Urban Parks Movement Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Public urban parks are a product of a reform effort that emerged in the mid-19th century to ameliorate the living conditions of working people. In the United States, the best known park advocate was Frederick Law Olmsted, who, with his partner Calvert Vaux, conceived of and promoted the construction of Central Park in New York City (1858) and the Emerald Necklace in Boston (1878-80), as well as some of the most notable parks in other large cities in the United States. Never easy to fund, the case for parks was always pitted against the potential for profit from the undeveloped real estate, and the possibility that parks would attract lower classes into more affluent areas. Related conflicts continue to this day.

Over the course of the 20th century, the case for constructing urban parks has ebbed and flowed, evolving with changes in the affluence and demographic composition of neighborhoods. At the beginning of the century, interest in providing access to nature in densely urbanized areas began to shift toward an outdoor recreation model, wherein recreation facilities were developed to encourage fitness, team sports, and activities aimed at the acculturation of immigrant communities. Natural or naturalistic spaces were then less important, and were encroached upon by tennis courts, baseball fields, recreation halls, and other facilities. At the same time, there was an increasing interest in the preservation of nature and wilderness far from the urban centers. This movement is well known as the conservation movement, largely formulated under Theodore Roosevelt’s administration (1901-09).

The Late 20th Century

As the country became more affluent after World War II and the federal government underwrote suburbanization, the groundwork was laid for the emergence of the environmental movement, including greater concern about ecological processes and the need to preserve wilderness and open spacesincluding at the suburban fringe. Conservation approaches of the Roosevelt Progressive Era that espoused the use and long-term sustainable management of natural resources were replaced by a politics of preservation for ecological values and for leisure. It is also during the late 1960s and into the 1970s that new models were experimented with, such as conservation easements, greenways, community gardens, and land trusts in and near urban areas. Large-scale national recreation areas adjacent to cities were also created from the newly established Land and Conservation Fund (1964) to offer natural settings for outdoor recreation for urban dwellers. There was a general shift in appreciation toward more natural settings that offered contact with local indigenous ecosystems such as the Santa Monica National Recreation Area, dominated by coastal chaparral and oak woodlands.

What constituted a park became harder to define, and the umbrella under which such as concept could be categorized broadened. Meanwhile, older cities were being depopulated by the middle class, and investments were being made in parks in suburbs, combining large open spaces with recreation facilities; in urban fringe open spaces; and in the preservation of remote “wild” lands. Urban parks, including such well-known ones as New York City’s Central Park, suffered from lack of funds as many large cities went through fiscal crises in the 1970s.

With the rise of the environmental movement, there was an increasing recognition that natural processes, especially at the urban fringe, needed to be protected. Ian McHarg’s Design With Nature (1970) was one such important intellectual milestone. McHarg pointed out that development could be designed to minimize environmental impacts if natural environmental processes were understood and considered in siting subdivisions. He pioneered the use of overlay maps showing streams and sensitive riparian corridors, for example, and where development could take place that would have the least ecological impact. While McHarg’s analysis was influential intellectually, it remained at the margin of planning practice. Yet, it was important because it supported challenges to sprawl, and contributed to emerging efforts to preserve ecologically important (and other) open spaces in suburbanizing environments.

Large-scale subdivisions at the urban fringe, especially those catering to the middle class and upper middle class, felt obliged to provide open spaces and parks as part of the amenity package. They followed a formulaic offering of lawns, playing fields, meandering bicycle paths, and recreation facilities. In deteriorating urban cores, another phenomenon was developing: the rediscovery of urban gardens for food self-sufficiency on vacant and abandoned parcels. Neither of these different trajectories corresponded-understandably-to the early mission of urban parks to provide relief from insalubrious and crowded living conditions and an aesthetic respite from the industrial city. With urban diversity came an increasingly disparate set of approaches to public open spaces addressing the multiplicity of urban settings-the older, poorer urban core, the more affluent residential neighborhoods, older established suburbs, and expansion on the urban fringe.

The 21st Century

By the turn of the 21st century, the variety of approaches to public open spaces has grown considerably, and encompasses diverse ideologies about nature, the role of public spaces, and the place (and type) of recreation in an urbanized context. The rise of new urbanism and return to the urban core of large cities have revived interest in urban parks as places for relief from city pressures, a place for nature, and other functions such as stormwater mitigation. The new sciences of conservation and restoration biology have also been a factor in reassessing the function and location of urban parks, leading to tension about what kinds of new parks should be created, and where, and the functions of older parks. For example, in Chicago, efforts have been made to renaturalize portions of the extensive park system, removing and replacing non-native trees. In California, this has led to the extirpation of nonnative eucalyptus. In both cases, these efforts have encountered opposition.

For these reasons, urban parks are harder to define today. With the preservation and inclusion of undeveloped natural spaces in cities, restored waterways, the creation of bioswales in interstitial and often overlooked places, innovative re-engineered streetscapes for storm water management, and street calming approaches that involve widening sidewalks and expanding the pedestrian sphere into linear street parks, the traditional idea of urban parks is no longer sufficient.

Going into the 21st century, urban parks will encompass a range of services and uses. Non-built urban land-both on the urban fringe and in cities themselves-may increasingly be recruited to mitigate the environmental impacts of urbanization and climate change, as well as serving recreation and aesthetic purposes. Wild, vestigial remnants of urban land-“feral” spaces-may also increasingly be recruited into the park portfolio as urban land becomes more scarce for traditional park creation. At the same time, as population and urbanized lands in some areas continue to increase, cities, counties, and other governmental organizations will be expected to expand park and open space venues in the newly urbanizing areas.

None of these changes occur easily and the challenges involve the creation of new models for stewardship and funding. As municipal budgets have declined due to the restructuring of fiscal revenues, parks and recreation departments have suffered across the country. One new possibility for funding may be the valuation of open space ecosystem services, whether for storm water regulation or air pollution mitigation. Research demonstrates that natural services contribute benefits to cities that have monetary value. The very notion of the urban park, starting from a strategy to relieve human inhabitants of polluted, crowded, and unsanitary cities, may come full circle as a new approach to helping to remediate the newer problems of global climate change, toxic hotspots, and water shortages through renaturalizing the urban environment.

Bibliography:

Troy Erdman, “Landscape Architecture: Design and Problem Solving,” Tech Directions (v.61/2, 2001);
Ian McHarg, Design With Nature (John Wiley & Sons , 1992 [1970]);
Witold Rybczynski, A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century (Scribner, 2000).