“A Total Approach to Urban Problems”: Summer in the Parks and the National Park Service

This paper discusses the creation and implementation of the National Park Service’s Summer in the Parks (SITP) pilot program that ran from 1968 through 1976. Under this program, the Park Service tried to address the so-called urban crisis by improving access to recreational activities and promoting access to park spaces. To do so, the Park Service implemented creative, flexible programs that worked with existing community organizations. Summer in the Parks drew local residents into underused local parks to make them community spaces through infrastructure improvements such as better lighting and more playgrounds and benches, and through programming such as concerts and carnivals. It created strong ties with the local community by responding to their stated needs, which included a widely popular bookmobile program. It bussed schoolchildren into natural ecology camps and Black cultural history camps outside the city.

The Park Service began the program after the release of the 1968 Kerner Report, which listed unequal recreational opportunities as one of the impetuses for urban uprisings across the United States during the 1960s. The Summer in the Parks Program sought to address social inequality while simultaneously working towards a goal of quelling rebellion through recreation. This paper examines how a federal agency known for its experience managing large, non-urban western areas worked to make the city a more livable place and how it responded to the recreational needs of urban residents, and the limits of this simultaneously progressive and paternalistic program.