Land and Leisure

Concepts and Methods in Outdoor Recreation

Carlton S. Van Doren, George B. Priddle, John E. Lewis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429649448
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1974. Leisure has come to be a vital force in our lives, a part of self-discovery, essential for our well-being. With increased amounts of leisure time, there has been rapid growth in the demand for diverse recreational facilities and their subsequent overuse. With this in mind, it is clear why the planning, managing and administration of recreational resources, particularly in urban areas, is of personal interest to everyone.

Land and Leisure introduces the student to all aspects of recreational land use - spatial, economic, behavioural and physical. This second edition is designed to demonstrate some of the basic up-to-date ideas and issues of the last decade and a half that have been influential in shaping decisions, and is concerned both with urban recreation and the uses of resources within metropolitan areas and with the role of the private sector in providing facilities. The book is divided into five parts with discussions ranging over topics such as the individual's recreational needs, recreational land-use evaluation, regional planning and the problems of decision-making and the provision of recreational resources. Its interdisciplinary approach will enable students to understand the problems, concepts, methods and approaches helpful in furthering and integrating their knowledge of recreational resources.

Part One

RECREATION, CHANGING SOCIAL VALUES & ASSESSMENT

OVERVIEW

An underlying issue of all recreation provision is its social value and how we assess our ability to provide it. The chapters in part 1 concentrate on the issues and processes at work within our recreation system and society. It stimulates the reader by posing questions about recreation/leisure in a contemporary context. Then the parts that follow provide the means to answer some of the questions posed.

Although since World War II and particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, heightened environmental interest and a vocal populace have been of significant benefit to the recreation and parks movement, professionals have been at times slow to respond to many social changes occurring in contemporary American society. Chapter 1 proposes a plan to develop a more responsive and humanistic approach as a basis to improve leisure services. Then, in order to provide a dynamic framework to assist us in understanding recreation/leisure values and behavior, chapter 2 gives descriptive insights as to how individuals view leisure at various stages in the life cycle.

A “systematic” approach to planning for recreation appears in chapter 3. This discussion helps us begin to answer questions concerning the total recreation system and how facts and values can be analyzed as part of the planning process. Finally, the last chapter, which is more factual and technical than the others, cogently poses some basic questions concerning urban recreation needs, and it reviews three techniques for assessing recreation.

1

CHAPTER

FUTURE PERSPECTIVES

David E. Gray

Seymour Greben

When this article first appeared in 1974, its candid assessment of the recreation and parks movement in the United States was intended to provoke introspection within the profession. Here it serves as an excellent introduction to this volume by providing an historical overview of urban recreation, commentary on its present, changing status, and speculation for its future. Though directed at the movement in the United States, the appraisal by David Gray and Seymour Greben has implications for recreation and park professionals and students everywhere.

YESTERDAY

[The United States in the 1970s] is, admittedly, an America which is perceived quite differently from [that] of 1900 by its citizens and by people around the world. It is a country that no longer is preeminently shaped by the Frederick Jackson Turner vision of a never-ending physical or geographical frontier. What remains of that type of frontier is, in the main, peripheral to the mainstream of America, and no amount of nostalgic yearning for the past in the form of citing moon, space, and undersea exploration can obliterate the reality that if America is confronted today with frontiers of preeminent consequence, they are social frontiers—not geographical ones.

In the 1930s America suffered a debilitating economic depression. A combination of war and near-war and tinkering with the country’s free enterprise, sometime Keynesian economic system has since dimmed the memory of that horrible, degrading period by providing a kind of inflationary near-prosperity for a relatively large percentage of the people. (This should not be read as a walking away from the truth of large, continuing poverty pockets in the populace, [discussed below].) Only the “old” people in our society still remember the Great Depression, and even they no longer make major lifestyle decisions on the basis of those memories. If the Great Depression of the 1930s is of importance today, it is probably so for two primary reasons:

1. Having experienced it, or not having experienced it, represents one of the consequential symbols of the generation gap.

2. The depression period marked the beginning of a realization that government can, and will, play a major role in confronting the chronic problems of specifically identifiable groups within our midst. Government became involved with social reality—and quite definitely will remain involved in spite of temporal rhetoric … to the contrary.

Reprinted from Parks and Recreation, July 1974, pp. 26–33; 47–56, by permission of the National Recreation and Parks Association and the authors.

This paper was originally addressed to members of the recreation and park movement and written at the suggestion of the General Council of the National Recreation and Park Association.

Since the depression [the United States] has experienced war and near-war as a way of life; and as a by-product (fringe benefit?) the economy has received continuing, substantial governmental stimulus and control. [The United States] has been clearly established as a major world power with all the attendant pragmatism, self-righteousness, and virtues that are bequeathed to nations of this status. We have sallied forth from isolation to involvement in everyone’s affairs throughout the world, and now we. are flirting again with a probably unattainable goal of semi-isolation. We have begun to explore the solar system and will continue to do so, and we have become somewhat titillated with the bottom of the sea. Anticommunism has become an obsession which, unfortunately, is not usually counterbalanced by pro- anything of substance. Now we are doing business with the “worst” Communists—and we are pleased about it.

The social historians say that we have been involved with things and accumulation, not ideas or matters of the spirit. Those of us who are forty and [over] are mystified and often angry with those who do not seem to understand and appreciate what we feel we have accomplished. Just when we start to feel proud, they “kick us in the ass” (that is how they would say it), and they say we are selfish, self-centered, and inconsistent.

It is the they that may be a dominant theme of [the 1970s] and of the future; they are all the people [of the United States] who no longer can be fitted under the traditional umbrella of American majority opinion and culture, the ones who have been shaking us and threatening us and challenging us and changing us … [in the recent past].

[Currently] in America, we are visibly affected by the reality of old people, hippies, blacks, teenagers, women, American Indians, migrant poor, Chicanos. It is true that … it is becoming stylish to say that the antiwar movement, the youth movement, and the women’s rights movement, as examples, are all passing fancies. They have won no elections, they have had no long-term effect on our national thought process, and they will pass on like dance marathons, goldfish swallowing, green stamps, and other fads.

This is patent nonsense, a kind of wishful thinking to go back to a stability that never really existed. The “movements” which we have experienced—and they can all be recognized as social movements—have truly revolutionized society; they have brought about profound, lasting change and they continue today. Their rhetoric and their style have infuriated us at times, but their noise and fervor must not cause us to lose sight of their deep significance. Who can deny the reality and permanent significance of these changes?

1. Government can no longer … dictate what is right and desirable. Government, at all levels, is absolutely dependent upon maximum citizen participation if it is to succeed in accomplishing the classical functions of a democratic government.

2. Ethnic, religious, and other minority cultures must participate equally in the mainstream of life. Abject, unadulterated bigotry cannot and will not be tolerated, legally or socially, and the more socially sophisticated forms of intolerance are passing from the scene.

3. No public institution can function on the basis of a dual standard; i.e., this is what we say we stand for, but it has no relationship with the way we operate (e.g., [U.S.] colleges and universities teaching about democracy but, in the minds of their students and faculty, functioning as an oligarchy, or worse, a dictatorship).

4. No longer can industry or government or individuals plunder the physical environment in the names of development and progress and growth. The new laws that are now on the books—and, more important, the attitudes of our people—will simply not allow for further despoiling of the environment. Perhaps the most astounding reality [today] is that somehow industry does accommodate itself to newly formulated controls which protect the environment. Industry continues to survive in spite of new zoning laws and legislation which control utility placement, billboards, and signs and which establish standards for open space and park dedication and even [in spite of enacted] … laws say what can be developed when.

5. [In the United States] our conscious and acknowledged attitudes toward social behavior, particularly relationships between the sexes, have taken a whole new dimension, perhaps most typified by a beginning of a diminishing of hypocrisy. Many of us would disagree as to which of the many changes in this category is most significant and lasting, but the changes are real and positive. They have been inspired largely by young people’s insistence on honesty and acknowledgement of what is real. Again, this is not to be confused by the distraction of style and rhetoric—or four-letter words—when the main value is one of shock therapy.

6. We must recognize that to be old or to be a female in [U.S.] society provides a separate experience, a separate environment from all who are not old or female. We must recognize that the old and the female (and how many other groups?) will no longer allow themselves to be despised or ignored or legislated against.

7. The majority culture must recognize that the job of creating a healthy society requires a conscious and ethical responsibility to share with all of the minority cultures the equal opportunity to participate in the mainstream.

This, then, is a partial, selected view of [the United States in the 1970s], the America in which the recreation and park profession functions and serves. [As professionals], our task now is to attempt to define … the state … of the recreation and park movement today, so that we can evaluate our potential to provide productive services to the [United States] which will emerge [at the turn of the century].

TODAY

Unfortunately, even as late as [the 1970s], recreation and parks [professionals] attempt to remain all things to all people. We have many spiritual parents, and perhaps our most.honorable parentage stems from the fact that some of the thinkers who caused us to come into existence conceptualized our role as a part of the total quest for the “good life.” Early progressive movements in [the United States]—the historically significant ones that dealt with pure food and drug laws, working conditions, and humanized immigration laws—also paid attention to protection of natural resources and productive use of leisure time. Since early in the twentieth century, these recreation and park issues have been a part of the total progressive movement and ethic in the United States. As a result, government throughout the United States has come to accept recreation and parks as a basic in the list of services which citizens should receive; and all facets of local government—city, county, and special purpose district—share the responsibility for the function.

With this acceptance has come the development of a formalized recreation and park movement which has tended to emulate other governmental services in formulating goals, organizational patterns, and symbols of professionalism. Nationally known leaders have emerged (at least they are nationally known in our recreation and park world); and, to simplify communication and understanding in our world, we have created our version of a party line complete with words and phrases defined with consistent meaning by most of our colleagues. We have, in the best traditions of our country, formed a variety of different professional groups based upon political subdivision, geographic regions, specialized interest, and profession. And we attempt regularly to evaluate ourselves.

Therefore, in attempting to chronicle what we might aspire to in the … next thirty years for recreation and parks, it would seem reasonable to attempt to evaluate the recreation and park movement today. How we have functioned historically, our perceptions of the world around us, should give reasonable insight into what might be expected in the future.

Unfortunately, based upon a measurement of leadership in social movements, there is not much reason for optimism. This is not to say that the recreation and park movement has not made important contributions to the well-being of [the United States] or that certain individuals within the movement have not made singularly brilliant contributions which are viewed in an aura of great public acceptance. Rather, what we are saying is that our contribution has been somewhat minimal in terms of providing leadership for the main current of social progress in [the United States] and somewhat marginal as to where the action is.

… [I]n terms of what is important in our world (achievements, problems, etc.), it appears that we are not yet in the foreground of dynamic change and that typically we have been followers, not leaders. How do we arrive at this conclusion?

1. In most [U.S.] cities, publicly supported recreation and park budgets are an embarrassingly small portion of the total—at a time when many, perhaps most, [persons in the United States] would agree that the dual tasks of preserving and protecting the physical environment and providing constructive, useful leisure time experiences rise to the top of our national list of needs. This conceivably results from our own inability to define our role beyond narrow, often parochial boundaries.

2. In most [U.S.] cities, it is difficult to identify any great overall community interest and knowledge [of the recreation and parks] movement or of our local ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Contents
• Introduction to the Second Edition
• Part One Recreation, Changing Social Values & Assessment
• Part Two Resource Utilization: Planning & Management
• Part Three Methods of Recreation Use Evaluation
• Part Four Provision of Resources: Public & Private
• Part Five Recreation, Resources & Decisions
• General Reading and Bibliographies