A review by octavia_cade
Politics of Park Design by Galen Cranz

informative slow-paced

4.0

This is surprisingly interesting, given the absolute blandness of the cover! It's also somewhat dated, restricted as it is to urban park design in the US to the beginning of the 1980s. But for all that, the writing is lucid, and there's a well-researched history here of motivation behind park design. Political motivation, that is: debates over what a park is for, exactly, and how landscape architecture can best be used to deliver on that purpose. Looking at the park near my house (not American)... it's basically just a big square, lined with trees, and a giant floaty sort of sculpture in the middle. I don't think that many of the park planners that Cranz describes would have approved... many of them seem to want to use public parks to somehow elevate public behaviour (to get the poor unwashed to mimic the culture of their betters), or to somehow fulfil patriotic, law-abiding, democratic, and other desired traits.

I have to admit that, enjoying parks as I do, I hadn't given a great deal of thought to the general history of their use - or, perhaps, of their intended use - but Cranz shows the slow evolution of purpose, and the varying desires of stakeholders, in a really interesting way. It's made me think about parks differently, so that's something.