Looking Forward, Looking Back: Making Sense of a Changing Neighborhood through Two City Parks

• In Event: 574 - Regular Session. Urban Sociology

Abstract

City parks are settings for diverse interactions and social control. But beyond serving as context for important urban processes, city parks themselves play an active role in everyday lived experience of the city. In this paper, I compare two nearby parks in a changing New York neighborhood distinguished by ethnic succession and gentrification.
Drawing on ethnographic observation, interviews, and secondary analysis, I explain different roles played by these two parks in defining their neighborhood and its social boundaries, and imagining its past, present, and future. I analyze routine interactions between park visitors, material culture of the parks, as well as discourse by powerful actors to show the complex ways in which everyday roles and meaning-making articulate with meanings and identities propagated by powerful actors through place. Although superficially similar and geographically close, the two parks help construct two different narratives of the neighborhood, with varying measure of success. One park aims to re-establish fading dominance of an ethnic group but ends up showcasing the neighborhood’s growing ethnic diversity. The other park creates an oasis of middle class cultural consumption within a mixed-income, stigmatized area, constructing a collective memory of the neighborhood that excludes marginalized groups as much as direct surveillance and policing. The urban culturalist approach of treating culture as an independent variable and locating it in place sheds light on the role of city parks in collective representations of neighborhoods and their relationship to local power hierarchies.

Author

• Sofya Aptekar, University of Massachusetts-Boston