Dave Boucher trims the grass at the Spirit of Brandtjen Farm project. The 520-acre housing development has more than double the open space that local ordinances require. Dave Boucher squeezes his lawn mower between pine trees, the needles scraping his arms.
Back and forth, from tree to tree, he drags his shadow through a trailing cloud of dust, then pauses to look around. "Sure, I like the open space," mutters Boucher, wiping his dirty brow in the 90-degree heat. "But if I had to mow it all, maybe not.
" He'd better get used to it. The Spirit of Brandtjen Farms project in Lakeville has 130 acres of open space - more than double what is required by local ordinances - built to be the next generation of parks. Like a handful of cutting-edge developments in Minnesota, its open spaces are: Not for children.
New parks are primarily for aging baby boomers who want trails more than playgrounds. As demand for parks grows, fewer and fewer children are playing in parks - largely because frightened parents won't let them outside unsupervised, experts say. Emphasizing connections, as a personal and almost spiritual mission.
By shrinking private yards and expanding shared spaces, the project makes a social statement: Joining a community is better than living in isolation. A curious mingling of public and private lands, like gated communities without the gates. Instead of fencing off private trails, the developers weave them into public trails for anyone to use.
Neighborhood-sized "pocket parks" are private but won't feel that way. Spirit is experimenting with parks, as are the developers of other projects such as Dancing Waters and Stone Mill Farm, both in Woodbury, and Liberty on the Lakes in Stillwater. Early reviews are glowing.
"There is just no comparison to other places, between the beauty and the trails and the lakes," gushed Tricia Flor, 55, an empty-nester who moved into a Spirit town house last year. "I love it here, and it radiates off me when I talk about it," said Flor, a kindergarten teacher who shows homes part time for one of the Spirit home-builders. The new parks are riding a wave of social trends from environmentalism to dropping birth rates to the narcissism of aging baby boomers.
"Those developers are smart," said John Archer, an expert on suburbs and a University of Minnesota professor of cultural studies who said they have tapped into a zeitgeist of personal fulfillment. "It's not all about career goals any more, but your relationship with nature and the world." "The trails are all about fitness and feeling good about yourself - the gratification of the adult ego," he said.
"Our society is about who the individual wants to be." Parks haven't always been a path to self-fulfillment, said Galen Cranz, an expert on America's parks and a professor of architecture at the University of California-Berkeley. But they evolve according to public demands.
"Boomers are getting older, and we are the great consumer group." In her classic 1982 study of America's parks, "The Politics of Parks," she identified four types of park design, introduced at different stages: "The Pleasure Ground." The earliest American parks were like Central Park in New York City, which was created in 1858 as a large-scale antidote to city life.
These were beautiful, peaceful and huge, like nature itself. "Reformed park." From 1900s to 1930s, these parks were part of a progressive movement calling for small urban parks for children's playgrounds.
"Recreation facility." Cranz says the heyday of the large-scale sports facilities - typically fields for football and baseball - was from 1930 to 1965. "Open space systems," in which large tracts of undeveloped land were added to the mix of parks.
In addition, Cranz has added another phase, "sustainability." Beginning in about 1990, Cranz says, society's concern for the environment began to manifest itself in natural-style parks. She said Minnesota's new wave of parks is a blend of the latter two phases, a shift away from recreational facilities to more natural, adult-oriented parks.
With a whiff of nostalgia, Marc Putman recalled how easy the sports mega-plexes were to build. "I have built a lot of ballfields," sighed Putman, of Putman Planning Design, who designed the Spirit project. They were easy to build - just knock down the trees, roll the ground pancake-flat and plant grass.
"They are not integrated into the neighborhood." To this day, some exurbs attract enough families to support new regional sports complexes, such as the world-record, 52-field soccer complex in Blaine. "It's the Andovers and Lino Lakes and Forest Lakes with young populations," said John Shardlow, principal for Bonestroo, a consultant for cities and developers.
But in such parks, play is never spontaneous - it's controlled by adults, arranged on tight schedules, and requires a trip in a car. Experts say that kind of park is passé. Birth rates are plummeting, especially among higher-income homes.
Suburbs increasingly are dominated by the elderly, said Shardlow, who used his hometown as an example. "I am sitting in Roseville, with declining school enrollment and the third-oldest population in the state," he said. "A survey would say there is demand for trails and entertainment in parks.
There is not a drastic demand for soccer fields." The proof of the declining impact of children is in the ballot box, said Minneapolis pollster Bill Morris, owner of Decision Resources. In referendums for schools or child-oriented parks and sites, said Morris, the Me Generation votes against the Wee Generation.
"For folks over 55, the opposition is intense," Morris said. My kids are grown, and I am concerned about taxes.' " Even if kids had more neighborhood playgrounds, it isn't clear they would use them.
Today, only 6 percent of children play outdoors unsupervised even once a week, according to the Child Nature Network. Instead, children ages 8 to 18 now spend about 44.5 hours a week in front of a computer or TV screen, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
They live in what has been called "virtual protective house arrest" - put there by their parents. The national rate of child abductions by strangers has declined in the past 20 years - to about 100 a year, making them about as rare as getting killed by lightning. But experts say paranoia is rampant - and blame news coverage of abductions that can terrify parents.
Flor has seen it in her job, as a kindergarten teacher and knows it from her own experience as a mother. She points out how the fear generated by a single case can linger for years. "I think Jacob Wetterling was the catalyst for our fears," Flor said, referring to the 18-year-old kidnapping case in St.
"Fear has escalated, and it's almost irrational," Flor said. To make the outdoors more inviting, Spirit developers created small pocket parks. From a cluster of houses, parents will look out their windows and see their children playing in a private park - like a shared front yard.
But overall, rather than wasting land on playgrounds, developers now build for adults. The focus is increasingly on making trails and parks more beautiful and useful to everyone. Woodbury officials even built an indoor park - Central Park - primarily to cater to older people.
"It is a lot more these days than bulldozing 40 acres and putting in some playground equipment," said Julie Lehr, Woodbury spokeswoman. Dave Boucher trims the grass at the Spirit of Brandtjen Farm project.
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