HW October 27th, 2011

Thoughts on Urban Life

I enjoyed reading this book (for the most part). It was interesting reading about ethnography and how people go about researching other communities. Some of it was boring to me since I am not overly intersted in anthropology, but I enjoy learning new things, and this opened my eyes to a whole new way of looking at my community and the city itself.

Rethinking Urban Parks (pages 1-18)

"The Cultural Life of Large Urban Spaces"
This chapter was an introduction to looking at urban spaces. It give reasons why public urban spaces are important. We depend on spaces such as parks, garden, benches, ect for cross-class and multicultural contact. We need these types of spaces to promote social and cultural diversity. Here are six lessons to provide a guideline for park planning, management, and design:
1. People and their culture need to be represented in these spaces
2. Acess (visitation and income) must be taken into account for all social groups
3. Social intereaction within diverse groups can be maintained with safe, spacially adequate space for everyone
4. Accomodating differences in the ways social class and ethnic groups use and value public sites
5. Contempory historic preservation for the facilities, diversions and scenic aspect.
6. Symbolic ways of communitcating cultural meaning

Social sustainability is important in the framework of planning and managing large urban spaces. Place preservation, cultural ecology theories, and cultural diversity help make up this framework. There are many arguments that affect social sustainability. Cultural property rights, community participation,empowerment and citizenship, heritage, and cultural values are a few that are touched on in this essay. It is really important to have an understanding of sultural diversity adn community values if a city is to have a successful park, bench or heritage site.

I think this book will be very interesting since it takes public spaces from New York City and focuses on them. I am looking forward to learning more about this.