The idea of seeing core elements of cities as parks, with everyday spaces such as streets transformed into our parks and gardens, aligns with movements like ‘London National Park City’, as well as the numerous urban forest programmes around the world.
Street trees and forests can be brought together so that we see a continuum, rather than segregation, of vegetation. This implies a reforesting of cities, effectively, using the streets as its root systems.
“Street trees and trees in forests have different advantages. Street trees provide cooling and carbon capture, and are especially positioned to capture particulate matter. For a real urban drawdown in emissions, preserving existing urban forests and expanding them can get more bang for the buck.” —Adrian Benepe
As Benepe says, “this isn’t about scenery. This is about life-saving infrastructure for cities.” In the 19th century, when that idea first emerged most clearly, the municipal park saved lives through separated spaces. In the 21st century, amidst mass diversity loss and crises of climate resilience, public health and social justice, we understand that model is no longer enough. That life-saving dynamic has to extend beyond segregated set-pieces and flood through our streets, the street being the basic unit of the city.
We have a chance to reinvent the idea of the park by opening it up to a more radically diverse set of ideas, enabling it to rebalance our towns and cities by locating it everywhere rather than somewhere, ensuring it has the truly participative maintenance and care regimes of a garden, that it speaks to the needs and desires of diverse groups of people by placing it literally in their hands.
2020’s major events, from COVID-19 clearing the street to Black Lives Matter filling it, indicates that it is clearer than ever that the street is where the city’s politics plays out. It always has. Parks have always been a space of ‘ritualised routine’ – now we might connect these ideas, representing the need for integrated approaches to the more complex challenges of the 21st century, rather than the merely complicated ones of the 19th and 20th, which allowed that all-too-easy separation of infrastructure, space, culture and politics.
By immersing the park in the street, we can flip the logic of the park inside-out, moving it well beyond its roots in Evelyn’s Fumifugium and the municipal activists of the 19th century.
One could argue that by putting ‘park’ everywhere, it is nowhere. But if that nowhere is a richly restorative biodiversity, a generative tangle of human and non-human social life, addressing climate resilience, public health and social justice it may be worth exploring. This could be a possible scenario for not only the future of parks, but of the infrastructure of everyday life and the way that we live.
“A garden locates you in eternity … It also connects you to the future. When you don't know how much time you have left, that sense of planting something that will flower next summer is immensely sustaining.”
Derek Jarman
