Constructing Gardens, Cultivating the City

Constructing Gardens, Cultivating the City is the first cultural history of major new parks developed in Paris in the late twentieth century, as part of the city¿s program of adaptive reuse of industrial spaces. Thanks to laws that gave the city more political autonomy, Paris¿s local government launched a campaign of park creation in the late 1970s that continued to the turn of the millennium. The parks in this book represent this campaign and illustrate different facets of their cultural and historical context.
Archival research, interviews, and analyses of the parks reveal how postmodern debates about urban planning, the historic city, public space, and nature¿s presence in an urban setting influenced their designs. In sum, the city adopted the garden as a model for public parks, investing in complex, richly symbolic and representational spaces. These parks were intended to represent contemporary twists on traditional designs and serve local residents as much as they w