Script:
A cultural historian has been invited to speak to an urban studies class. Listen to part of the lecture.
The agricultural revolution of ten thousand years ago started the great shift from rural to urban living. As human settlements evolved from simple groups of huts to larger villages, and then to towns and cities, their basic pattern changed.
The early rural villages grew naturally—sort of organically—as if they were plants or bushes, and buildings were clustered near water sources, and around village gardens, with trees for shade and pastures for animals.
A lot of us yearn to escape to these simpler, more romantic settlements of the past. But there are probably more of us who have a powerful urge to explore new ideas and to build bigger and better structures. We now have super settlements called cities. Our city planners and architects have converted the organic pattern of the village into a geometrically perfect grid. Our natural habitat has been transformed into an expanse of hard straight surfaces, with stone and metal and concrete and glass.
Of course, the city is still a wonderful place for stimulation, for opportunity, and for cultural interaction. In fact, you could say the city is our most spectacular creation. And believe it or not it still has elements of the rural past.
In the average North American city, about one-third of the surface is given to streets and buildings. The rest is covered by trees and grass foresters call it the "urban forest” -meaning all the trees in city parks, the trees planted along streets and highways, and the trees in people’s yards. The extent of this forest is sort of amazing—two-thirds of our urban space.
The concept of a tree-lined village green has a long history, but one of North America′s first public parks - that was sort of created as a unified project—was Central Park in New York City. Central Park was designed by landscape architects Olmsted and Vaux in the late nineteenth century. They took their inspiration from the gardens of European estates and the romantic landscape paintings from that period.
Central Park was set in a rectangular site covering over 800 acres in the middle of Manhattan Island. By the nineteenth century, the original forest was long gone. The area had been used as a common pasture for farm animals, but eventually it deteriorated into a kind of urban wasteland, dotted with garbage dumps.
Olmsted and Vaux transformed this wasteland into something like its original appearance, with rolling hills, grassy meadows, and woody thickets with thousands of trees. The result is sort of an oasis in the middle of steel and stone. Central Park has been called “the city’s lung" because of its purifying effect on the air, not to mention its effect on the human psyche. It remains one of the best examples of what we can do with the open spaces of our cities.
When you look at how far we’ve come as humans, when you consider that we′ve developed something called civilization, you come to realize that the finest evidence of our civilization is the city. The city is a symbol of experimentation and creation, a place where we can come together for work and entertainment, for art and culture, for wonder and opportunity. And. like the rural villages of the past, the city is where we come together to share cultural experiences with other humans—indeed, to define what it is to be human.