Thinking of social factors in park design

In the last studio of this semester, we discussed the social factors that should be considered in landscape design and how to define “justice” in the design. This cannot help but remind me of my reading about Morningside Park. The background of this park is closely related to a word called “green justice”. Therefore, in this article, I would like to introduce the park.

If architecture is a city’s skeleton, then the landscape is like its blood vessels. In some way, landscape can sew together urban fabric and bridge the city’s “faults.” It can not only reinvigorate communities, but also promote social justice. Some landscapes, however, will face great social resistance in the planning process or in the early stages of construction. These obstacles may lead to a negative effect to the landscape; thus, it may lose its vitality, becoming a barrier in the city.

Morningside Park is a typical park in this respect. If we look back on the history of this area, it is located on a site under the influence of two different cultures because of the early days of Dutch colonization. From a geographical point of view, a huge bluff stretches across the center of the plot, dividing it into two heterogeneous spaces — the higher space and the lower space. From the perspective of social events, during the War of 1812, several blockhouse fortifications were built in the area. The first such fort was built in what is now Central Park, and three other blockhouses numbered 2, 3, and 4 were erected within present-day Morningside Park. From the perspective of the construction process, the Great Depression divided the park’s construction stage into two huge periods of time; fourteen years elapsed between the end of the first phase and the beginning of the second phase.

After the completion of the park, however, the increasing racial conflicts turned the park into a barrier between communities. The northward movement of the black community has resulted in changes to the structure of New York residents, especially in the communities near Morningside Park. The difference in ethnic distribution between the two communities (Morningside Heights has more white people, and Central Harlem has more black people) has made Morningside a barrier between the communities.

Later, with the passage of time, the rise of affirmative action, various social movements, and social organizations actively promoting Morningside Park to the society, plans were made to re-build the park. The park began to regain vitality, which, in turn, promoted itself to transform from a barrier into a corridor among urban communities.

The mission of a city park should be to provide more leisure space for citizens inhabiting the cold and hard architectural complexes. It should also foster a relationship with the neighborhood, just as I stated at the beginning, to become the lifeline of maintaining and connecting the city. I think the value of Morningside Park is providing a model for the construction of an urban park over a complex bluff. If we look at the park in the green space of the whole city, it can become a system with Riverside Park and Central Park, each park complementing the others in terms of functions and spatial organization, making Morningside an integral part of New York’s green space system.