Modern Urban Parks

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4488914
AutoresTerence Young (autor de correspondencia)
Año1995
Volumen85
Número4
Páginas535
Fecha de publicación1995-10-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaGeographical Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0016-7428 • E-ISSN: 1931-0846
EditorialJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/215924
OpenAlexW1969042070
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas15
Referencias citadas4

In July 1893 the commissioners of the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco reported the creation of a field for athletic games in the park. The new recreational valley was twenty acres in extent, enclosed by slightly rising grounds and studded with pines on three of its sides. . . . [It will be] a beautiful lawn where foot-ball and base-ball will not only be permitted but encouraged. Benches will be placed under the trees, which furnish an inviting shade for the convenience and comfort of the thousands who go there to witness and engage in these sports (SFBPC 1893, 13). A seemingly commonplace public notice, this statement nevertheless announced a fundamental change in the park. Only a few years prior, a specialized, intentionally enclosed area with distinct uses by specific segments of society would not have been permitted in the park. Social-spatial divisions would have been seen as anathema. The local society, however, was modernizing, and its park spaces were changing along with it. One characteristic of modernizing urban societies has been a tendency toward increasing complexity through segmentation and specialization. Modernity stresses greater complexity through the creation of new social groups and hierarchical divisions for both production and consumption. The source of the trend is the modernist search for increased efficiency, quantifiability, predictability, and control (Ritzer 1993). In concert with the additional social divisions has come a corresponding increase in the number and type of spatial segments (Tuan 1982; Sack 1986). That is, a historical examination of modern social geography, especially urbanization, reveals an expanding diversity of places, regions, territories, and landscapes. But what about the natural world? Do those places treated as natural by the members of modernity have increasingly complex, segmented geographies? Although nature is often positioned as the antithesis of culture, there is no reason to assume that natural places would not be subject to the space-segmenting tendencies of modernity. Numerous scholars from diverse intellectual backgrounds have pointed out the social-cultural constitution of nature (Evernden 1992). Nature is the reification of a bafflingly complex set of geographically diffuse parts and processes. To label this complex is to create a sense of wholeness where none may exist. Because the definition of that whole occurs in a social setting, nature should be socially segmentable, subject to modernizing tendencies. In this article I argue that nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century urban parks such as Central Park in Manhattan, Prospect Park in Brooklyn, and Forest Park in St. Louis underwent modernization. I examine in detail the process of spatial segmentation and specialization between 1880 and 1920 through the study of a typical example of the period, Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Specifically, new spatial segments and social uses replaced earlier ones in the eastern end of that park. The geographical changes were linked to a shift in the beliefs of an influential elite. These ideas and their relationships to parks are detailed in three examples of the segmentation of Golden Gate Park after 1880: the new uses of ornamental plants, the first playground, and the development of athletics. Finally, the persistence of rationalistic notions into the 1990s addresses the significance of modernization in urban parks. PARKS AND SOCIETY From the 1850s through the 1920s the outspoken proponents of parks in San Francisco were an elite of largely middle- to upper-middle-class, native-born, white men. The values and voice of that group were the most influential in determining the character of the city's parks. The working classes, foreign born, nonwhites, and women had influence that was less effectual in San Francisco, as was the case elsewhere (Cranz 1982; Rosenzweig and Blackmar 1992). However, the narrow base of this elite did not necessarily preclude its ideas about parks from resonating with many individuals in the larger society

Archaeology · Geography · Modernity · Notice · Political science · Recreation · Tourism · Witness · American Environmental and Regional History · Financial Crisis of the 21st Century · Landscape and Cultural Studies · Law