If you’ve been to a state park lately, chances are good you didn’t encounter many minorities in the wilderness. According to the Parks Forward Commission, a group tasked with modernizing California’s sprawling parks system, African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans are underrepresented on the visitor rolls. That could change with a new app designed to overhaul the system’s outdated image.
CaliParks is a web-based data-visualization app with information about the state’s 12,000 national, regional, and urban parks, which collectively encompass more than 1.6 million acres. Besides letting users filter parks by distance and recreational activities — as well as peruse maps — the app also integrates crowdsourced images from Flickr and Instagram so you can creep on other people’s great time outdoors.
“It’s important for people to see people like themselves in public spaces in order to feel welcome there. We can present a more diverse California,” Jon Christensen, a partner with the firm that launched CaliParks, told CityLab.
In addition to enticing minorities, the app also hopes to remind young people that being outdoors and being online aren’t contradictory. By harnessing social media, the app aims to tear down the walls separating parks from the rest of the world (figuratively speaking) and create a more interactive visitor experience. “Parks are social,” Christensen said, “people do things in parks that they do in the rest of their lives. They take pictures, they take selfies, they meet up. It’s like people are having a party over there.”
For its part, the Parks Forward Commission wants us to stop thinking of parks as “wilderness cathedrals” and more like “one of those small churches in South L.A. where people go every weekend,” in the words of commission member Manuel Pastor.
The parks system is aiding that shift in public perception by modernizing itself. For example, some parks now accept credit cards for day use fees in addition to cash. Identifying ways to make parks more accessible via public transit is on the horizon, as is building more amenities such as picnic tables and soccer fields.
As the Los Angeles Timesreports, Governor Brown’s latest budget proposal includes $16.8 million just to keep parks operating at their current bare bones level, along with $20 million for overdue maintenance (the total bill is more than $1 billion).
An app like CaliParks is a first step towards getting those visitor numbers up and ensuring parks’ longevity. As Manuel Pastor told the Times, “Unless we get young people and their families using the parks now, the kind of political support that’s needed won’t be there.”
[via CityLab; image courtesy of CaliParks]
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