Partnerships for Adaptive Reuse

Cities can better enable the establishment and preservation of parks, recreational spaces, and areas for community gardening and urban agriculture through adaptive reuse of vacant lands. Adaptive reuse refers to repurposing property for a use other than the one originally intended, and in the context of reusing vacant lots to create new greenspace, it can be an effective way to enhance natural resilience, reduce urban heat island impacts, create new community assets, and reduce practical and fiscal challenges with city oversight of vacant properties.^{See footnote 1} Vacant properties can be transformed into community assets that improve natural resilience such as pocket parks or community gardens, and cities can expand access to park and recreational land through development of shared use policies.

Often, cities have facilitated adaptive reuse through partnership arrangements with land trusts, environmental and conservation nonprofits, community-based organizations, and agricultural organizations or extension schools, whereby the city facilitates the process for a land trust to secure ownership or long-term lease of a vacant property for the purpose of community gardening or developing a neighborhood park, and the community assumes responsibility for maintenance of the greenspace.^{See footnote 2} Community parks and gardens can improve access to local, healthy food, enhance social cohesion, and provide educational and training opportunities, among other benefits.^{See footnote 3} Educational and training partnerships can help community members maintain natural assets within their neighborhoods and create homegrown experts. In the long term, this can help reduce burdens on the city of upkeep and maintenance of all public greenspace, meanwhile fostering social cohesion among community members that work together to maintain their own greenspace.

In some instances, cities have been able to facilitate neighborhood-scale flood mitigation by utilizing a larger-scale approach to adaptive reuse that invests in the reuse and greening of multiple vacant lots in a single neighborhood through coordinated partnerships among city agencies.

Considerations of Partnerships for Adaptive Reuse for Natural Resilience

Lessons Learned

• Pair adaptive reuse partnerships with educational and training initiatives (or engage additional partners such as extension schools that can provide education and training) to create homegrown experts in the community and provide for sustained maintenance of community parks and gardens.
• In some cities, there is significant overlap in neighborhoods that experience flooding and water pollution challenges, such as from combined sewer overflows, and neighborhoods with higher percentage of impervious surfaces, and challenges of vacant and abandoned property. In these instances, cities can utilize adaptive reuse to create networks of new “pocket parks” and other greenspace, as a nature-based component of a large-scale flood mitigation strategy.