Citation

Kosnoski J. Space Cult. 2011; 14(1): 51-66.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2011, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/1206331210389268

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This article examines how Frederick Law Olmsted’s parks, especially Prospect Park in Brooklyn, can be thought of as spatial technologies that mediate between individuals and their urban environment to foster an open, creative, and democratic relationship with the differences of their fellow city dwellers. The park accomplishes this spatially by encouraging citizens to journey through distinct geographies that enable associational styles Olmsted calls the "neighborly" and the "gregarious." Through alternating between environments conducive to intimate, reassuring neighborly groupings and exciting, superficial, gregarious interaction, the park user encounters others within distinct spatial and temporal qualities that allow them to appreciate otherness without being overwhelmed by it. The spatial techniques derived from Olmsted’s work challenge accounts in political theory and urban planning that contend free movement through cities encourages tolerance and fluid identities and instead contends that structured, mediating spatial structures might be necessary to facilitate the cultivation of such characteristics.