In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 9 Conclusion Lessons on Culture and Diversity W illiam H. Whyte’s seminal work in the 1970s on small urban spaces was so clear and convincing that the city of New York revised its zoning code to reflect most of his recommendations. Whyte’s work inspired some of his associates to found the Project for Public Spaces, a consulting firm that has worked to bring his vision of user-friendly, comfortable, and popular public spaces to communities throughout metropolitan New York and beyond. With this book we at the Public Space Research Group seek to expand the dialogue about public spaces beyond the issues of comfort and vitality propounded by Whyte, as important as they are. We realize that it is one thing to talk about comfort and vitality in the public realm and quite another to discuss race, ethnicity, class, and exclusion. However difficult, these issues are becoming increasingly pressing as private groups take over from public agencies in planning, designing, and managing large public spaces. The spaces William Whyte studied in New York were privately built and managed—that is, plazas and other spaces provided by private owners of large office buildings for public use. Our concern is with truly public spaces, including the great urban landscape parks built by the city decades ago and always completely public. Private advocacy and management has brought some of these parks back from conditions of neglect and underutilization . Central Park in particular is the restored jewel in the crown of New York’s public parks, thanks to the highly successful career of the Central Park Conservancy. But renovation and restoration of a space can affect its cultural equilibrium. Attractive as it is, is Central Park as inclusive and democratic a space now as it was before the advent of the Central Park Conservancy? Some people dislike questions like that—how dare one question a group that has produced such wonderful results in a beloved public space? So what if a few people feel less welcome?—look at how many more people overall come to the park now; so the argument goes. We do not argue for a return to the run-down and dangerous park conditions of the 1960s and 1970s. We commend the tireless efforts of friends-ofthe -park groups and conservancies everywhere in bringing urban parks back from the edge. What we hope to do here is to demonstrate how important it is 196 R ETHINK ING UR BAN PAR K S to maintain the cultural diversity that makes these great spaces truly urban. We think that most park advocates share in this vision of culturally diverse public spaces. We also think that many do not understand how the reconstructions and assertive management techniques can encode symbols of class privilege and so discourage and even exclude many people of color, immigrants, and poor and working-class people, all of whom should be as welcome in the public spaces of the city as the assimilated white professionals who support the park conservancies. Lessons Revisited Having concluded our tour of parks and research methodologies, we return to the six lessons for promoting and sustaining cultural diversity in parks and heritage sites, introduced in Chapter 1. In the following discussion we restate each lesson and then elaborate on it, referring to our various examples from field research. (I.) If people are not represented in historical national parks and monuments or, more importantly, if their histories are erased, they will not use the park. The classic example of erasure and consequent nonattendance in our work is that of African Americans in Philadelphia in relationship to Independence National Historical Park. In that case the coincidence of several factors had the effect of erasing not only the symbols but the black community itself from the neighborhood of the park. The area just south of what is now the park contained the historic black settlement in Philadelphia, which W. E. B. Du Bois described in the Philadelphia Negro in 1897. The Society Hill redevelopment project and the federal action of land acquisition and clearance for the park itself displaced what remained of this African American community in the 1950s. What took their place was a shrine to the white founding fathers of the United States. Independence National Historical Park and the adjacent Society Hill neighborhood together replaced an unvarnished swath of the historical city with a colonial park and upscale neighborhood, peopled largely by white residents and white tourists. Until recent years...

Share