The urban garden : Port Alliance, Texas

Abstract

This thesis focuses on of three urban parks; Central Park i n New York , the Fens to Franklin Park in Boston, and Rock Creek Park in washington, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and the growth of the cities around them. Imbedded in the histories of the parks and their cities are strategies for the development of a new town on the plains of north Texas around an airport named Alliance. A regional park system organized along the creek bottoms and flood plains surrounding Alliance can be a strong organizing element for growth in the last undeveloped quadrant of the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Not unlike the area around Alliance, Olmsted's parks were in the path of urban growth , yet each of the parks has been bounded by a diverse range of built response s from the cities that now surround them. This thesis examines the evolution of the urban edge where Olmsted's parks and their cities meet. The built domain that bounds the parks is called the Urban Garden. The Urban Garden i s a metaphorical set of ideas about how the urban edge of the city and the park interact. The variations in the Urban Gardens of New York, Boston, and Washington provide vivid examples of how cities build at the edge of urban parks. These variations of the urban edge suggest some possible futures for the parks and the city that will develop around Alliance.