Search Results

Grappling with Growth

Lily Geismer

in Don't Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party

This chapter looks at how the issues of open space and environmental protection revealed the tension between the structural processes of growth that had produced Route 128 and its suburbs and the ... More

This chapter looks at how the issues of open space and environmental protection revealed the tension between the structural processes of growth that had produced Route 128 and its suburbs and the ideology of historical and liberal distinctiveness of many of the residents along its ring. The area was considered “unique and special”—an outlook which propelled a genuine concern about the environmental degradation advanced by postwar suburbanization. Yet the localist measures that residents took to protect their communities elevated both a sense of their own distinctiveness and a focus on their own individual standard of living and quality of life, further obscuring an acknowledgment of their role in perpetuating many of the problems of environmental and social inequality.Less

Every child matters in public open spaces

Helen Woolley

in Securing respect: Behavioural expectations and anti-social behaviour in the UK

In 2003 the British government declared Every Child Matters. This assertion stated that children should be healthy, safe and happy, and they should make a positive contribution and be allowed to ... More

In 2003 the British government declared Every Child Matters. This assertion stated that children should be healthy, safe and happy, and they should make a positive contribution and be allowed to achieve economic well-being. One of the goals of this policy was to provide a joined-up approach to children and young people's services in local government. Another development towards this policy was launched in December 2007. This was the Children's Plan for England which was intended as a ten-year program with an aim of making England the best place in the world for children and young people to grow up in. This chapter examines the place of children and young people in public open spaces and considers whether they are accepted or respected. It uses examples and narratives of young people skateboarding and the provision of outdoor play spaces for children. The chapter concludes with a discussion that public spaces are significantly controlled by adults. The implications for respect and citizenship are also included in the discussion.Less

Spaces of the City

Robert Gottlieb and Simon Ng

in Global Cities: Urban Environments in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and China

The chapter analyzes and compares the different uses of urban space – whether public space, open space, or privatized space -- in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and China. It contrasts the modernist spatial ... More

The chapter analyzes and compares the different uses of urban space – whether public space, open space, or privatized space -- in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and China. It contrasts the modernist spatial strategies that cater to the automobile and traffic flow and the desire for speed with an alternative view about a more walkable, bikeable, and transit friendly urban environment. It compares the immigrant and different ethnic experiences – a Latino immigrant urbanism in Los Angeles, elderly women dancing in the streets of the city in China, or the immigrant communities constructed in the village-in-the-city enclaves in places like Shenzhen and Guangzhou. It describes the rise of the gated communities in all three places in contrast to the growing advocacy around the right to the city for everyone.Less

The Vertical Cityscape in São Paulo: The Influence of Modernism in Urban Design

Silvio Soares Macedo

in Contemporary Urbanism Brazil: Beyond Brasilia

This chapter examines the influence of modernism in the urban design of the vertical cityscape of São Paulo, Brazil. It considers the isolated tower on a lot and the complex of towers in a block as ... More

This chapter examines the influence of modernism in the urban design of the vertical cityscape of São Paulo, Brazil. It considers the isolated tower on a lot and the complex of towers in a block as the hegemonic models that resulted from the Brazilian modernist paradigm, and discusses how they have configured São Paulo 's contemporary cityscape. It suggests that the approval of urban legislation regulating verticalization in São Paulo in 1972 influenced the city's spatial organization by generating ample and generous private open spaces, fostering construction of shared facilities in such spaces and encouraging the creation of corporate plazas while discouraging excessively tall buildings.Less

Local Open Space Preservation in the United States

Daniel Press and Nicole Nakagawa

in Toward Sustainable Communities: Transition and Transformations in Environmental Policy

This chapter examines national trends in local open space preservation, focusing especially on how—or whether—these evolved during the environmental policy epochs described at the outset of this ... More

This chapter examines national trends in local open space preservation, focusing especially on how—or whether—these evolved during the environmental policy epochs described at the outset of this volume. Although local preservation can refer to the whole suite of land-use tools available to communities (land acquisition, conservation easements, growth limits, zoning, tax incentives), the chapter focuses on land or easement acquisitions.Less

Parks and open spaces

Katharine Mumford and Anne Power

in East Enders: Family and community in East London

This chapter talks about how the conditions of parks and open spaces are managed. These places are used as the main focus of the chapter, since families need these spaces and use them often. As the ... More

This chapter talks about how the conditions of parks and open spaces are managed. These places are used as the main focus of the chapter, since families need these spaces and use them often. As the families talked more about their children's need for open space, their views on public spaces offer detailed insights into how neighbourhood services actually operate.Less

Young people and their experience of place in the city

Teresa Strachan and Elisa Lopez-Capel

in Justice and Fairness in the City: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach to 'Ordinary' Cities

This chapter explores the relationship that young people nurture for open spaces in their neighbourhoods and the value that they attribute to them on an everyday basis. Reflecting on the outputs from ... More

This chapter explores the relationship that young people nurture for open spaces in their neighbourhoods and the value that they attribute to them on an everyday basis. Reflecting on the outputs from engagement projects involving young people in the east end of Newcastle upon Tyne, and drawing on the work of Lefebvre and the ‘right to the city’, the chapter develops the concept that in spite of the expert knowledge that these young people cultivate for the spaces they use, this fails to be acknowledged in the planning process. It could be proposed that only through a carefully constructed participation process will young people gain their true right to the city and the spaces within it.Less

The Nature Cure

John Macdonald, Charles Branas, and Robert Stokes

in Changing Places: The Science and Art of New Urban Planning

This chapter looks at interventions for land and open spaces and their impact on public health and safety. Abandoned, vacant, and neglected land is of great and growing concern in many cities. The ... More

This chapter looks at interventions for land and open spaces and their impact on public health and safety. Abandoned, vacant, and neglected land is of great and growing concern in many cities. The chapter considers recent efforts to address this sort of land-based blight and how planners can partner with scientists to implement and evaluate land-remediation and zoning strategies to best improve public health and safety. In many ways, these changes represent the innate human desire for nature and green spaces. Without action from planners and landscape architects, such natural spaces would not exist in many of the cities. The chapter then showcases several studies that provide evidence that the mere presence of green spaces have healing and calming effects, an effect that occurs even if residents do not actively use these spaces. Indeed, there have been myriad efforts over the past decade or so by cities to revisit and reinvigorate their green and open-space planning efforts. Much of this effort has been to insert managed green spaces into smaller parcels and equitably distribute them across neighborhoods that lack access to larger green spaces. This pocket-park movement has economic drivers but, in some cities, also seeks to leverage the likely health benefits to local residents.Less

| | Patterns and Prospects

in Grounds for Review: The Garden Festival in Urban Planning and Design

This chapter identifies common themes, universal concepts, and traditions as well as emergent trends in garden festivals. The focus is on the open space production of these events. A key question is ... More

This chapter identifies common themes, universal concepts, and traditions as well as emergent trends in garden festivals. The focus is on the open space production of these events. A key question is how and to what extent planning correlates with the ultimate quality of the final site condition, given that garden festivals are essentially self-contained processes that do not always reflect, or follow, local planning policies. The chapter also attempts to cull from selected projects innovative or validating aesthetics of the spatial aspects of the urban experience. Given that there can be considerable debate over just what qualifies as ‘aesthetic’, here it is required that the urban landscape be understandable at a human scale and that it may be apprehended in terms of visual, as well as functional, patterns.Less

Environmental Justice

Gail Hansen and Joseli Macedo

in Urban Ecology for Citizens and Planners

Environmental justice has become a major urban issue in the last 50 years or so. With increased awareness of the detrimental impact that environmental degradation can have on humans, social movements ... More

Environmental justice has become a major urban issue in the last 50 years or so. With increased awareness of the detrimental impact that environmental degradation can have on humans, social movements led by environmentally conscious activists developed to demand government action. Environmental justice can be considered from both an amenity and a hazard perspective; the result is uniformly the same: where there is inequity, poorer and ethno-racial minority neighborhoods have less access to environmental amenities and are exposed to more environmental hazards, while affluent neighborhoods have more access to environmental amenities and are not exposed to environmental hazards. Most sustainable cities try to offer equitable access to environmental amenities, such as green open spaces, to all citizens; however, brownfields and other environmental hazards are still present in most urban areas.Less

Open Space at Continent’s End

Shelley Alden Brooks

in Big Sur: The Making of a Prized California Landscape

Chapter 4 revolves around the pivotal year of 1962, when Monterey County planners and Big Sur residents crafted a pioneering open-space master plan that foreshadowed the state’s commitment to coastal ... More

Chapter 4 revolves around the pivotal year of 1962, when Monterey County planners and Big Sur residents crafted a pioneering open-space master plan that foreshadowed the state’s commitment to coastal conservation in the following decades. Some residents balked at the idea of submitting to increased regulation, but the majority of residents understood that the government was going to have growing influence over the shape of landscapes and acknowledged the paradox that to retain a sense of the wild, residents would have to work alongside the government to determine viable residential and tourist features. Together, residents and Monterey County officials helped to secure in Big Sur a landscape quite distinct from two other notable California destinations: the rapidly commercializing Tahoe region and the newly established Point Reyes National Seashore. By accommodating a spectrum of visitors while restricting the numbers who could settle here, Big Sur locals and county officials secured the appearance of a democratic landscape long associated with the West, while, in fact, creating an increasingly exclusive landscape more representative of contemporary California.Less

Temporary urban landscapes and urban gardening: re-inventing open space in Greece and Switzerland

Sofia Nikolaidou

in Urban gardening and the struggle for social and spatial justice

New forms of urban gardening are gaining a momentum in cities transforming the conventional use and functions of open green and public space. They often take place through informal and temporary ... More

New forms of urban gardening are gaining a momentum in cities transforming the conventional use and functions of open green and public space. They often take place through informal and temporary (re)use of vacant land consisting part of greening strategies or social inclusion policy through new modes of land use management, green space governance and collaborative practices. Particular emphasis is placed on shifted meanings of the notion of open public space by referring to its openness to a diversity of uses and users that claim it and relates to the questions of access rights, power relations among actors, negotiations and the so called right to use and re-appropriate land. By using examples drawn from the Greek and Swiss case, this chapter underlines differences and similarities in urban gardening practices, social and institutional contexts, collaborative governance patterns, motivations, levels of institutionalisation, openness and inclusiveness of space. More specifically it calls attention to the critical role of the temporary nature of these initiatives in relation to their multifunctional, spatial and socio-political aspects that affect new configurations of urban green areas and public space as well as related planning practices.Less

Renaissance Stage Curtains

Veronica della Dora

in The Mantle of the Earth: Genealogies of a Geographical Metaphor

This chapter shows how the great geographical discoveries, along with the pioneering of linear perspective and of human anatomy in the Renaissance, marked the opening of space at both a macro- and ... More

This chapter shows how the great geographical discoveries, along with the pioneering of linear perspective and of human anatomy in the Renaissance, marked the opening of space at both a macro- and micro-scale. As explorers crossed the Atlantic and circumnavigated Africa, the closed world order of the medieval mappa mundi gave way to an expanding order, which was reflected in Ptolemaic maps shaped as opening mantles (for example, the Waldseemüller map of 1507). Likewise, as the fleshy mantle of the human body was for the first time pierced by the anatomist, new and unexplored territories were uncovered and charted in dedicated atlases (Andreas Vesalius’s De humanis corporis “fabrica” was printed in 1543). At the same time, with architects and artists theorizing and implementing linear perspective, space acquired a third dimension to be penetrated by the eye—depth.Less

Visions of a Green Tokyo

Thomas R. H. Havens

in Parkscapes: Green Spaces in Modern Japan

This chapter examines visions of a green Tokyo that were stirred by the earthquake and fires of September 1923 through the American occupation of 1945–1952. It considers two visionary designs ... More

This chapter examines visions of a green Tokyo that were stirred by the earthquake and fires of September 1923 through the American occupation of 1945–1952. It considers two visionary designs developed by planners in the Home Ministry and Tokyo prefectural government for the future metropolitan landscape, both of which incorporated public parks and other open spaces. Before discussing the impact of each vision on city planning in the postwar period, this chapter provides a background on the Kanto disaster that struck Tokyo on September 1, 1923. It explores how the disaster presented the opportunity to redefine public space in the capital region. It then considers the influx of private land donations for public use throughout the metropolitan region in the wake of the Kanto earthquake and fires, along with the Home Ministry's role in the establishment of a large number of city parks in the 1930s. It also describes the proposed green space plan for Tokyo, the postwar metamorphosis of green spaces into city parks, and the rebuilding of city parks from 1945 to 1955.Less

Parks and Prosperity, 1950s–1980s

Thomas R. H. Havens

in Parkscapes: Green Spaces in Modern Japan

This chapter examines urban and natural parks during the era of sustained economic growth from the 1950s through the 1980s. A number of interrelated events sparked public demand for both national and ... More

This chapter examines urban and natural parks during the era of sustained economic growth from the 1950s through the 1980s. A number of interrelated events sparked public demand for both national and city parks in Japan from the end of the occupation in 1952 until the economic slowdown of the early 1990s. Environmental concerns expressed by neighborhood groups beginning in the mid-1960s added to the clamor for more green spaces in the cities, resulting in the expansion of urban parks between 1960 and 1990. This chapter first considers how public spaces were conceived as a way to stimulate positive attitudes as Japan was grappling with the meaning of postwar democracy. It then discusses the City Parks Law of 1956 and how it provided the impetus for planning open spaces in the capital region. It also describes the creation of more city and national parks at a time when Japan was enjoying high-speed growth, along with the issue of environmental protection regarding city park planning. The chapter concludes with an assessment of urban green spaces during the affluent 1970s and 1980s.Less

From Private Lands to Public Spaces: Early City Parks

Thomas R. H. Havens

in Parkscapes: Green Spaces in Modern Japan

This chapter traces the history of public parks in Japanese cities from the initial enabling act in 1873 through early forms of urban planning, ending with the City Planning Law of 1919. It begins ... More

This chapter traces the history of public parks in Japanese cities from the initial enabling act in 1873 through early forms of urban planning, ending with the City Planning Law of 1919. It begins with an overview of forerunners of the modern urban in the Edo era, notably daimyo gardens, and goes on to discuss the conversion of open spaces into city parks via Directive No. 16 issued by the Grand Council of State on January 15, 1873. It then considers the evolution of the Ueno Park, along with the proposed plan for a modest 330 hectares of parklands in forty-nine locations in Tokyo. It also examines how partisans broke the monopoly of discourse on public space by the Grand Council and Home Ministry and paved the way for broader civic participation in deciding how urban parklands should be utilized. In particular, the chapter looks at the conflicting meanings that were ascribed to Hibiya Park once it opened in 1903. The chapter concludes with an assessment of incremental growth of parklands in Japan in the early twentieth century.Less

Introduction

Ting Xu and Alison Clarke

in Legal Strategies for the Development and Protection of Communal Property

This Introduction is divided into three sections. The first section sets out the context, significance and themes of this volume. The second section reviews the spread and potential reach of communal ... More

This Introduction is divided into three sections. The first section sets out the context, significance and themes of this volume. The second section reviews the spread and potential reach of communal property, exploring the eclectic mix of institutions, resources and patterns of resource use and management which can be brought under the ‘communal property’ banner. The third section emphasises the importance of examining the nature of communities and highlights the possibilities and challenges of vesting the power of governing communal resources in communities.Less

Parks and New Eco-Regimes

Thomas R. H. Havens

in Parkscapes: Green Spaces in Modern Japan

This chapter examines new eco-regimes of volunteerism and ecological consciousness in both city and natural parks during the 1990s and early twenty-first century. During the 1990s and early 2000s, ... More

This chapter examines new eco-regimes of volunteerism and ecological consciousness in both city and natural parks during the 1990s and early twenty-first century. During the 1990s and early 2000s, civic-minded Japanese increasingly engaged with ecological issues in general and open space planning in particular, in both city and natural parks. Since World War II, Japanese leaders have devoted enormous resources to bringing green spaces to their cities but relatively fewer to protecting the nation's seemingly abundant countryside environment. This chapter first considers the issue of wildlife protection that affected natural parks and other preserves in the early 2000s, along with the international recognition received by Japanese national parks and other landscapes as World Heritage sites and Ramsar Convention wetlands. It also discusses the emergence of a new forest culture aimed at attracting visitors to the recreation areas within national forests; the emergence of eco-regimes that sought to restore rural interfaces between farms and forests; and the ecotourism spawned by natural parks and national forests.Less