Travis Elborough’s A Walk in the Park
This is a short essay inspired by Travis Elborough’s A Walk in the Park: The
Life and Times of a People’s Institution (Jonathan
Cape 2016).
Travis
Elborough’s new book A
Walk in the Park is
an informative, entertaining and elegant ambulation through the history of the
public park covering a period of four millennia. While drawing on a breadth of
research on the park and providing much useful information, Elborough still
manages to keep the book lively and engaging when situating this phenomenon in
its cultural lineage.
Rather
than provide a book review (you can read some of the more ‘regular’ reviews
here: one by Rachel Cooke in The
Guardian and one by Daisy Dunn in The
Times), I am offering a short essay. Inspired by the book my
article draws on Michel Foucault’s theory of the heterotopia.
The
park is an excellent example of a heterotopia as explained by Foucault in his
text Of
Other Spaces (1967).
In his essay, which was originally a lecture, Foucault describes the difference
between a utopia and a heterotopia: “Utopias are sites with no real space,”
whereas heterotopias “…are real places – places that do
exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something
like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real
sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are
simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” (2001: 239).
In Of
Other Spaces Foucault
details the complex criteria required to consider a particular space to be a
heterotopia, setting out his four principles. He also uses labels such as
“crisis heterotopias” and “heterotopias of deviation” to apply to, for example,
19th-century boarding schools and contemporary
psychiatric hospitals, respectively (2001: 240). However, I shall be choosing
to look at the public park from the perspective of a heterotopia of
compensation since they are designed to “create a space that is other,
another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is
messy, ill constructed, and jumbled” (2001: 243).
At the beginning of his book, Elborough explains that: “many of
the globe’s most famous public parks were created in part to quell political
unrest and prevent revolutions” (2016: 3). They were: “widely deployed as tools
to tame supposed wildness among the population, ease alienation and see off
social discord” (Elborough 2016: 4). In this respect, we can see that creating
a calm ordered greenspace for potentially unruly citizens to spend their social
time could be advantageous for political administrations (on a local and
national level). Civil unrest is not economically productive and is expensive
to police and clean up. Therefore, the park has the effect of controlling the
behaviour of individuals by operating on the body politic.
All space (whether urban, suburban or rural) is structured in such
a way as to enforce a certain habitus (Pierre Bourdieu) on individuals. This
organises their behaviour, at the same time inculturating them into a specific
socio-cultural practice. The public parks encouraged certain behaviours and not
others. These were (are) subtly written into the very design of the parks and
more overtly into the rules attached to behaviours that were considered
unacceptable in the space (some written and some not). By behaving in a
different way than was deemed customary in these parks, individuals could be
seen as being deviant or criminal, and Elborough’s book provides examples of
this, such as fighting, homosexuality, prostitution and rape.
The ideologies and practices behind the development of urban space
appear in the form of programmes which have specific material and social
effects on individuals (Fischler 1995: 22). This is what Michel Foucault refers
to as a regime of rationality. But this geographical and social ordering also
has a function other than one of just control. Above, Foucault alludes to a
dichotomy between the organised space of this type of a heterotopia – one of
compensation – which opposes supposedly ‘real’ space in its disorganised form.
The public park, in fact, becomes a kind of hyperreal space. If we look at Jean
Baudrillard’s levels of simulation, we can classify the public park as level 2:
“it masks and denatures a profound reality” (1994: 6). Thus, the park also has
the effect of ‘hiding’ the needs and desires that may arise through the social
reproduction inherent in everyday space: the disparity in wealth which is
always geographically apparent in urban space and the differences between
inherited privilege and raw poverty.
The
public park was designed as a cultural space available to all citizens
irrelevant of class. Quoting a British parliamentary committee, who in the
early 19th century
were looking at a potential public parks programme, Elborough says: “those who
spent their lives ‘shut up in heated factories’…should ‘on their rest day’ be
able to ‘enjoy the fresh air’” (2016: 70). Everyone then has access to the
park, and this creates the illusion of social levelling. But what happens is
that this type of heterotopia not only orders the space within the park.
Through its compensatory function, it also organises the lived experience of
individuals so as to exert power over them in the everyday.
I
am sure it is no coincidence that surges in public park programmes accompany
times of great socio-cultural challenges. Indeed, in Britain, there is a Parliamentary Select Committee that has just announced a public parks
enquiry (this follows years of public funding cuts, meaning public parks have
been under threat for a while). The Victorian period also provides a good
example of a public parks programme and Elborough discusses in depth this
period in Britain and the parks that were formed at this time, for example,
Battersea Park in London (see above image). Opened in 1858, this part of London
had previously been a wilderness where duels and riots took place, and the
police feared to go (Elborough 2016: 75). To the Victorian bourgeoisie, these
unruly wastelands were probably considered ‘Godless’ places.
This
moment in time reflects the same philosophical epoch of Friedrich Nietzsche’s
declaration “God is Dead” (The Gay Science1882).
It also echoes Baudrillard’s second level of the simulacra, which I have
attributed to the public park phenomenon. For Baudrillard’s second level of
simulation “there is no longer a God to
recognise his own, no longer a Last Judgement to separate the false from the
true, the real from the artificial resurrection, as everything is already dead
and resurrected in advance” (1994: 6). Thus, the formation of the Victorian
park, many of which still survive today, is a stand-in for a God, who had
already left the scene.
While
today we are fighting to keep our public parks open, perhaps our
attachment to them is as much because the real has been lost to us as it is
about protecting our public spaces. “We require a visible past, a visible
continuum, a visible myth of origin, which reassures us about our end”
(Baudrillard 1994: 10).
Bibliography:
Baudrillard,
Jean. 1994. Simulacra
and Simulation, trans.
by Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press).
Elborough,
Travis. 2016. A Walk in the Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution (London: Jonathan Cape).
Fischler,
Raphaël. 1995. ‘Strategy and History in Professional Practice: Planning as
World Making’, in Helen Liggett and David C. Perry (eds.), Spatial
Practices (London:
Sage), pp. 13-58.
Foucault,
Michel. 1998. ‘Of Other Spaces, in Nicholas Mirzoeff (ed.), The
Visual Culture Reader (London:
Routledge), pp. 237-244.
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