Municipal public parks

Municipal public parks

The 'public park', as caricatured at the start of this chapter, has been a happy hunting ground for reformers. The first generation of park planners saw them as a health measure, to allow tired workers access to fresh air and to wean them from liquor [Fig 4.5]. The next group of reformers wished to persuade workers to keep fit, for their country's sake and also for their own good. A 1960s group of reformers wished to shake off the authoritarian mantle of 'public health' park management and to open parks up to the easy-going hippie culture of the times. Ironically, this often meant going back to those open space uses which had been expurgated in the 1860s (eg dancing, drinking and fairs). In the 1980s, park reformers had a sense of ecological mission. They wished parks to be havens for nature in the city, full of wild plants and free of exotics, pesticides, herbicides, fertilisers and maintenance by fossil fuels. Was one group of reformers right and the other groups wrong? In our pluralist age, with society becoming more multi-cultural and multi-faith by the day, it seems right to accord value to each of the historic park management ideas, and to modern ideas as well. Public open spaces should need more diversity [Fig 4.6]. This could be done in several ways. 4.6 Parks should be diversified. This Park Planning Chart shows a range of options. One set of choices has been ringed in red - for an urban fringe park. Different choices will create different parks First, we could take a plan of a city, on which all the open spaces are coloured green, and assign different colours to areas where different management objectives would apply. A town with four similar spaces could allocate one to each of the four reform ideas: horticulture, sport, cultural events and nature conservation. Second, we could treat the reform ideas as 'overlays', or new ingredients, to be added to the management objectives of each and every space. This is what many park managers have tried to do, with mixed results. Third, we could give each of the reform ideas priority in one of the spaces. Fourthly, we could use all three approaches, depending on local circumstances. The example of Greenwich Park , which is the nearest large park to my home, is a useful illustration.