Constructing Gardens, Cultivating the City: Paris’s New Parks, 1977-1995 (Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture)

Constructing Gardens, Cultivating the City is the first cultural history of major new parks developed in Paris in the late twentieth century, as part of the city's program of adaptive reuse of industrial spaces. Thanks to laws that gave the city more political autonomy, Paris's local government launched a campaign of park creation in the late 1970s that continued to the turn of the millennium. The parks in this book represent this campaign and illustrate different facets of their cultural and historical context. Archival research, interviews, and analyses of the parks reveal how postmodern debates about urban planning, the historic city, public space, and nature's presence in an urban setting influenced their designs. In sum, the city adopted the garden as a model for public parks, investing in complex, richly symbolic and representational spaces. These parks were intended to represent contemporary twists on traditional designs and serve local residents as much as they would contribute to Paris's role as a world city. The parks' development process often included points of conflict, pointing to differing views on what Parisian space should represent and fundamental contradictions between the characteristics of public space and the garden as it is traditionally defined. These parks demonstrate the ongoing cultivation of the city over time, in which transformed sites not only fulfil new functions but also engage with history and their surroundings to create new meaning. They stand for landscape as a form of signifying cultural production that directly engages with other art forms and ways of knowing. Just as the Luxembourg Gardens, the Tuileries, and the Buttes-Chaumont parks exemplify their eras' cultural dynamics, such parks as the Jardin Atlantique, Parc André-Citroën, and the Jardin des Halles express contemporary French culture within the archetypal space of their era, the city. Finally, they point the way to current trends in landscape architecture, such as citizen gardening and ecological initiatives. "This book focuses on the five spaces whose designs best illustrate changes to park development practices, theoretical debates, and public perceptions in their shared time and place (1977-1995). These parks appear different from each other in many ways. The Parc de Bercy and Parc André-Citroën are four times as large as the Jardin Atlantique and Jardin des Halles. The Coulée verte, constructed from four kilometers of railroad right-of-way, inaugurated a new typology for parks. Different people, in teams composed of artists, landscape architects, architects, and urbanists, designed each park. Visually, their appearances vary widely, from the traditional details and naturalistic plantings of the Promenade plantée to formal gardens and modernist or postmodernist features in the Parc de Bercy, Parc André-Citroën, and Jardin Atlantique. Despite these differences, they all share a family resemblance thanks to the late twentieth-century Parisian context within which they were built. In this book, each park serves to illustrate a different facet of this cultural and historical context. In each park, gardened space crystallized debates about urban planning, the historic city, public space, and nature's presence in an urban setting. As these debates unfolded, they influenced planners, designers, and the everyday urban environment"-- Provided by publisher