Park as a place: refuge to the nature or tamed pastoralism?

A right to the city means right to the urban life. The urban life according to Lefebvre is dialectical, as the conflict between the claim to the nature and the claim to urbanity will alter the apprehension of urbanity. The driving forces behind this process are nostalgia and tourism, the need for urban dwellers to return to the nature. The right to the nature is essential for humans as the urbanity is of recent origin but it has only recently entered the urban social sphere. (Lefevbre 1996, 149.)

Voids – empty spaces in the city – are spaces for the possible, not necessarily vacuums or left-overs, land reserves. In the context of urban planning, the nature in the city is often perceived as a void, something un-built, unplanned and non-profitable. Space is a function of the search, even struggle for scarce resources, which is often evident in the context of urban parks as the parks are often conceived as land reserves. (Lefevbre 1990, 349.)

Urban space can be approached in a variety of ways. Space can be conceived as a physical context, describing the mere areal settings, restrictions and limitations of a given space. Space is also a social product, produced by subjects with varying power and aims. It is also a product of social translation, transformation and experience. (Soja 1990, 79-80, 120.)

The distinction between space and place is a basic one in the development of urbanity. While Christian time and place drew on the body's powers of compassion, economic time and space drew on its powers of aggression. These contraries of space and place, of opportunity and fixity, of compassion and aggression, occurred within every bourgeois trying both to believe and to profit in the city. (Sennett 1994, 188.)

Edward Soja has had the Lefebvrian dichotomy as his starting point but he maintained it to explain insufficiently the nature of spatiality. According to Soja, Lefevbre treats “Nature” rather naively as something pure, unaltered and original. In context of urban parks, the concept of “Second nature” is often more valid, as the city parks are politically and ideologically re-shaped “products” of nature. Central Park is not a natural but a lived space, and in that sence it can be labelled as “real” and “authentic”. (Soja 1990, 79-80)

Places are not only onthological entities. As they are produced by human actions, they are also epistemological entities (Cresswell 2007, 110). As the Sojan Firstspace is about the physical and empirical space and Secondspace characterises the conceived, experienced and even imagined notion of space, the Thirdspace is about living the space. Thirdspace describes the ways in the space is used and lived. (ibid., 38.) In other words, Firstspace could be characterised as the physical space, Secondspace as the mental space and Thirdspace as the social space (Soja 1990, 120).

Yet, Lefevbre admits the possibility of socially produced space, albeit he stresses the power relatedness of its definition and creation (Lefevbre 1990, 26). There are indeed often conflicts concerning the definition of places; a notion reminded by Massey (Cresswell 2007, 70). When something is called a park, this directs the actions towards it and interpretations of it. This representation implies abstraction of a physically understood space, and this process is always power related (Lefevbre 1990, 370).

Representational space refers to the directly lived space by bodily practices, “space of inhabitants and users”, the concept being comparable with the Sojan Thirdspace. Green areas activists often stress the “cultural ecology” of places, emphasizing the uniqueness of biological resources at one given place (Cresswell 2007, 84). The processes of producing and using of spaces, spatial practices include space politics and the daily spatial routines, routes and networks linking up places for different spheres of work, “private” life and leisure (Lefevbre 1990, 38-39; 235-236)

The need for urban nature protests against noise, pollution and fatigue caused and/or escalated by the rotting or exploding of cities brought about with the urban congestion of population. In cities, naturality is destroyed by or sacrificed for commercialised, industrialised and institutionally organised leisure pursuits. City misery needs to be complemented by satisfaction and self-realisation.
“Nature” or what passes for it, and survives of it, becomes the ghetto of leisure pursuits, the separate place of pleasure and the retreat of “creativity” (Lefevbre 1996, 149).

Yet, as Lefebvre claims that urbanity is still perceived as a residual of rural and itside its scheme, he claims that the urban dwellers can not be totally charmed by the rural countryside. Man is yet to be a urban creature; we are still reflecting on our rural society, this also being reflected in the apprehension of rural, natural and pastoral being perceived as the natural state of being. Instead man needs urban parks to be apprehended and for recreation and Central Park provides with it an appropriate amount of pastoralism for urban dwellers. (ibid.)

The treating of space provided by urban parks as public, providing the people fresh air and fastening moral standards by providing attachments to the society for the people, the city parks do are in fact embodiments of the idealised rural standards of life (Lacour & Puissant 2007, 738).