In a previous post I announced the publication of a new article about Central Park in Environment and Planning D, this time focusing on the governmental and strategic role of the park’s schemein the context of local struggles to consolidate or challenge existing hegemonies. For that purpose I elaborated a theoretical framework around the concept of ‘environmental hegemony’ drawing on the work of Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault, which emphasizes the responsibility of technical interventions in the forge of regulatory apparatuses, integral state formations and subjectivity projects.

The Society and Space website has now published a companion piece where I expand some of the theoretical and historical arguments of the article with a more general reflection about the political horizon of design disciplines.

What would a Central Park designed by proletarians look like? How would such a subaltern landscape differ from the creatures of nineteenth-century bourgeois pastoral taste that we have come to identify with urban nature? Would Manhattan’s structure and social space have been radically changed by such a historical detour? Landscape and New York City scholars…

Read more: Landscape struggles, environmental hegemonies and the politics of urban design — Society & Space