Imagining social justice and the false promise of urban park design

Urban park designers have long championed the social underpinnings of their work. Of late, however, certain landscape practitioners have articulated a more explicit connection between park design and social objectives, arguing that the fundamental role of urban parks is to foster equity and justice. Drawing on Marxian geographer David Harvey’s notion of the geographical imagination, this paper interrogates the relationship between parks and social processes by exploring the role that social issues have historically played in urban park design and by unpacking the prevailing imaginaries of social justice landscape architects and designers have employed in contemporary urban park projects. In doing so, it juxtaposes the lofty rhetoric of designing for social justice against the material reality of development-driven urban regeneration. In this way, the geographic imaginary provides a framework for understanding the limited capacity of urban park design to address broader social issues, even as it offers a mechanism for conceiving and articulating alternatives that more completely address the conditions through which social injustice occurs.