Park futures: Excavating images of tomorrow’s urban green spaces (original) (raw)
Related papers
Thinking forward through the past: Prospecting for urban order in (Victorian) public parks
Theoretical Criminology
Supplementing familiar linear and chronological accounts of history, we delineate a novel approach that explores connections between past, present and future. Drawing on Koselleck, we outline a framework for analysing the interconnected categories of ‘spaces of experience’ and ‘horizons of expectation’ across times. We consider the visions and anxieties of futures past and futures present; how these are constituted by, and inform, experiences that have happened and are yet to come. This conceptual frame is developed through the study of the heritage and lived experiences of a specific Victorian park within an English city. We analyse the formation of urban order as a lens to interrogate both the immediate and long-term linkages between past, present and possible futures. This approach enables us to ground analysis of prospects for urban relations in historical perspective and to pose fundamental questions about the social role of urban parks.
Can a Park Save the City?: Hopes and Pitfalls of the London National Park City
Przegląd Kulturoznawczy, 2020
This article enquires into the transformative potential of the London National Park City. In doing so it situates the vision for, the becoming, and the Charter of an urban national park in relational thinking about metropolitan nature and sustainable urbanisation. It looks at hopes and pitfalls of the London National Park City in the face of growing socio-environmental injustice and the climate crisis. First, the article explores the National Park City as a form of ecological reflexivity and social practice in the context of relational concepts of nature and the city. Second, it examines opportunities offered by the Park City with respect to urban environmental sustainability, health and wellbeing, connected diversity, socio-economic inclusion and political agency. Third, it looks at pitfalls of the National Park City relating to environmental gentrification, as well as to trade-offs between grassroots creativity and capability to bring about material change. Last but not least, the...
Spaces apart: public parks and the differentiation of space in Leeds, 1850–1914
Urban History
While the Victorian ideal of the public park is well understood, we know less of how local governors sought to realize this ideal in practice. This article is concerned with park-making as a process – contingent, unstable, open – rather than with parks as outcomes – determined, settled, closed. It details how local governors bounded, designed and regulated park spaces to differentiate them as ‘spaces apart’ within the city, and how this programme of spatial governance was obstructed, frustrated and diverted by political, environmental and social forces. The article also uses this historical analysis to provide a new perspective on the future prospects of urban parks today.
The Future Prospects of Urban Public Parks: Findings - Informing Change
2017
Public parks are long-standing and familiar features of the urban environment. For many people, visiting parks is an integral part of everyday life in the contemporary city. Yet parks in the UK are at a possible 'tipping point', prompting important concerns about their sustainability. Parks face essential challenges over funding and management, as well as questions of unequal access and competing demands on use. This study of public parks in the city of Leeds focused on how they have changed through time, how they are used today, and what their future prospects might be.
Future of Public Parks: Policy, Practice and Research
2017
On Thursday 13th July 2017, the University of Leeds hosted a major one-day national conference entitled 'The Future of Public Parks' at The British Academy in London. The conference was generously sponsored by the Leeds Social Sciences Institute and idverde, with support from The Parks Alliance, Historic England and Groundwork. Some 79 delegates participated in a lively and engaging event which drew together innovative thinking and learning from policy, practice and research on ways to maximise the value of parks as public assets in the twenty-first century, and to consider challenges that threaten the sustainability of public parks in the future. The event brought together academics from diverse disciplines, funding bodies, policy-makers and practitioners from the across the public, voluntary and private sectors. At a time when the future of public parks is both in the balance and in the national spotlight, the presenters and delegates explored important issues and challeng...
From ‘the People’ to ‘the Citizen’: Municipal Leisure in Manchester’s Urban Parks
This paper examines the transition from the Victorian to the Edwardian municipal park in Manchester. It focuses on the acquisition and development of the 650 acre Heaton Park by Manchester City Council during the years 1902 – 1912. It argues that the purchase of the park marked the transition from the Victorian idea of parks as improving spaces for ‘rational recreation’ to the Edwardian idea that parks offered spaces for many diverse activities centred around active citizenship and social responsibility. Although this represented a re-framing of many Victorian ideas about leisure, it also resulted in a redefinition of the role of a municipal park in the Edwardian city. It is this redefinition which forms the focus for this paper.
2018
The demand for green spaces in highly urbanised, metropolitan cities is well documented. However, adjacent to or surrounding these densely populated urban centres are extensive areas of newer suburbs, where land use and public space demands differ from those found in large urban cities. Though dependent on the age of a suburb and its associated societal changes, the demands made upon suburban green spaces are changing. However, little research has focused on ageing suburban park systems, which today may be managed by multiple administrative entities. The development of a master plan for the seventy-year-old network of Bergen County parks, located in north-eastern New Jersey, approximately 30 km outside of New York City, is a case study that illustrates this environmental planning challenge. Competing user interests can be traced to conflicting demands and expectations for open space amenities, highlighting the difficulty of providing an equal voice to all park user populations. A pr...
Form, Funding and Political Purposes of Urban Parks
2018
This paper examines the political motivations behind the establishment of public urban parks in western Europe and the United States, and addresses issues affecting the funding of those parks. It does this through a chronological examination of park development, arguing that the physical form and facilities provided in parks reflect the purposes for which they were designated. As such, the form and purpose of parks therefore reflect, in their various forms and functions, the intentions and values of their funding agencies. The paper examines principal sources of funding for public parks, and documents current challenges in funding urban parks with public money.
Making the city green: the creation of public greenspace in suburban Sydney, 1940-1992
ENVIRONMENT
The creation of greenspace in cities is often spoken of as if it were the result of orderly planning or regulation. Sydney did have a plan to conserve greenspace on the urban fringe but the 1948 Cumberland County Planning Scheme carried little real power to implement this goal in the face of population growth and expansion which was far higher than had been predicted. Working class residents in Sydney's south western suburbs after World War 2 did not wait for planning or regulation. These people in low-income and newly subdivided suburbs expected little from government and took matters into their own hands, dragging local councils along with them until they had assembled a string of locally-managed and, at times, locally-constructed greenspaces along the banks of the Georges River for which they then demanded the designation of 'national park'. In doing so, they were building on a long history of Aboriginal and then early settler occupation of these lands in collective recreational, cultural and highly socialised uses. They had seized on two of the key characteristics of the 'national' park as it had been defined in the United States and in Australia in the later nineteenth century: as a site for protection of indigenous 'nature' and as a democratic space 'for the people'. Some of their management strategies are today decried as damaging to the environment, but the local park committees saw themselves not only as carving out and creating public recreational spaces but as protecting and extending what they understood to be 'natural' native floral and faunal environments, which was one of the reasons they demanded the 'national park' designation. This paper explores the underlying factors in this grass roots making of greenspace. A historical case study approach which draws on both social and environmental history frameworks allows an exploration of the sustained conflict between popular conceptions and official views of the meanings of 'nature' and a 'national park' in an urban setting. It indicates that the concepts of 'nature' and the 'native' have changed significantly over the last 50 years and that the accusation that local groups damaged pristine environments is misleading. It explores just what 'the public' meant in relation to city greenspace. Often socially unrepresentative and, as time went by, consistently failing to recognize Environment 10 Making the City Green ENVIRONMENT 10-2