Parks for People
Yasir Husain
yasir.darya@gmail.com
Purpose
- Building communities around parks step-wise:
- Engage in kitchen gardening using greywater recycling
- Sharply reduce re-usable water overloading drains and replenish groundwater
- Developing cultural & awareness programs tailored for each park and neighborhood.
Number of parks
- 50-100 barren parks _ scalable to all 1500 public parks in Karachi
Strategy
- Start with cleaning up, kitchen gardening workshops and setting up a veggie-seedling nursery. Increase programming to add a cultural layer such as a Climate Emergency film festival and engage larger numbers in the neighborhood. Programs may be centrally planned or developed with the park community. Activate linkages with existing cultural spaces, such as T2F, for travelling exhibits, workshops and film fests.
Benefits
- Kitchen gardening, income substitution
- Greywater Re-Use
- Reduction in water drainage load
- Water efficiency in a city with acute shortage of water
- Collaborative community & cultural interaction
- Awareness about climate, environment, health and urban issues
- Green Therapy for mental health
- Park & green spaces development Green rooftops and green cover expansion which will reduce the Heat Island Effect.
- Health and nutrition benefits from fresh food
Activities
- Making rooftop gardens
- Collaboratively developing and maintaining parks
- Developing grey water usage throughout the neighborhood
- Managing rainwater drainage
- Increasing the number of people interacting and getting to know each other, for neighborhood solidarity
- Building open cultural and community programs including workshops, film festivals.
Start with urban farming
- Kitchen gardening, urban rooftop farming workshops.
- Give away seasonal seedlings to jumpstart interaction & interest.
- Build on interaction and positive reinforcement to develop other community programs using the park as cultural and community space. Developing the park itself collaboratively.
Greywater use
- Greywater will be used for growing veggies and watering needs of the park. Grey water is wasted in enormous quantities. It is plentiful in residential units and particularly that from ablution/wuzoo in mosques. Water quality will be monitored.
Blackwater use
- Sewerage water may be treated in small units in park to water trees in park. This is generally not suited for growing food. Water quality will be monitored.
Note
- All technical, health, environmental and community expertise is locally available.
- We will work with written agreements/permissions with all concerned departments.
