The European City and Green Space

London, Stockholm, Helsinki and St Petersburg, 1850–2000

Peter Clark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754654292
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351890359
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Recent years have seen sustained public debate and controversy over the 'greening' of European cities, associated with the environmental movement, pressures of urban redevelopment, and the promotional strategies of cities competing in a global market. But the European debate over urban green space has a long history dating back to Victorian concerns for the 'green lungs' of the city to combat the health and social problems caused by rapid population and industrial growth. This book explores the multiplicity of green space developments in the modern city - ranging over parks and commons, garden suburbs and the cities in the park, allotment gardens, green belts and national urban parks. It is concerned not only with the different types of green space but the many influences shaping their evolution, from international planning ideas, to the rise of modern-day sport and leisure, and the effects of the transport revolution. No less vital in this story is the interaction of the many actors involved in the often fractious political process of creating green spaces - architects and planners, politicians, developers and other businessmen, NGOs and local residents. This volume is particularly concerned with contexts: how international planning ideas are transmitted and adapted in different European cities; how the construction of green space is affected by local power structures and relationships; and how ordinary people perceive and use green spaces, quite often at variance with official designs. The European City and Green Space looks at these and other issues through the prism of four metropoles - London, Stockholm, Helsinki and St Petersburg. All represent different types of North European city, yet each has experienced distinctive economic, political and cultural trajectories, whilst also facing powerful challenges and problems of similar kinds with regard to green space. This volume examines how each has responded to them and what patterns emerge.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Peter Clark and Jussi S. Jauhiainen

The ‘greening’ of European cities has been one of the most important, widespread and controversial of modern urban developments. Notions of the ‘green’ city go back at least to the seventeenth century, when Thomas Fuller described the English provincial town of Norwich as ‘either a city in an orchard or an orchard in a city, so equally are houses and trees blended in it’. But it was in the nineteenth century that references to green space in the urban context multiplied. The need for ‘zones of open country’ around London was mentioned in the 1820s and ‘green corridors’ in the 1880s, and similar phrases were picked up and disseminated in other cities and towns across the continent.¹ Increasingly, the concern was less with natural open space, which was increasingly built over and developed, than with artificial or planned open space. In the 1920s London County Council published a map of open spaces in the capital, including parks and sports grounds, and marked them all in green. However, the notion of an all-embracing urban green space appears to have emerged after the Second World War.²

Controversy over the creation, redevelopment and conflicting uses of green space has become a recurrent feature of urban public debate. There were protests over the squares, parks and commons in London before and after the First World War. There were tensions over the management of garden suburbs in Stockholm during the inter-war period, and over the planned rebuilding of Käpylä in Helsinki in the 1960s. Street demonstrations occurred at Kungsträdgården park in Stockholm in the early 1970s, and there has been controversy over the Green Belt around London throughout the post-war era. Though public discussion was largely absent in St Petersburg/Leningrad in the Soviet era, there was still considerable party debate about the purpose of open spaces in the city.³ In the contemporary era, green space issues remain a vital theme in discourses about urban planning, the global city, and the environmentally sustainable city.⁴

What is new and important about this book is that while we consider the different forms of open space development, we are, above all, trying to look at the evolution of metropolitan green space in aggregate, to develop, however tentatively, some typology of green space and to see how the varied elements interact and network. The growing conceptualisation of green space in all its complexity is partly a function of the prominence given to it in public and planning debates, and also due to heightened environmental consciousness and lobbying for better environmental quality and maintenance of ecological systems in cities. But it is also promoted by other factors, including the widening consumption of green space in the city, as transport advances along with suburbanisation encourage town-dwellers to travel further and make use of a greater range of urban spaces. Indirectly at least, this helps to create a metropolitan ‘market’ in open space with some types becoming less attractive than others, having repercussions in turn for urban policy.

‘Green space’, of course, is not always perfectly green: sometimes it is a frozen grey or muddy brown or wintry white, especially in Nordic countries. But it is ubiquitous even in the biggest city. For we must remember not only the parks and squares, garden suburbs and green belts which have attracted most attention from historians and others, but also the infinite multitude of churchyards, cemeteries, hospital grounds, sports and school grounds, river-banks and little strips of empty land at the end of streets, as well as the fields and woodland on the edges of the invading metropolis. Rivers, sea-edges and offshore islands, sometimes described as blue space, also need to be taken into the equation.⁵ Ecologically, all these different elements may link with the myriad of domestic gardens, quintessential private space, to form networks of green space across the urban landscape. With the rise of agro-industries and the ‘de-greening of the countryside’ in the late twentieth century, urban and suburban green spaces are increasingly recognised as important ecosystems on a local scale, vital refugia for indigenous plants and animals. Development processes in the contemporary context of urban green spaces have multiple directions. On the one hand, there is the shrinking and destruction of green space, both natural and otherwise, as non-built-up areas are converted into a built environment. This is linked to the internal and external densification of urban regions. At the same time, there are processes by which the amount of green space is increased through the conversion of former industrial sites into housing areas interleaved with parks (often on the urban waterfront), and through the cleaning-up of polluted land and conversion to parks and the like.⁶

Analysis of the development of urban green space as a whole is essential not only for illuminating the physical, social and ecological changes in European cities. Such work can also help us understand the way that cities interact – emulating, competing and networking – with one another. Though historians have for many years studied the evolving commercial and financial relationships of cities – from the age of the great medieval fairs to modern stock exchanges – much less research has been done until recently on the process of cultural networking, as big cities internationalise in the contemporary world.⁷ One of the concerns of this book is how ideas and policies on the different forms of green space as well as the wider notion get exchanged between different European cities: the channels of transmission, the chronology of diffusion, and their impact. The theme can thus offer a window to understanding the formation and working of a more integrated and international urban system in Europe during the modern and contemporary period.

All urban change is negotiated and ideas and policies, whether international or not, are constantly adapted, refined and reformulated in different time and space contexts. Ideology is almost always transformed by political process and power relationships that determine the distribution of resources. The reception and implementation of new ideas and policies on green space is often the outcome of sustained and even fractious dialogue between city politicians, planning professionals and administrators, private developers, environmental organisations and engaged local householders. In a number of the chapters below, we shall see how that political process in different cities works, shaped by their distinctive economic and cultural landscapes and power structures. At the same time, the wider debate about green space, its uses and meaning, is not limited to the political and civil arena. Of vital importance is the wider public sphere, how ordinary local people understand and respond to green space, how they perceive and use it. Here we are not dealing with the relatively closed world of experts and policy-makers, lobby groups and administrators, but with the vast urban majority of citizen consumers. What do they make of it all? Once again, however, this is not a simple question. Uses and attitudes to green space may be affected by economic interest (propertied or property-less?), social class and gender, and also by life-cycle and change over time – not least because of the widening scope of choice of green spaces available in the city.

Fundamental then to our analysis are two general questions: how far is there a trend for European metropoles between 1850 and 2000 to converge in their policies and programmes of urban green space, that convergence affected by common challenges, by international planning and environmental ideas, and by the impact of intercity competition and emulation; and how far do we see a persistent level of local development, shaped by specific socio-economic contexts, institutional patterns and local demands?

In this book we seek to look at these and other issues through the prism of four Northern metropolitan cities: London, Stockholm, Helsinki and St Petersburg. All represent different types: London always in the first rank in the period 1850–2000, as an imperial and now (like Paris) a global city; Stockholm and Helsinki figure as medium-rank European capitals but the second a late developer, only becoming the capital of an independent state after 1917; and St Petersburg, a former capital city, which has spent much of its modern history under the Soviet system. As we shall see below, they have experienced quite distinctive economic, political and cultural trajectories. Yet they have often faced similar challenges and share at least some common features. All have been innovative cultural centres in their own countries and, in particular, they have been international gateways for new ideas and policies in the realm of green space. Important interactions and exchanges have occurred between the cities. London at least up to the Second World War was one of the most innovative and fertile cities in terms of generating green space ideas which were diffused across Northern Europe. Stockholm too had a significant international role during the 1930s and after the Second World War, influencing Helsinki, London and beyond. As well as its links with Stockholm, Helsinki enjoyed a historic cultural relationship with St Petersburg in the period before 1917 when the Finnish capital was part of the Russian empire. Thereafter St Petersburg (as Leningrad) went its own way in key respects, but Soviet-era policies on green space show more than a passing resemblance to those in the West.⁸

In this introduction we look first at evolving theories about green space, then at the broad urban trends, problems and resources of our cities. Finally, we explore some of the key themes framing the international and local development of urban green space, in relation to the detailed chapters that follow.

Theoretical perspectives

Historians have been rather slow to focus on environmental developments in the modern and contemporary city. There has been some discussion of the problems of pollution and waste disposal, and the impact of urbanisation on the countryside, but relatively little on changing ideas, policies and attitudes to green space.⁹ Admittedly, a great deal of often detailed work has been done by urban historians on public parks and boulevards and by planning historians on the Garden City movement in Britain and its many international offshoots.¹⁰ But there has been only limited discussion of post-Second World War ideas and policies and almost no attempt to relate different ideas and initiatives together to provide a coherent discussion of the evolution of urban green space as a whole, whether from a national or comparative perspective. No less striking is the absence of a theoretical perspective on urban space.

In contrast, geographers have been more adventurous in their formulation of ideas and theories, raising intriguing questions about the competing and complementary forces conn...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The European City and Green Space
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• General Editors’ Preface
• Plates
• Figures
• Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 London and green space, 1850–2000: an introduction
• 3 The social construction of green space in London prior to the Second World War
• 4 Politics, ideology and the issue of open space in London, 1939–2000
• 5 Stockholm and green space, 1850–2000: an introduction
• 6 Stockholm’s urban parks: meeting places and social contexts from 1860 to 1930
• 7 The social park: Stockholm, 1900–1939
• 8 The Stockholm Style: a model for the building of the city in parks, 1930s–1960s
• 9 The formation of National Urban Parks: a Nordic contribution to sustainable development?
• 10 Helsinki and green space, 1850–2000: an introduction
• 11 The role of nature in the city: green space in Helsinki, 1917–60
• 12 Politicians, professionals and ‘publics’: conflicts over green space in Helsinki, c. 1950–2000
• 13 The seasonality of green space: the case of Uutela, Helsinki, c. 2000
• 14 St Petersburg and green space, 1850–2000: an introduction
• 15 St Petersburg’s parks and gardens, 1850–1917
• 16 Red parks: green space in Leningrad, 1917–1990
• Index