Kaupunkiluonto

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...

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 ...