Kaupunkiluonto

During the second half of the 19th century, the rapid industrialisation brought about a rapid urbanisation. In the process, the urban environment went through a profound change, the over-population bringing about restlessness, poverty and crime. It soon became evident that the needs of city-habitants had to be met, those needs being not only vocational and residential. The cities had become “too big, too polluted, too built up, too crowded, too diseased, too polluted, too artificial, too commercial, too corrupting and too stressful” (Cranz 1982, 3). Horrified by these circumstances escalated in the growing cities, the protagonists of the City Beautiful movement stressed the needs to create the urban environment more pleasant by providing sufficiently open, green areas for the city dwellers. These areas were meant to regulate the morale of the city-habitants by refreshing them and providing them with beauties of nature. In 1870 Frederick Law Olmsted published an article "Public Par...

Empirical part: interviewing, whom? - “What does Central Park mean to you?” - What are doing there, when and with whom?” A city can be understood as a socially understood text or as a virtual object. The textualist interpretation stresses the city as an object for cultural consumption for tourists and for aesthetic apprehension, stressing both the spectacles and the picturesque elements of the city. (Lefevbre 1996, 149.) Is the Helsinki Central Park a park as it a forest? Places can be “produced”. For instance, as the Helsinki Central Park is essentially a forest, it is yet called a park. Helsinki Park is another more recent example of place producing of this kind; areas usually conceived as Eastern parts of the Central Park has recently been labelled officially as Helsinki Park, stretching down to the seashores of Helsinki. Yet this concept is not quite well known. An easy and readily available, obvious positive answer would be to be content in mere declaring that it is a park because...

What is a park? What are the necessary minimum conditions for a park? Which kind of functions it is about to serve? According to a simplification by Cranz, there are three basic visions of parks, their functions and their onthology. A naive vision of park implies that they are mere plots of (unused) and thus preserved land, being manifestations of democracy as they are free for anyone. Parks can be considered works of art, aesthetic objects. Then, parks can be containers of moral and social (reformist) ideals, as the case was with the idealist ideology behind the Olmsted Central Park in New York. (Cranz 1982, 253.) According to Jacobs, the four elements essential to successful public parks are those of intricacy, centering, sun and enclosure. By intricacy Jacobs means the principle of multiple use: parks should be used by different persons, for different purposes and at different times. Even the same user might use the park for different purposes at different times. By centering Jacobs...

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 int...

The version of spring 2008 of the research proposal for my doctoral thesis   Chapter 1: The Right to Urban Parks What is a park? What is an urban park? What is its function, definition and for what it is being used? Why urban parks? For which purposes have they been created, by whom and for whom? In order to understand the function of urban parks and the relationship between nature and urbanity, work of the founder of the landscape architecture and park planner, Frederick Law Olmsted is studied. I will study definitions of various forms of parks in the urban context and the history of parks. As there hardly is a one all-embracing definition of their onthology and function, the existence, definition and parks has been a cause for struggle. Who “owns” the parks? Are they a public good or a luxury? Who use them, for what, when and with whom? Where do the park users live? Are the parks there to be admired, aesthetic objects or do they serve functions for the city? My central focus will...