November 13, 2003
Should we think of parks as islands, precious green spaces within an urban sea? Or should we think of them as elements within transportation- and water-related regional systems networks of conservation and recreation tied to other networks that sustain contemporary life?
Civic battles over contested parcels of land heated debates as to their proper economic and social use and their design make what is essentially local loom large. This is especially true in the case of parkland. The Regional Plan Association has a broader let’s say a panoramic perspective. For RPA the configuration of green space is not merely the result, but also a means, of urban and regional planning. This, of course, is not to say that achieving RPA’s planning objectives is not every bit as intensely political a process as that which takes place at the neighborhood scale.
Both islands of green and green systems are important. Every community garden saved from destruction and every barren traffic island reclaimed as a handkerchief park is a victory for the forces of civic amenity. At the same time, cities affect and depend upon spheres far beyond their boundaries, if they indeed have boundaries other than merely jurisdictional ones anymore.
Because these urban spheres have been expanding with accelerating rapidity, regional planners are forging a new definition of the term greensward. More than a stretch of grassy lawn, the metropolitan greensward as conceived by RPA is a means of promoting sustainable economic development, environmental stewardship, and social equality for the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut metropolitan region.
Advanced technology and misguided actions often obscure the fact that all planning is necessarily grounded in geo-physical circumstances. Geography and climate are primary. The land itself its topography of hills, valleys, rivers, and shorelines; its soil and water; its plants and minerals; its people and wildlife is fundamental.
For millennia human beings used manual technologies to harness the forces of nature and build cities. By necessity, they lived in intimate relationship with the land. Few could travel and then only hazardously; most were imbedded in their immediate environs. Industrial technology radically changed that within the relatively brief span of the past two centuries. It fueled Western society’s drive to make nature serve human ends, with very little consideration of the consequences. It set everything in motion over increasingly long distances: raw materials and manufactured products; finance and commerce; fashion and culture. And, of course, people as well. The patient centuries when an agrarian society performed its timeless round and mercantile trade operated through well-grooved channels has now been replaced by a culture of fast-paced global manufacturing, finance, and consumer capitalism.
What has this meant in terms of the relationship between city and country, between human beings and the natural world? And what has been our response to this course of events? To answer these questions, let us examine the roots of metropolitan and regional planning.
Industrialization spawned the growth of cities to unprecedented size. The production and distribution of goods made possible by machine industry and new means of transportation reconfigured the natural landscape as cities grew and the movement of people and goods between them became commonplace. Metropolitan planning is a response to the Machine Age.
Paris is the first modern metropolis. Baron Haussmann, Napoleon III’s equivalent of New York’s master builder Robert Moses, transformed that city thoroughly. Mid-nineteenth-century Paris saw the construction of an entire new infrastructure of sewer and water lines, the creation of many new squares and tree-lined boulevards linked to the train stations scattered around the urban periphery, and the transformation of old royal parks such as the Bois de Boulogne into new pleasure grounds.
At the same time, New York, which was still a small commercial port city, aspired to metropolitan status. It had no planner backed by royal authority like Paris’s Haussmann, but it did have citizens of remarkable vision. In 1842, the people of the city celebrated a signal achievement of regional dimensions: the opening of the Croton Aqueduct and Reservoir system, an important victory for public health without which New York would not have been able to grow into a metropolis.
Anticipating large-scale metropolitan growth, in 1853, the state legislature passed the bill that led to the creation of Central Park. Significantly, the winners of the design competition for the new park, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, called their entry the Greensward Plan. While it evoked the green pastures and still waters of the psalmist and simulated natural scenery so convincingly that many people even now do not realize it is completely manmade, Central Park has what in its day was an extremely progressive infrastructure. Sunken transverse roads allow workaday traffic to traverse the park unnoticed by visitors, while masonry vaults bridging these depressed thoroughfares support carriage drives (now interior roadways) at park level. This early example of grade-separation of traffic was a model for later parkway and highway designers.
Olmsted and Vaux went on to design Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and Olmsted later authored the plan for Boston’s Emerald Necklace. In Brooklyn, their metropolitan vision led Olmsted and Vaux to propose the construction of park-linking thoroughfares, Eastern and Ocean Parkways. These parkways were modeled on the great tree-lined boulevards built in nineteenth-century Paris and were not therefore the kind of roads we call parkways today. But they were exemplary in another way: they provided a green arterial skeleton guiding future urban growth.
Thus, Olmsted and Vaux were not only park builders; they were America’s first city planners as well. In Boston, Olmsted’s plan to drain the Jamaica Plain and the Backbay Fens had as its desired result a continuous chain of parks and parkways with Franklin Park as its pendant jewel. The effects of the Emerald Necklace were several: it offered opportunities for scenic recreation; it produced an important transportation corridor; it created the grounds for the Arnold Arboreteum; and it extended the city planning efforts Olmsted and Vaux had begun in New York by providing a framework that would guide and enhance future metropolitan development. Olmsted’s ability to combine hydrological engineering, transportation, and the creation of new parkland at the same time was remarkable. Charles Eliot, his protogé and young partner, extended this urban planning vision to encompass the entire area within a ten-mile radius of Boston. Through a campaign of adroit political persuasion within the surrounding municipalities, he succeeded in forming the Metropolitan District, an entity charged with acquiring a comprehensive system of important natural areas around the city and its harbor.
A similar vision to guide metropolitan growth through a synthesis of nature and technology occurred on an expanded scale in the early twentieth century in the wake of the invention of the automobile. The Bronx River Parkway and several Westchester Country parkways launched regional-scale recreational motoring in America. Landscape architects were commissioned to work with engineers on the designs for these and other early parkways such as the Taconic State.
The invention of the automobile opened up abundant opportunities for developing suburban land. The urban critic Lewis Mumford and an almost forgotten visionary named Benton MacKaye were two of the founders of the Regional Planning Association of America (not to be confused with Regional Plan Association). Like those in Britain who implemented garden cities new greenbelt towns in the rural countryside this small organization of early regional planners was dedicated to dispersing population into humanely designed new communities with plenty of fresh air, sunlight, and grass a vital alternative to the industrial cities with their congested tenements, crowded streets, and polluted skies.
The key to this early version of the New Urbanism was the creation of what MacKaye called the Townless Highway, a transportation artery bypassing, but with with exits leading to, the communities en route. Its obvious purpose was the Highwayless Town, one that resembled the colonial New England prototype with its handsome Main Street, dignified simple homes, green commons, and encircling rural fields. MacKaye saw that the reality on which that idyllic image was based was already fast disappearing as the old New England villages were being rapidly depopulated and their surrounding agricultural lands returned to brush in the headlong migration to the urban centers. (Second-home gentrification had obviously not yet come of age.)
MacKaye, a follower of Thoreau, is best remembered as the father of the Appalachian Trail. But that thousand-mile long, much prized greenway for hikers was really just part of a larger vision to harness power, channel transportation, and plan communities on a regional scale. MacKaye’s book, The New Exploration, begins with the view from the top of the Times Building on Times Square, a lofty pinnacle from which to make a regional survey. Aerial perspective, novel in an age when the first skyscrapers were being built and before air travel became routine, is the regional vantage point par excellence. At the dawn of the twentieth century, in Edinburgh, Mumford’s Scottish mentor Patrick Geddes equipped his so-called Lookout Tower with a camera obscura, which he trained on the ancient and its environs, inviting his fellow townsmen to consider the current and future urban mass in the context of its regional topography. The publication of the Regional Planning Association of America was called Survey Graphic. Its Olympian voice was Mumford’s.
At the same time that Mumford, MacKaye, and their cohorts at the Regional Planning Association of America were writing about and demonstrating the principles of regional planning through the creation of two early model communities, Radburn, New Jersey and Sunnyside in Queens, the Regional Plan Association was being formed by a separate group of early regional planners. These included Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and they too sought, like Olmsted, Sr., to create a more civilized living environment though the synthesis of nature and technology. In 1929, RPA produced the Graphic Regional Plan, a cartographic analysis of the New York region’s land use and population density; subdivision, land development, and housing; circulation and communication; open spaces and recreation. This plan provided an imperfect yet admirable series of guidelines for the future development of the metropolitan region.
With visionary astuteness, Robert Moses appropriated elements of RPA’s 1929 Plan, and as state park commissioner forcefully implemented some of its proposed park and parkway projects. But many of the goals of regional planning were betrayed by circumstances in the affluent post World War II era when subdivisions of tract houses seemed to sprout overnight in fields where potatoes and lettuce had recently grown. The subdivision shopping center and later the regional shopping mall ushered in a new era of consumer retailing. Developers had clearly hijacked regional planning and turned it from socially responsible ends to purely profitable ones.
In 1960, the staff of RPA under the leadership of director Stanley Tankel responded with The Race for Open Space, a ninety-five-page brief for the preservation of open land for three major purposes: for recreation; for conservation; and for a livable and efficient residential development pattern. The report said, Today the one-family house is dominant. . . Factories and shopping centers sprawl over many times the land they once did. Armed with demographic statistics and land-use analysis, the plan called for an increase in permanent open space in the tri-state metropolitan region from a total of 600 to 1,700 square miles.
Not withstanding, urban cores continued to grow soft with the flight of city dwellers and merchants to the suburbs and the relocation of factories away from old docks and rail lines. In the last thirty years, the amount of urbanized land in the tri-state region of counties surrounding New York City has increased by more than sixty per cent while population has grown by only thirteen per cent. The loss of forty-two per cent of the region’s agricultural land has been compounded by the effects of far-flung suburbanization in which the construction of massive campus-style shopping malls and industrial plants in the countryside has burdened local governments with huge infrastructure and school construction costs. This substantiates the term sprawl already coined by RPA in 1960 in The Race for Open Space.
In the context of this center-less urbanization, the planners at RPA redoubled their efforts to advocate an alternative. In spite of the difficulty in achieving a non-competitive, common vision for land-use regulation, water-shed agreements, and a unified road and rail transportation system, RPA has continued to plan, gathering statistics to predict trends, and to offer solutions, particularly ones dealing with transportation and land preservation issues. In the process it has moved beyond a merely functional, people-centered philosophy focused upon open space primarily as a recreation resource to one that considers the right of the land itself. Just as gardens must be tended, so entire natural systems networks of water supply and drainage must be looked after and rivers and estuaries kept free of pollution. Recreation can still be part of this agenda, but it must be encompassed by place-based land stewardship.
RPA is now attempting to shape this agenda into an expanded Olmstedian one in which the entire Mid-Atlantic region is the planning focus. Giving new currency to Olmsted and Vaux’s naming of their design entry for Central Park as Greensward, RPA currently strives to oversee the building a Metropolitan Greensward, an initiative that involves helping communities establish eleven regional reserves, restore urban open spaces, and build a network of greenways. If its Greensward vision succeeds, this region, which has pioneered the concept and practice of regional planning, will have provided the nation with a counter-strategy to urban sprawl in the form of a large network of protected lands composed of rivers, trails, ridgelines, and the conversion of brownfields industrial and waterfront wastelands to parkland.
The creation of Central Park was essentially a visionary political act. One hundred and fifty years ago, the New York State legislature authorized setting aside acreage in Manhattan now occupied by the park. The park’s designers, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, were constantly embroiled in politics as they sought to achieve their essentially humanitarian vision of a pastoral and Picturesque park that would serve all classes in the growing city. RPA has understood from the beginning that its visionary goals could only be achieved though effective advocacy toward political ends. This is a collaborative process, one that involves many local communities and governmental jurisdictions as well as several legislative and regulatory bodies. Here is RPA planner Rob Pirani to tell you more about the New Greensward Council’s efforts to build a metropolitan Greensward.