Design History of 19th-Century Urban Public Parks

Abstract

The Enlightenment engendered the spread of the public parks’ movement in Western Europe. Hirschfeld’s book on garden art provided the theoretical foundation and summarised the services the urban public parks can offer. The book advises all ‘wise civic governments’ to create public parks for the benefit of the people. Garden design history provides an extensive documentation of public parks as a pioneering European initiative. However, Central European public parks are not widely known internationally, although some of them are, arguably, important precursors of urban landscape architecture. This chapter concentrates on the Central-European capitals of Vienna, Budapest, and Ljubljana, where the development of urban parks shows a close correlation because of their shared historic context. The cultural, social, urban, and garden art aspects construct an appropriate research approach for the historic development of urban parks. The way in which citizens and governments treat their parks refer to the responsibilities of both civil society and urban policymakers. European urban public parks embody the contemporary concept of heritage, since they are designed green spaces, ecosystems, unique living monuments with a spiritual and aesthetic identity as well as the living manifestation of the relation between nature and society.