Park Politics

Abstract

Historically, the emergence of “the urban park” in the 19th century constituted a point of transition in the development of public space. A favourite topic of modernist art, the park has been frequently mythologized, but also challenged. In Seurat’s famous painting of Grand Jatte, the park emerged as the sum of a multitude of colourful and expectant impulses, furthermore enveloped in sparkling backlight. In contemporary works of art, however, like that of Dominique Gonzales-Foerster, the park instead provides ”a plan for escape…a catalogue of seemingly unrelated parts…anti-landscapes for micro-events…” As an urban architectural type, the public urban park is ambiguous: Is it to be considered a space for the re-creation of social orders? Or does it rather provide a space for the transgression of preordained urbanity?