Making Space: An Exploration of Parklets in North America and Vancouver
Making Space: An Exploration of Parklets in North America and Vancouver Kathleen Corey University of Guelph, 2014 Advisor: Nathan Perkins University of Guelph In the last few decades many municipalities have temporarily closed streets to vehicular traffic to open them to people and foster community. More recently, New York and San Francisco introduced pop-up parks to street rights-of-way, initially as plazas reclaimed from excess road space. On a smaller scale, ‘parklets’ are a response to people’s desires to repurpose parking stalls for community spaces. In June 2013, VIVA Vancouver launched its stand-alone Parklet Pilot Program. The parklet application and design process was examined using an action research case study method for one of the first parklets to be built under the program by PWL Partnership. San Francisco and Vancouver parklets were mapped and compared. Findings reveal that parklets begin as business sponsored projects and over time evolve into community partnerships. Recommendations have been developed for emerging and established programs across North America.
Punching above their weight: the ecological and social benefits of pop‐up parks
Current global enthusiasm for urban greening and bringing nature back into cities is unprecedented. Evidence of the socioecological benefits of large, permanent greenspaces is mounting, but the collective potential for pop-up parks (PUPs) small, temporary greenspaces to augment urban ecosystem services is unknown. To showcase the potential of PUPs, we first highlight a case study demonstrating how PUPs may enhance biodiversity in a densely urbanized area; we then review evidence linking the design of small greenspaces with positive social outcomes, including benefits to human well-being. Finally, we emphasize how PUPs can function as socioecological laboratories to help inform urban design, and then propose a research agenda to better understand how PUPs may be optimally designed to provide benefits to humans and other species.
Modernity, Mestizaje, and Hispano Art: Patrocinio Barela and the Federal Art Project
yet symbolic. At a time when European modernists integrated primitive art from Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas into their own oeuvre—viewing sculpture as the most primitive of art forms—critics quickly discerned an affinity between the formal qualities of Barela’s art and an evolving Western modernist aesthetic.29 FAP itself became imbued with this impulse through National Director Holger Cahill, who organized MoMA’s American Primitives (1930) and American Sources of Modern Art (1933) exhibitions, which connected U.S. art with preColumbian influences.30 Barela constituted a “link” to modernism rather than a modernist per se because his art was deemed primitive not simply in form but also in context. Although Hunter viewed santero art as a product of “exchange” between the “Christian and the pagan Indian,” with the passage of time, santos became distanced from “tradition,” and in turn, “primitive in feeling as well as in technique.” Moreover, when santos were “not made for religious purposes,” as in Barela’s case, “they became entirely primitive,” concluded Hunter.31 Divorced from academic training and ecclesiastical tradition (Barela rarely attended church), Barela became the timeless “primitive” whose lack of formal training encouraged the image of an artist moved by nature and intuition rather than by the modern trappings of status and materialism. Hunter’s own vision of his protégé as “child-like,” and in need of “guidance” and “protection” from tourists and “autograph seekers,” simply reinforced this image.32 As Hunter declared, “school means an unlimited observation of natural phenomena. . . . With the inherent adaptability of his realistic race, [Barela] takes things as they are with a fatalism not less than oriental, but he meets them with unconquerable idealism and fortitude. Knowing little of life’s tangible complications . . . he is free from our national passion for accumulating things. But of natural philosophy, of timeless wisdom, he knows more than most persons gain through formal degrees . . . faith is axiomatic and life has reason.”33 Barela’s work, being untrained, was considered a vital expression of spirituality. As Hunter repeatedly claimed, Barela was not like other santeros who were merely “copyists.”34 While Barela deployed a familiar religious iconography, his art bordered on ritual performance. Rooting Barela’s art so deeply within the world of Hispano religion simply affirmed the sense of the primitive for critics because the Anglo-American vision of Hispano Catholicism was already that of a faith lost in time, superstition, and the so-called archaic rites of confraternities such as the Order of 48 ✜ Journal of the Southwest the Penitent Brothers. Barela himself drew inspiration from the moradas (chapels) and death carts used by the Penitent Brothers in Holy Week processions. Although Anglo artists employed Hispano religious motifs in their own work, they invariably viewed this faith as “mystical, naïve, and primitive,” and as the very essence of Hispano life itself.35 Thus, for Barela too, art, faith, and creativity became manifestations of ritual. It did not matter that Barela was “not an orthodox Christian”: in the eyes of New Deal sponsors he remained “essentially religious.”36 Mestizaje, pan-americanism, and the universal In evaluating Barela’s art, critic Douglas Hale noted that “others have seen various cultural origins in Barela’s carvings: Moorish, Mayan, Aztec, Penitente, Navajo sand painting, Easter Island, early Christian.”37 Thus, despite the search for the authentic and the noted affinities between Barela and so-called “tribal art” from other parts of the world, Barela’s work was also distinctly hybrid: it was forged from a unique cultural synthesis over time, and as Wendell Anderson later observed, “out of the duality of Old and New World forms.”38 Most significantly, Barela’s synthesis was rooted firmly in the Americas. Contemporaries certainly viewed Barela’s work—and New Mexico itself—as lying at the intersection of the Americas. If Barela’s art was perceived as uniquely American in its everyday, popular appeal, it was also American by way of its cultural hybridity, which distanced it in time and space from European influences. Barela’s art became part of a cultural nationalism but also of a wider, hemispheric nationalism—panAmericanism. The connection between Latin American art, Native American art, and cultural diplomacy during the late 1930s and early 1940s has been acknowledged.39 But few scholars have explored the relationship between Hispano art and pan-Americanism. The call for hemispheric solidarity through artistic expression derived momentum at the regional level from the historical specificities of New Mexico’s ethnic and cultural landscapes. New Mexico lay at the center of a transnational relationship in reform and cultural policy during the 1920s and 1930s. As Suzanne Forrest notes, the Hispanic New Deal in New Mexico became entwined with the revival of Native American arts and with Mexico’s cultural revolution and sponsorship of the popular arts. In Mexico, Anglo patrons and Modernity and Mestizaje ✜ 49 reformers found a perfect model for the preservation of Hispano and Native American culture.40 These links become more apparent when we consider that there was not simply an overlap in ideology but in personnel too. New Deal Indian Policy under John Collier developed from existing links with New Mexico and patrons in Santa Fe. Collier also looked to Mexican folk art when creating the Indian Arts and Crafts Board. Collier brought folk art specialist René d’Harnoncourt north from Mexico to work on the board after d’Harnoncourt organized several key exhibitions of Mexican art in the USA during 1930.41 And it was d’Harnoncourt’s exhibition of Mexican art that was deployed to improve intercultural relations in New Mexico. During 1931, d’Harnoncourt’s Mexican art exhibit traveled to Albuquerque and Santa Fe with the support of the Mexican consulate and with the aim of acknowledging the state’s Hispano population and stimulating the preservation of Hispano arts through community art centers and vocational education. Writing to d’Harnoncourt, New Mexico Governor Arthur Seligman promoted Santa Fe in particular as “the largest center of this character in the United States,” while the Albuquerque Morning Journal declared the city “the historic contact point between America and Mexico.”42 Nina Perea Collier, a FAP state official and daughter-in-law of John Collier, worked for the Indian Bureau and later for the Office for Inter-American Affairs. Perea Collier noted the obvious connections between Latin American and Hispano arts but conceded that more effort could have been made to integrate Hispano culture into the government’s pan-American initiative.43 Hunter and Cahill did however arrange for a traveling exhibition of Mexican children’s artwork to be sent to New Mexico’s Hispano community art centers, and in return, sent the Portfolio of Spanish Colonial Design for display across Latin America.44 New Mexico remained an important testing ground for intercultural relations into the 1940s. For Mexican American scholar J. Manuel Espinosa, the state’s “harmonious combination” of indigenous, Spanish, and Anglo peoples made New Mexico “a significant laboratory of the Good Neighbor Policy.”45 Although there are few direct references to Barela in terms of cultural diplomacy, Barela’s art represented Espinosa’s “true synthesis of the Americas.” This perhaps explains Barela’s position as one of the few sculptors to exhibit at the New York’s World’s Fair American Art Today show (1939). Barela’s hybrid art forms complemented the intercultural emphasis of the fair perfectly. Designed to 50 ✜ Journal of the Southwest establish connections between old and contemporary cultural expression in much the same way that critics perceived affinities between primitive and modern art, the fair planned as one of its key themes and expositions the “cultural evolution and development of man in the three Americas” with the aim of “bringing the peoples of the Three Americas into a relationship of closer understanding.”46 Indeed, conceived within this transnational perspective, the link between mestizaje and modernism becomes much more than incidental. As Tace Hedrick demonstrates, in Latin America a specific form of mestizo modernism was formulated between 1900 and 1940, a modernism that considered “how to fuse, or hybridize, modernity and indigenous tradition” and how to blend regionalism, locality, and the vernacular with “a continental sense of ‘Americanism.’” Mirroring the interest shown in Barela’s art, Latin America’s mestizo modernism derived inspiration from rural, folk, and indigenous traditions: in this way, the “un-modern” would soothe the contradictions of modernity while being inserted into a forwardand future-thinking nation. According to Hedrick, Diego Rivera’s pan-American hybrid aesthetic typified mestizo modernism in its bid to transcend the “seeming antinomies of modern life: the North and the South, the mechanical with the organic, the agrarian with the modern, and of course, the Indian with the Hispanic.”47 If this modernism involved biological and cultural mestizaje, it also reflected the assumption of MoMA’s American Sources and American Primitives exhibitions: that the modern and the un-modern could coexist in one hemispheric space across time (albeit on an unequal footing). Barela must be understood within this framework of mestizo modernism, because it too impacted the United States as a distinctive form of modernism, one intimately tied to and resistant of the hegemonic forces of U.S. and European modernism. Moreover, during the 1920s and 1930s, Rivera’s mestizo modernism filtered northwards through the “Mexican art invasion,” described by Helen Delpar, to coincide with the U.S. desire for art that was both “untainted by academic [and European] modernism and