Of parks and politics: the production of socio-nature in a Gujarati town

Abstract

Urban parks in India are often discussed as positive environmental projects, and their creation appears as unproblematic in public discourse. This paper presents the creation of a municipal park in a small city in Gujarat, India. Using insights from history and architecture, we stress the importance of reading parks as political and to some extent ideological projects in the larger context of city-making. The political ecology and history of the particular park studied here allow us to problematise the socio-ecological project of urban "beautification" via park creation. The municipal park, established in the centre of a small urban agglomeration after displacing a slum settlement from the site, is -as we argue -an integral part of a local geography of power. As such it expresses several registers of values upheld by local elites and brings into focus highly conflictive social relations. The case study contributes to further developing a situated urban political ecological approach that starts theorising cities from the South. It moreover offers a critical perspective on the understudied urban nature of small towns. ARTICLE HISTORY

Caring for nature matters: a relational approach for understanding nature’s contributions to human well-being

“…Care, as an important subset of relations, provides a strong justification for such a new focus on relational values and an extension of methods connected to it. Open methodologiesincluding deliberative evaluation [75**, 76] using the notion of care -can serve as a useful entry point and allow people to express their relation to nature in their own terms 9 , and thus reduce epistemic injustice.…”

“…Exceptions are inter aila given in ecofeminism, feminist ecological economics [22 ,23], as well as human geography and non-Western environmental philosophies (see below). 2 The combined works of nature and humans have, e.g., also been conceived as "cultural landscapes" [6], nature-culture-regimes [7,8] or socionatures [9]. 3 E.g.…”

A Multidisciplinary Approach to Analyzing Questions of Justice Issues in Urban Greenspace

“…Urban foresters call for greenspace justice because the ecosystem services provided by trees should be available to all [38][39][40]. For landscape architects, the importance of greenspace justice relies on the core purpose of parks, which is to provide recreational places for all [41], and because parks contribute to the division of societies, as our case from India suggests [42]. Park managers consider greenspace justice important because parks are public facilities that should serve everyone, comparable to schools, libraries, and museums [45].…”

“…Similarly, public health researchers explore these issues mostly in terms of distribution, both with a spatial focus [32], temporal [34], or with both a spatial and temporal focus [33]. In contrast, our sample of landscape architect research looks at greenspace justice exclusively from a procedures' perspective, mostly in hindsight, including the examination of social processes that were used in park design [41], politics and ideologies behind the creation of parks [42], and historic analysis of narratives [43].…”

“…However, these trends are changing in some cities in the U.S. as whites are moving to the urban core [37]. In other cases, periurban areas are deprived of vegetation, as can be seen in the cases from Bogota, Colombia [40], Cape Town, South Africa [44], and Vijalpore, India [42]. Finally, there are situations in which periurban areas are both beneficiaries of the distribution of greenspace as well as areas deprived of vegetation, as the case of Kumasi, Ghana suggests [35].…”