Urban Parks Essay -- New Urban Landscape

Like most Americans, I expect to occur in every city, every town, even in every colony in the country, an outdoor recreation area or what is usually called a park and I am seldom disappointed. No matter how innovative and unfinished a town may be, or however grey-haired and poor, I know that it will contain, wedged in among the crowded blocks of buildings, a rectangular space with grass and trees and meandering paths and perhaps a standstill or a flagpole.--John B. Jackson, The Past and Future Park in modify Visions urban parks are defined in their comparative and out or keeping(p) relationships to the urban environments surrounding them. Although frequently patternualized as natural landscapes, the physical and cordial uses of parks give proof to their inherently cultural nature. For the purpose of this paper, I will use the term culture to refer to piece enforced social objects and actions nature, then, as a written word and a concept circulated in culture, become s a cultural construction. The idea of nature or natural, I will attempt to argue, refers to a certain set of cultural concepts as constructed through a discourse that is centered away from humans and characterized by irrationality, purity, and vitality. Differently stated, nature functions as a cultural construct of anti-culture, providing an evasion from the confines of culture in the sense of civilization, but does not altogether evade the conceptual framework inherent to the social, discursive formation of human ideas. This intermingling relationship between nature and culture is well illustrated in the object lesson of urban parks. Parks are constructed as natural environments but literally and figuratively constructed by human cultural proc... ...el, B. and Cecil D. Elliott. Designing America Creating Urban Identity. New York Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1994.Groth, Paul. Vernacular Parks. Wrede and Adams 135-137.Jackson, John B. The Past and Future Park. Wrede and Adams 129-134Peck, Robert McCraken. The Museum that never Was. Natural History July 1994 62-7.Platt, Rutherford H. Conclusion in The Ecological City, Rutherford H. Platt, Rowan A. Rowntree and Pamela C. Muick, eds. Amherst The University of mummy Press, 1994. Schultz, Stanley K. Constructing Urban assimilation. Philadelphia Temple University Press, 1989.Schuyler, David. The New Urban Landscape. Baltimore The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.Wrede, Stuart and William Howard Adams, eds. Denatured Visions Landscape and Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York The Museum of Modern Art, 1991.