Cities are the most comprehensively artificial constructions of Humankind. This is, of course, the very argument for urban parks. Frederick Law Olmstead, the designer of New York’s Central Park and Boston’s Emerald Necklace, the father of American Landscape design and ardent advocate for urban parks, championed green space as the instrument for the redemption of the crowded industrial city. Parks aerated the city and offered healthful recreation to urban populations. Others touted parks as the means to preserve the more or less natural landscape that survived within city limits. Parks were even promoted for their supposed ability to stimulate urban expansion. It is now a fundamental tenant of urban design that open space and natural materials are an essential complement to city life. Our project does not contest this. It aims, though, to expose the internal conflicts within the ideology of urban parks.
The first conflict, of course, is that, parks are not natural, but rather an image of nature created by artifice. New York’s Central Park was made with the aid of 166 tons of dynamite, the movement of 3,698,000 cubic yards of earth and stone, and the planting of 270,000 trees and shrubs. There are plenty of good reasons why a park landscape must differ from what is found in the wild. The fundamental one, of course, is that the park must relate to the city outside its borders. The relationship is functional—the way city dwellers will use it—but it is also psychological. Parks must overcome an inherent fear of the natural environment on the part of the urbanite. There is a long history of this, beginning with the fear of the “howling wilderness” outside the town limits of colonial settlements and preserved in regulations that close the parks from dusk to dawn. Olmstead recognized it when he originally rejected the proposed site for Morningside Park in New York. The terrain was too steep, the ravines too deep, too dark and too dangerously hidden from view: it could not be (and, indeed, has not been) made safe.
In an effort to be safe, but also to engage the visitor, park landscapes were designed to be transparent. In the country, dense forest, steep rock face, or boggy wetland all, in their different ways, block the visitor from entering into the space of the natural world. Parks avoid this kind of barrier. Open meadows, long vistas, and protected paths invite the visitor with visual cues and then with physical aids. Paving, lighting, and benches signal that the city has pacified this land. The aesthetic of park landscape is calm and tame. It aims at conventional beauty and picturesque effect. The sublime in nature—those landforms where extreme conditions overwhelm sensation and inspire fear or ecstasy—is not part of the vocabulary of the city park.
Conflict is built into the multiple ambitions of the founding park idea. The ambition to improve the environment of the city’s working population came into immediate conflict with the realities of land acquisition. Central Park was built well above the inhabited city, not near the slums. Parks on the periphery and the landscaped boulevards that connect them were more obviously of value to real estate developers and the city’s tax base than to the urban poor. The preservation of undeveloped sites often conflicted with the desire to increase accessibility. It was also challenged by the changing demands that the city put on the parks. Early recreational activities were much less active than contemporary ones. Meadows have given way to golf courses. Ball fields and tennis courts demanded level surfaces. Playgrounds replaced parkland. Cars transformed carriageways into highways.
Change is everywhere in the parks. The most persistent force for instability is nature itself. Maintenance of the plant material in the parks was essential but not always provided. Trees and shrubs have grown, deteriorated, and died. Volunteers invaded beds dedicated to other species and flourished. Animals and insects colonized the parks and left their mark.
In the course of their 150 year history politics, too, has penetrated the parks. The intended audience of the nineteenth-century park was the individual and the experience planners’ attempted to stage was subjective and aesthetic. But the parks are protean environments. On Commonwealth Avenue and on the Boston Common they have become the place for monuments that express the values of the city. And when the country is in turmoil, the parks have accommodated the assembly of large crowds.
The parks were never intended as places that offered the freedom of the wilderness they simulated. Social regulation in the parks is explicit. Beaches, the seashore parks, famously have long lists of rules: no smoking, no alcohol, no open fires, no “amplified sound” and, sometimes, no swimming. Similar regulations constrain behavior in the inlands parks. But enforcement is necessarily less strict than on the streets and the parks are also sites of resistance. Hidden areas harbor a wide range of unauthorized behaviors. Campsites, secret places of assembly, rustic structures, improptu earthworks, and unlicensed redecoration are their traces.
In other countries the picturesque landscape style established in eighteenth century England and that dominates parks like those of Boston’s Emerald Necklace found a less sympathetic reception. In Mashad, Iran a British style park established in the 1960’s on the outskirts of the city as a resort destination had, by the 1980’s, been surrounded by the expanded city and become a dangerous place. Redesigned in a style more sympathetic to the Persian garden tradition it now functions very differently. It accommodates meeting places for the social groups of recent immigrants and has become an instrument for the preservation of local culture.
See the link dedicated to the long term project done collaboratively with Navid Haghighi and David Friedman.
