Park Movement Research Articles

Kardeş Türküler as ‘art action’: The multiple cultural heritages of Anatolia

Abstract This article focuses on Kardeş Türküler, a band that reflects the multiple cultural heritages of Anatolia in its concerts and albums. Kardeş Türküler has taken a unique stance in choosing to express itself from a culturally pluralistic perspective rather than following a single language or identity. Referring to Kardeş Türküler as ‘art action’, and utilising the non-reductive methods of John Street that focus on the two-way interaction between music and politics, I conducted in-depth interviews in 2017, 2020 and 2021 with the core members and the former coach of the group regarding its intellectual roots and internal modus operandi. There are three main reasons for Kardeş Türküler's deep engagement with music as protest: being against the cultural–artistic policies of the Republican period; the political meaning of making multilingual music in Turkiye; and Kardeş Türküler's engagement with post-neoliberal street protests such as the Gezi Park movement.

The Power of Scenery: Frederick Law Olmsted and the Origin of the National Parks by Dennis Drabelle (review)

Reviewed by: The Power of Scenery: Frederick Law Olmsted and the Origin of the National Parks by Dennis Drabelle John Sandlos Drabelle, Dennis–The Power of Scenery: Frederick Law Olmsted and the Origin of the National Parks. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. 272 p. Frederick Law Olmsted may not be a household name in North America, but thousands of people are exposed to the footprint of his ideas about landscape and environment in city parks throughout the continent. Most famous as the designer of New York’s Central Park, Olmsted established a blueprint for city parks that brought nature to the urban core, preserving remnant woodlands, establishing cultivated plots of vegetation that were appropriate to the surrounding landscape, and above all else, creating spaces that were open to an urban public craving a natural oasis from the surrounding built environment. Through the direct influence of Olmsted’s landscape architectural firm, or many of his acolytes who trained there, literally hundreds of urban parks in North America have incorporated his key design principles. Even my somewhat remote hometown of St. John’s, Newfoundland, hosts the very “Olmstedian” Bowering Park (designed in part by Canadian devotee Frederick Todd), which features lazy winding pathways, rustic pavilions, a curvy shoreline enclosing a bucolic duck pond, and a mix of gardens, fields, and forests that evoke a stroll through the countryside. If these city parks seem a far cry from big wild spaces, Dennis Drabelle’s The Power of Scenery makes a case for including Olmsted in the pantheon of conservation heroes—among them, Henry David Thoreau, George Catlin, and John Muir—who originally developed the idea of the national park. To make this argument, Drabelle focuses on Olmsted’s brief residency (1863–1965) in California as manager of the unsuccessful Mariposa gold mining venture. Here, he was appointed a commissioner of the Yosemite Valley land grant (which first designated the land a public reserve), penning a report on the Yosemite Valley that advocated managing the park along fairly strict preservationist lines, welcoming visitors to appreciate the natural beauty of the place but restricting the kind of commercial developments that had, according to Olmsted, defiled Niagara Falls. The report also called for an appropriation of funds from the state government to fund at least [End Page 209] some infrastructure for the newly envisioned Yosemite Park, but several other commissioners balked at the suggestion and urged the state governor to bury the report. Despite such suppression, Drabelle traces the dissemination of Olmsted’s ideas on the public preservation of natural reserves through the writer Samuel Bowles, who published sections of the Yosemite document in a popular book, Across the Continent, and advocated for the protection of Yosemite and Yellowstone region. According to Drabelle, then, one can follow a direct line from Olmsted’s visionary report to the creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872, Yosemite’s eventual designation as a national park in 1890, and the general promulgation of the national park ideal throughout the United States, Canada, and eventually the globe. Drabelle’s book will certainly be of great interest to anybody interested in the origins of the national parks. With vivid and lively prose, he skillfully weaves a portrait of the intellectual milieu that generated the national park movement, including America’s inferiority complex with respect to the great cultural monuments and cities of Europe (and hence the desire to create monuments out of nature), the growing aesthetic veneration of the sublime mountainous landscapes of the West, and the desire to retain public ownership of natural wonders as a hedge against their commercialization. Across the Continent succeeds at capturing the passion of the early national park advocates, mobilizing from a wealth of sources the words, deeds, and passions of the early wilderness preservation movement. Drabelle is somewhat less successful at putting Olmsted at the centre of this narrative. Much of the book’s storyline focuses intently on other aspects of Olmsted’s career: the early days designing Central Park, and later projects such as the creation of park landscapes at Niagara Falls and the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina, all somewhat peripheral to his work on the national parks. Indeed, Olmsted...

One movement, three clusters: the national parks movement in England and Wales, 1929-1949

ABSTRACT The history of the national parks movement in England and Wales culminated in the passing of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act in 1949. Many constituent bodies were, however, dissatisfied with the administrative arrangements in the new National Parks. To explain this inconsistency, this article seeks to understand the national parks movement as a heterogenous network of loosely affiliated civil society organisations. The movement consisted of three separate clusters, each with its own approach to, definitions and expectations of national parks. These clusters emphasised the aspects of planning and rural preservation, scientific interests and nature preservation, and open-air recreation, respectively. They first joined forces in 1929, when the government appointed the first National Park Committee. Different core organisations led the movement at different stages, forming different coalitions and committees, re-defining the character of the national parks movement and its public and political profile in the process. The scientific and nature preservation cluster was the most successful after abandoning the other two clusters after 1945. This article offers a new interpretation of the history of the national parks movement in England and Wales as a highly contentious and internally divergent social movement.

Gezi Park analysis as an example of social movement

Abstract This article aims to analyze the Gezi Park social movement, which started in Istanbul in 2013 and spread all over Turkey in a short time, in the context of class dynamics. In this context, firstly, the adequacy of examining the Gezi Park movement within the scope of new social movements will Gezi Park analysis as an example of social movement be emphasized. Secondly, the study will attempt to establish an alternative critical approach based on class. With this approach, class dynamics of the Gezi Park movement will be sought under the titles of historicity, antagonism, and holism.

A U-Turn to the Future: Sustainable Urban Mobility since 1850 ed. by Martin Emanuel et al. (review).

Reviewed by: A U-Turn to the Future: Sustainable Urban Mobility since 1850 ed. by Martin Emanuel et al. Hans-Liudger Dienel (bio) A U-Turn to the Future: Sustainable Urban Mobility since 1850 by Martin Emanuel, Frank Schipper, and Ruth Oldenziel. New York: Berghahn, 2020. Pp. 340. This anthology aims at nothing less than summing up many years of research on the history of sustainable urban mobility since 1850, within the T2M (International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility) and ToE (Tensions of Europe Network). It makes use of historical studies on the actual transformation toward more sustainable urban mobilities, thus breathing the spirit of the "Eindhoven School" into retrospective technology assessment (Johan Schot). The collected volume is divided into four sections, each with three chapters. A total of eighteen authors contribute, and the editors are involved in half of the chapters. Section 1 analyzes why and how urban and transport planning became a profession and academic discipline in Western Europe and the United States, driven by associations, which pushed imaginaries of individual motorized transport systems. They became dominant against narratives of [End Page 872] public transport systems and individual nonmotorized transport like walking and cycling in the twentieth century. This section does not acknowledge the strong visions for public transport systems in the late nineteenth century. It does show that throughout the twentieth century, a lively minority in Western cities continued to favor public transport and an urban atmosphere based on walking and cycling. City governments were often more positive about walking and cycling than transport experts. Swiss cities with a direct democracy culture kept their streetcars to ensure a majority at the ballot box. Thus, the section implicitly advocates more power for elected city governments. Section 2 looks at the history of twentieth-century sustainable urban mobility and presents fascinating case studies of how pedestrians and cyclists managed to scramble through urban transport infrastructures that gave them increasingly less room to maneuver. All three chapters underline that official transport statistics throughout the twentieth century more or less ignored nonmotorized urban transport. The authors recommend using other sources, like diaries and street photos, to verify the quantity and quality of cycling and walking in cities. Section 3 goes one step further and analyzes where and how urban public transport, walking, and cycling prevailed. Socialist cities maintained robust public transport because they could not afford the imaginaries of the West, while their transport planners had already switched to Western models of urban mobility. Frank Schipper interprets the strong movement toward urban parks as what Elizabeth Shove calls "pockets of persistence," though the park movement fits nicely into the separation of urban functions in a Charter-of-Athens city. Martin Emanuel demonstrates through a case study in Stockholm how the urban scenario combining pedestrians, cyclists, and public transport survived on many European cities' main roads, unlike in North America's urban sprawl. Section 4 harvests recommendations for future history projects and urban policies. It calls for new data collection of sustainable urban mobilities, including sources other than official statistics. Mimi Sheller highlights that a sustainable mobility policy can enlarge the inequality between rich and poor in the city. She suggests even more radical concepts to overcome this struggle for mobility justice. So far, mainly middle-class actors support her vision. The book breathes the social movement spirit of sustainable urban mobilities and sees history as an ally to support these movements. A UTurn to the Future examines individual mobility and competing imaginaries of driving, cycling, and walking, not focusing on public transport. It was published just before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Two years on, the book's strong push toward further individualization of transport makes even more sense. Our cities need new infrastructures for individual [End Page 873] sustainable urban mobilities. I agree that this exploration of the past 170 years of cultural policies for sustainable urban mobilities serves as a good resource for the U-turn. Hans-Liudger Dienel Hans-Liudger Dienel is professor in Work, Technology, and Participation at Berlin University of Technology, where he chairs the Sustainable Mobility Management MBA program. Dienel was president of T2M (2008–14) and is editor...

GEZI PARK AS SPONTANEOUS DEVELOPMENT: RE-IMAGINING THE TURKISH PUBLIC

The subject of this paper is the Gezi Park movement that took place in the summer of 2013 in Turkey. Despite starting out as a peaceful protest      to stop the demolition of Gezi Park for the purposes of the “Taksim Pedestrianization Project”, the gatherings quickly became one of the biggest social movements to take place in Turkish history. People from all ages, classes and social groups came together in support, after government attempts to suppress the protest through brutal police actions garnered widespread criticism. Although the movement did not generate any immediate or drastic political change, it did leave a lasting effect on the Turkish public, especially because of the immense solidarity and social cohesion demonstrated by the participants. Hence, in this paper, I will argue that Gezi Park could be treated as an example of ‘spontaneous development’, an informal process through which the citizens of Turkey re-imagined the Turkish public and possibilities of modes of life within the state. Instrumental in this process was the long-lasting stratification of the Turkish public between the laicist, Kemalist ‘modernists’ and the Islamic, Erdoğan ‘conservatives’. I argue that in the context of a historical and current      repressive and silencing state, Turkish people constructed a Gezi community in direct opposition, in which social hierarchies were disbanded and freedom of speech was maintained as one of the highest values. By taking anthropological and developmental studies of the informal/formal sector dichotomy and their interrelation, I apply these understandings to the human development sector. Thus, I argue that informal modes of organization and maintenance of social cohesion can be treated as informal development, directly affecting people’s imaginations and actions, as well as a potential source of knowledge and inspiration for formal-sector development. In this sense, I employ Amartya Sen’s freedom-approach to development to demonstrate that freedom of expression played an instrumental role in the construction of this imagining. Further, I argue that despite theoretical limitations in social theory, ethnographic research and anthropological studies can be useful in the application of informal sector knowledge to formal development strategies.

Back of Beyond: A Horace Kephart BiographyHorace Kephart: Writings

Back of Beyond: A Horace Kephart BiographyHorace Kephart: Writings

Making the People’s landscape: Landscape ideals, collective labour, and the People’s parks (Folkets Parker) movement in Sweden, 1891-present

Beginning in the 1890s, workers’ associations and social-democratic activists in Sweden developed a series of People’s Parks (Folketsparker) that extended across the length and breadth of the country. By the the mid-twentieth century, nearly every city, town, and village boasted its own People’s Park. Built for relaxation and recreation, as well as for political agitation, Folketsparker also represented a significant expropriation and transformation of bourgeois landscape ideals and in the process became places where a new, working class-based folk, or people, could come to be. This paper traces the production of Folketsparker as landscape, focusing on the ways in which working people reworked landscape ideals in order to contest bourgeois constructions of Swedish national identity, while asserting their own power to shape that identity. We argue that working people traded in, and transformed, two landscape ideas – one rooted in bourgeois notions of the rural idyll and the other rooted in an older more specifically Scandinavian tradition of landscape as a shaped space belonging to those who shaped it. But we also show how, as the social-democratic state consolidated its hegemony in the middle-twentieth century, the underlying material basis for shaping the parks as landscape was transformed. Folketsparker became places primarily for recreation and entertainment and their status as shaped spaces that shaped identity faded.

Keeping it peaceful: Twitter and the Gezi Park movement

Over the last decade, social media platforms have become the leading communication tools for activists and protesters all over the world. Understanding protesters’ motivations and reasons for using social media is a challenging issue for researchers. In this article, we analyzed the use of Twitter during the anti-governmental protests in Istanbul that was launched in May 2013. We examined 13,794 tweets posted to the #direngeziparki hashtag over a 6-day period. Based on the results of a qualitative content coding of the tweets, we found that the Twitter platform was widely used to mobilize protesters, share information about the events, and express opinions about the policing of the protests. We argue that social media can help keep protests peaceful by preventing vandalism, informing the protesters about extremist or violent groups participating in the protests, and can help them to avoid engaging in violent acts against police forces.

The symbol of social media in contemporary protest: Twitter and the Gezi Park movement

This article explores how Twitter has emerged as a signifier of contemporary protest. Using the concept of ‘social media imaginaries’, a derivative of the broader field of ‘media imaginaries’, our analysis seeks to offer new insights into activists’ relation to and conceptualisation of social media and how it shapes their digital media practices. Extending the concept of media imaginaries to include analysis of protestors’ use of aesthetics, it aims to unpick how a particular ‘social media imaginary’ is constructed and informs their collective identity. Using the Gezi Park protest of 2013 as a case study, it illustrates how social media became a symbolic part of the protest movement by providing the visualised possibility of imagining the movement. In previous research, the main emphasis has been given to the functionality of social media as a means of information sharing and a tool for protest organisation. This article seeks to redress this by directing our attention to the role of visual communication in online protest expressions and thus also illustrates the role of visual analysis in social movement studies.

'#OccupyGezi Architecture' and Archival Tactics of Resistance

Abstract Herkes için Mimarlık ('Architecture for All', HiM) is a group of architects, urban planners, designers, and sociologists who conduct participatory renovation projects. They were involved in the Occupy Gezi Park movement by questioning top-down urban politics in Istanbul, developing a series of online and on-site events including the Gezi Festivals, interview videos, timelines, zines, and exhibitions. Working from these case studies, this article examines the ways HiM archived the occupied milieu as a means of resistance: How do the materials that HiM documented during the Occupy Gezi Park movement contribute to knowledge production through a non-authoritarian and a non-linear history writing? I argue that temporality plays a crucial role in this process, as it is impossible to predetermine the duration of a protest movement and the course of events complicates decision-making regarding what to include or exclude in the archive. Through in-depth interviews and archival research that focus on HiM's public events and design works, this article examines the group's curatorial and documentation practices with respect to questions of authenticity, authorship, accessibility, and security.

The Nature Park movement in Austria – from recreational areas to(wards) model regions for sustainable development

The Nature Park movement in Austria – from recreational areas to(wards) model regions for sustainable development

Two-Stage Trajectory Optimization for Autonomous Ground Vehicles Parking Maneuver

This paper proposes a two-stage optimization framework for generating the optimal parking motion trajectory of autonomous ground vehicles. The motivation for the use of this multilayer optimization strategy relies on its enhanced convergence ability and computational efficiency in terms of finding optimal solutions under the constrained environment. In the first optimization stage, the designed optimizer applies an improved particle swarm optimization technique to produce a near-optimal parking movement. Subsequently, the motion trajectory obtained from the first stage is used to start the second optimization stage, where gradient-based techniques are applied. The established methodology is tested to explore the optimal parking maneuver for a car-like autonomous vehicle with the consideration of irregularly parked obstacles. Simulation results were produced and comparative studies were conducted for different mission cases. The obtained results not only confirm the effectiveness but also reveal the enhanced performance of the proposed optimization framework.

The Forest in the Metropolis: Elk Island (Losinyi Ostrov) National Park and the Disappointments of the Russian National Park Movement

A 116 square-kilometer section of forest in the northwest part of Moscow, Elk Island National Park (Losynyi ostrov) became Russia’s first in 1983. Russian environmentalists became enamored with national parks through increased interaction with Western colleagues, Russian environmentalists, including the supporters of Elk Island National Park, asserted that the USSR’s lack of national parks demonstrated that Russian environmental protection efforts lagged behind the West. This strategy was successful in pushing the government to establish national parks, including Elk Island. However, Russian environmentalists have had much less success in convincing government officials to support, protect, and develop national parks, even as they frequently asserted that its failure to do so cast Russia in a bad light before the international community. Because of its highly visible location in Moscow, Elk Island’s struggles have been a particularly painful reminder for Russian environmentalists of the Russian Federation’s seeming disinterest in national parks.

Istanbul sounding like revolution: the role of music in the Gezi Park Occupy movement

AbstractThis article focuses on the role of protest music in the biggest social movement of recent Turkish history. It is the result of three years of fieldwork triangulating musical and cultural analysis with ethnographic methods. Motives of the protest, strategies of the movement, agency of musicians and participatory performances are investigated and contextualised in an analysis of Turkey's cultural changes. The function of music shifted from framing the protest to encouraging political action and fostering a sense of belonging to the collective identity of the Gezi Park movement. Music even became political activism. By underlining different functions played by music in the case of the Gezi Park movement, this article problematises the relevance of music for social movements.

"Everyone Gets a Blister": Sexism, Gender Empowerment, and Race in the People's Park Movement

"Everyone Gets a Blister": Sexism, Gender Empowerment, and Race in the People's Park Movement

Framing Landscape While Building Density:

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chicago developers, architects, and residents defined a new residential vernacular: brick courtyard apartments, which massed units in low-rise buildings around landscaped courtyards, often open to the street. These buildings accommodated higher levels of residential density and seemingly did the opposite as well—preserved and cultivated nature. The Chicago courtyard apartment creatively negotiated the social and cultural tension between reverence for the iconic single-family house and an urban society increasingly occupying multiple-unit dwellings. The designs drew upon the interest in sunlight, air circulation, and natural landscape that influenced contemporary tenement house reform, urban hospital design, the small park and playground movement, and the rethinking of the dimensions and possibilities of residential lawns and gardens. In Framing Landscape While Building Density: Chicago Courtyard Apartments, 1891–1929, Daniel Bluestone looks closely at specific Chicago courtyard apartments, unpacking the design and cultural logic at play in their construction.

Japan’s Mountain Tourism at a Crossroads: Insights from the North Japan Alps

ABSTRACTThis article explores the transition in the mountain tourism landscape of Japan through two instructive case studies from the North Japan Alps. Before Japan’s modernization, mountains were considered sacred places and consequently they were out of bounds for commoners. During the early modernization phase, the mountains and their secluded valleys witnessed drastic changes as they became objects of conquest and, later, places for tourism development. The relative proximity of these mountains to urban centers and their modest elevation helped mass access to these landscapes. Tourism development thrust these landscapes into a dual trajectory: while visitor increase and consequent development resulted in the depletion of natural ecosystems and a trivialization of place, early conservation efforts that later morphed into the national park movement were borne out of this situation. Today, these landscapes are under renewed threat from visitor pressure and global environmental change, but some indications of a heightened ecological consciousness and sense of place can be detected among local tourism stakeholders which can provide insight for more sustainability-oriented tourism development.

Modern Anarchism in Social Movements

Le mouvement Occupy Wall Street, depuis ses débuts en 2011, a été relié à la théorie et à la pratique anarchiste par différents universitaires tels que David Graeber, Nathan Schneider et Mark Bray. Cependant, Occupy n’est pas un cas isolé dans l’histoire des mouvements sociaux. Le mouvement s’est développé à un moment où les manifestations des courants anti-néolibéral et pro-démocratie — à la fois locales et mondiales —, qui étaient apparues à la fin du XXe siècle, ont atteint un point culminant. En quelques années, des manifestations, des révoltes et des protestations sociales se sont répandues à travers le monde, au Nord comme au Sud. Cela va des printemps arabes en 2011 au mouvement de Gezi Park en 2013, en passant par les protestations en Grèce, le mouvement des Indignés et Occupy Wall Street. Cet article s’intéresse à la présence d’idées et de pratiques anarchistes au sein de ces mouvements, apparus au début des années 2010. Il s’appuie sur des études qui portent sur les aspects politico-économiques de ces mouvements. On pose comme hypothèse que si l’anarchisme est lié aux mouvements des années 2010 c’est au travers de ses valeurs et de ses pratiques politiques et économiques. En effet, la période qui précède les mouvements des années 2010 – –qui s’étale du milieu des années 1990 jusqu’en 2010 – a vu le développement des mouvements anti-néolibéral, altermondialiste et pro-démocratie. Ainsi, le point de contestation central qui caractérise ces mouvements – que l’on qualifiera de mouvements de la 3e vague – est donc bien politico-économique. Les études empiriques utilisées comme base de travail pour cet article ne montrent pas toutes de façon explicite le lien qui existe entre ces mouvements et l’anarchisme, mais elles révèlent cependant l’usage de pratiques politiques et économiques alternatives qui peuvent être considérées comme anarchisantes – proches des idées anarchistes sans le mentionner clairement. La présence d’idées et de pratiques anarchistes au sein des mouvements des années 2010 montre ainsi un lien avec la réémergence de l’anarchisme, sous la forme du post-anarchisme, depuis le milieu des années 1990 et dont le développement est étroitement lié au mouvement altermondialiste. Sous cette nouvelle forme, l’anarchisme a tendance à s’éloigner de son passé violent du XIXe siècle. Ainsi, même si l’anarchisme n’est pas mentionné comme tel dans la presse grand public, il existe au travers de nouveaux mouvements tels que l’alter-mondialisme et les expériences de démocratie directe.

Trees and umbrellas: a parallel reading of the Istanbul Gezi Park Movement and the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement

ABSTRACTThis paper makes a parallel reading of two recent urban protest movements: the 2013 Istanbul Gezi Park Movement (GPM) and the 2014 Hong Kong Umbrella Movement (UM). As regional centers at both ends of Asia, Istanbul and Hong Kong might at fırst sight appear to be incongruent cities for comparison. Istanbul’s recent past has been defined by contrasting opinions about the city’s post-imperial identity, while Hong Kong’s recent past has been shaped by competing visions around the city’s post-colonial status. Directing attention to the striking parallels between the GPM and UM in terms of the nature of the events themselves, the profile of the participants and opponents, the government response that they received, and the cultural sensitivities concerning the questions of belonging and identity that they rekindled, the paper argues that comparative studies of the new urban protest movements would provide significant insights for discerning the dynamics of emerging illiberal democracies across the world.