Urban Parks Essay -- New Urban Landscape

Like most Americans, I expect to find in every city, every town, even in every village in the country, an outdoor recreation area or what is usually called a common and I am seldom disappointed. No matter how new and raw(prenominal) a town may be, or however old and poor, I know that it pass on contain, wedged in among the crowded blocks of buildings, a orthogonal space with grass and trees and meandering paths and perhaps a bandstand or a flagpole.--John B. Jackson, The Past and Future Park in Denatured Visions urban park are defined in their comparative and contrastive alliances to the urban environments surrounding them. Although frequently conceptualized as natural landscapes, the physical and friendly uses of parks give proof to their inherently cultural nature. For the purpose of this paper, I allow for use the term culture to refer to human implemented social objects and actions nature, then, as a written word and a concept circulated in culture, becomes a cultur al construction. The idea of nature or natural, I will attempt to argue, refers to a certain set of cultural concepts as constructed with a discourse that is centered away from humans and characterized by irrationality, purity, and vitality. otherwise stated, nature functions as a cultural construct of anti-culture, providing an escape from the contain of culture in the sense of civilization, but does not entirely shelve the conceptual framework inherent to the social, discursive formation of human ideas. This intermingling relationship between nature and culture is well illustrated in the example 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-fashioned York Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1994.Groth, Paul. Vernacular Parks. Wrede and Adams 135-137.Jackson, John B. The Past and Future Park. Wrede and Ad ams 129-134Peck, Robert McCraken. The Museum that Never Was. indispensable 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 Massachusetts Press, 1994. Schultz, Stanley K. Constructing Urban Culture. 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.