Cities are creating open space from urban remnants. But can remnants effectively bind the city together?
By Peter Gisolfi, ASLA
Cities are more and more often developing new parks from
leftover bits of land. Granted, these cities are almost completely developed,
so there is little land left over for parks. Nevertheless, the current park
model is very different from the grand urban visions of the past, when land for
parks was deliberately set aside in the city plan.
The earliest city plans, which are still celebrated, placed
the main open space at the center. Examples are the cities of Boston and New
Haven, Connecticut, where the town surrounds a green or a common. More
elaborate plans include the systematic integration of multiple greens within
gridded plans, such as those found in Philadelphia and Savannah, Georgia. In
the second half of the 19th century, the parks movement embraced a grander
vision. Central Park in Manhattan, Prospect Park in Brooklyn, and the Boston park
system were created with ambitious social and environmental objectives in mind.
The reformers believed intensely that bringing the pastoral beauty of the
countryside to growing cities would remedy the social ills brought by the
Industrial Revolution and teeming immigrant populations.
After the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, the city
beautiful movement focused on transforming existing cities in a manner similar
to Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s interventions in Paris. From that movement
came the great boulevards we continue to recognize today—Mosholu Parkway in the
Bronx, Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, and the
Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia. The purpose of these boulevards was
not only to bring green space to the city core, but also to transform the city
plan by creating new processional connections.
After World War II, the greatest urban open space
intervention in America unwittingly turned out to be the Interstate Highway
System. No matter what we think about the urban renewal efforts of that era,
the construction of interstate highways through and around major cities was one
of the most significant events. Picture Hartford, Connecticut, split by I-84;
New Haven, Connecticut, cut off from Long Island Sound by I-95; I-90
intersecting Commonwealth Avenue in Boston; or I-5 on two levels at the edge of
Puget Sound in Seattle. These were the great urban open-space initiatives of
the 1950s and 1960s, even if they did not produce green space. Swaths of
asphalt cut through the existing urban fabric to create the largest continuous
open-space systems in the history of American cities.
What are we doing now to create open space? By necessity, we
are focusing on remnants from previously used land within the city. But does
this method of selecting open space bind the city together?
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