From Yellowstone to the Great Smoky Mountains, America's national parks are sprawling tracts of serenity, most of them carved out of public land for recreation and preservation around the turn of the last century. America has changed dramatically since then, and so has its conceptions of what parkland ought to be. In this book, one of our premier environmental historians looks at the new phenomenon of urban parks, focusing on San Francisco's Golden Gate National Recreation Area as a prototype for the twenty-first century. Cobbled together from public and private lands in a politically charged arena, the GGNRA represents a new direction for parks as it highlights the long-standing tension within the National Park Service between preservation and recreation. Long a center of conservation, the Bay Area was well positioned for such an innovative concept. Writing with insight and wit, Rothman reveals the many complex challenges that local leaders, politicians, and the NPS faced as they attempted to administer sites in this area. He tells how Representative Phillip Burton guided a comprehensive bill through Congress to establish the park and how he and others expanded the acreage of the GGNRA, redefined its mission to the public, forged an identity for interconnected parks, and struggled against formidable odds to obtain the San Francisco Presidio and convert it into a national park. Engagingly written, The New Urban Park offers a balanced examination of grassroots politics and its effect on municipal, state, and federal policy. While most national parks dominate the economies of their regions, GGNRA was from the start tied to the multifaceted needs of its public and political constituents-including neighborhood, ethnic, and labor interests as well as the usual supporters from the conservation movement. As a national recreation area, GGNRA helped redefine that category in the public mind. By the dawn of the new century, it had already become one of the premier national park areas in terms of visitation. Now as public lands become increasingly scarce, GGNRA may well represent the future of national parks in America. Rothman shows that this model works, and his book will be an invaluable resource for planning tomorrow's parks.

In recent decades, suburban growth and the decline of industry have left cities throughout Europe and America searching for creative and effective ways to revitalize blighted areas and reclaim underused land. In Grounds for Review, Andrew Theokas examines one particularly exciting tool for reinvigorating urban areas: the garden festival. These festivals, which began in post-war Europe, have been popular throughout the Continent for decades but are just beginning to gain currency in the United States. A garden festival temporarily transforms a previously derelict area, such as an abandoned factory lot, into a festival of horticulture, combining luxurious landscapes with exhibits and carnival rides. Most garden festivals last about six months--during which time they draw millions of visitors--but the success of the fair itself is only the initial step in a detailed plan for urban improvement. At the conclusion of the festival, funds from its operation are used to transform the grounds once again, this time with an eye toward the long-term use of the land. The enduring result of a successful garden festival is thus the transformation of derelict land into a community asset, such as a new urban park or an affordable housing project. Theokas considers here fifteen garden festivals--in Europe, England, and the United States--in all their dimensions. He examines the role they play in stimulating urban redevelopment, their effects on the practice of landscape architecture, and the contentious debates over their financing, purposes, and future prospects. This highly illustrated volume will serve as a useful introduction to garden festivals for all those interested in urban planning, horticulture, and the future of cities.

Winner of the Western History Association's 2009 Hal K. Rothman Award Finalist in the Western Writers of America Spur Award for the Western Nonfiction Contemporary category (2008). The San Francisco Bay Area is one of the world's most beautiful cities. Despite a population of 7 million people, it is more greensward than asphalt jungle, more open space than hardscape. A vast quilt of countryside is tucked into the folds of the metropolis, stitched from fields, farms and woodlands, mines, creeks, and wetlands. In The Country in the City, Richard Walker tells the story of how the jigsaw geography of this greenbelt has been set into place. The Bay Area’s civic landscape has been fought over acre by acre, an arduous process requiring popular mobilization, political will, and hard work. Its most cherished environments--Mount Tamalpais, Napa Valley, San Francisco Bay, Point Reyes, Mount Diablo, the Pacific coast--have engendered some of the fiercest environmental battles in the country and have made the region a leader in green ideas and organizations. This book tells how the Bay Area got its green grove: from the stirrings of conservation in the time of John Muir to origins of the recreational parks and coastal preserves in the early twentieth century, from the fight to stop bay fill and control suburban growth after the Second World War to securing conservation easements and stopping toxic pollution in our times. Here, modern environmentalism first became a mass political movement in the 1960s, with the sudden blooming of the Sierra Club and Save the Bay, and it remains a global center of environmentalism to this day. Green values have been a pillar of Bay Area life and politics for more than a century. It is an environmentalism grounded in local places and personal concerns, close to the heart of the city. Yet this vision of what a city should be has always been informed by liberal, even utopian, ideas of nature, planning, government, and democracy. In the end, green is one of the primary colors in the flag of the Left Coast, where green enthusiasms, like open space, are built into the fabric of urban life. Written in a lively and accessible style, The Country in the City will be of interest to general readers and environmental activists. At the same time, it speaks to fundamental debates in environmental history, urban planning, and geography.

In recent years, recreation scholars and professionals began calling for a return to municipal recreation’s historical roots as a “public good.” Blaming neoliberal ideology for the current pay-per-use model, these calls for a more inclusive recreation system have suggested the sector's "business-like" practices should be of concern because they are in direct opposition to the historic mandate of “equal opportunity.” A central assumption underlying these calls for the recreation profession to return to its “historical roots” is that municipal recreation services, until the late 1980s and early 1990s, were available to all members of society. This narrative is, however, a romanticized account of recreation’s history. In this book, Lisa Tink challenges the often-repeated narrative of a more inclusive and equitable era in recreation’s past. Tracing some of the conditions that have given rise to what she has termed the recreation industrial complex, Tink’s research demonstrates how recreation has, by design, served the interests of white, heterosexual, able-bodied, middle- to upper-class Canadians. By exposing the ways particular bodies came to be centered in a recreation context, the purpose of this important piece of recreation scholarship is to demonstrate how historical inclusions and exclusions (whether intentional or not) were in fact part of a broader biopolitical project intended to sustain white supremacy, with the ultimate goal of encouraging critical dialogues about what is inherently problematic, difficult, and dangerous in the discourses, practices, and policies that govern our contemporary recreation systems.

The theme is related to “Large Parks on Post-industrial Sites in Contemporary Urban Landscape Conceptions”, which is expounded in the fields of landscape architecture, landscape ecology and urban planning. A worldwide perspective is created so as to conduct cross-cultural research on the theories and practices of large-scale urban parks in North America, Germany and China. Through the scientific approach of ‘critical rationalism’, three design paradigms of large parks in different conceptions of contemporary urban landscapes are formulated based on quantitative and qualitative analysis, which are classified as the organic parks of North American ‘landscape urbanism’, the structural parks of German ‘landscape structuralism’ and the large parks of Chinese ‘urban inventory renewal’. By means of critical thinking in diverse cultural interpretations, the research aims to reveal remarkable similarities and differences between the cultures in the Western world according to their understanding of landscapes (coherent vs. creative), landscape and ecology (representation vs. metaphor), and landscape and life (diversity vs. unpredictability). Through theoretical analysis and case studies, it demonstrates that the international park paradigms characterised by complexity, diversity, sustainability, appropriation and identity can influence various socio-cultural, ecological, and aesthetic developments. Finally, the analytical results of the two park paradigms in Western countries are adopted in the examination of landscape architectural park models and urbanistic theoretical frameworks in China. This monograph is written primarily for scholars, professionals and students in the fields of landscape architecture, urban planning and architecture. The book, involving in-depth analysis about urban parks, green open spaces, green infrastructure and post-industrial landscapes, will have international appeal. It will appeal to readers at different levels. Above all, it may be of interest to professionals who are concerned with the topics urban parks and post-industrial landscapes, as well as Chinese scholars and experts, particularly those looking at China’s urban renewal and the ongoing transformation of post-industrial sites at different scales. This book will have strong implications for relevant urban landscape practices in China. Furthermore, it will be supported by the author’s colleagues from various countries such as Germany, Italy, USA, Canada, Brazil and China. Moreover, students to whom the author teaches courses of Landscape Architecture History and Theory and Landscape Planning and Design at BUCEA, as well as the international students at Collaborative Classes organized by BUCEA, TUM, and POLIMI (Politecnico di Milano, Italy), are encouraged to read this book.

The positive effects of urban green spaces are well-known, ranging from the promotion of health, support of biodiversity to climate regulation. However, the practical implementation of urban landscapes is less discussed. How can we make these spaces functional, economically feasible and inclusive, especially as cities become more diverse? The publication explores strategies to reconcile the various demands, such as food production, resilience and nature conservation. Indeed, urban landscapes have to be restorative, ecological and aesthetically pleasing at the same time. This is a particular challenge in high-density cities like Singapore, Seoul or New York where space is a scarce commodity. The continuing growth of the worldwide urban population imbues the topic with a special urgency.

Seattle, often called the "Emerald City," did not achieve its green, clean, and sustainable environment easily. This thriving ecotopia is the byproduct of continuing efforts by residents, businesses, and civic leaders alike. In Seattle and the Roots of Urban Sustainability, Jeffrey Craig Sanders examines the rise of environmental activism in Seattle amidst the "urban crisis" of the 1960s and its aftermath. Like much activism during this period, the environmental movement began at the grassroots level—in local neighborhoods over local issues. Sanders links the rise of local environmentalism to larger movements for economic, racial, and gender equality and to a counterculture that changed the social and political landscape. He examines emblematic battles that erupted over the planned demolition of Pike Place Market, a local landmark, and environmental organizing in the Central District during the War on Poverty. Sanders also relates the story of Fort Lawton, a decommissioned army base, where Audubon Society members and Native American activists feuded over future land use. The rise and popularity of environmental consciousness among Seattle's residents came to influence everything from industry to politics, planning, and global environmental movements. Yet, as Sanders reveals, it was in the small, local struggles that urban environmental activism began.

Mill Power documents the making of a national park that changed the concept of what a national historical park could be. For a time in the 1800s, Lowell was Massachusetts’s cosmopolitan, must-see second city. The city’s industrial model was as high-tech then as Silicon Valley is today. It drew the attention of luminaries like Charles Dickens, Congressmen Davy Crockett and Abraham Lincoln, feminist sociologist Harriet Martineau, and abolitionist Frederick Douglass. This insider’s account of the creative, bold community-driven process to establish the park explains why today Lowell National Historical Park is renowned as “the partnership park.” The park’s establishment was an integral piece of an urban revival strategy that has made Lowell the subject of scores of newspaper articles, magazine profiles, TV and radio reports, scholarly papers, and book chapters. Historic Preservation magazine has hailed the park as “the premier rehabilitation model for gritty cities worldwide.” The Lowell story has much to teach the mid-sized cities of the nation and the world. Mill Power frames the Lowell comeback in its historical context and brings together the people who dreamed, wrote, designed, pushed, and cheered a new national park into existence along with those who came after with the charges of shaping the ideas into material form. The volume features 100 photos, many of them showing the before-and-after story of this revitalization.

The contributors to this volume propose strategies of urgent and vital importance that aim to make today’s urban environments more resilient. Resilience, the ability of complex systems to adapt to changing conditions, is a key frontier in ecological research and is especially relevant in creative urban design, as urban areas exemplify complex systems. With something approaching half of the world’s population now residing in coastal urban zones, many of which are vulnerable both to floods originating inland and rising sea levels, making urban areas more robust in the face of environmental threats must be a policy ambition of the highest priority. The complexity of urban areas results from their spatial heterogeneity, their intertwined material and energy fluxes, and the integration of social and natural processes. All of these features can be altered by intentional planning and design. The complex, integrated suite of urban structures and processes together affect the adaptive resilience of urban systems, but also presupposes that planners can intervene in positive ways. As examples accumulate of linkage between sustainability and building/landscape design, such as the Shanghai Chemical Industrial Park and Toronto’s Lower Don River area, this book unites the ideas, data, and insights of ecologists and related scientists with those of urban designers. It aims to integrate a formerly atomized dialog to help both disciplines promote urban resilience.