The Death of the Olmstedian Vision of Public Space

Abstract

Privatization: An End to the Parks and Recreation Profession Know it, the title of an article by Gary Lane ( 1997) , practitioner in the public sector, is plea for and strategy by which public parks and departments can fend off private sector entrees to more (a word that will return to presently) deliver parks and services to the general citizenry. Lane's strategy is not defense of public parks and service delivery, but vision that operationally privatize the same. Or, Lane ( 1997) stated it: we must . . . operate our leisure time services [public sector] (p. 8). Lane (1997) transform public parks and service delivery by requiring its practitioners to have at minimum a minor in . . .attend seminars and marketing conferences, become members of the chamber of commerce, [and] become accomplished salespersons (pp. 8; 15). Further, he suggested that recreation advisory boards be discarded and replaced with business advisory councils (Lane, 1997, p. 15). Lane (1997) understood the nature of advice the council might impart, he recognized that governments privatize as means to decrease their immense payrolls, utilities, high union scale wages and (p. 8). Lane treats these worker losses benignly, while Rosenzweig and Blackmar (1992), in their voluminous history of Central Park, understood that privatization of New York City's Department of Parks and Recreation programs and services, would [result in] reduced wages and benefits, thus eroding the major gains that unionized park workers had won in the post war years (p. 508) . The decisions advisory council makes narrow citizen economic rights by narrowing the participant base and adversely impacting employee payroll and benefits and delimit political actions to the constituency. This is one aspect of the privatization process Lane is proffering-the attenuation of the democratic process. Although Lane does not explicitly extol democracy's diminution, others do. Drawing his inspiration from the Disney and MacDonald's Corporations, Joseph Curtis (1990) effusively endorses contracting out public parks and services mechanism whose salutary value lies in its ability to preempt public involvement in the establishment of their own (public) parks and policy. It remove, to great extent, recreation's future development from the foibles and unpredictability of local and regional political elections, candidates' muddling of policies and philosophies, citizen anti-tax rebellions, and the twoto four-year administrative upheavals new men and women are periodically elected to public office . . . The prime advantage of the McRec concept is the fact that once the decision to enter such contract is made by the local agency or municipality, all details of staff, program, color, quality, new facilities, and so forth be in the hands of career professionals and specialists. Continued affirmation of the contract assure that this same high professional quality and effectiveness be maintained consistently, despite local political skirmishes and firefights that might occur. (p. 57) Although Curtis does not use the very word, indeed, today's privatization mantra, efficiency, which recommends privatization over public sector delivery of services, can glean from his and Lane's arguments the central tenants of what is meant by the of privatization. Not only does privatization cut costs by curtailing employee rights and benefits, downsizing personnel and relying on more temporary staff, it downsizes democracy, the very process by which employee and citizen rights can be protected. Stated more directly, the most attractive feature of privatized efficiency is its ability to rid service delivery of the inefficiency of democracy. But it is the socalled inefficiency of democracy-debate and dialogue regarding social policy-in which inheres the potentiality for the creation of civic bond, the lost community that left, fight and center acknowledge having been lost. …