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dear designers, historians or not, the model of metropolitan open space that Central Park (1857, Olmsted & Vaux) represents was created at the same time as that of Yellowstone (1872, Muir), prototype of National Parks. Their political histories r deeply entangled & problematic 1/
for sake of leisure & health of a primarily white elite, parks r models of urban frontiers designed as bourgeois open space at the height of a nascent parks movement originating in New York City where sanitation, health, and infrastructure converged 2/
however, they call it open space for a reason: those parks were intent on 'opening' space for a privileged class but in order to do that it required the 'closing' of space of BIPOC to exclude 3/
those parks (both metropolitan and national) were an extension on an ongoing project of settler-colonialism with a single objective to establish a capitalist property regime, making room and opening space for bourgeois leisure, but 4/
it was premised on the marginalization, dispossess, & erase BIPOC that precede settler occupation. One can argue that those parks and landscapes, the very idea of the picturesque and of wilderness, were created as instruments of elimination of the settler-colonial project 5/
parks confronted, affronted, and violated Indigenous rights 2 self-determination by eliminating access 2 land as foundation of sovereignty...rights that are being fought for to this day 6/
modernism in landscape architecture & urban planning was and still is entirely if not exclusively premised on erasure. 4 example, compare Ethan Carr's *Mission 66* (on modernism of National Parks) with Mark Spence's *Dispossessing Wilderness* (on Indigenous erasure in NP) tnaf 7/
we (design disciplines of architects/planners/engineers/city builders, conservationists/ecologists) need 2 STOP denying underlying environmental racism, inequality & injustice that these landscapes represent in order 2 acknowledge/transform original dispossessive intents 8/
at the very least, please just STOP fuckin' using, touting, & instrumentalizing New York City's Central Park as a shining model of great urbanism because that's exactly what it is not. 9/
10/ this, in context of UNESCO's current evaluation of Central Park as an example of 'outstanding universal value' https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/6234/ submitted in 017 of course by @Interior who oversees National Parks, Indian Affairs, Mining, Fish & Wildlife... https://www.doi.gov/bureaus
Completely, and if you are in any position of pedagogical, organizational or institutional power in academic institutions today, you are choosing to either uphold that weaponization, to resist it, or to subvert it.*
