Landscape architecture according to Olmsted: beyond purifying the air, pacifying the mind

Although the works of Frederick Law Olmsted – such as Central Park, Prospect Park, Franklin Park, Riverside – are today widely recognized and appreciated, some of them having, in fact, been the object of important restoration work, the thinking which engendered them is much more unfamiliar, notably due to its complexity. The mission of landscape architecture, as it is defined by Olmsted, is above all social: to improve the living conditions of the population, beginning with the most unfavored. It is not just a matter of providing breathing spaces, but of allowing people to experience places capable of appeasing their minds.

Mapping Urban Park Cultural Ecosystem Services: A Comparison of Twitter and Semi-Structured Interview Methods

Understanding the benefits received from urban greenspace is critical for planning and decision-making. The benefits of parks can be challenging to measure and evaluate, which calls for the development of novel methods. Crowdsourced data from social media can provide a platform for measuring and understanding social values. However, such methods can have drawbacks, including representation bias, undirected content, and a lack of demographic data. We compare the amount and distribution of park benefits elicited from (1) tweets on Twitter about Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York (n = 451) with park benefits derived from (2) broad (n = 288) and (3) directed (n = 39) questions on two semi-structured interview protocols for park users within Prospect Park. We applied combined deductive and inductive coding to all three datasets, drawing from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment’s (MEA) cultural ecosystem services (CES) framework. All three methods elicited an overlapping set of CES, but only the Twitter dataset captured all 10 MEA-defined CES. All methods elicited social relations and recreation as commonly occurring, but only the directed question interview protocol was able to widely elicit spiritual values. We conclude this paper with a discussion of tradeoffs and triangulation opportunities when using Twitter data to measure CES and other urban park benefits.

A Squeeze of the Hand

We recorded forty-five-minute dialogues for thirty straight days around New York City. Half these talks took place at a Union Square health-food store that we call “W.F.” Other locations included MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Opera House, Central Park, Prospect Park, and a Tribeca parking garage. What follows is our twentieth conversation. Here sickness, emptiness, a train delay, and an argument seem to prefigure disaster and the project’s sudden end. But this disaster—much like the two-character Japanese word for “crisis”: the first one meaning “danger,” the second, “opportunity”—offers clarities perhaps best expressed by a Japanese proverb:Luck turns Wait