The necessity of having green spaces within the urban grid: Where cities breathe

Great parks surpass the ambitions of their designers

There is likely no better way to get the measure of a city than to wander around its parks, at least for those of us given to people-watching. And yet, it’s odd that we mostly get to know of a city’s green and common spaces only in the passing in travelogues and novels. In a volume she edited in 2013, City Parks: Public Places, Private Thoughts , Catie Marron wrote: “…I’ve been fortunate to visit a number of the world’s most vibrant and revered cities, and I noticed after a while that I always gravitated to the nearest park. I started to look for books about my favourite parks and wondered why there were so few.”

There are still too few, and it’s interesting to return to City Parks to deepen one’s own appreciation of the local park. Some essays stand out.

Shared experience

Some spaces demand companionship, and invite a contrast with places not yet visited. David Lida, an American writer, asked a fellow traveller on his flight to Mexico City for recommendations on the sights around town, and at the end of a long list the impromptu guide said he should not leave without going to Xochimilco, comparing it with the canals of Venice. Xochimilco is one of the 16 boroughs of the Mexican capital, but the reference was to the network of canals in certain parts.

Lida went there on a Sunday, when all of Mexico City seemed to be about, and he observed entire families playing out their weekend routines. But as he navigated through the food and sounds of Xochimilco, he felt he had missed out on something: “I had experienced alone, as an outsider, what would ideally have been a shared experience.”

Some time later, after moving to Mexico City, Lida went back with a friend he had made in town, and got an insider’s tour, including to the “creepy” Island of the Dolls, where decades ago a man started hanging dolls from the trees to ward off a lost spirit. Lida concludes by saying he had not, at the time or writing, been to Venice for fear of being confronted with “a grand decaying centre of Europe”, as opposed to the “vibrancy” evident in Xochimilco.

Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif finds resonance of Cairo’s current and past rhythms — “Cairo, historians say, was built around a garden, and was always full of pleasure parks and amusement grounds” — in the city’s al-Azhar Park, where there’s room for everyone.

Writing in the afterglow of the Arab Spring, Soueif says as she spies guards around checking on couples: “We’re in transition, we say to each other, from dictatorship to democracy, from oppression to freedom. We’ll get there. In an ideal world there would be no guards, no walls, no entrance fee. But in an ideal world, there would be at least twenty parks like Azhar dotted over Cairo, a park for each million of the city’s inhabitants.”

Art in nature

Perhaps no other city has shown better how to develop green, common spaces within the urban grid as New York City has with High Line, the redeveloped public park on a discarded elevated railway line/ yard. The rail line facilitated deliveries in the meatpacking and industrial districts of Manhattan, till it was abandoned in the 1980s. For the New York-based writer André Aciman, to appreciate that transformation is also to meditate on time: “It is time that confers meaning to the High Line; time is the film we bring to everything we wish to see when we hope to amplify what our eyes are seeing.”

Even as it has attracted glitzy real estate development around, and is a magnet for city-dwellers, High Line is aware of the city’s and its own past. Writes Aciman: “High Line… is a park that loves itself, its past, and its city. It has all the untamed, dishevelled growth you expect to find on any abandoned railway track.” Those tracks are key — they were removed, cleaned and restored to the High Line, so that: “The park remembers its unshod days of abandonment. But it isn’t held hostage to them. And in this compromise lies art.”

But in the end, it’s the people who validate a park’s existence. As former U.S. President Bill Clinton concludes his piece on Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., “Something surprising lurks around each corner — someone with a fascinating story who came from far away to visit; or every once in a while, a young man or woman, resting on a bench, peacefully absorbed in a book.”

The writer is a Delhi-based journalist.