Participatory parks planning : exploring democratic design as a tool to mediate cultural conflict over neighborhood green space

Abstract

America's park history has largely been a story of the commodification and representation of nature, from the idyllic naturescapes of the mid-nineteenth century to the reform parks and playgrounds of the City Beautiful era. Not until this century, however, has it become clear that this interpretation of nature is often an Anglo-centric vision, influenced by Western notions of landscape and the frontier. Rarely do American urban parks consider or reflect the non-Western ideals of nature; consequently, these parks are often culturally inaccessible to new immigrants and communities of color. As the United States becomes an increasingly pluralistic society, the need grows for open space that can foster interaction between different ethnic and racial groups and that can serve multiple user groups simultaneously. Parks-and particularly, American parks- are largely products of political will and reflections of power structures, at least with respect to their locations and designs. Design decisions dictate who feels welcome in a space and who feels excluded; similarly, programming choices-often informed by design-can define a park's audience. Thus, a discussion of power in the context of planning provides a critical link in considering reflections of culture in park design, as well. To that end, this thesis will examine the intersection of the discourses on urban parks, citizen participation, and nature, beginning with an exploration of how the historical narrative of parks planning in the United States can be reframed to reflect the contemporaneous histories of America's communities of color.

(cont.) Through this new lens, the thesis will examine strategies for understanding and planning multicultural open space in urban environments, focusing specifically on democratic design processes as a tool for effecting change. Democratic design, a participatory planning strategy that empowers the community very directly as an actor in the design process, has rarely been applied to parks planning. However, recent experiments with democratic design processes for small community parks in the Eastlake neighborhood of Oakland, California and the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota provide unique opportunities to explore the potential of this nascent planning strategy as a mechanism for creating multicultural neighborhood parks in the center city and mitigating the problem of park underuse.