A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
Landscape struggles, environmental hegemonies and the politics of urban design
What would a Central Park designed by proletarians look like? How would such a subaltern landscape differ from the creatures of nineteenth-century bourgeois pastoral taste that we have come to identify with urban nature? Would Manhattan’s structure and social space have been radically changed by such a historical detour? Landscape and New York City scholars are familiar with the demands and proposals of various working-class groups and organs during and following the creation of the park. A system of green and open spaces in Lower Manhattan and other sites near workplaces and poor neighborhoods would have replaced the idea of a grand park located in a then suburban area. Design would have prioritized content over form, fostering active uses of space, sports, and other modes of physical culture and sensuous entertainment as opposed to the passive, ocularcentrist experience promoted by landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. And, of course, instead of the decorous and restrained regime of publicity implicit in their plan, the new green spots in town would have become another opportunity for collective celebration, merry dancing, heavy drinking, and political agitation, a natural extension to the convivial space of nineteenth-century streets and saloons in popular districts.
Landscape struggles, environmental hegemonies and the politics of urban design
What would a Central Park designed by proletarians look like? How would such a subaltern landscape differ from the creatures of nineteenth-century bourgeois pastoral taste that we have come to identify with urban nature? Would Manhattan’s structure and social space have been radically changed by such a historical detour? Landscape and New York City scholars are familiar with the demands and proposals of various working-class groups and organs during and following the creation of the park. A system of green and open spaces in Lower Manhattan and other sites near workplaces and poor neighborhoods would have replaced the idea of a grand park located in a then suburban area. Design would have prioritized content over form, fostering active uses of space, sports, and other modes of physical culture and sensuous entertainment as opposed to the passive, ocularcentrist experience promoted by landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. And, of course, instead of the decorous and restrained regime of publicity implicit in their plan, the new green spots in town would have become another opportunity for collective celebration, merry dancing, heavy drinking, and political agitation, a natural extension to the convivial space of nineteenth-century streets and saloons in popular districts.
Landscape struggles, environmental hegemonies and the politics of urban design
Sevilla Buitrago, Álvaro (author)
2017-01-01
Society and Space, 2017
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
DDC:
710