In the previous post, I discussed how industrializing cities broke the principles of sustainability, leading to the degradation of the environment and of residents' quality of life.
As city planners and architects saw the devastating effects that unethical urban planning had at sites like Bradford, London, and Paris, they designed greenspaces as a response (Cleary 68-69). By building public parks and gardens, citizens would have room to breathe and experience nature within the city.
One social thinker who was especially influential in this movement was Englishman John Ruskin (1819-1900) who criticized Victorian Era industrialists for diminishing nature and abusing English laborers. Ruskin argued that cities needed to be "rooted in the soil" and to understand their relationship to the land around them. By understanding our relationship to the earth, we can be more aware of how we harm the land.
Following this philosophy, landscape planners designed urban parks of various scale to help cities return to being "rooted in the soil" and provide opportunities for urban dwellers to experience nature, one of our principles of sustainability. In cities like Paris, London, and Berlin, lands held in private through the Renaissance were made into public parks like the Bois de Boulogne, Regent's Park, and the Tiergarten. Thereafter, the concept of "green lungs for the city" became common and civic thinkers saw the benefits that parks had on public health and wellbeing.
In addition to bringing nature into the city, national parks were established, starting in America in 1890, to preserve nature outside the city. With Teddy Roosevelt's signing of the Yosemite National Park Bill, the first national parks were established to set land aside, away from industrializing urban centers so that they would be protected. National parks and national game reserves would provide opportunities to experience nature as it was before developing countries industrialized their locales.
So with the development of these two kinds of parks, urban dwellers in the 19th and 20th centuries again had opportunities to experience nature and to be social in public. By maintaining public health and wellbeing, these early greenspaces at the city level were the first steps toward making the city sustainable again.
In the next post, I'll examine how community gardens and neighborhood parks lead to social sustainability at the microcosmic level.
Works Cited
Cleary, Richard. “Making Breathing Room: Public Gardens and City Planning in Eighteenth-Century France.” Tradition and Innovation in French Garden Art. Eds. John Dixon Hunt and Michael Conan. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2002. 68-81. PDF file. 28 Jan. 2016.
Schlaier. "Das Cafe am Neuen See im Großen Tiergarten in Berlin-Tiergarten." Digital photograph. 17 Aug. 2009. Web. 9 Mar. 2016. Source