Why the environment will lose in the long run
Have you noticed, how park areas in the bigger cities typically get smaller over time?
When they were originally laid out, there was typically plenty of free space — the city had not yet expanded to these areas, so it was possible to plan with a generous area for what was at the time considered a good service to the citizens, something that was valued and popular.
Of course, during history, park facilities have often been created by rulers and wealthy people for their own use. But I am speaking about those parks arranged during modern times, basically during the industrialization. When urbanization really took off, when people by large moved from the country areas to the cities in order to work in the factories there, it led to significant growth of the cities — by the number of inhabitants and the occupied land area alike.
As it became clear along the way, people do need to breathe fresh air, and arranging some spots in the cities for this to be possible became necessary.
Also before the industrialization, there were such thoughts, but with the often very compact areas of workers’ apartments, and just as compact areas of the industries themselves, the parks became a much bigger contrast to “home” and “work” addresses than they had ever been before.
Buildings became taller, many people lived on the same area, light hardly reached all the way down to the ground, which increasingly was covered with stones or asphalt. Industries sent out massive amounts of smoke and smells, and the noise from both the industries, people, and traffic, became intense.
So, parks were needed to allow for such moments in life where people could feel that they were not being consumed completely by modernity.
But cities continued to grow, and various new functions, new types of building uses entered, and the need for moving certain businesses into the city center became ever bigger. But there was no space left. Despite an occasional demolition of an old building, often giving room for an even higher and more dense new one, there was still a need to find room for more buildings.
The parks were there. Business people could often find an excuse for cutting a corner of a park to build, say, a restaurant, or perhaps a sports stadium. After all, such buildings were directly relatable to the recreative nature of the park itself, so having them nearby, or even inside the park, could be seen as an advantage for most people.
But sports facilities began having office spaces inside as well as the original recreative spaces, and shopping centers, some production or administrative functions also moved in, and what we saw as a result was shrinking parks. Corner after corner were cut off, and as soon as these had been taken into use as built areas, they would never be given back to the parks.
The logic behind such dispositions is in its essence quite simple: Someone has an idea, finds the needed money to make it come through, and starts working on convincing the city administration that this is a good idea — that the park will become a better park with this office building in the corner of it, as there will be taxpayers visiting the building, being happy for the city council to have arranged for it to be there, and there will still be some park area left behind the building. Actually, making the office building tall and wide will both create a spectacular view from many windows in the building, and it will cover the park from some of the city noise. It’s a win-win.
Of course, some city administrations would then say that the park area is needed, we cannot keep cutting corners off it, as there is already too little space left for all the increasingly many people living in the city. But a rebated golf vacation or cruise will often help on such thoughts, making the administrators much more willing to consider the rationality of the idea. Because of their obvious business insights and good network, they could also get a good job in the building company or some other related business. They would feel that making the “right” decision was worth the moral deterioration.
This doesn’t happen every time. There are many proposed corner-cutting projects that are never realized, but as the ground taken for buildings is in general never given back to the park, it just has to happen now and then for the park to keep shrinking over the years.
Similarly outside the city, where some important nature areas also lose a corner now and then, as these would be great recreational areas, of course requiring hotels, golf courses, and other needs of the civilization.
Very polluting industries will, nowadays, often be placed outside the cites, and this will almost always lead to beautiful areas with their wildlife and esthetics being ruined.
A growing population with growing needs, a bigger economy that allows for more consumption, will effectively require more space being occupied by production and business administration, hence, there is not really anything to do about this.
But the best addresses for people to enjoy life, unfortunately, often happen to be the best addresses for building a new office building or factory.
And it goes only one way. There are examples through history of towns and other civilized areas that have been abandoned completely, though often leaving a partly destroyed landscape behind. Mining towns with ore and other minerals lying around in piles, leading to polluted groundwater, sometimes poisonous dust flying around, killing plants and animals that try to survive in that place.
So, even when those corners are given back to nature, they have often been ruined and lost their original values for both humans and everything else alive.
Bit by bit. Corner by corner. Golf holiday by golf holiday.
We are destroying our recreational areas, at times slowly, at times faster, but for sure.
Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash
