Urban Parks Essay -- New Urban Landscape

Like most Americans, I expect to find in either city, every town, even in every village in the country, an outdoor recreation area or what is usually called a park and I am seldom disappointed. No matter how tonic and unfinished a town may be, or however old and poor, I know that it will contain, wedged in among the crowded blocks of buildings, a orthogonal space with grass and trees and meandering paths and perhaps a bandstand or a flagpole.--John B. Jackson, The Past and Future Park in Denatured Visions Urban pose are defined in their comparative and contrastive relationships to the urban environments surrounding them. Although frequently conceptualized as natural landscapes, the physical and social uses of parks give test copy to their inherently cultural nature. For the purpose of this paper, I will use the term culture to refer to military personnel implemented social objects and actions nature, then, as a indite word and a concept circulated in culture, becomes a c ultural micturateion. The idea of nature or natural, I will attempt to argue, refers to a certain pock of cultural concepts as constructed through a discourse that is centered away from humans and characterized by irrationality, purity, and vitality. Differently stated, nature functions as a cultural construct of anti-culture, providing an escape from the confines of culture in the sense of civilization, but does not entirely evade the conceptual framework inherent to the social, discursive formation of human ideas. This intermingling relationship between nature and culture is well illustrated in the example of urban parks. Parks are constructed as natural environments but literally and figuratively constructed by human cultural proc... ...el, B. and Cecil D. Elliott. Designing America Creating Urban Identity. in the altogether York Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1994.Groth, Paul. Vernacular Parks. Wrede and Adams 135-137.Jackson, John B. The Past and Future Park. Wrede and Adams 129-134Peck, Robert McCraken. The Museum that Never Was. Natural write up July 1994 62-7.Platt, Rutherford H. Conclusion in The Ecological City, Rutherford H. Platt, Rowan A. Rowntree and Pamela C. Muick, eds. Amherst The University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. Schultz, Stanley K. Constructing Urban Culture. Philadelphia Temple University Press, 1989.Schuyler, David. The New Urban Landscape. Baltimore The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.Wrede, Stuart and William Howard Adams, eds. Denatured Visions Landscape and Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York The Museum of Modern Art, 1991.

Passionate Learning :: Philosophy Psychology Education Essays

Passionate Learning To lack self-respect is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of each love or indifference.....It is the phenomenon sometimes called alienation from self. In its advanced stage, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something that we could say no without drowning in self-reproof is an idea alien to this game.-Joan Didion, On Self-RespectLast Spring, as part of a senior project, I took Tai Chi classes and researched how meditation is used in mind/body medicine. I read several books by doctors who use meditation as a form of healing, in stress-reduction clinics and as treatment for community suffering from severe disoblige and panic dis modulates. One doctor in particular, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn teaches a method he calls mindfulness, in which he has his patients meditate in order to achieve total mind/body awargonness. Zinn instructs patients to focus on their pain and to become aware of it. This often helps them realize tha t they can reside with their pain. No pain is too extreme, he says, in the same way that no emotion is a wrong emotion. Awareness is the only absolute, and the only thing that allows people to live in the moment. Not live for the moment, but live in the moment.I left that project feeling extremely aware and extremely at peace. subsequently three years of struggling to find answers, happiness, and a sense of purpose, I began to appreciate my present state of mind. I began to revel in the struggle, confusion, and push of non knowing. And as I approached graduation, my high school experience suddenly made sense to me. I understood life as a system of games. juicy school was simply one of them. I came to realize that playing games was both understandable and necessary as long as we are aware that we are playing them. I realized that a major struggle throughout high school had been my struggle to resist playing its game. I spent my three years at boarding school governed by my passi ons rather than playing by the rules of the institution. And in refusing to play by its rules, I made it increasingly more difficult for me to function within its realm.By rules, I do not mean the actual dos and donts, but rather, I am referring to the prompts the school sets up in order to fulfill its goals as an academic institution.