems with proportion: If only a fraction of the population within walking distance of a recreation center play tennis, then building enough tennis courts to hold a major tournament means that most of the people playing on those courts will have to drive to get there. There are several sustainability ramifications here: Most obvious is the fact that you’re burning a lot of gas to get there. But you also have to surround the recreation center with lots of parking for all the cars. Plus, you’re clogging the streets of the neighborhood with traffic. Also, because the recreation center doesn’t attract nearby neighbors for all the general-use stuff like dog-walking, you’re starving the neighborhood streets of pedestrians that would otherwise make the neighborhood more vibrant and safe as I described in this post.



There are a couple rules of thumb distinguishing between parks and recreation centers: First, parks are made up primarily of multi-use fields. This means that less than half of the space in a park should be dedicated to single-use recreational facilities. A much better number is less than one-fourth single use, with the vast majority being multi-use. Many great parks are completely multi-use.







There’s also the Grandstand Rule: If an activity needs a grandstand, it’s probably drawing a crowd from further around than just the neighborhood.

So is there a place for a recreation center? Yes: Out on the highway somewhere. They are large, expensive, sprawl-based facilities, but if your community can’t do without one, then put it where it belongs: where lots of traffic can get to it quickly and easily. But by all means, don’t put it in a neighborhood. It’s not a good neighbor. It needs to keep to itself.



Parks, on the other hand, are necessary parts of a sustainable neighborhood. Everybody should be within a five-minute walk of a park, and smaller playgrounds for kids should be scattered throughout the neighborhood so that every kid is within a two-minute walk of a playground. Town planners such as those at the Congress for the New Urbanism, of which I’m a member, support these park principles.



There is a growing threat to neighborhood parks today: they’re increasingly being eaten up for single-use recreational activities, so in effect, they’re being transformed into recreation centers right under our very noses! My own Flamingo Park in Miami Beach is in grave danger of this fate. Already, so much of the land has been given over to single-use activities that there are only two general-use fields left, and they constitute a ridiculously low percentage of the entire park. Now, the tennis advocates want to take one of those two fields so that they can add to the seventeen tennis courts they have already! Might as well change the name to the Flamingo Rec Center and build a new parking lot on the other remaining field to handle all the extra traffic!



~Steve Mouzon