GEOG 262 Week 8 - Green Spaces

nature

• initially conceptualized as diametrically opposed to the city

• geographers now tend to theorize nature as a set of hybrid relations between human and non-human processes

• “nature is a continuum, with wilderness at one pole and the city at the other” (anne whiston)

Parks Movement

• creation of public parks in 19th century was a radical idea

• public urban parks = product of a reform effort to ameliorate the living conditions of working people (sometimes with classist intentions)

Birkenhead Park

• first truly public park

• near Liverpool, England opened 1847

• intended to improve the health of the poor

• inspired Frederick Law Olmsted when he visited in 1850

Pocket Parks

• small parks in dense urban centers

• cities more willing to fund these parks than large scale ones

• often associated with large ‘global cities’ and citizen involvement

• ex: Paley Park

Frederick Law Olmsted

• designed and proposed parks and similar spaces

• his parks were not natural but were ‘naturalistic’ or ‘organic’ in form

• designed parks in Seattle around view of the natural landscape (views of the Sound, Mount Rainier, and the mountains)

W.E.B. Du Bois

• 1868 - 1963

• sociologist, historian, and pan-africanist civil rights activist

• founding member of the NAACP

• believed green space would “restore the bodies, minds, and spirits of urban dwellers weakened by the city’s punishing environment”

Forward Thrust

• 1968 - 1972

• series of 12 ballot initiatives in king county and seattle for major infrastructure improvements that included new parks, recreation, and professional sports facilities, sanitation, fire stations, a youth service center, and community centers

P-Patches

• parcels of property used for gardening

• “P” originally stood for Picardo after the family who owned the farmland used for the original P-Patch

P-Patch Program

• Seattle’s community gardening program launched in early 1970s

• Darlyn Rundberg started a community garden in Wedgewood by asking her neighbors the Picardos (immigrant family from southern Italy) if she could use a corner of their remaining farmland for a community garden

Picardo Family

• family (three brothers) that emigrated from southern italy to seattle in the 1890s and started truck farming in South Park on the duwamish river

• South Park neighborhood was a neighborhood with many Italian and Japanese farmers

Little Italy

• derogatory name: “Garlic Gulch”

• North Rainier Valley and northeast Beacon Hill

• beginning in around 1900, Italian immigrants came to Seattle to work in coal mines and as construction laborers and farmers

• Italian immigrants attracted by inexpensive housing, convenient location near downtown, and potential for small farm plots in North Rainier Valley