Imagine a big well used city park.
The buildings in the park consist of a busy maintenance department, a yard with various buildings that keep machinery, and materials, admin. There are 3 sets of toilets spread around the park. One is in use the other 2 that have lain derelict and abandoned for many years. There is also a bandstand that has suffered the same dereliction.
Over the last ten or so years attempts have been made to turn the bandstand into a pub and a few other commercial outlets- these efforts were stopped by local campaigns.
More recently one of the toilets has been leased out and turned in to a private-run cafe. The maintenance department has been demolished and work is on-going to build a school on the site. The park is being used more and more as an commercial event space under various fun-day, community inclusion, banners. Most of these events are indistinguishable from one another as they are saturated by the same generic fairground attractions, noise, business branding and fast food outlets.
The Park
We need to remember when thinking about parks and inner city green space in general, even “places that are never used” are psychologically important to us that they exist. These places will become even more important as the roads clog up and people can’t just shoot off in their cars to the countryside.
Parks to the victorians who built them offered a respite for people rich and poor away from the squalor, pollution and over crowding of the industrialised city. Today the park offers the same function in terms of traffic, consumerism, technology and stress.
The leasing of of parkland to business destroys the autonomy of the park and “lets in” what we go to the park to get away from.
There is a fountain in the park which has been restored at a cost of £512000 and a skateboard park. They are now building a school. (in the park) When all these developments have been going on the bandstand still lies abandoned.
What folk walking past the bandstand see, is an old derelict building no one cares about. What they are usually unaware of is that there has been a 15 year community council campaign, to put the bandstand back into public use – Architectural surveys, costing, part funding, is in place. The project has been backed by a great many of the people in the community, arts organisation’s, local bands, orchestras, theatre groups and lots of favourable publicity.
QUESTION: Why would a small and insignificant in cost, park facility like the bandstand, be ignored for so long?
See also: No Public Relation
