Rethinking Urban Parks: Public Space and Cultural Identity

The new book Rethinking Urban Parks: Public Space and Cultural Diversity, by Setha Low, Dana Taplin, & Suzanne Scheld (2005), recognizes that large parks, beaches, and heritage spaces are important to bring together diverse groups where they can encounter each other in an open and inviting atmosphere. Cultural diversity expresses the idea that, at the grass roots level, democracy consists of groups of people engaging with one another to make community. Parks, beaches, and heritage spaces are vital settings for the fundamental social activity of a democratic society.

The book presents six lessons for promoting and sustaining cultural diversity in parks, beaches, and heritage sites. These lessons are meant to provide a framework and guidelines for culturally sensitive decision making in park planning, management, and design.

1. If people are not represented in historical national parks and monuments or, more importantly, if their histories are erased, they will not use the park. Erasure and non-attendance can result, for example, from the failure to recognize or interpret the social uses or history of a place.

2. Access is as much about economics and cultural patterns of park use as circulation and transportation; thus, income and visitation patterns must be taken into consideration when providing access for all social groups. Underrepresentation is sometimes attributed to cultural patterns when economics may be the real cause. Ellis Island, for example, is a free National Park, but the $7.50 ferry ride to get there is prohibitively expensive for many poor city residents. Cost sifts the poor out of the visitor population. Inadequate public transportation has been considered the biggest obstacle preventing the Gateway National Recreation Area from reaching its potential as a National Park for New York City residents.

3. The social interaction of diverse groups can be maintained and enhanced by providing safe, spatially adequate territories for everyone within the larger space of the overall site. Park managers tend not to think in these terms, concentrating instead on the needs of the resource, rather than the needs of the community. Users are displaced because of a mismatch between vernacular activity and the prescribed used of the area. In Prospect Park in Brooklyn, for example, volleyball games by Latino immigrants have been curtailed because the design for the area used as a playing field calls for scenic landscape passages.

4. Accomodating the differences in the ways social classes and ethnic groups use and value public sites is essential to making decisions that sustain cultural and social diversity. Sustaining diversity in parks can be an important part of sustaining diversity in the city overall. People need to feel that a public park is for them. As privatized managements design parks in a “polite, middle-class idiom,” poorer people and people of color may read the landscape as exclusive —something for others. People read cues of exclusivity in the landscape. There is a pronounced difference in user class and ethnicity between Battery Park and Battery Park City parks, for example. Battery Park City parks exist to enhance the appeal of Battery Park City to its overwhelmingly white and Asian American tenants. The working class users of Battery Park, predominantly black and Latino, stay there for the most part, and leave Battery Park City parks largely to Manhattan’s affluent professional class.

5. Contemporary historic preservation should not concentrate on restoring the scenic features without also restoring the facilities and diversions that attract people to a park. Design that includes social values as well as aesthetic and ecological values can be just as true to the original design and meet historic preservation criteria as well.

6. Symbolic ways of communicating cultural meaning are an important dimension of place attachment that can be fostered to promote cultural diversity. Park management should share with user groups the prerogative of interpreting the culture of the park and inscribing that interpretation in the landscape.

These lessons are consistent with the work of The City Project to implement a collective vision for a comprehensive and coherent web of parks, playgrounds, schools, beaches, forests, and transportation that promotes human health and economic vitality, and reflects the cultural urban landscape while serving the needs of diverse users.