FROM THE LEXICON - CUDC Quarterly 1:4 - Summer 2001

Park

This word has undergone an instructive series of changes in meaning since it entered the language from French in the Middle Ages. It used to refer primarily to a game preserve, or more generally to any enclosed land adjacent to a princely or aristocratic residence. The term "park" implied exclusion, the decision to keep common people off a swath of land so it could be preserved for aristocratic sport. Public spaces in cities had other names and, given the pressures of the market, were comparatively small in scale and paved for intensive use.

The democratization of "park" begins after 1800 with precocious examples like Regent’s Park in London, where the Prince of Wales turned part of his land into a public greenspace surrounded by new development cannily designed by John Nash. Above all, we associate the idea that parks are for the people with the great American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who created a series of famous park designs (starting with New York’s Central Park) in which public access to greenery and fresh air is combined with provisions for cultivation of the body and mind. Even so, Olmsted’s work is not without its attendant controversies. The new parks of the late 19th and early 20th centuries tended to take a form that suited the prejudices of those in power, who were concerned to improve populations (immigrants especially) who were seen as lacking, and there is a strongly paternalistic aspect to Olmsted’s vision of what parks are and how they should be used.

Who uses parks, and how they use them, remain contentious points today, though very few parks are being built these days in American cities. Since mid-century the trend has been to privatize the word "park" and the kind of landscape to which it refers. Suburban industrial and residential developments are placed in "parklike" settings. Recreation is removed to privately owned amusement parks. In general, the public responsibility to provide programmed open spaces for all has (like so many other public responsibilities) been outsourced.

All of this suggests that the definition of park is ripe for new mutations. The primary political question for cities, of course, is whether the Olmsted ideal of universal access will mutate as well.