Community facilities: it's not just building them, it's making the program better when you do so

will sent me this piece, a WTOP story ("Major funding dedicated to new sports complex, revamped facilities in DC") about how Washington will be investing over $300 million in community recreation facilities over the next the 6 years.

From summer programs to renovated recreational centers and a brand new sports complex, there will be new or upgraded facilities coming to all eight wards in the District. It’s part of a $365 million investment expected to happen over the next six years within Mayor Muriel Bowser’s budget for Fiscal Year 2023.

It reminds me of a piece I wrote about this in 2008, "Prototyping and municipal capital improvement programs," and how building more isn't enough, we should also build better in terms of making facilities more useful, by widening the range of facility elements to support more types of activities.  From the entry:

DC built a slew of recreation centers during the Williams Administration.

While it's great that many facilities were built and that the array of facilities was improved, at the same time an opportunity was lost to rethink recreation centers.

Should they have been transformed into community centers?

Could other functions have been added?

Would that have required the construction of a different type of building?

And should the facilities have been planned in terms of achieving broader program/city objectives, not just within neighborhoods?

For example, I don't think any recreation center has an indoor track. Every neighborhood doesn't need an indoor track, but certainly couldn't a couple have been constructed as part of a citywide planning and capital improvement program?

Most of the new recreation centers are one floor. If they had an additional floor, other programs could be offered, such as more structured adult education programs, or the inclusion of art programs and studio space. Etc.

Probably they could have/should have built one facility first as a test, and then had anybody and everybody "tear it apart," criticize, compliment, and bring up ideas for improvement.

Then they could have modified the construction plans, incorporated these ideas into the other facilities, without having built them all roughly at once.

And just like there are regional malls and super-regional malls, a couple of the facilities should have been designated "super-regional" recreation centers with even more enhanced facilities, such as the Thomas Jefferson Recreation Center in Arlington County, which has a exposition center/indoor track and a theater-auditorium (which also houses a resident theater company).

But without testing, and expecting otherwise constrained patterns of government thinking, these kinds of changes aren't likely to result, without a big planning-charrette-experimentation phase preceding the massive construction phase.

This 2009 piece, "Provision of public services and recreational centers," suggests planning facilities within a city at a minimum of three scales:

1. City-wide; 
2. Sub-city districts (in DC, you could do this by quadrants, the city has four, or by Wards, the city has eight, although the boundaries change after each Census, by "Cluster, the city has defined 39, or by "Areas," in the most recent Comprehensive Plan, 10 areas with fixed boundaries were defined, and replaced ward-based sub-plans); and  
3. Neighborhoods.

Similarly, my piece "Neighborhood libraries as nodes in a neighborhood and city-wide network of cultural assets," isn't just about "neighborhood libraries," but about community serving facilities, and repositioning neighborhood libraries as community cultural centers.  The entry lists dozens of best practice examples, albeit mostly from the US and Canada, on how to do this.

The entry also discusses how many decades ago, the Baltimore County parks department and the school system created a joint program where the parks department would invest in recreation and other facilities within schools so they could be "overbuilt" and used by the community as well, including gyms, auditoriums, etc.

Note that neighborhood schools can be repositioned in part as community cultural centers too, although I haven't fully defined the concept ("Schools #2: Successful school programs in low income communities and the failure of DC to respond similarly").

FWIW, now I call this broader approach to facilities planning/developing a network of civic assets as "transformational projects action planning," where you leverage projects big and small in two ways, to:

(1) push vision and revolutionary practice forward within a particular project

(2) move other related projects forward simultaneously, resulting in greater success overall.

Sadly, most facility planning initiatives aren't particularly visionary, and too often, communities hire consultants that are local which they celebrate, but often they've hired firms with limited subject knowledge and experience on the type of facility being planned (e.g., consultants who haven't worked on libraries, developing master plans for libraries, etc.).

I will say that Salt Lake City and County have some interesting examples of creative facility development.

The County has a couple of co-located facilities, such as the combination Millcreek Senior Center, Cafe, Recreation Center, Library, which we use all the time, the central library with both indoor and outdoor conference and special event facilities, and the Sorensen Multi-Cultural Center in Salt Lake City's westside.

For example with the Millcreek Senior Center, by contrast DC builds separate facilities, so that the fitness and other facilities can't be used by other segments of the population, although yes some facilities are specific to seniors, but others are shared.  

Salt Lake City's libraries have meeting and other facilities, the Central Library takes this further ("building review"), and the program for youth is branded Youth City, and offers a wide range of programs complementing the recreation centers (which even in the city are run by the county).