{"id":20643,"date":"2017-03-27T17:46:27","date_gmt":"2017-03-27T21:46:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/?p=20643"},"modified":"2017-03-27T18:10:43","modified_gmt":"2017-03-27T22:10:43","slug":"large-parks-complete-cities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/2017\/03\/27\/large-parks-complete-cities\/","title":{"rendered":"How Large Parks Complete Cities"},"content":{"rendered":"

A review of <\/em>Large Parks<\/strong>, edited by\u00a0Julia Czerniak and George Hargreaves. 2007. ISBN 1-56898-624-6. Princeton Architectural Press, New York. 255 pages. Buy the book.<\/a>\"\"<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cLarge parks are priceless, and those cities that do not have an effectively designed one will always be the poorer.\u201d \u2013James Corner<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As a Regional Park Planner, I have to say up front that I love large parks, especially those embedded within urban areas. To me, there is nothing quite so compelling as temporarily leaving behind the sights, sounds, and smells of a bustling modern city and slipping into the magical realm of a large park. The jolt to my senses as I transition from one realm to the other is always profound.<\/p>\n

When I am in a large park, I wake up to my surroundings\u2014I become immersed in the sights, sounds, and smells of the world around me. As a regular large park visitor, I get to witness the playing out of natural and social processes over time, such that themes of constancy and change become a mirror to my own lived experience. To me, a large park completes a city and a large park completes my city experience.<\/p>\n

\u201cLarge Parks\u201d is at once thought provoking and sophisticated, helping us understand why large parks are complex\u2014and vital.<\/blockquote><\/figure>\n

That\u2019s why I was so excited to be able to read and review Large Parks,<\/em>\u00a0a 2007 Princeton Architectural Press book edited by Julia Czerniak and George Hargreaves. The essays in this volume explore many of the dimensions of large urban parks from a landscape architecture perspective. Large Parks<\/em> is at once thought provoking and sophisticated in its arguments and narratives. The contributors to Large Parks<\/em> are some of today\u2019s leading landscape architects, architects, design theorists, critics, and historians.<\/p>\n

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Large Parks<\/em> emerged out of a series of events, including a conference held at Harvard University Graduate School of Design in April 2003, where ideas about the significance of size in relation to parks launched discussions relative to the planning, design, and management of past and future large parks. Subsequent colloquia, meetings, discussions, and debates helped to shape the eight essays contained in this volume. Large Parks<\/em> follows The Landscape Urbanism Reader <\/em>(2006) and Recovering Landscape <\/em>(1999) as the third in a series of publications from Princeton Architectural Press that focus on a continuing and abiding interest in landscape.<\/p>\n

James Corner starts things off with a stimulating Foreword that paints a picture of large parks as \u201cextensive landscapes that are integral to the fabric of cities and metropolitan areas, providing diverse, complex, and delightfully engaging outdoor spaces for a broad range of people and constituencies.\u201d He recognizes that large parks are also valuable for their ecological function, providing habitat for a rich variety of plant, animal, bird, aquatic, and microbial life, as well as essential ecosystem services such as storm water filtration, air purification, and climate regulation. Corner believes that large urban parks function as \u201cgreen lungs,\u201d helping to cleanse, refresh, and enrich city life.<\/p>\n

While these essential functions of large parks have been fundamental to their establishment and on-going public support, Corner states that the creation of most contemporary large parks are now a by-product of expansive development schemes, or as remediation projects for abandoned industrial sites. Unfazed, Corner says these sites present us with enormous opportunities to create entirely new types of public parkland that still provide essential ecological benefits while also embracing often uncomfortable site histories. According to Corner, \u201cthe time to reinvent large parks has never been better.\u201d<\/p>\n

Corner lays out a central thesis of the essays contained in Large Parks<\/em> by stating that the ecological, operational, and programmatic aspects of large parks is vitally important, but not very well understood in the development of large urban parks today. These concerns are particularly significant to landscape architects, because large parks are usually designed<\/em> spaces.<\/p>\n

Corner carefully argues that the creation of large parks is a long-term process, subject to revision and change over time. The trick for landscape architects, according to Corner, is to design a large-park framework \u201csufficiently robust to lend structure and identity while also having sufficient pliancy and \u2018give\u2019 to adapt to changing demands and ecologies over time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Central Park in New York City. Photo: David Maddox<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Corner contends that if a large park design cannot address serious issues such as park stewardship, maintenance, cost, security, programming, and ad-hoc politics, that the result will be \u201cthe typical bland, populist pastoral pastiche that passes for most recreational open space today, with none of the grandeur, theatricality, novelty, or sheer experiential power of real large parks.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her Introduction to the essays, author Julia Czerniak delves deeply into the two words forming the title of this volume\u2014\u201cLarge\u201d and \u201cParks.\u201d Czerniak makes the case that studying parks selected by size allows us look at parks not usually considered together. She argues that due to the present number of large parks in various stages of conceptualization, planning, and development, that a study of large park design, management, and use is timely and necessary.<\/p>\n

Czerniak highlights the relevance of \u201clarge\u201d in relation to parks, saying that size has practical and disciplinary consequences, and that as the \u201csole criterion,\u201d the term becomes critical. For the purpose of the essays in this volume, Czerniak defines a park that is at least 500 acres in size as large. This definition in part derives from a statement made by Andrew Jackson Downing during the development of New York\u2019s Central Park that \u201cfive hundred acres is the smallest area that should be reserved for the future wants of such a city\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Oslo Park. Photo: Tim Beatley<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Czerniak argues that large amounts of land are indeed necessary for ecological resiliency and for economic sustainability, in the sense that today\u2019s parks must be big enough to include the resources for their own making. To Czerniak, size also implies ambition\u2014or the embrace of \u201cbig plans\u201d as exemplified by Daniel Burnham in talking about his plans for Chicago. Largeness also requires \u201cconsiderable energy, vision, commitment, and innovation\u201d by those who work to make these parks happen.<\/p>\n

In her discussion of the term \u201cpark,\u201d Czerniak acknowledges it is one of the most debated forms of landscape. While early park advocates tied its meaning to green open space with turf and trees, Czerniak notes that now the \u201ccharacter and image of parks, the roles they play, their emergence relative to cities, and their use by various publics has certainly changed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Czerniak rightfully notes that, together, \u201cLarge\u201d + \u201cParks\u201d claim a complex conceptual territory which allows for \u201cinquiry at multiple scales and through diverse frameworks that may give rise to how we think about parks today.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her contribution to the book, \u201cSustainable Large Parks: Ecological Design or Designer Ecology?,\u201d Nina-Marie Lister delves into recent shifts in perceptions of ecosystems as deterministic and closed to a more nuanced view of living systems as open, self-organizing, and unpredictable. To Lister, this view of ecological processes demands a new approach to the design and management of large parks. Lister argues that complex natural processes must inform how parks are envisioned to allow for self-organizing and resilient ecological systems to emerge. Lister further argues that designing a park to allow for an \u201coperational ecology\u201d is a basic requirement for long-term sustainability. Lister makes a clear case that large parks within metropolitan areas warrant special consideration and study, and that planning, management, and maintenance must provide for \u201cresilience in the face of long-term adaption to change, and thus for ecological, cultural, and economic viability.\u201d<\/p>\n

Park connector in Singapore. Photo by Tim Beatley.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Landscape historian and theorist Elizabeth K. Meyer builds on Lister\u2019s essay in \u201cUncertain Parks: Disturbed Sites, Citizens, and Risk Society,\u201d where she discusses how many contemporary large parks are created from ecologically and culturally disturbed sites, such as abandoned factories, landfills, and military bases. These damaged sites are a byproduct of industrial era expansion and modern consumer culture. As such, they are \u201cconstituted by debris and toxic byproducts of the city.\u201d Meyer doesn\u2019t ask us to erase these site histories, but rather to view them as spaces to recollect and interpret precise <\/em>site histories. Meyer interestingly advocates for telling the site\u2019s particular story through park design and programming that reveal and blur the boundaries between \u201ctoxicity and health, ecology and technology, past and present, city and wild.\u201d Meyer believes this will allow the public to confront \u201cperceptions of ourselves as a collective of citizen-consumers and as residents of a risk society.\u201d<\/p>\n

Architect Linda Pollack\u2019s contribution, \u201cMatrix Landscape: Construction of Identity in the Large Park,\u201d posits that a preoccupation with \u201cthin green veneers\u201d often masks a park\u2019s heterogeneous character. She focuses her essay on the Fresh Kills Landfill, a 2,200-acre site that had served for more than 50 years as New York City\u2019s landfill. An international design competition was held for the redevelopment of the site after it was closed in 2001. The design team Field Operations In New York won the design competition, and in 2006, a draft master plan was released for Fresh Kills Park. The project website stated that \u201cthe Parkland at Fresh Kills will be one of the most ambitious public works projects in the world\u2026\u201d Pollack elaborates on the conceptual and representational design strategy used by Field Operations, which she calls the \u201cmatrix.\u201d According to Pollack, Field Operations conceptualized the project as a \u201creconstituted matrix of diverse life forms and evolving strategies\u201d as represented in the spatial framework of threads, islands\/clusters, and mats\u2014which, Pollack says, can be understood as the \u201cagent of a fluid set of ecological systems, allowing the interaction of programmatic, cultural, and natural elements to create the complex, synthetic environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his essay, landscape architect George Hargreaves asks, \u201cwhy large parks\u201d? To Hargreaves, who approaches the question from a design perspective, size does matter. In his words, large parks \u201cafford the scale to realistically evaluate the degrees of success or failure of many of the issues embedded in public landscapes: ecology, habitat, human use and agency, cultural meaning, and iconographic import, to name but a few.\u201d Hargreaves believes that these issues can\u2019t be understood without considering the physical characteristics of the site itself, and that large parks reveal the importance of the designer\u2019s attitude towards the site and its physical forms and natural systems. He argues, \u201cthe extent to which designers embrace or fight the physical history and systems of a site is an important determinant of a park\u2019s long-term success.\u201d Hargreaves provides seven case studies of parks that he has visited and photographed to showcase the work of designers who have grappled with these issues with varying degrees of success.<\/p>\n

Landscape theorist Anita Berrizbeitia\u2019s essay, \u201cRe-placing Process,\u201d examines potential associations between making places of lasting identity and value, and facilitating the natural and cultural processes that transform them. Berrizbeitia recognizes that large urban parks are complex and diverse systems that respond to change through time, and as such that they require a process-driven design approach that is open-ended and adaptable. Berrizbeitia believes that large parks \u201cabsorb the identity of the city as much as they project one, becoming socially and culturally recognizable places that are unique and irreproducible.\u201d According to Berrizbeitia, successful large parks are the product of deliberate decisions that leave them flexible in terms of management, program, and use, and that they result from \u201cequally conscious decisions that isolate, distill, and capture for the long term that which makes them unique.\u201d Berrizbeitia\u2019s essay captures the relationship between process and place, between those practices that leave a site open to \u201ccontingency and change,\u201d and that also capture a place\u2019s \u201cenduring qualities.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his essay \u201cConflict and Erosion: The Contemporary Public Life of Large Parks,\u201d critic John Beardsley writes about the \u201cmultiple, often conflicting publics that use large parks\u201d and the possibility of even finding a large park anywhere in the world today that is fully public. To Beardsley, this means a park that is \u201centirely free and accessible in all places at all times and fully supported by public funds.\u201d Beardsley writes that the complexity of large parks has an impact on how they are designed, such that there is an increased focus on \u201cadaptability to accommodate different user groups at different times.\u201d Beardsley is alarmed at what he sees as the most disturbing trend of all in contemporary parks, which is the increasing expectation that they will pay their own way. He states that \u201cthe pastoral park is obsolete; parks are now looking more like commercial landscapes or entertainment destinations\u2026\u201d In the end, Beardsley believes we must reaffirm that \u201cunimpeded access to public parks is a crucial element of environmental justice,\u201d and that we must reclaim large parks as \u201ckey features in functioning urban social and ecological systems.\u201d<\/p>\n

Editor Czerniak closes the book with her essay \u201cLegibility and Resilience,\u201d in which she looks at how large parks have \u201csignificant ecological, social, and generative roles in the contemporary city.\u201d Czerniak argues that successful large parks share two essential characteristics: legibility and resilience. By this she means that a park must be understood in its design scheme, and it must be able to experience disturbance while maintaining its identity and function. Czerniak elaborates on the locational shifts of many contemporary large parks from the urban core to the periphery, where redevelopment lands are often located. She highlights winning schemes from recent international design competitions as case studies, examining how large parks can play vital roles in the city in three ways: as social catalysts, as ecological agents, and as imaginative enterprises. Understandably, Czerniak believes that \u201cthe large, the park, the city, and the future are intimately related\u201d and that parks are something that, \u201cboth literally and metaphorically, must be cultivated.\u201d She finally calls on those within the design field to understand why parks are necessary, the roles they can play, and how they can look.<\/p>\n

The essays in Large Parks<\/em> are individually and collectively stimulating, thought provoking, and often challenging in their observations and conclusions. The writers are at such a high-level that non-landscape architects may find the material a bit difficult to work through, particularly if they are not familiar with landscape design language and concepts. That being said, a careful read through Large Parks<\/em> is well worth it, particularly if you are interested in gaining a greater understanding of some of the theoretical and practical considerations that design professionals are concerned with at this level.<\/p>\n

As a regional park planner, I am familiar with natural area parks in an urban context, although the parks I work with are not \u201cdesigner parks\u201d per se; by Julia Czerniak\u2019s standard, they would probably lack \u201clegibility.\u201d That being said, I\u2019ve been fortunate to visit some of the world\u2019s great large urban parks and I can certainly attest to their enduring and irreplaceable qualities, which I now believe stem in large part from successful landscape design strategies that facilitate emergent processes and spontaneous interactions, while also celebrating the familiar and beloved characteristics that bring people back time and again.<\/p>\n

It would be hard to imagine the world\u2019s great cities without their iconic parks. However, after reading Large Parks<\/em>, I better understand the complexities inherent in designing, planning, and managing these often contested public spaces, and I have a greater appreciation of the challenges that they face now and into the future. I would recommend Large Parks<\/em> to anyone interested in learning about one of our most important and enduring forms of public space from a highly informed landscape architecture perspective.<\/p>\n

Lynn Wilson<\/strong>
\nVancouver<\/p>\n

On The Nature of Cities<\/a><\/p>\n

Click on the image to go to Amazon and buy the book. A portion of the proceeds returns to The Nature of Cities.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A review of Large Parks, edited by\u00a0Julia Czerniak and George Hargreaves. 2007. ISBN 1-56898-624-6. Princeton Architectural Press, New York. 255 pages. Buy the book. \u201cLarge parks are priceless, and those cities that do not have an effectively designed one will always be the poorer.\u201d \u2013James Corner As a Regional Park Planner, I have to say […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":20645,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[298,299,296],"tags":[40,28,34,409,392,66,88,29],"coauthors":[203],"class_list":["post-20643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essay-people-and-communitites","category-essay-place-and-design","category-review","tag-architecture","tag-design","tag-experiencing-nature","tag-green-infrastructure","tag-justice","tag-parks","tag-planning","tag-what-is-urban-nature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20643\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20643"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=20643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}