Rising East Online

New Urban Landscapes

Ken Worpole

In early 2001, I was commissioned by Groundwork London to write a paper for a European project they were involved in, looking at the rehabilitation and landscaping of former industrial sites in Europe. This brief study looked at three London parks - Burgess Park, Lee Valley Park and Mile End Park - all of which had been created in, on or around land formerly used for housing, industry or other uses. In this sense they were all ‘post-industrial parks’, inhabiting sites that belonged to a different economic and social era, which had now largely disappeared. Here are some of the common characteristics found:

Firstly:

• All three parks were created out of war-damage, industrial decline or comprehensive housing re-development.
• All were much larger than traditional urban parks, and were designed and developed as ‘regional’, or at least, ‘sub-regional’ amenities.
• All three parks had complicated ownership and management structures

Secondly:

• All three parks operated what might be called ‘mixed economies’, in that they were not simply funded out of the public purses, but were required to develop commercial or quasi-commercial activities and relationships to help pay their costs.

Thirdly:

• The history of most existing London parks is that they once belonged in private lands, as landscaped gardens or mansion estates, and when handed over into public management, preserved their historical design attributes. There was often a clear relationship between a large house and the parkland which it occupied.
• However, the three new London parks studied, were all developed from an ad hoc process of land assembly, with no previous landscape history so to speak, which made design issues immensely fraught and experimental.
• It is interesting that all three parks are essentially linear parks, all of them following the line of a canal – whether extant or not, all of them bisected by roads and railway lines, and so sharply divided and entirely discontinuous in their landscape form.

Fourthly:

• Over a hundred years or so, the public have got used to, and often highly appreciative of, certain urban landscape forms, particularly those with a history and structure, such as London squares, ornamental town parks, recreation grounds, and large naturalistic parks such as Brockwell Park, Finsbury Park, Victoria Park.
• However, the public sometimes find it difficult to interpret, understand or even use, these new kinds of parks which lack a clear unified landscape style or aesthetic, and at times may seem more like wasteland than finely cultivated gardens.
• Because of their linear shape, these post-industrial parks are no longer at the centre of settled, homogenous residential communities, but cut through slices or layers of very different kinds of communities of class, ethnicity, lifestyle, making consultation and community ‘ownership’ especially difficult. Their linear shape also makes them all edge and no heartland, and boundary conflicts are exacerbated.

Conclusions:

These new post-industrial parks are having to develop their own new landscape aesthetic, combining Arcadian, formal, functionalist, commercial, ecological and pleasure park traditions. This is very difficult, not only to design, but also to finance and manage.

One of their strengths is as a form of green corridor or transport network for walkers and cyclists. The idea of creating urban linear parks which allowed people to access the city centre by foot or bike was pioneered in Stockholm in the 1930s. New parks such as the Promenade Plantée in Paris, a former railway line, now function in this way, as a connecting route into the city. Perhaps the most famous, and spectacular European post-industrial park, is that at Duisburg-Nord, in Germany, on the site of a former steelworks, where much of the infrastructure has been preserved.

I personally find these parks fascinating, each of them possessing their own kind of tough beauty. There will be more of them as towns and cities continue to de-industrialise and as new housing displaces more dense, nineteenthcentury urban settlements. Towns and cities are becoming ‘greener’, but even this greening process needs a social and economic programme – as well as an environmental, one of course.

Ken Worpole, writer and environmentalist (www.worpole.net)

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