Grassroots movements are building garden cities

We're changing the aesthetic from the bottom up.

In the first pages of Genesis, humans start in a garden. Cain then murders his brother and builds the first city as a walled enclosure focused on defense and self-preservation.

The story carries on through thousands of years and many generations, with the Cain lineage producing Babylon and God’s faithful producing Jerusalem, the one-time urban recreation of the Eden ideal. After that too falls away the Bible ends in a city-garden that is referred to as the “New Jerusalem,” descended from heaven.

One way to look at the biblical story is a winding narrative describing human striving to build a garden together. The battling metaphors of Eden and Babylon represent different approaches we can take. One approach values all of life, and the other creates division. These different perspectives become inbuilt in our architecture and urban designs, further entrenching their impact.

Modern cities resemble Babylon more than Eden. We forget that we, too, are living and thrive off of affiliation with other forms of life. Severing our cities from communal green spaces creates a scar over the psyche, leading to isolation and fear. A 2024 study by the Trust for Public Land found that cities with good parks “are more socially connected and engaged with their neighbors than residents who live in cities with lower-ranking park systems.” Higher-ranking park systems also have “on average 26 percent more social connections between low- and high-income individuals.”

Poor urban design also exacerbates acute and longer-term environmental issues, culminating in existential crisis. The simplest way to mitigate these issues is to build parks where communities can congregate, bringing mutual benefits to both humans and the environment we depend upon.

The Garden City movement of the early 20^th century sought to create this partnership between the built and natural environments after the pollutive sprawl of the Industrial Revolution. A British urban planner named Ebenezer Howard created a new template for development with his 1898 book “Garden Cities of To-morrow.” Inspired by a utopian novel that imagined Boston in the year 2000, Howard diagrammed the future of cities as dense, walkable urban development centered on a public park and capped at 6,000 acres and 32,000 citizens. These urban centers would be surrounded by belts of undeveloped land that could include “small landholdings, allotments, pastures, large farms, forests, orchards, open space for recreation, and charitable institutions.” These modest sized urban centers would connect to other nearby urban centers by roads and rail.

The movement gained in popularity and became a source of debate and admiration among urban planners. Although Welwyn Garden City (it’s actually called that) remains as a “triumphant” example of the concept, many confused Howard’s vision, forgetting how important urban density is to community. The dream has all but faded from public memory.

Still, centrally located parks are important to the life of many cities. The most famous of these are Central Park and Golden Gate Park, city-defining tracts of land born in an era when cities were younger and could more feasibly reserve many hundreds of acres for cultivation and recreation. It is meaningful that in these parks, one can remove themselves from the madness of the city and enter the solitude of the wilderness. Studies show that time in nature increases its positive effects on mental health in proportion to the level of immersion and the quality of the nature encountered.

Other hallmarks of these great parks are interesting topography, landscaping, and architecture. All of this of course takes an initial investment and constant maintenance—this is a partnership between public and private funds. Golden Gate Park relied on federal and state grants, city taxes, donations, and park bonds for the purchase of 1,013 once-desolate acres. The Golden Gate Park Conservancy and the Central Park Conservancy are private trusts that fund park maintenance that the city can’t provide.

Sadly, many American cities see a dearth of beautiful parks because of the high level of existing urban development and increasing prices of land. The Trust for Public Land (TPL) for its part finds that effective parks will satisfy a city’s need to balance the books. According to TPL studies, parks “are key to attracting and retaining a diverse, happy, and healthy workforce.” The report studies Atlanta, Boston, Minneapolis, Boise, and Plano, Texas, where both park investments and working-age labor forces were significantly above the national average. We can try to parse apart the chicken and the egg here, but the point is clear—effective parks are part of a thriving city.

We cannot afford to let funding for these parks backslide. We could even encourage their use through a nationally recognized Parks Day in early spring, lowering driving speeds city wide to school zone speed limits and throwing events in parks throughout the city. While President Trump plans to start a sovereign wealth fund (SWF) to buy TikTok, we should also consider a SWF for our urban parks. As these funds are “supposed to invest for the collective good of a nation,” I can hardly think of a better application for a SWF than beautiful, inspiring public places.

Cities could also engage more proactively with park fundraising, inviting local artists to perform in certain parks, charging event admission that will go to park beautification and preservation. The Real Estate Council is one of the donors for the monumental Klyde Warren Park built in Dallas over a freeway. With Klyde Warren Park’s $2.5 Billion impact on Dallas through land value, taxes, surrounding retail, and access to the city center, the investment of corporate groups seems like a no brainer. As mentioned above, the positive impact of parks are not only economic. Psychologists find that children who grow up with access to quality green space have reduced risk of serious psychiatric disorders later in life. Why can’t more developers, medical associations, building associations, and artistic trusts donate to build and maintain parks, as each of their successes are interlinked with healthy parks nearby?

Arguably the most important aspect of a park is that you can walk to it. The increased exercise associated with walkability can help kids overcome physical and psychological issues that are often exacerbated by stressful urban environments. The goal for the Trust for Public Land is that everyone can access urban green space within a ten minute walk. Ideally these nearby parks are more than just open fields, but include amphitheaters, basketball courts, waterways, forested walkways, outdoor gyms, monuments, shade, and gardens. Strapped cities can employ hardworking nonprofits to provide the “interior design” that fills out these reserved green spaces. One such example is Washington Parks and People, which has been working since the 1990s to return Washington, DC to its original vision as an urban forest. Acting on the TPL initiative with quality landscape design would transform our cities aesthetically, lower crime, lower health care costs, increase productivity, reclaim biodiversity, capture rainfall, and cool city temperatures. The Trust for Public Land website even includes a developed database of the 100 largest cities in the US, depicting areas ripe for a public park as they are over ten minutes from any other green space.

Bringing TPL’s dead zones to life is a brutal, drawn out process including the displacement of citizens, allocation of funds, ratification of city officials, design of firms, and the process of development. Some nonprofits have stepped into the fray, assuming the role of land conversion when the municipality falls short. Depave, as the name suggests, focuses on replacing underutilized parking lots with gardens near schools, churches, community centers, businesses, and housing developments. In their fifteen years, they have completed 84 projects, replacing 8.4 acres of pavement mainly in Portland and Chicago.

A Depave before and after.

One nonprofit with international reach is Better Block Foundation in Dallas. Operating off donations and government grants, Better Block organizes up to ten pop-up demonstrations a year. I spoke with Imani Chet Lytle, the communications coordinator at the foundation, who said anyone can contact Better Block with an idea for the location of a new third place. Once the concept and funding are solidified, Better Block will send their Better Block in a box shipping container, which carries various disassembled chairs, tables, shade structures, lawn games, and other materials that will decorate the pop-up on site. The empty storage container is then used to sell food, house DJs, host discussions, provide shade, and give local artists a canvas in the temporary park. The pavement in the surrounding area is often painted to depict proposed bike paths, garden planters, or other structures that aid in the public reimagining of an often overlooked space. City officials as well as local artists and community organizers are usually invited to generate momentum towards officially implementing the pop-up design.

Even if you can’t organize a Better Block event, their website includes open-source materials that you can add to a public space near you. The Wikiblock page of the Better Block website includes design files for the furniture included in their Better Block in a box. Anybody can download these files for free and plug them into a CNC router. The router will cut the appropriate plywood into pieces that are assembled without using nails or glue.

What is important to Better Block and other similar organizations is that these projects are carried out with local needs in mind. No one knows the needs and desires of a community like the community itself, and the best way to create a useful park is to ask the community to propose a concept to the city officials, not the other way around.

A couple pro skaters in Dallas lead the charge in this fashion. 4DWN is a skatepark in the worst part of town, hosting local artist installations, fund raisers, food donations, and a local garden. I gardened and sorted food donations with Rob Cahill, one of the skatepark’s founders. Cahill was once a top-ranked professional skater, as well as a University of Texas student of physics and philosophy. Along with fellow skater Mike Crum, Cahill acquired the land for next to nothing—it was a scrap yard in the middle of tent city. Leveraging his skate sponsorships with Dickies and Vans, Cahill and Crum enlisted the help of their friends to pour the concrete and build the wooden vert ramps. The park started off just for themselves, until one day they decided to distribute food in the neighborhood by growing their own and taking donations from grocery stores around town.

“We never knew what we were doing, but if you’re not afraid of failure, you can learn quickly” Cahill told me.

A skater would know something about getting over the fear of failure, but the principle rings true for every city block in the nation. What if you turned your front yard into a community garden, and accepted the food scraps from your neighbors for compost? What if you left a lot empty on your block, and split the cost with nearby residents and real estate companies, putting up a wooden fence along the length of it for monthly art projects, decorating it with Better Block open-sourced furniture, or letting dads in their garage toolsheds create add-ons as they desire? What if you opened your apartment to monthly poetry readings and amateur concerts for people in your building? A bi-annual block party could transform your local community, and if you have nothing else, you have a stoop where people can gather.

It seems that in America and possibly many other places, wealth and ownership of private property begets isolation from the community. Many low-income-countries host admirable communities because people really depend on each other in times of need. Elle Griffin, founder and editor of City State, told me about her travels in Southeast Asia where neighborhoods congregate on their front lawns every night to play music and visit with one another. If we are to break our culture of isolation, it starts with acknowledging how vulnerable we are, how much we need each other, and the importance of place.

Building a beautiful city is a day in, day out job. It takes consistent, sometimes grueling work. But the reward is a life well lived. And if we want utopia, if we want the canals of Amsterdam, the terraces of Machu Picchu, the plazas of Florence, and the design of Tenochtitlan, it starts on the ground level with us. I am a big picture person, but the more I spoke with people, the more I realized that community solutions come from communities. We have our work cut out for us, and until then, the future is up to those of us who choose to demonstrate, vocally or visually, that we can craft for ourselves a more engaging future through the invitation of public space.

The stunning turn in the Eden narrative is that each of us can be the union of heaven and earth. Perhaps this is what the New Jerusalem descending looks like, working and bringing it about together, rather than waiting for it to drop from the sky. The beautiful ending is that in partnering with life, all of strife will end and even the cosmos will flourish, for in the heart of humankind lies the key to restoration.

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This essay is by

Stephen Mackintosh

, author of

Stained Glass Graffiti

. It is part of CITY STATE, a collection of seven writers exploring autonomous governance through an online series and print pamphlet.