By being out in the open air, a citizen, the president Thomas Jefferson said, breathes free: he applied this metaphor to the countryside, which he loved (Sennett 1994, 270).
From cities´ point of view, the function of parks is integrative. Parks are – according to Cranz – historically, politically and aesthetically integrative (Cranz 1982, 248-249).According to Lefebvre (1996, 147), the citizens of cities have several social needs in respect to cities. These needs are conceptualised in dialectic form, and they include:
- need for security/opening
- need for certainty/adventure
- need for the predictable and the unpredictable
- need of similarity/difference
- need of isolation/encounter
- need of independence (solitude)/communication
- need of immediate/long-term prospects
- need for creative activity; the need for information, symbolism, the imaginery and plan
o play, sexuality, physical activities (e.g.sport), creative activity, art, knowledge
These urban needs can not be reduced into exchange value, commerce and profit. These needs – creating time-spaces for social actions and apprehension - can not be directly met by planners, although they can contribute to development of inhabiting and creating time-spaces, yet it requires time (Lefevbre 1996, 149).
According to Lefebvre, the classical humanist notion of urban spaces treats them as finite and monolithic objects, neglecting the aspect of urban planning. The two contrasting approaches to planning are those of a Nietzschean superhumanity, a finished product of planning rationality and the urban society as an oeuvre. (ibid., 149.)
A Lefebvrian experimental utopia is based on the following questions it tries to answer:
- What are and would be the most successful places?
- How can they be discovered?
- According to which criteria?
- What are the times and rhythms of daily life which are inscribed and prescribed in these successful spaces favourable to happiness? (ibid., 151.)
As urban planning can encourage social inclusion (as well as exclusion) and participation in making of urbanity, it requires deliberate, even revolutionary actions to defeat currently dominating planning interests, ideologies and discourse and to take over in defining urbanity. This is only when the city can become an oeuvre as it is the people who essentially make the city. (ibid., 149.) If parks can work as instruments for social control, they also contain a sociality of their own independently of any deliberate planning (Cranz 1982, 240-242).
Richard Sennett maintains that public parks serve same kind of functions that restaurants, pubs and cafeterias used to do as settings for casual encounters, places where people would meet and chat, even make speeches. At restaurants and subsequently at parks, part of the enjoyment is observing people without being too pushy. The difference between those places and public parks is that parks are primarily places for silence, not for making speeches and if one is talking to a stranger in a park, the park provides settings for encounters between strangers even from different social classes. (Sennett 1994, 80-85.) And by doing so, parks do - at least the early city parks - potentially serve a democratic function in towns in the manner Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) had as his ideal when planning his conception of New York Central Park as a public open space.
The creation of the Regent's Park in London, initiated by the future King George IV, planned by John Nash, was based on the analogy of the urban lungs of the city. In connection to the park planning, all traffic was to be excluded from the park. (Sennett 1994, 325-328.) However, the notion that parks function as public open spaces in the cities is a contrafunctional one, according to Jane Jacobs. If the parks are conceived as open spaces, they might in fact promote air pollution . As the Central Park of Helsinki may be an "open space" as it is open to everyone, but it is essentially a forest, not a park in a Jacobsian sense, it can nevertheless operate as the green lungs of the city, providing oxygene and absorbing some of the pollution mainly caused by city traffic. As Jacobs maintains that city parks in their purest form are neighbourhood parks and that the parks' functioning as the green lungs of the city is nonsense (Jacobs 1961, 91), from this notion one wonders whether the Helsinki Central Park is a park at all.
Urban neighbourhood parks are - according to Jacobs - the most generalized form of city parks, representing a "generalised public-yard use" (Jacobs 1961, 91). As Olmsted and many other park protagonists of the 19th century thought that parks would have an uplifting and morally boosting effect on cities, Jacobs thinks that the essence of parks stem from the way the immediate neighbourhood uses and appreciates them (ibid., 95.) A successful park needs to be used by different kinds of people for different purposes at different times, it is not a vacuum between the built masses but it instead adds up to its surroundings an appreciated and a functional element (ibid.).
Parks are not parks if they are not used by people. In order to function properly as successful city parks, they do have to function as a demand good, providing settings for something that is already inherent rather than forging an unnatural element of sociability into locality. As Jacobs concluded, "it is useless to "bring" parks where the people are, if the very reasons for parks' existence is substituted by a park.” (ibid., 101.)"
If a park is unpopular, it may become used by "unwelcome" users, frightening away the other possible users (Jacobs 1961), as the case is with the Kaisaniemi park in Helsinki. The 1930s economical recession had indeed brought about a new “leisure” class, spending much of their time in parks (Cranz 1982, 105). As the more affluent middle class could afford a refuge to the suburbs with more rural pleasures, the parks became domains of the poor. The “non-use” or misuse of parks, referring to the undesirable users of parks is often connected to criminality, causing avoidance of parks. (Cranz 1982, 137; 186; 220.)
However, a neighbourhood parks suffers if it is "too" popular, according to Jacobs (ibid., 102), perhaps maintaing that the very popularity is contradictory to the calming effects of a park. As Olmsted had an educational idea about his parks, meaning that parks would educate people from different social classes to tolerance and co-operation, Jacobs thinks that this aimed diversity represents a problem (Jacobs 1961, ). However, in Finland the class divide is not that evident.
As a park may act as an important identity factor for its surroundings, this again stems from the notion of them being appreciated and used. For instance, Harlem has a wealthy amount of parks compared to most parts of New York, but still the parks of Harlem hardly function as centers of its social life or essential identity factors (ibid.). Olmsted maintained that parks could serve as the essential signature features, the prides of any major city; he with his assistant Calvert Vaux always saw parks as an integral element of the towns rather than isolated entities, this being most tellingly described here:
"We regard Brooklyn as an integral part of what today is the metropolis of the nation, and in the future will be the center of exchanges in the world, and the park in Brooklyn, as part of a system of grounds, of which the Central Park is a single feature, designed for the recreration of the whole people of the metropolis and their customers and guests from all parts of the world for centuries to come" (L. Hall 1995, 155-156).
As the essence of the parks is to be used by the public, Jacobs mentions the Gravery Park in New York as an example of a park to be observed, not used. As the park is locked and can only be entered with a key, it becomes justified by its beauty. Jacobs maintains that parks that are to be used mainly to please the eye, are best small and intensive in their layout, not
perfunctory and spread. (Jacobs 1961, 107.)
If a park is not popularly "enough" used as a multiple use neighbourhood park, Jacobs suggests that diversity of using purposes must be deliberately brought to the parks by introducing such activities into them that are otherwise crowded out of cities, such as bike mending, fishing or kite flying. Providing various kind of park activities as demand goods could contribute to the parks’ functioning as essential parts of the city, as a service provided by the municipality. When Olmsted thought that magnificent landscapes and vistas are demand goods in themselves, Jacobs maintains that not many enough people appreciate these as they need activities. If converting life of city people into park does not succeed, the park should be converted into a special theme “sub” park. (ibid., 108-110.)
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