Jane Jacobs is famous for her observations regarding sidewalks in the opening chapters of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Right after this is a chapter on parks. In summary, she suggests are not automatically good as they can easily become problem areas if there is not regular foot traffic in and through the park.

I thought of this when seeing a plan of how the former Motorola Campus in Schaumburg might be turned into “a Millennium Park for suburbs”:

Schaumburg trustees Tuesday will consider approving a $1.1 million bid for construction of the first phase of a 12-acre, urban-style park ultimately envisioned as a sort of Millennium Park for the suburbs.

Planned for the former Motorola Solutions campus, the park when completed could house such amenities as a large outdoor performance venue, a sculpture garden, a dog park and a winter ice rink.

Phase one, however, will focus on the basic outline of the park and providing passive recreation opportunities to serve residents of the area, before the next set of upgrades are budgeted and built.

A suburban park, no matter how beautiful it is or how many amenities it has, could easily fall prey to the issues that Jane Jacobs describes. Do people live around the park? Will there be people regularly walking through the park? Will it have the same kind of lively pedestrian activity and interaction that she recommends for sidewalks?

A park built on a former office park campus might not have any of these. Located in a sprawling suburb, would the majority of users have to drive here? Would people be there just for the park and its particular amenities or are there nearby activities that would keep them in the area such as shops or restaurants? Are there enough residents within walking distance who can informally help keep an eye on the park and those who use it?

This could all be in the eventual plans. In the Chicago suburbs it is currently popular to suggest mixed-use developments to replace office parks, shopping malls, and other large properties. But, it takes time for such developments to happen and for community to arise. Parks do not automatically work like they do in Simcity where placing a park next to commercial or residential property boosts property values. Just because there is a pristine park in the plans does not mean that the park becomes the kind of asset Jacobs suggests they can be in the right conditions.