The
Idea of Openness
Christopher DeWolf
Few developments
today can escape the rallying cries of "Open Space!", a demand for plenty of
parkland and greenways in urban and suburban development. This is a selling point for many
developments, glossy brochures and roadside billboards that proclaim a surplus of open
space, whether the development is a new greenfield subdivision or a high-density, highrise
urban development. But, how exactly does one define open space? Taken literally, it could
be an untouched wood or a grassy park, or even an extra-wide street – after all, that
is open space. Most often, however, open space is simply a moniker for parks that feature
a lot of grass and a lot of, well, open space. New neighbourhoods that are supposed to be
urban by design spend most of their energy trying to appease residents from adjacent
neighbourhoods by including plenty of open space, lots of room for children to play in,
lots of room to breathe. This raises the question: when does enough open space become too
much, and are people simply longing for the idea of open space, a rosy fiction of urban
countryside rather than well-designed, well-used urban parks?
Take a look at the dozens of large-scale urban infill
developments across the continent. These new neighbourhoods are being created on former
railyards, former port lands, former military bases. The one thing they all have in
common, aside from being inner-city and distinctly urban, is that they all cling to the
concept of open space. Concord Pacific Place, a dense development in downtown Vancouver,
prominently boasts of its large amount of open space in its promotional literature.
CityPlace in Toronto, another large downtown-adjacent development, boasts of a large,
eight-acre park and many linear parkways. Recently a group of activists occupied a bridge
in downtown Boston, re-"paving" it with sod and grass as a protest against the
nearby Fan Pier development’s inclusion of streets in its tally of planned green
space, ignoring the possibility of a sidewalk being leafier and better-used than any open
field of grass. In community meetings around North America, citizens clamour for open
space, which has quickly become the urban design concept in vogue.
All this yet few have asked whether or not open space is
actually used the way neighbourhood activists and developers want it to be. On my own
personal forays into new urban developments, the much-vaunted open space is often deserted
on all but the hottest, sunniest days. They are mostly large fields of grass with some
trees on the periphery, hardly the kind of meticulous landscape design Olmstead practised
in Central Park, Mount Royal Park or Prospect Park. Olmstead’s parks are not always
well used but at least feature a great deal of care and attention that was put into their
construction. It seems that this concept of open space that is running through our popular
imagination is more of an idea than a practical urban amenity. New urban residents like
the idea of living in the city, but they also like to have the comforting thought of a bit
of countryside a few blocks away. Whether or not this open space is actually used is
unimportant: what counts is that it is there.
It is nice to have a bit of green in the sometimes tiring
urban environment, and not just trees planted alongside streets. Green areas are best done
in moderation, however, in amounts small enough and well-designed enough to become good
public spaces. Instead of large, impersonal greenways that lay on the periphery of a
neighbourhood, grassy and windblown wastelands, we need to see more green gathering places
such as the Brooklyn Heights Esplanade in Brooklyn, the Prado in Boston’s North End
or the multitude of small (emphasis on small) neighbourhood parks scattered around urban
areas. All of these areas focus on benches and trees rather than great expanses of grass,
and are spacious enough for a small game of toss-ball yet intimate enough to encounter a
strolling neighbour. The last thing our cities need are more empty fields, sparked by
nothing more than a vain desire to have something "open" nearby. There is so
much more that can be done with greenspace than what is currently being; we need to
silence the cries for new open space that is merely grass and a few trees, and put real
thought into good green additions to our neighbourhoods.
Christopher DeWolf is the editor of
Urbanphoto. He lives in Montreal.
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