For all of its mega structural boldness, Evelyn's idea of obscuring pollution with fragrance does not move the science forward much beyond the Venetian plague doctor's mask with its elongated nose, or proboscis, stuffed with flowers to fend off 'the miasma'. This practice of shuffling much of the problem elsewhere, recalls the feminist geographer Val Plumwood's notion of 'shadow places'. While hiding the residual impact with a large greenspace segregated from industry and housing, Fumifigium contains the seeds of a more recent urban vision.

The idea of grand municipal parks as the 'lungs of the city' emerged in the 19th century bureaucratisation of spatial formation and function; it also presupposes large greenspaces working as clear zones to counterpoint the maladies of industry, housing, and commerce. John Evelyn was a botanist rather than a biologist and did not reach for the metaphor of lungs, but after three centuries, his ameliorating greenspaces were eventually transplanted into the city.

So in this sense, the idea of the park is an old model. For all that it can be considered the green ‘shadow’ of other apparently more important urban functions, for most of the following two centuries it was a powerfully beneficial element of cities. Yet just as the late Ken Robinson described how Industrial Revolution-era societal patterns still damagingly pervade our education systems, long after mass factory work has disappeared, the idea of 'square plots of fragrant shrubs' as a green sticking plaster onto the wounds carved into a largely grey-brown hardscape city no longer makes much sense. The broader issue is that, with its segregated ameliorating function, this model of park does not change systems – it works more as counterpoint than point.

Richard Sennett has noted how urbanists and planners have traditionally found it easier to efficiently segregate rather than devise open, fluid, porous urban spaces required for sociability of human or nonhuman life:

While it may have been efficient to segregate function at one point, cities are not about efficiency. Yet the idea of the park as segregated space still pervades. The integration of biodiversity into living spaces is still not tight enough given the order of challenge we face. This ‘othering’ of non-human biodiversity foregrounds the fact that parks were not simply about greenery, either. In the UK, the creation of parks was also about regulating forms of behaviour as massive infrastructures amongst the masses.

Conversely, in Sweden parks emerged at the same time from the bottom-up often as a challenge to established hierarchy. Alongside the introduction of the People’s House model all over Sweden, as a place for progressive newspapers, cooperative associations and unions to organise, the People’s Parks were places to hold associated rallies, events, dances.

Over time, both the regulating and organising became absorbed into the city’s everyday life. Its political roots remain in the soil yet the park became something to be managed, following the bureaucratic logic of the last half-century.

Yet that physical separation of parks from other spaces, and a bureaucratic shuffle to its own column in the municipal spreadsheet, means that they can often be picked off if the political weather changes.  The Heritage Lottery Fund report State of UK Public Parks 2016 concluded that "It is clear that there is a growing deficit between the rising use of parks and the declining resources that are available to manage them”.