CityStates: Commentary on an Urban World

Guest Post: The Problem of Parks Provision in High-Density Areas

The high densities we see in many urban residential developments leave very little land for adjacent gardens or planting. Yet the need for emotional comfort which the natural environment has traditionally provided is still a human requirement, and various measures have been adopted to try to satisfy this need. Public parks became the principal item in the new world of massive, high-density urban structures which sought to retain the primary bond between the human spirit and the natural environment. 

Other items included in the urban development program to reduce the harsh appearance of the concrete asphalt street systems was to line them on both sides (and sometimes down their centre lines as well) with trees and other smaller plantings. The effect of these measures is quite remarkable. One has only to move down any street on which the dwellings front directly on the street and are separated from the paved street only by a fence, and then move onto a different street where such trees and other plantings have been located and the contrast is astonishing. The bare, unplanted street is not only visually repellent but emotionally depressing, creating the impression of an impoverished community. On the planted street the immediate view is that of the lush foliage, and the emotional uplift which comes with that view is a sense of community balance and bonding with the natural appearance.  

Regrettably the efforts of city councils to provide an adequate supply of parks and landscaped open spaces have not been very successful. Access to these spaces is not easy for residents in the high-rise residential towers in our urban centres. This is especially true for elderly residents. Some relief has been found in the provision of outdoor balconies or decks which are directly accessible from the living rooms of many apartments in the residential towers. These balconies are usually open-aired and the residents generally provide trays of flowers and other plants and decorative items on them so that they can enjoy this glimpse of the natural environment while relaxing in their deck chairs. Access to the public parks and playgrounds however is not easy, particularly for the elderly and children. Transportation is often required to and from these facilities and may not always be readily available.

One approach to resolving these difficulties has been to try to provide an open-space area adjacent to the residential towers but this has rarely been successful. Part of the problem in this approach has been the fact that the construction of the residential towers on the one hand, and the provision of public open space, on the other hand, are the responsibilities of completely different authorities. The design and construction of the residential buildings is in the hands of the private developers and the design and construction of public parks and other recreation facilities is in the hands of the city council through its parks division. The objective of the private developer is to ensure that the residential project is completed and occupied within the limits of original financial analysis; the public parks authority is limited by the availability of land in a desired location and the cost of acquiring that land. The private developer is limited by the market demand for their product, the head of the city’s parks division is limited by the overall demands on the city council’s budget.

It seems an irresolvable dilemma. And yet it has been resolved on a few occasions. Those occasions occurred when the responsibility for both the apartment project and the related park were in the hands of a single authority and that authority was the private developer. The occasions when this occurred were very few and far between. But they did happen. However they did not often combine the two components – the park and the residences – very successfully. But even if they were not entirely successful they indicated that a more satisfactory level of success may be possible if the dilemma of the differing responsibilities can be solved. In the next post, I will suggest one means of addressing this barrier.

Written by Dr. Earl A. Levin

Photo: (Top): Nagyman; (Bottom): Tommy Weir (flickr.com)

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Guest Post: Urbanism and Our Bonds with Nature

In the beginning, when human beings first began to walk on the Earth in communal groups, their primary objective was survival. In order to maintain life, food was the fundamental necessity. Fortunately for the species their habitat was the natural environment and in the natural environment there was enough food both in quantity and variety to sustain them. They were hunters and gatherers and the necessary foods for their sustenance, as well as the basic materials for the provision of garments and of shelter were adequately available in the natural environment, which was their habitat. Under adverse weather conditions which must have been part of the normal environmental occurrence they sometimes were able to take shelter in vacant caves. If such shelters were not available, they could put together sufficient cover from tree branches and animal hides to serve the immediate shelter purposes. The natural environment was the fundamental source of all the requirements to sustain life and support its continuity. All of these requirements were of a physical nature – food, garments, shelter etc. They were so basic to the survival of the species that ultimately and inevitably there evolved a firm bond between the species and their natural environmental habitat. It would be appropriate to regard this connection between the early humans and their natural environmental habitat as a physical bond.

There was, however, another type of bond which ultimately evolved between humans and their natural environment. The basis for this other environmental connection was the emotional reaction to phenomena that occurred in the natural environment and which were perceived visually or audibly but had nothing to do with their sustenance requirements. The phenomena of night and day and those events which occurred in the sky above involving the sun, the moon, the stars, sunsets, lightning, the awesome presence of mountains, the landscape elements of lakes and rivers, the foliage of the trees, the recurring colour and scent of the seasonal floral growth, all of them evoked a sense of wonder, of visual pleasure, of breathtaking awe and self-identity. They were moved by these events to the realization that their habitat had other dimensions to it and their own visceral pleasure in experiencing these mysterious phenomena ultimately found its way into the basic sub-stratum of the various religions of the world. The bond with the emotional components of their habitat can be regarded as the spiritual bond while the bond which nourished their physical existence can be regarded as the physical bond. Through the emergence of these two types of bonding the personal relationships between the individual human beings in any group were strong, warm and commanding.

These close individual relationships among group members probably declined as the physical and spiritual bonds were loosed by emerging new lifestyles and population growth and increasing population densities. As technologies advanced and the production of human food moved from the primal source and methods to agriculture and manufacture, the bonding between humans and the natural environment in which they lived also underwent changes. The greatest change was, of course, in the production of food – that is, in the physical bond. With the advances in agricultural production and processing the hunters and gatherers were replaced by the farmers and ranchers who produced the foodstuffs in their grain and cattle farms and ranches.  The acreages involved in these new food technologies were large but it was customary on most farms to reserve some small part of the acreage to grow items that continued the spiritual bond with the natural environment, although in a modified form. Space was usually provided on most farms for shrubs, bushes, ornamental trees, fruit trees and fruits and vegetables. The bond with the natural environment was maintained in its spiritual sense as well as in its physical sense although both in greatly modified form.

Eventually the profound changes which were occurring in virtually every branch of technology produced correspondingly profound changes in the lifestyles of people which resulted in the inevitable movement of population from rural areas to urban areas. At an early stage in this urbanization the new resident population was housed in single-family dwellings. It was typical of these dwellings that they were built on lots with some space left as front yards and back yards. It was also typical that the occupants of the dwellings planted grass and gardens in these yards in a way reminiscent of the plantings which the farmers of a preceding era had put into the spare acreages of their grain or cattle farms.

However, it was not long before the low-density urbanization of our cities became a flood of high-density development with a heavy concentration of rental apartments and condominiums in the central areas. The resulting isolation of people from their former close connections with nature has come at a price. In future posts I will discuss how modern urban developments have sought, with varying degrees of success, to address this problem.

Written by Dr. Earl A. Levin

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