Abstract
The past few decades have seen a profusion of high-profile public park design, sometimes growing from the grassroots level, such as the High Line in New York City, and sometimes gaining national attention through widely publicized events, as with the Millennium Park in Chicago. Such widespread awareness at the public level makes a timely opening for a book that intends to be a comprehensive resource for park planning. Alexander Garvin brings a clear passion for parks and years of related planning experience to the book, along with a reverence for the work of Frederick Law Olmsted.
With the title declaring the goal of the book as an argument for the necessity of parks in urban design, one might expect the work to focus on how successful parks contribute to livability of surrounding communities and, at a more fundamental level, what makes such parks successful. While such topics are broached, the book functions more as a historical survey, shifting gears midstream to provide an overview of the mechanics of administering a park. This is not an in-depth analysis of design typologies or of how design interventions play out over time in the real world. As an overview of the history of park design in the United States and Western Europe, it offers a solid grounding, with emphasis on the seminal works of Frederick Law Olmsted.
If the intended audience are landscape architects, designers, and planners, readers may be disappointed in the depth of the work. The book is at its strongest reviewing the historical trends of the development of parks, and in this it offers an array of examples from across the United States and Western Europe. Where it falters is in the lack of rigorous analysis in support of its central goal—to prove the necessity of parks to livable communities. The author posits intuitive conclusions regarding the influence of parks on the surrounding community, often without backing them up with strong evidence. The difficulty here is that the book is in some ways preaching to the choir. The book’s audience is probably involved with or interested in park design and is likely to agree with the notion that parks are important to the health of communities. By offering intuitive conclusions without making a robust case for them, the book leaves readers very close to where they started. A more potent argument could have been made through the use of more case studies and in-depth research. As a result, the book is most useful for students, designers, planners, and citizen groups looking for a solid background in the history of parks and the park development process.
Garvin begins the book with a chapter titled “The Emergence of Public Parks” by defining the concept of public park, limiting use of the term to sites that were purchased or designed for the purpose of recreation and were openly available to the public free of charge, though he acknowledges that public open spaces have always been a part of cities. This focus on the intention of the park rather than its function is clear in his assessment of the Englische Garten in Munich, stating that it did not become a public park when the former royal military garrison was opened to the public in 1792 but in 1804 when Friederich Ludwig von Sckell was appointed to oversee the park’s design. Interestingly, the Tuileries in Paris is given no such stringent definition, though the author may have considered it to be implied. Garvin acknowledges that Le Notre’s original design remains largely the same as when the Tuileries was a royal garden, thus skipping the requirement of public-oriented design, yet it functions as one of the most popular public parks in Paris. Perhaps the seventeenth-century need to accommodate hundreds of royal courtiers at any one time led to design decisions that work well for twenty-first-century open public access. Such analysis is absent from this work, however. It seems the author is not here to examine design in detail, only to require its intentional application in order to confer the status of public park.
With his second chapter titled “Key Roles,” Garvin gets to the meat of the subject, delineating four key roles that parks play in contributing to the livability of communities: (1) improving public health by giving people a place to exercise and enjoy nature; (2) “incubating a civil society” by bringing all classes together; (3) providing environmental benefits such as cleaner air, storm water filtration, and wildlife habitat; and (4) “providing a framework for development,” by which the park provides amenities that make people want to live and work nearby, spurring additional development in the surrounding neighborhoods. Here again, the reader is offered a cursory overview of each role, focusing largely on historical survey. What could have been an in-depth evaluation of why parks are essential to urban life is instead a single chapter offering largely intuitive conclusions.
The third chapter, “Quantifying Value,” goes on to attempt to catalogue the value of parks, for which Garvin focuses on the trend of increased development potential of property adjacent to urban parks. By and large, he argues that investment in a large public park would lead to increased property values and subsequent residential development, ultimately enlarging the tax base for the city and off-setting the cost of park creation. Yet, though a few case studies are offered, there is no analysis of why it worked in some instances but not in others.
As a case in point, one of the parks offered as an example is Victoria Park in London’s East End. This park was built after a public outcry for open space for the poor and working classes of the city. The overall public opinion at the time, in the 1840s, held that public open space would improve the health of the city dwellers by offering cleaner air, access to nature, and an opportunity for wholesome exercise, which would decrease the likelihood that those residents would take part in less desirable activities like drunkenness and crime. The reader is offered the intuitive assumptions of the English public, but were those assumptions correct? Once the citizens of London got the park they wanted, did it function the way they expected? Garvin does not attempt to analyze the situation, saying that those assumptions were probably correct but that there is no way to know.
The book would benefit from deeper analysis of the trends and issues it raises and could add to its effectiveness with a refined focus on what makes a park essential to an urban community and how the particular needs of a given community affect the requirements of park design. Garvin himself argues in the chapter on “Site Selection and Adaptation” that choosing the right site is important, though again, the analysis is sparse.
The remainder of the book diverges from the quest to prove the value of parks and broadens the scope of the work to include elements of the planning process as well as the logistics of implementation, which are essential to the function of the park. Chapter 4, “Park Development,” looks at how communities develop parks, offering case studies of communities that have identified the need for open space and gone through the process of selecting a site and financing the project. Garvin continues this direction with the following chapters, examining site selection, design influences, how parks evolve over time, and even a chapter on parkways and park systems. These, again, are broad overviews of large topics, but as historical overviews, they are useful.
The remaining seven chapters of the book focus on the bureaucratic influence on parks, looking at how maintenance, finance, and the role of government come into play. These segue into the final chapter, “Sustainability: The Key to Success,” which argues that sustainability on every level is the key to making a park successful. This includes social, financial, and environmental sustainability, although the book does not go into depth on what those mean for parks. The largest lesson the book offers is that community involvement through entrepreneurial management is crucial to keeping parks well maintained through hard economic times for the city.
The lessons offered by the book are important ones, and it is useful to step back and look at the larger picture of how parks developed over time. With the pressures of growing populations and ever-increasing efforts to use urban space more efficiently, the concept of what makes an appropriate site or function for a park will continue to evolve. This book offers those involved with park planning a firm grounding in park history and an opportunity to get excited about the possibilities for the future. Knowing where parks came from is an important step in understanding where they can go from here.