The inestimable Jim Bacon over at Bacon’s Rebellion asks a question that has bothered me from the advent of the suburbanization of the Fredericksburg area to the present day.
How come there’s no stinkin’ parks?
London has a remarkable number of parks, some public, some private. Google a map of London and you’ll see not only the massive Hyde Park and Regents Park but dozens and dozens of smaller neighborhood parks. No matter where you live in the city, you’re only a couple of blocks from a park. (You may not have access to it, but at least you can enjoy the view while walking past it!)
Insofar as London parks are built by developers and maintained by private property owners, they provide a partial amenity for the general public at private expense. Personally, I like the idea of developers building parks and handing them over to local government for public maintenance and public enjoyment. But, then, we probably would end up with a lot fewer parks that way.
Bacon discusses the idea of private “key parks” where private membership allows individuals to enter specific parks — which seems far too bourgeois for my tastes.
That having been said, the need for public spaces — parks, libraries, and the like — is and should be a common feature of a republican landscape. This is far different from mere open spaces, where developers simply put a grassy knoll with some sort of cheap playscape up that decays over time, misuse, and the benign neglect of the local HOA. One might object and say that’s precisely what public squares were in the good ol’ days (colonial era and medieval England), but they were public pastures after all — not quite what we moderns would expect.
Yet there’s something to be said for a publicly purchased and privately maintained garden as common space or garden plot akin to a co-op, or even a common library (just the shelves and volunteers, please — books can be donated) where members of a community can wander in and out.
It’s a pleasant thought when local governments and planning commissions are approaching ideas for sustainable communities and the like, rather than the simulacrum of gilded estates via automatonic plywood palaces that we seem to have created for ourselves. If anything, it might encourage folks to wander outside and actually see the world beyond the LCD screen.
