Open Space and Parks

History of Open Space and Urban Housing

More than 50% of the worldwide human population resides in cities. Urbanization and population concentration in the United States is typical of global trends and historic settlement patterns. Early America was an agrarian culture, with small settlements and farms interspersed across the landscape. Industrialization promoted both expansion of settlements across the continent and ever greater population concentration in cities. By the end of the 19th century, the entire nation was effectively settled. The 1920 Census was the first to recognize that the United States had become a majority urbanized country; today, more than 80% of U.S. citizens reside in urbanized areas.

Residential land uses are the most extensive land cover type within urbanized areas and range in density from high-rise multifamily buildings to single-family homes in urban neighborhoods or suburbs. Visionary urban planners have long recognized the benefits of having parks and open space integrated with housing. In the late 19th century, the success of New York's Central Park (codesigned by Frederick Law Olmsted) launched the design of comprehensive parks and open space systems across North American cities (such as Boston's Emerald Necklace). In the early 20th century, proponents of the garden city and city beautiful movements used formal, symmetrical layouts of parks, open spaces, and monuments to redevelop and beautify urban areas. Later models such as Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City proposed suburban housing patterns using parks and open space as organizing elements.

Each of these landmark integrations of built and green space systems pursued both aesthetic and social reform goals. Advocates claimed that the experience of refined nature would encourage moral and civic virtues in the urban masses. Early city beautification programs thus aimed to increase quality of life and generate a more harmonious social order within the crowded housing that emerged during industrialization.

Mid-century planned cities and “new towns” intentionally incorporated open space. Chandigarh, India, and Reston, Virginia, were built in the 1960s based on post–World War II planning principles. As globally recognized models of development, each includes neighborhood-based parks, gardens, tree-lined avenues, and intertwining greenbelts. Since the 1980s, new urbanism proponents have urged creation and restoration of walkable, transit-oriented, compact, mixed-use communities modeled after pre-automobile towns. This urban form includes accessible public spaces that are framed by environmentally sustainable elements, such as bioregional landscape design and connected regional open space.

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