It is almost impossible to imagine any great landscape architectural design in isolation from a broader social context and in particular from an urban condition. The great gardens that exist today and that have been preserved over in some cases centuries embody a public discourse or social relationships. Large parks like New York’s Central Park were imagined in the context of the urban condition that it would ameliorate.
Referring to 19th century park designs Beth Meyer writes:
“These park designers and their clients believed that spatial practices such as promenading, riding, and boating in the company of others engendered what Olmsted referred to as a sense of “communicativeness” or “commonplace civilization”. A democratic community emerged through the enactment of everyday recreational spatial practices in constructed rural scenery”.
These days, in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, most people ride bicycles, not trotting horses. We’re there for a run, hanging out with friends, or Lindy-in-the-park, not promenading. And, in addition to the official uses, Golden Gate Park has a host of unofficial uses – commercial sex, other kinds of deals. As John Beardsley writes:
“...parks are among the few places where people are most free to pursue the ordinary and (my italics) extraordinary expressions of daily life. . . We need to reclaim parks as part of our essential urban infrastructure, as key features in functioning urban social systems, …maximize their potential as ecological systems, … and promote them as the vital laboratories of democracy”.
Though the specifics have changed, the effects still seem to be true.
It is easy enough to think about urban parks, even though urban parks may not be the same things today as they were in Olmsted’s time, because “urban park” provides a handle to grasp contemporary urban landscape. But contemporary cities are urban megalopolises, not the large 19th century cities, and we’re really talking about a network-patchwork of fragmented (socially, programmatically, ecologically) landscape of which large parks are (just) large patches. Even the large well-known park projects in the news these days – Fresh Kills in NYC, Downsview in Toronto, Great Park in Orange County (Los Angeles) – are connected to and have relation with adjacent or nearby landscape features. It’s just that in some cities we see the large patches of landscape and in other cities the network-patchwork of landscape is more intact, that’s all.
It is not just the big urban parks that deserve our attention as designers these days but it is the network of urban landscape open space. As a whole the network-patchwork can address a host of urban "problems": creates connections at nested scales (from local site to region), provides for flows of people, water, wildlife, and plants, provides recreational and educational opportunities, meets various municipal regulatory codes, reveals its intrinsic character. The network of landscape areas, large and small, public and private is the contemporary Central Park.
