Home
Site Index

The importance of open space

Open space is proving to be a salient political issue. At the local level, more than 70% of open space and community livability initiatives passed in the 1998 elections, providing $7.5 billion in state and municipal funding. (2) In 2000, Rhode Island voters passed a $34 million bond initiative called Open Space 2000. The goal of the program is to preserve an additional 35,000 acres of land by 2010. (3)

The increase in available funding is due to the rapid loss of open space in the United States. Between 1992 and 1997, nearly 16 million acres of forests, farmlands and open spaces were lost. (4) In Rhode Island, 11,500 acres of farm and forestlands were developed between 1988 and 1995, an area almost equal to the city of Providence. (5)

Unplanned growth, or sprawl, has multiple negative environmental impacts including: increased non-point source water pollution, increased congestion on roadways and vehicle miles traveled, increased infrastructure costs, contamination and loss of potable groundwater, fragmentation of rare and endangered species habitat, and aesthetic disorder and blight. Sprawl also has a devastating impact on cities, draining population and resources away from older, and often heavily minority, areas. As a development pattern, sprawl is inefficient since it requires more land to accommodate a similar population. For example in Rhode Island between 1961 and 1995, population grew by 16% while the amount of developed land increased 147%. (6)

In contrast to traditional sprawl development, adherents to smart growth promote compact, planned development that uses fewer resources and land, while preserving more open space. There are many different policy options for achieving smart growth ideas. Open space acquisition (fee simple purchase of land by municipalities, state government, and private land trusts) is one tool for limiting the effects of sprawl by physically containing cities and villages, creating an accessible network of greenways and parks, and diverting growth away from sensitive natural habitats. (7)

Growth in South Kingstown, RI
Development in Rhode Island is not occurring in cities, but on the rural fringe. As a result, South Kingstown, in the southern part of the state, has experienced some of the most rapid growth. The 2000 census put South Kingstown's population at 27,921, a 13.4% increase over the past decade. (8) The town has also had the largest increase in population from 1980-2000 of any municipality in the state resulting in a 40% increase in the number of housing units. (9)

South Kingstown is attractive for a number of reasons. It is located along the Route 1 corridor with easy access to Providence about a half hour north. The University of Rhode Island in Kingston and a reputation for high quality public schools attract growing families and higher education students. The town is characterized by scattered village centers surrounded by working agricultural landscapes and the coastal plain south of Route 1.

South Kingstown has also been the most proactive municipality in Washington County in attempting to control its residential growth. This policy was clearly outlined in the 1992 Comprehensive Plan:

The Town wishes to avoid the suburbanization which has overcome many communities located on the outer fringes of metropolitan areas. It wants to continue to be an area offering economic opportunity and a wide range of housing options, but it does not want to encourage urban sprawl fostered by high-speed highways and suburban shopping centers. (10)

To implement this vision, the town has imposed a cap on the number of residential building permits and levies one-time "fair share development fees" for school funding and development of open space and recreation facilities. (11)

South Kingstown leads Washington County not only in implementing technical solutions to growth management, but in thinking about how to preserve the unique identity of the town. In 1998, with the help of the University of Rhode Island's Coastal Resources Center, more than 140 residents created An Inventory and Analysis of Village and Rural Qualities in South Kingstown. The report and its accompanying hand-drawn maps identified hundreds of important features that contribute to a unique sense of place in the eleven districts in the town.

The politics of open space acquisition
In 1999, the South Kingstown Planning Department adopted an open space plan to guide land conservation. In addition, a number of other organizations participate in acquiring open space in the town. At the state level, the Department of Environmental Management distributes both state bond funds and federal monies. The Nature Conservancy and the Audubon Society are active in purchasing open space. At the local level, since 1983 the South Kingstown Land Trust has managed and acquired open space. As a result of this activity, 23.4% of South Kingstown is currently protected at some level from development.

Despite the ongoing efforts of these organizations, there is still more interest in preservation than available funding. Moreover, not all potential open space is created equal. Some lands have important natural resources such as wetlands and endangered species habitat, magnificent views, or are contiguous to other protected parcels. As a result, each organization employs a set of scoring criteria to direct limited funds to the most critically important land. The decisions about scoring land is sometimes ad hoc, based on expert knowledge, but it often relies on information contained in RIGIS, a collection of statewide spatial data maintained at the University of Rhode Island. GIS is crucial to this process because it can be used to analyze vast quantities of data. It was this data set that was used to create Critical Lands, a model for identifying regions with multiple co-occurring resources to aid local land conservation organizations in prioritizing land acquisition. (12)

Critical Lands and most of the individual scoring schemes used at the state and local level allocate priority to land with identified scenic, historic, or cultural value. The cultural data contained within RIGIS, however, is poor. Comprised only of National Register sites, scenic landscapes, and potential greenways, the data themes are outdated, inaccurate at the parcel level (the unit at which open space purchases occur), and based solely on expert evaluation and studies.

Mapping the sense of place
RIGIS lacks detailed cultural data for a number of reasons. Most of the themes are based on studies performed for the entire state, not local initiatives. Thus, although the Inventory of Village and Rural Qualities in South Kingstown was an excellent example of citizen-led planning, much of the data was never mapped in GIS. More fundamentally, however, agencies such as the Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission have no internal GIS capacity and have not traditionally employed GIS technology in their planning. (13) Moreover, while it is estimated that up to 85% of all data have a spatial component, meaning that they can be mapped, not all spatial data is equally capable of being incorporated into a GIS. (14) What cannot usually be represented on a map is why certain features are significant. Unlike mapping natural resources such as wetlands, where a given parcel of land either does or does not contain wetlands, cultural resource mapping is far more qualitative. As Parsons writes, "Qualitative spatial information might include aspects such as the local architectural style of buildings, climate, ambient sounds, smell, etc." (15) Cultural reports are frequently long, narrative in tone, and accompanied by visual images. Current GIS systems do not adequately account for this type of information.

Outside of GIS, cultural reports risk being overlooked by a planning process increasingly reliant on digital cartography. There is a clear need to investigate ways of representing qualitative data within GIS so that it can be used not only in current open space initiatives, but in future town planning. The integration of multimedia into commercial GIS software packages represents the next wave of spatial sophistication. (16) A qualitative GIS has the potential not only facilitate access to existing data, but legitimize locally derived sense of place knowledge, democratizing a high-barrier technology and bringing the opinions of residents more directly to bear on the municipal planning process.

1. Building Livable Communities (2000). Washington, D.C.: Environmental Protection Agency.
2. Better America Bonds Home Page. Environmental Protection Agency. Accessed 25 April 2001:http://www.epa.gov/bonds/
3. Rhode Island Open Space 2000 Campaign. Department of Environmental Management. Accessed 24 April 2001: http://www.state.ri.us/DEM/programs/bpoladm/plandev/landacq/bond/rios2000.htm
4. Better America Bonds Home Page. Environmental Protection Agency. Accessed 25 April 2001:http://www.epa.gov/bonds/
5. Chung, H. C., Hoben, B., Chalder, G. and Eigen, R. (1999). The Costs of Suburban Sprawl and Urban Decay. Providence, RI: Grow Smart Rhode Island.
6. Ibid.
7. Flinker, P (2000). South County Greenspace Protection Project. Providence, RI: Department of Environmental Management.
8. Davis, P. (2001). Census Figures Growth: But consensus is, numbers are low. Providence Journal-Bulletin, 30 March.
9. Chung, H. C., Hoben, B., Chalder, G. and Eigen, R. (1999). The Costs of Suburban Sprawl and Urban Decay.
10. Comprehensive Community Plan (1992). South Kingstown, RI: Planning Department: 2.
11. Policies and Procedures. Town of South Kingstown. Accessed 25 April 2001: http://www.southkingstownri.com/code/policies.cfm
12. Critical Lands for Conservation. Environmental Data Center, University of Rhode Island. Accessed 25 April 2001: http://www.edc.uri.edu/criticallands/
13. Personal communication with Rick Greenwood, 19 March 2001
14. Chan, Y. and Easa, S. (2000). Looking Ahead. In S. Easa and Y. Chan (eds.), Urban Planning and Development Applications of GIS. Reston, Virginia: American Society of Civil Engineers.
15. Parsons, E. (1994). Visualization Techniques for Qualitative Spatial Information. Fifth European Conference and Exhibition on Geographical Information Systems. Retrieved 20 April 2001 from the World Wide Web: http://spatialodyssey.ursus.maine.edu/gisweb/spatdb/egis/eg94046.html
16. Raper, Jonathan (2000). Multidimensional Geographic Information Science. London: Taylor and Francis.