Gone to the Dogs: Why Cincinnati Socialists Opposes the Burnet Woods Dog Park
A concrete pathway in Burnet Woods reading “DON’T TURF OUR PARKS”
The City's plan
The Cincinnati Park Board plans to construct a dog park near the Brookline entrance of Burnet Woods. The proposed site is surrounded by woods, and is uphill from the park’s fishing lake, a shelter and playground area, and the Burnet Woods Nature Center. The dog park will be a health hazard to both the park itself and the surrounding communities. With its concentration of urine and feces, the dog park will poison the life surrounding it, including fish in the nearby lake. Not only that, but the dog enclosure’s synthetic turf is made with “forever chemicals” known as PFAS (per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances). The Environmental Protection Agency points out that, “PFAS are widely used, long lasting chemicals, components of which break down very slowly over time. Because of their widespread use and their persistence in the environment, many PFAS are found in the blood of people and animals [and] at low levels in a variety of food products and in the environment.” According to The Guardian, PFAS may “contain heavy metals, benzene, VOCs and other carcinogens that can present a health threat. The material also emits high levels of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and sheds microplastics and other chemicals into waterways.” PFAS are so toxic, in fact, that artificial turf has been prohibited on public land in Boston.
The expected cost of the project is $450,000, with $150,000 to be “raised by the community” and $300,000 from the city’s tax dollars. The upkeep of the dog park, which would include flushing the urine and feces built up in the synthetic turf out into the grassy and wooded areas surrounding the dog park, would be done by Cincinnati Park employees and also be paid for by tax dollars. According to the City’s online resources, “The project is contingent upon community fundraising, and project advocates are currently fundraising to complete the project budget.” A private NGO called the Cincinnati Parks Foundation is the main “project advocate” dealing with the “community” fundraising for this project. The members sitting on the Executive Committee of this foundation include executives at banks and real estate companies like Fifth Third Bank, Coldwell Banker Realty, the Tiffany Collective, and Wealth Dimensions Group.
While Cincinnatians are justly proud of Cincy’s splendid parks and playgrounds, no park system should be operated as the private estate of the ruling class. Yet the scheme to construct a dog park against the wishes of the vulnerable neighboring communities of Clifton, Corryville, and CUF is a clear example of Cincinnati’s ruling oligarchy cynically advancing its own economic interests under the cover of privately-run, yet tax-exempt, NGOs. According to the Park Board, “The dog park will provide a new recreation experience for area residents and their dogs, further contributing to the attractiveness and quality of life for park visitors and residents of Clifton, Corryville, and CUF.” Cincinnati Parks also claims that “along with other proposed improvements to the park, [it] would bring more people into the parks, which will help improve its image.” This rhetoric reveals the real motivations of the city through the Cincy Park Board: to make Clifton attractive to businesses and real estate developers and improve its image for wealthy out-of-town investors.
Enclosure is theft
As Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels explained, the enclosure of arable land by the English landed aristocracy in the late Middle Ages was one of the originary acts of capitalism. “Enclosure,” in this sense, meant the withdrawal of customary rights of pasture and tillage from peasants living on feudal estates. Before the enclosures, feudal peasants had hereditary rights to run their pigs in the woods, to cut peat for fuel, to gather wood from the forests, and to fish on the lands of their feudal masters. After enclosure—which started in the fifteenth century but began in earnest with the Industrial Revolution in the mid-eighteenth century—rural workers were forced to either become wage laborers on their former lands, or to emigrate to find work in the growing English cities. Enclosure not only deprived rural workers of the means of subsistence, but destroyed traditional communities and their networks of mutual support.
Many researchers have compared the contemporary worldwide practice of gentrification to the English enclosures. Gentrification encloses land, not with hedgerows and moats, but with over-policing, private roads and parking lots, and rent increases. Modern urban gentrification also differs from early capitalist enclosure in that today’s land speculators receive rentier income not from the sale of agricultural produce, but from (inflated) direct payments from residential renters. Modern gentrification therefore means both cutting off low-income workers from access to the amenities of gentrified neighborhoods and the use of state power to cultivate and maintain amenities for high-income workers.
A playground for yuppies
Cincinnati Socialists has nothing against dogs. We also have nothing against brunch. However, like fenced-off sidewalk brunch spots, dog parks are a form of enclosure. They take from the many and give to the few. A recent article by Alissa Greenberg on the Smithsonian Website points out that dog park users tend to be overwhelmingly white and upper-income. Recent research by sociologist Sylvie Tissot similarly shows that dog park advocates frequently and openly use the rhetoric of gentrification in making their case. For example, they advocate dog parks as “a way of promoting neighborhood safety, and [as] an incentive for business.” The ruling class and the associated well-off fragments of the working class, that is, not only demand literal enclosure of green spaces for their private use but celebrate dog parks as sociological markers of spaces rendered safe for private capitalist profits.
Tissot’s work implies that dog parks, no matter how well-intentioned or rationalized, in practice serve as anchors for gentrification. A dog park in a popular urban green space is essentially an announcement that the park’s extant users are no longer welcome. At the literal level, moreover, every square foot of space devoted to a dog park is a square foot of space subtracted from general use by the people of Cincinnati for relaxation, recreation, and exercise. Likewise, every dollar devoted to a dog park is a dollar subtracted from animal-welfare programs like trap-neuter-return—programs that benefit the entire animal population and the entire human population to boot. Hence, when the capitalist state—in this case the Cincinnati Park Board—intervenes to make a section of a park more exclusionary, it also announces its undisguised contempt for democratic control over public spaces. The Park Board is not only stealing a part of Burnet Woods from the many to give to the few, it is also flouting the democratic right of Cincinnati’s people to determine how public spaces should be used.
Undemocratic, irresponsible, and unaccountable
Nearby residents have staged protests against the dog park, and community councils have officially expressed their opposition to the plans, but these voices have been largely ignored, as additional funds for the project were approved earlier this year. After receiving over a thousand e-mails from the community in opposition to the dog park, the Park Board announced:
“While every resident and park user will not ultimately agree with every decision pertaining to our vast park system, the Board of Park Commissioners and Cincinnati Parks Staff are grateful for the substantial interest in this project and continue to carefully consider and weigh all public feedback in decision making.”
Here we see Cincinnati’s “progressive” city leadership promising to “hear out” the views of the people, while, in the event, ignoring them completely. Like the thwarted attempt to sell the downtown library’s North Building, along with FC Cincinnati’s successful dispossession of the people of the West End, this is an example of neoliberal, technocratic governance supplanting popular democracy in Cincinnati As Preserve Burnet Woods argues in their petition to stop the construction of the dog park:
“[D]eliberate avoidance of professional community engagement, which would center voices of the people most impacted, is what enables polluters to protect profit while simultaneously contaminating human bodies and the environment.”
No principled socialist—and no principled socialist organization—stands by and passively observes an infringement on the democratic rights of the people, and no socialist organization in Cincinnati can view with equanimity the poisoning of one of our most beloved common green spaces. Therefore, in solidarity with the neighbors of Burnet Woods, the people who enjoy it and the wildlife that inhabits it, we vigorously oppose the construction of the dog park. We oppose it because the residents of the surrounding neighborhoods oppose it. We oppose it on behalf of the flora and fauna that live in Burnet Woods. We oppose it because it will divert resources away from park conservation projects which protect the native wildlife that already exists there, and because we oppose the gentrification of Cincinnati in all of its forms. We encourage all Cincinnatians to join with us, the park’s neighbors, and Preserve Burnet Woods in vigorously standing together to put an end to the toxic dog park swindle.