Urban Parks

Book Description :

Urban parks such as New York City's Central Park provide vital public spaces where city dwellers of all races and classes can mingle safely while enjoying a variety of recreations. By coming together in these relaxed settings, different groups become comfortable with each other, thereby strengthening their communities and the democratic fabric of society. But just the opposite happens when, by design or in ignorance, parks are made inhospitable to certain groups of people. This pathfinding book argues that cultural diversity should be a key goal in designing and maintaining urban parks. Using case studies of New York City's Prospect Park, Orchard Beach in Pelham Bay Park, and Jacob Riis Park in the Gateway National Recreation Area, as well as New York's Ellis Island Bridge Proposal and Philadelphia's Independence National Historical Park, the authors identify specific ways to promote, maintain, and manage cultural diversity in urban parks. They also uncover the factors that can limit park use, including historical interpretive materials that ignore the contributions of different ethnic groups, high entrance or access fees, park usage rules that restrict ethnic activities, and park "restorations" that focus only on historical or aesthetic values. With the wealth of data in this book, urban planners, park professionals, and all concerned citizens will have the tools to create and maintain public parks that serve the needs and interests of all the public.

Book Description :

Galen Cranz surveys the rise of the park system from 1850 to the present through 4 stages - the pleasure ground, the reform park, the recreation facility and the open space system.

Book Description :

Great City Parks is a celebration of some of the finest achievements of landscape architecture in the public realm. It is a comparative study of thirty significant public parks in major cities across Western Europe and North America. Collectively, they give a clear picture of why parks have been created, how they have been designed, how they are managed, and what plans are being made for them at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Based on unique research including extensive site visits and interviews with the managing organisations, this book is illustrated throughout with clear plans and photographs– with this new edition featuring full colour throughout. Tate updates his seminal 2001 work with 10 additional parks, including: The High Line in NYC, Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and Westergasfabriek, Amsterdam. All the previous city parks have also been updated and revised to reflect current usage and management. This book reflects a belief that well planned, well designed and well managed parks and park systems will continue to make major contributions to the quality of life in an increasingly urbanized world.

Book Description :

The question of how to live in the city and increase the quality of urban life creates new challenges for both urban policies and academic research. Urban parks are important keys for achieving a broader understanding of the urban landscape. Open green spaces in every form are essential for life in our ever more urbanised society and are becoming a vital issue for the liveability of the urban environment.The purpose of the present research is to acquire a more thorough knowledge of the evaluation of urban parks. The study uses statistical analysis methods combined with landscape planning and visualisation methods. The research provides an innovative and sophisticated point of view along with the means to improve the comprehension of people's preferences for alternative urban park scenarios. The results are expected to create an advanced discussion platform and make a contribution towards improving knowledge of the public's perception of urban parks. The investigation was conducted with empirical experiments on two parks in Zurich.The functional component of the research is the visualisation of spatial data using powerful visualisation tools. The theoretical prospect is the achievement of broader knowledge about individuals' perception of open green spaces, focusing on previously unexplored experimental research combining conjoint analysis and visualisation methods.The experiments created for the research are effective for modelling and explaining the signifi cance that people assign to specific dimensions characterising different park scenarios. Two motivations are at the base of the research: exploring the use of conjoint analysis methods to study virtual urban parks and evaluating the use of visual stimuli with conjoint analysis.

Book Description :

This book re-evaluates the contribution of the urban park to our civic history and considers their impact on patterns of public leisure and the use of open space in the city.

Book Description :

Download Urban Parks and Recreation Recovery Program book written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, available in PDF, EPUB, and Kindle, or read full book online anywhere and anytime. Compatible with any devices.

Book Description :

The park system of two Massachusetts cities-Holyoke (pop. 44,819) and Fitchburg (pop. 39,332)-produced an estimated 605,608 visitor-hours of use during the summer of 1979. The average park produced 7,877 visitor-hours in Holyoke and 9,624 in Fitchburg, though use levels varied widely. Contrary to original expectations, neighborhood characteristics had little influence on use levels. Rather, park characteristics, particularly activities and amenities, had a significant effect on use. City officials wishing to maximize the use of their park system should consider investments in these resources while researchers build a more thorough, systematic body of knowlege about urban parks and their users.

Book Description :

For years American urban parks fell into decay due to disinvestment, but as cities began to rebound—and evidence of the economic, cultural, and health benefits of parks grew— investment in urban parks swelled. The U.S. Conference of Mayors recently cited meeting the growing demand for parks and open space as one of the biggest challenges for urban leaders today. It is now widely agreed that the U.S. needs an ambitious and creative plan to increase urban parklands. Urban Green explores new and innovative ways for “built out” cities to add much-needed parks. Peter Harnik first explores the question of why urban parkland is needed and then looks at ways to determine how much is possible and where park investment should go. When presenting the ideas and examples for parkland, he also recommends political practices that help create parks. The book offers many practical solutions, from reusing the land under defunct factories to sharing schoolyards, from building trails on abandoned tracks to planting community gardens, from decking parks over highways to allowing more activities in cemeteries, from eliminating parking lots to uncovering buried streams, and more. No strategy alone is perfect, and each has its own set of realities. But collectively they suggest a path toward making modern cities more beautiful, more sociable, more fun, more ecologically sound, and more successful.

Book Description :

Great City Parks is a celebration of some of the finest achievements of landscape architecture in the public realm. It is a comparative study of twenty significant public parks in fourteen major cities across Western Europe and North America. Collectively, they give a clear picture of why parks have been created, how they have been designed, how they are managed, and what plans are being made for them at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Based on unique research including extensive site visits and interviews with the managing organisations, this book is illustrated throughout with clear plans and professional photographs for each park. This book reflects a belief that well-planned, well-designed and well-managed parks remain invaluable components of liveable and hospitable cities.

Book Description :

Catie Marron’s City Parks captures the spirit and beauty of eighteen of the world’s most-loved city parks. Zadie Smith, Ian Frazier, Candice Bergen, Colm Tóibín, Nicole Krauss, Jan Morris, and a dozen other remarkable contributors reflect on a particular park that holds special meaning for them. Andrew Sean Greer eloquently paints a portrait of first love in the Presidio; André Aciman muses on time’s fleeting nature and the changing face of New York viewed from the High Line; Pico Iyer explores hidden places and privacy in Kyoto; Jonathan Alter takes readers from the 1968 race riots to Obama’s 2008 victory speech in Chicago’s Grant Park; Simon Winchester invites us along on his adventures in the Maidan; and Bill Clinton writes of his affection for Dumbarton Oaks. Oberto Gili’s color and black-and-white photographs unify the writers’ unique and personal voices. Taken around the world over the course of a year, in every season, his pictures capture the inherent mood of each place. Fusing images and text, City Parks is an extraordinary and unique project: through personal reflection and intimate detail it taps into collective memory and our sense of time’s passage.

Book Description :

This important volume focuses on the sensitive issue of interrelationships between national parks situated near or within urban areas and their urban environment. It engages with both urban and conservation issues and and compares four national parks located in four large cities in the global South: Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town, Mumbai, and Nairobi. Though primarily undertaken as academic research, the project has intensively collaborated with the institutions in charge of these parks. The comparative structure of this volume is also original and unique: each of the chapters incorporates insight from all four sites as far as possible.The term “naturbanity” expresses the necessity for cities endowed with a national park to integrate it into their functioning. Conversely, such parks must take into account their location in an urban environment, both as a source of heavy pressures on nature and as a nexus of incentives to support their conservation. The principle of non-exclusivity, that is, neither the city nor the park has a right nor even the possibility to negate the other’s presence, summarizes the main argument of this book. Naturbanity thus blurs the old “modern” dichotomy of nature/culture: animals and human beings can often jump the physical and ideological walls separating many parks from the adjacent city. The 13 chapters and substantive introduction of this volume discuss various aspects of naturbanity: the histories of park creation; interaction between people and parks; urban governance and parks; urban conservation models; wildlife management; environmental education; and so on. This is a must-read for students and researchers interested in social ecology, social geography, conservation, urban planning and ecological policy.

Book Description :

From Yellowstone to the Great Smoky Mountains, America's national parks are sprawling tracts of serenity, most of them carved out of public land for recreation and preservation around the turn of the last century. America has changed dramatically since then, and so has its conceptions of what parkland ought to be. In this book, one of our premier environmental historians looks at the new phenomenon of urban parks, focusing on San Francisco's Golden Gate National Recreation Area as a prototype for the twenty-first century. Cobbled together from public and private lands in a politically charged arena, the GGNRA represents a new direction for parks as it highlights the long-standing tension within the National Park Service between preservation and recreation. Long a center of conservation, the Bay Area was well positioned for such an innovative concept. Writing with insight and wit, Rothman reveals the many complex challenges that local leaders, politicians, and the NPS faced as they attempted to administer sites in this area. He tells how Representative Phillip Burton guided a comprehensive bill through Congress to establish the park and how he and others expanded the acreage of the GGNRA, redefined its mission to the public, forged an identity for interconnected parks, and struggled against formidable odds to obtain the San Francisco Presidio and convert it into a national park. Engagingly written, The New Urban Park offers a balanced examination of grassroots politics and its effect on municipal, state, and federal policy. While most national parks dominate the economies of their regions, GGNRA was from the start tied to the multifaceted needs of its public and political constituents-including neighborhood, ethnic, and labor interests as well as the usual supporters from the conservation movement. As a national recreation area, GGNRA helped redefine that category in the public mind. By the dawn of the new century, it had already become one of the premier national park areas in terms of visitation. Now as public lands become increasingly scarce, GGNRA may well represent the future of national parks in America. Rothman shows that this model works, and his book will be an invaluable resource for planning tomorrow's parks.

Book Description :

Parks are a certain kind of property, and thus creations of law, and they are subject to all kinds of presumptions about what parks are for, and what kinds of people should be doing what kinds of things in them. Parks -- as they are currently constituted -- are colonial enterprises. On This Patch of Grass is an investigation into one small urban park -- Vancouver's Victoria Park, or Bocce Ball Park -- as a way to interrogate the politics of land.

Book Description :

The large parks and green infrastructure presented here illustrate the diverse uses and many benefits of large urban parks across 30 major cities. Demand for large urban parks emerged at the height of the First Industrial Revolution in the mid-1800s, when large urban parks represented new ideas of accessible public spaces, often established on land previously owned by aristocracy, royalty or the army. They represented new ideas on how city life could be improved and how large green spaces could enhance urban citizens’ physical and psychological well-being (e.g. Birkenhead Park in Liverpool, Bois de Boulogne in Paris, Tiergarten in Berlin and Central Park in New York City). Today, large urban parks are habitats for biodiversity and spaces of climate change adaptation. For people living in cities, this biodiversity may represent high cultural, recreational and aesthetic values, but is also important for other aspects of health and well-being, for example by reducing the urban heat island effect, air pollution and risks of flooding. At a time when we are seriously reconsidering how we live in cities and our urban quality of life, while also grappling with serious challenges of climate change, the authors of this book detail the much-needed evidence, pathways and vision for a future of more liveable, resilient cities where large urban parks are at the core. This book will help park managers, NGOs, landscape architects and city planners to develop the green city of the future.

Book Description :

This book is relevant to architects, urban designers, planners, and policy makers concerned with enhancing climate-sensitive urban form and planning. It discusses building and neighborhood design: layout and design features that maximize energy efficiency and thermal comfort without compromising the ability of other buildings to enjoy similar benefits; the use of interstitial spaces (piazzas, streets, and parks) to improve the microclimate at the neighbourhood-level; design intervention case studies; innovative uses of interstitial spaces to improve the local climate at the neighborhood level; and urban radiative cooling solutions to mitigate the unintended climate consequences of urban growth and suggestions for ways forward.

Book Description :

An advisory commission was charged by the President of the United States to review public and private outdoor recreation opportunities, policies, and programs and to make recommendations for the future. The body of this publication is the final report of the Commission on Americans Outdoors which was delivered on January 28, 1987. Findings are presented in four major sections. These include: (1) "Americans and the Outdoors" (addressing the problems, benefits, and possibilities for outdoor recreation ); (2) "Americans: the People" (stressing the need for an outdoor ethic and for action and involvement in improving services); (3) "Outdoors: the Resources" (identifying needs, initiatives, and management concerns); and (4) "Making It Work" (highlighting the roles and necessity of partnerships, public policy, community action, strong leadership, and funding strategies). A summary of key issues and recommendations as well as a summary of the proceedings of the National Conference on Recreation and the American City are included as appendices. The full text of 12 selected case studies which describe innovative approaches to solving problems and maximizing opportunities to protect resources and expand recreation opportunities are presented. (ML)

Book Description :

This tenth volume in the series addresses an important topic of research, de sign, and policy in the environment and behavior field. Public places and spaces include a sweeping array of settings, including urban streets, plazas and squares, malls, parks, and other locales, and natural settings such as aquatic environments, national parks and forests, and wilderness areas. The impor tance of public settings is highlighted by difficult questions of access, control, and management; unique needs and problems of different users (including women, the handicapped, and various ethnic groups); and the dramatic re shaping of our public environments that has occurred and will continue to occur in the foreseeable future. The wide-ranging scope of the topic of public places and spaces demands the attention of many disciplines and researchers, designers, managers, and policymakers. As in previous volumes in the series, the authors in the present volume come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, research and design orientations, and affiliations. They have backgrounds in or are affiliated with such fields as architecture, geography, landscape architecture, natural re sources, psychology, sociology, and urban design. Many more disciplines ob viously contribute to our understanding and design of public places and spaces, so that the contributors to this volume reflect only a sample of the possibilities and present state of knowledge about public settings.

Book Description :

First Published in 2011. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Book Description :

The book highlights new trends and challenges in research on agents and the new digital and knowledge economy. It includes papers on business process management, agent-based modeling and simulation and anthropic-oriented computing that were originally presented at the 14th International KES Conference on Agents and Multi-Agent Systems: Technologies and Applications (KES-AMSTA 2020), being held as a Virtual Conference in June 17–19, 2020. The respective papers cover topics such as software agents, multi-agent systems, agent modeling, mobile and cloud computing, big data analysis, business intelligence, artificial intelligence, social systems, computer embedded systems and nature inspired manufacturing, all of which contribute to the modern digital economy.

Book Description :

Download Urban Parks book written by Margaret Ann Atwater, available in PDF, EPUB, and Kindle, or read full book online anywhere and anytime. Compatible with any devices.