This will be a short column.
Short because its subject is so preposterous, so obscene, so self-evidently and maddeningly wrong-headed that it requires no great argument to be unspooled against it.
That subject is the proposal, floated by the city earlier this month, to install massive digital advertising billboards in the city’s parks.
A briefing document, prepared by a senior deputy director of the Park and Recreation Department, states that exploring such proposals is in the interest of “strategically maximizing revenue opportunities” and is “in alignment with our department priority of operational excellence” — Orwellian bureaucratese that tries to make the indefensible seem rational.
It is not.
As an editorial in The Dallas Morning News noted, “a park is designed as a place of peace and recreation, not another place to have your attention stolen.”
Alas, the city seems intent on turning over its public spaces to advertisers. Last year, the city approved a plan to place up to 150 digital advertising kiosks that look like giant iPhones
on its already too-crowded sidewalks. That plan, according to the city, could raise some $67 million over 20 years.
The Sunset Spectacular in Los Angeles. (Mark Lamster)
The parks proposal is even worse: It would allow for digital billboards of up to 2,500 square feet to be placed within designated park spaces. For this, the city would receive a relatively paltry $10 million annually.
Among the design examples the proposal cites is the Sunset Spectacular, a 67-foot-tall architectural billboard on Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip that has achieved notoriety for its designer’s allegedly abusive workplace behavior.
The fact that city staff believes the Sunset Strip — perhaps the most famously advertising-rich stretch of road in America — is an applicable model for, say, Reverchon Park or White Rock Lake, suggests a
lack of design intelligence, not to mention common sense.
Dallas faces a difficult budget deficit, but selling out its public spaces is no way to solve the problem, and in the long run will only exacerbate its tax revenue problem by making the city a less appealing place to live and work.
There is but one possible answer to this proposal: No.
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This article originally published at Lamster: The worst idea in Dallas? Billboards in the parks.