“In many discourses, parks are posited as the best of urbanity, as an unmitigated “good” that represents all that cities can and should be. Parks are purportedly natural salves for the disordered immorality and filth of urban life, pools of respite, beauty and virtue. But those complicated and complicating claims make multiple contradictory and dubious arguments for human social and political life that are not easily dislodged or disentangled. Those claims are always bound up with rationalities of whiteness and colonial ordering: parks bring structured comprehensibility and access to the otherwise unruly “wilds,” cleansed of any savage and uncooperative residents, and disallow any activities that do not adhere to certain orders. A huge amount of work is expended on park design to ensure that they adhere exactly to settler colonial re-orderings of occupation.” ParksUrban PlanningSettler ColonialismParks Planning Book:On This Patch of Grass: City Parks on Occupied Land Source: On This Patch of Grass: City Parks on Occupied Land
“When we talk about any particular park, or city parks in general, what we are really talking about is how urban space could and should be allocated and used. Entwined within those conversations are presumptions about how human relationships with the other-than-human world can and should be mediated and controlled. The notion that parks are “good for people,” whether they are immense national parks far from cities or small urban parks set amidst dense residential, commercial and industrial activity, rests on highly questionable ideologies that tend to obscure far more than they illuminate. Claims to “diversity” habitually feign a commitment to commonality. When we talk about any particular park, or city parks in general, what we are really talking about is how urban space could and should be allocated and used. Entwined within those conversations are presumptions about how human relationships with the other-than-human world can and should be mediated and controlled. The notion that parks are “good for people,” whether they are immense national parks far from cities or small urban parks set amidst dense residential, commercial and industrial activity, rests on highly questionable ideologies that tend to obscure far more than they illuminate. Claims to “diversity” habitually feign a commitment to commonality without asking after the rationalities that structure the subjects of those commons: who is allowed in and under what conditions? without asking after the rationalities that structure the subjects of those commons: who is allowed in and under what conditions?” DecolonizationUrban PlanningSettler ColonialismParks Planning Book:On This Patch of Grass: City Parks on Occupied Land Source: On This Patch of Grass: City Parks on Occupied Land