Future Park: Imagining Tomorrow's Urban Parks

future park

Imagining Tomorrow’s

Urban Parks

Amalie Wright

© Amalie Wright 2013

All rights reserved. Except under the conditions described in the Australian Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, duplicating or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Contact CSIRO PUBLISHING for all permission requests.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Wright, Amalie, author.

Future park : imagining tomorrow’s urban parks / by Amalie Wright.

9780643100336 (paperback)

9780643106611 (epdf)

9780643106628 (epub)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Urban parks – Economic aspects – Australia.

Urban parks – Environmental aspects – Australia.

Urban parks – Social aspects – Australia.

333.7830994

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Front cover photography: Landschaftspark Duisburg Nord Amalie Wright.

Photography throughout: Amalie Wright unless credited.

Set in Clarendon LT and Corona Lt Std.

Edited by Anne Findlay

Cover and text design by Nicole Arnett Phillips

Typeset by Nicole Arnett Phillips

Printed in China by 1010 Printing International Ltd

CSIRO PUBLISHING publishes and distributes scientific, technical and health science books, magazines and journals from Australia to a worldwide audience and conducts these activities autonomously from the research activities of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of, and should not be attributed to, the publisher or CSIRO. The copyright owner shall not be liable for technical or other errors or omissions contained herein. The reader/user accepts all risks and responsibility for losses, damages, costs and other consequences resulting directly or indirectly from using this information.

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Contents

Introduction

01. Linkages

02. Obsolescences

03. Co-locations

04. Installations

Where to from here?

Endnotes

Appendix

Project distribution

Index

Places

Projects

People

Acknowledgements

This book has been a long journey, and I acknowledge with deep gratitude those who have travelled the road with me.

Firstly I thank Rosemarie Kennedy and the Centre for Subtropical Design in Brisbane, Australia. In 2007 I was the lucky recipient of a travel scholarship awarded by the CSD, which enabled me to visit the first of many parks in Colombia and the United States that feature in these pages.

Thanks also go to Ted Hamilton at CSIRO Publishing. Ted heard me interviewed about my scholarship travels and kindly offered the opportunity to develop a book. Ted later passed the baton to Tracey Millen and her team, who guided the book through to publication.

I am deeply humbled and grateful for the amazing generosity of design firms, local authorities, photographers, both professional and amateur, and other wonderful individuals all around the world, who have granted permission to use their photographs to illustrate the parkland projects.

To my family and friends who have lived this project for more years than should surely be reasonable, I thank you for your endless encouragement despite well concealed scepticism that it would ever be completed.

Thank-you Nicole Arnett Phillips, for creating such a wonderful house for my words to inhabit. The ‘k’ is indeed a delight.

Lastly to Richard – backstop, sounding board, site visit accompanist and head cheerleader – thank-you. Your support makes everything seem like a walk in the park.

The Author

Amalie Wright is an award-winning landscape architect and architect, passionate about achieving positive change through great design.

She is the director of Landscapology, a design studio established to help passionate and curious people create beautiful, contemporary and sculptural landscapes that are responsible and resilient. She has over 16 years’ prior experience in multidisciplinary practices, working on significant public realm projects in Australia and abroad.

In 2007 Amalie won the mecu travel bursary awarded by Queensland’s Centre for Subtropical Design. She travelled to Colombia and the United States studying the changing role of city parks, and parks as agents of social change. These investigations formed the starting point for this book, and for an ongoing fascination with the way cities and communities imagine, use and value their parks and people places – the places where everyday life happens.

www.landscapology.com.au

Amalie in the Landscapology design studio (Michael Clarkson)

For my parents, Marilyn Ann Charlesworth and Keith Samuel Wright.

Introduction

Introduction

What do a vacant lot in Philadelphia and a water treatment plant in central Colombia have in common? Cops? Cocaine? How about the Sydney Harbour Bridge and a sixteenth century Dutch fort? The answer: seen through my eyes, they are all places that have been transformed by parks.

We Westerners have a fairly consistent image of what a park is. There’s definitely some lawn, usually some trees and plants, often paths, and maybe somewhere to sit. In our cultural consciousness a park looks like this ...

‘Park’

‘House’

... in the same way that a house looks like this, even though very few of us actually live in, or walk our dogs in places that look like either of these two images. Beyond the stereotype, things can start to get complicated.

For some, a park is definitely a place where kids can play, or people can run around and kick a football. For this group an ideal park has lots of things to ‘do’, and there are facilities like cafés and bicycle hire stations, and events like outdoor zumba classes and multicultural festivals to provide variety and keep interest levels high. You know who you are.

A park with lots of things to see and do. Portland Farmers Market, South Park Blocks, Portland State University.

Reading alone in the middle of a city of 7.5 million people. Potters Field Park, London.

For other people, this is a description of sheer hell. Shrieking and hollering and frisbees and family reunions with fold-out chairs are all likely to have them running for cover as quickly as they can manage. They think a park should be a place of quiet and calm.

Rules

Then there are those who believe that parks should be very well maintained and manicured, with signs advising what sorts of activities are allowed, fences separating the dogs from the walkers from the children, and preferably uniformed staff around to make sure that adherence to the rules is scrupulously observed.

Anything goes: local men unself-consciously enjoy a day by the river at Jiuzhan Park in Harbin, northern China.

Many other people feel a park like this is akin to a shop window display, sterile and unwelcoming. They instead prefer a place where it is possible to set up some chairs under a canopy and enjoy a beer, or let a dog run freely. This type of person might sneak to a favourite secluded corner to canoodle. They are more than happy for the lawn to be mowed, but otherwise they prefer the park, like themselves, to be left to its own devices.

The further we delve, the further away we move from the prototypical park idea.

If there are remnants of past use – crumbling walls, rotting wharf piles – some of us think they should be retained and given special treatment, while others counsel demolishing and starting afresh.¹

Spread over 300 ha, part of the new Chenshan Botanical Garden is built in a former Shanghai quarry. Steps and paths traverse the steep sides of the cuttings. (Nev Connell)

No trace remains today of the farm that gave New Farm Park its name. The ‘new farm’ was established to supplement produce from the Botanic Gardens, necessary to feed the population of the convict colony. The farm displaced the indigenous population from the riverfront land, then became a racetrack in 1846, and finally a public park when the Brisbane City Council purchased the land in 1913.

Roma Street Parkland, Brisbane: dense, naturalistic planting.

Some of us strongly believe that parks provide a ‘connection with nature’, and they must always be heavily planted and as ‘naturalistic’ as possible.

Director Park, Portland: hard paving, furniture, water and very little vegetation. (Richard Buchanan)

Robert F Wagner Jr Park, New York: live music and children’s activities at Battery Point, near the ferry to the Statue of Liberty.

A sign warns park users away from this revenue-generating part of Roma Street Parkland.

Callan Park: the former Mental Hospital building, now part of the Sydney College of the Arts. (Adam J.W.C. via Wikimedia Commons)

Many others would argue that it is possible to create a successful park without a single blade of grass. Commercial activity is another bellwether for public opinion. Some argue that parks need commercial activity – cafés, food carts, spaces rented for weddings – to attract visitors and help defray costs. Opponents believe, equally as strongly, that the voice of commercial interest speaks louder than public interest. Once the door is open it’s hard to close, and parks risk becoming quasi-private enclaves.

In the face of so many options, many park owners and managers now use public surveys to define community preference. In 2008, Leichhardt Municipal Council in Sydney’s inner west used a two-page survey to generate input into a planned redevelopment of Callan Park. Question 3 asked ‘What were your main reasons for going to Callan Park on recent visits?’ There were 24 possible responses, ranging from ‘running or jogging’ through to ‘mental health services’, ‘picnic or social gathering’, ‘heritage gardens’, ‘drug or alcohol services’ and ‘peaceful enjoyment’.

For those not familiar with Callan Park’s location and history, the thought of some of these uses might be confusing and confronting.² Some might wonder, perhaps not unreasonably, whether those visiting a park for drug or alcohol services would be likely to fill out an online survey. The lead consultants, McGregor Coxall stress that the website created specifically for the project enabled the widest cross-section of the community to participate and have their voices heard.³ Others might hope that the only reason a council might want to know the numbers would be to discourage ‘undesirable’ park visitors. The realities, of course, are never that simple.

The Wellington Park Management Trust in Hobart, Tasmania, took a slightly different approach in its 2010 Community Values Survey. All Tasmanians were invited to comment, and the survey contained mainly blank space, where members of the public could respond in their own words. The survey formed part of a larger Landscape Study that included a Historical Landscape Values study and a Visual Quality study.

In the words of the Trust:

‘The results from these studies will be combined to provide a comprehensive statement on the landscape values of the Park. This new, detailed information will be used to help manage the important landscape and cultural values of Wellington Park, and enable the Trust to better meet its management obligations under the Wellington Park Act.’⁴

The dispassionate way in which the surveys were introduced could have implied that the Trust viewed Wellington Park primarily as an asset to be managed, rather than a place to be visited, enjoyed or even loved.

It is illuminating that so much of the Wellington Park study focused on ‘values’. In contemporary society there are few decisions that are made, few dollars that are spent, without at least some analysis of the ‘value’ that will be delivered by the proposed expenditure. Parks have not escaped this focus. Making parks takes time, money and space. Keeping them going requires additional time and money. Yet parks contribute to our cities in ways that are often difficult to measure using traditional accounting benchmarks. Cities benefit from parks in three main ways: socially, environmentally and economically.

Parks contribute socially by providing opportunities for different types of leisure and recreation, by enhancing the amenity of cities and neighbourhoods, and by incorporating cultural and heritage values. Parks provide a setting for cross-cultural differences to be negotiated – we can learn to get along in parks. In Brooklyn, researchers found that different cultural groups used Prospect Park in different ways. Locals from Hispanic or West Indian backgrounds, for example, visited in large, extended family groups, and stayed in the park for a whole day. They would hang hammocks from trees, cook barbecues, and generally occupy large areas of space. White visitors rarely barbecued or picnicked. Many white locals jogged or walked dogs, which few visitors from other ethnic backgrounds did. Park managers found that, in many cases, the way keen park-users actually wanted to use the park was in conflict with the original design intent of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux: attracting a large West Indian drumming gathering was probably not what was intended by ‘uplifting recreation’ in the park, and some well-meaning contemporary managers felt it risked tree damage by overcompaction of the root zone. In the midst of such diversity, attracting visitors remains very important for Prospect Park.

Unlike its more famous Manhattan counterpart, Central Park, Prospect Park does not benefit from wealthy neighbours willing to contribute millions of dollars annually to a conservancy that helps manage and maintain the park on behalf of the City. Prospect Park has to make every dollar count, so managing and maintaining the park to accommodate its cross-cultural constituency is as important as managing and maintaining its cultural legacy.⁵

Prospect Park, Brooklyn: the Drummer’s Circle. (Jen Robinson via Flickr)

The High Line, New York: Sunday afternoon peak hour at the Sundeck Preserve

Each year around 200 species of native and migratory birds are found in Prospect Park. So high is the species diversity that in 2002 it became home to the first urban Audubon Center in the United States.⁶ Fauna habitat and education are the first of several environmental benefits parks contribute to cities. Trees in urban parks enable carbon sequestration, and create microclimates that help mitigate urban heat islands. Greg Moore, of Melbourne’s Burnley College, has long argued for the value of urban trees. His studies have assigned dollar values to such benefits as pollution reduction, carbon sequestration, electricity savings from non-use of air conditioners and increased lifespan of asphalt pavements.⁷ Many other studies have demonstrated the benefit that parks, as part of ‘green infrastructure’ networks, provide to cities. Many of these benefits are addressed in later chapters.

Parks deliver economic value too. The High Line, spanning over 1.6 km along the west side of Manhattan, has been making news since its first section opened in 2009. Since then designer and philanthropist Diane von Furstenberg has led the catwalk of designer stores, hotelier Andre Balazs’s The Standard Hotel has drawn crowds from across the globe, and the Whitney Museum of American Art will draw even more visitors when it moves to its new Renzo Piano-designed building in 2015. New York City officials estimate the reinvention of the High Line will bring over US$2 billion in private investment and US$900 million in revenues to the city over the next 20 years. What these figures don’t show, of course, is the contrasting loss in revenue from the displacement of the processing and distribution centres that gave the district its name.

Just up the road from the High Line is another, bigger piece of green space. This is a park that started with a competition. This is also a park that removed some 17 000 potential building sites from the market when its 340 ha were designated for public use. It sits on a piece of land that is worth approximately US$529 billion, according to a 2007 study. And this is a park that is so desirable that, even in today’s economic climate, a three-bedroom apartment nearby can be confidently marketed for US$14.5 million.⁸ This, of course, is Central Park.

Central Park, New York: highrise apartment buildings overlook the park.

A report commissioned by the Central Park Conservancy estimated that ‘spending by Central Park enterprises and visitors to the Park directly and indirectly accounted for US$395 million in economic activity in the city in 2007, and that this activity, along with the increase in real property values attributable to proximity to the Park, generated US$656 million in tax revenues to the City in the same year’.⁹ Years before, Frederick Law Olmsted had already recognised the difference his creation had made. Olmsted reportedly ‘tracked the value of land around Central Park and found the city’s US$13 million investment had led to an astounding US$209 million increase in just seventeen years’.¹⁰ Central Park’s value to New York’s economy reflects both the foresight of its creators but also the cumulative impact of investment in its renovation, maintenance, management and continuous improvement.

Value is a contentious concept. Landscape architects today, caught in the midst of an earnest debate (with what are now called ‘stakeholders’) about whether there should be one or two rubbish bins next to the park entry, may regretfully remind themselves that Olmsted and Vaux weren’t required to participate in ‘value management’ workshops,¹¹ nor did they feel the need to survey the residents of upper Manhattan before submitting their competition-winning entry for Central Park. Nor were the residents of Paris’s 6th arrondissement asked by Napoleon to formulate a ‘community vision’ for how they would like to use the Jardin de Luxembourg. Today the designers wouldn’t make it past the proposal stage if they failed to describe how their consultation process would work. Yet these parks remain among the most beloved and visited in their respective cities, as do many more that were created without input from the people who would eventually end up using them. Is this due to the way we define ‘parks’?

Dictionaries are of little help. Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary offers this:

‘an area of land within a town, often with recreational or other facilities, which is set aside for public use’.¹²

Think for a moment about your favourite park in the world. Does this definition, these 20 words, come even close to capturing what is special about your favourite park – how the low light paints everything in a golden haze on winter mornings; how the new growth blushes onto the lilly pillies in spring; how the smell of barbecuing sausages wafts from the prize picnic spot next to the lake?

In their 2010 book for the Basics Landscape Architecture series, Ed Wall and Tim Waterman defined ‘park’ as: ‘In urban terms, an often green and pleasantly landscaped area of land set aside for public use, in particular sports, recreation and relaxation, and also valuable for its ecological functions.’¹³ Using this definition a place could be ‘not green’, and ‘not pleasantly landscaped’, and still be a park, as long as it is ‘set aside for public use’. Either way, it’s not much more evocative, nor more definitive than the dictionary effort.

Thirty years before them, pioneering teacher of landscape studies John Brinckerhoff Jackson argued that,¹⁴ through our misunderstanding of history, we now associate the word almost exclusively with the picturesque, structured and deliberately contrived park passed down to us through a lineage of aristocratic hunting and pleasure grounds. This park provides ‘urban amenity’ and opportunities for ‘passive recreation’, a term Jackson viewed nearly as dimly as ‘open space’. What we have forgotten, he argued, is that until well into the nineteenth century, every town also contained ‘sizeable areas of land where the common people, and particularly adolescents, could exercise and play and enjoy themselves, and at the same time participate in community life’. Those places, near churches, on riverbanks, in forests, outside city walls, do not exist anymore, killed off by the expansion of settlements, changes in our recreation preferences and societal abhorrence of risk.

The first type of park has become the default setting, and we build more of the same to validate our belief that, ‘what the public wants (or ought to have) is contact with nature in a professionally designed park’. Our belief is tested though, by the continued presence of the people disenfranchised by this type of park. Teenagers in particular ride bikes down stairs, parkour over walls and skateboard along rails and seats. I suspect that part of the magic world of Harry, Hermione and Ron so appealing to children is that, as well as the flying broomsticks, they also get to clamber their way through forests, and schlep through mud, and do battle, rather than climb to a safe distance, in carefully calibrated and age-appropriate heights, on a stable and secure piece of ‘play equipment’, encircled by impact-cushioning ‘softfall’. For our teenagers we have responded with things like ‘skate parks’, often crude and unlovely places where we corral them until they have ‘grown up’ enough to be let back into the real thing.

About the same time Jackson was making his argument, the beloved design touchstone A Pattern Language was published. Although it included 253 ‘patterns’ for ‘an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning’, there was no pattern for ‘park’. Instead a range of different patterns – ‘accessible green’, ‘common land’, ‘connected play’, and so on – described elements or qualities that might be combined at different scales to create many different types of outdoor or green spaces.¹⁵

Even as recently as 2007, Julia Czerniak described urban parks as ‘an increasingly