What Brings a City Park to Life?
A space that invites diversity, says Professor Setha Low
These are the last great public spaces,” says Setha Low, referring to the nation’s large urban parks. “These are the places where everybody is still coming together. Places like Prospect Park, Central Park, and Van Cortlandt Park are unbelievable spaces for a multiplicity of people.”
A Professor of Psychology and Anthropology at the Graduate Center, Low and her students often work with organizations like the New York City Parks Department and the National Parks Service toward the most practical of ends – to answer questions. Why are certain groups in the community using a park? Why are other groups not using it? Why do some urban parks fail? What makes an urban park work? And why is any of this important?
“I’m arguing that if you want a democratic city with the greatest tolerance, then the parks must be kept culturally diverse, especially when our plazas and the showcase centers of our cities are becoming more controlled,” Low says. She compares her work with a study of the natural landscape of a park. “Why study a park ecologically?” she asks. “Because if you don’t, the trees will die. You’ll have a barren park. Why isn’t it the same for the social environment? If we’re not looking at parks and studying them with some idea of what we want to happen, processes can be put into play that will change them in unintended ways that, from a social point of view, may not be to our best advantage.” In the book Rethinking Urban Parks, written with Dana Taplin and Suzanne Scheld, Low offers six “lessons” from their case studies of places like Prospect Park, Jacob Riis Park, and Orchard Beach in Pelham Bay Park. She believes that heeding these lessons can help keep public parks and beaches vibrant and at the heart of city life.
Originally a medical anthropologist, Low began her career in a university department of landscape architecture and regional planning, working with Ian McHarg, the visionary designer who believed that good design would result in good health. She collaborated with students in design studios and worked with them in the community, where her abiding interest in the cultural aspects of design took shape. Later, she was hired by Harold Proshansky, the Graduate Center’s second president, for its pioneering program in environmental psychology. Like McHarg’s studio, this program was, and still is, a highly interdisciplinary endeavor. Though many anthropologists try to understand the relationship between people and the built environment, Low is one of only about five in the U.S. who works directly with designers and planners.
Low’s research has found that, often, the various cultural groups in a community want to use their park in different ways. In a number of case studies, including Prospect Park, she observes that some activities are common to people from diverse backgrounds – activities such as walking, exercising, and visiting the playground. However, there are also significant contrasts in how the site is perceived. For example, one group might see the park primarily as a place for private relaxation and respite, while another is more likely to see it as a place for socializing experiences, such as picnics and barbecues. A successful park, Low concludes, is one that accommodates all these preferences and priorities.
The solution seems to be a park design that includes areas dedicated to specific types of activities (e.g., picnicking, dog walking), as well as areas where the groups pursuing these different activities can come together and mingle. “People do want spaces that they can retreat to and feel comfortable in,” says Low, “and that’s not so bad as long as you also have ways of mixing.” This approach seems to offer the most promise for having all local groups enjoy the park while preserving the vitality of the urban social fabric. In regard to parks, streets, plazas, and all types of public space, Low warns that “homogenizing forces don’t make for very interesting places.”
Though parks managers might have a mandate and funding to make changes to a park, the public events intended to solicit community input are often not attended by a representative cross-section of people in the surrounding neighborhoods. The small Parks Department staff is limited in its ability to reach out, and this is where Low and her students can perform a valuable service. They can conduct a REAP or Rapid Ethnographic Assessment Procedure. This technique combines a number of different anthropological methods (e.g., behavioral mapping, individual interviews, impromptu group interviews, focus groups, physical traces mapping, etc.) to provide a quick snapshot of a park that can expose underlying issues and problems. For pressured parks managers who need fast answers, the REAP is anthropology at its most useful.
Making anthropology more useful is a high priority for Low in her new role as President of the American Anthropological Association. She would like to see more communication and collaboration between academic anthropologists and applied anthropologists. “Half of our students are taking applied/practice jobs – jobs not in the university. Academics are not always the best trained for dealing with public policy. It’s an anthropologist within an organization who might make the real difference.” Thinking back to her days with Ian McHarg, Low says, “Training landscape architects has probably changed more parks than anything I’ve ever done. My students come back and say, ‘You can’t imagine how often I use what you taught me.’”
And Low is glad that Harold Proshansky brought her to the Graduate Center years ago. Naming a number of faculty members who work on some of the same issues that she is passionate about, she says, “I have a group of colleagues here who are public space activists in one way or another, and everyone who’s here is here for a reason. They care about the public and changing the world, and changing the nature of our relationships to one another from a positive, progressive point of view. I felt a lot braver once I got here, and you can see it in my work.”
Rethinking Urban Parks is generating considerable response and, as a result, it looks like Low will be doing some traveling. She has invitations to speak, run workshops for students, and work with local planning offices in Canada and Australia. Apparently, lessons from the book, learned largely in the five boroughs of New York, are being found relevant and useful far beyond the borders of the city.
—Gail Goldberg
