Spatializing Culture: The Language of Landscape in Franklin Park
Kellam, Elisabeth.
2020
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Thesis (M.A.)--Tufts University, 2020.
Submitted to the Dept. of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning.
Advisors: Julian Agyeman, and Kristin Skrabut.
Keywords: Cultural anthropology, Landscape architecture, and Urban planning.
Franklin Park is a 527-acre park situated at the meeting point of five demographically diverse neighborhoods that contain the ... read moremajority of the City of Boston's communities of color. No other park within the Emerald Necklace, Boston's extensive park system, is surrounded by such diversity. Franklin Park was originally designed by Frederick Law Olmsted in the late 19th century who embedded a landscape ideal that valued passive leisure and quiet contemplation of pastoral scenery commonly seen in the countryside. This ideal form of nature as a respite from the city was constructed through a white racial frame that was quite elitist in nature, evidenced by the belief that parks could make society more healthy, moral, and refined. Originally designed to embody this form of nature, Franklin Park today looks quite different from Olmsted's vision. Over the last few decades, proponents of Olmsted's landscape ideology have worked to restore Emerald Necklace parks back to his original vision, and Franklin Park has been no stranger to this effort. Official plans throughout the park's history have perpetuated this elitist discourse and it still remains in the background of conversations about the park to this day. With the timeliness of the development of the Franklin Park Action Plan, the park's first comprehensive plan in thirty years, there is a concern that it will continue to focus on Olmsted's legacy and not enough on local community needs and values. Communities of color have reclaimed the park since its period of disuse and degradation in the mid-20th century, and it is to them that the Action Plan team should be turning to in determining the future of the park.read less - ID:
- 1g05fr69d
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