Abstract

Historic urban green spaces are an essential part of our urban landscape and heritage. In changing urban culture green spaces and parks have culturally represented historical continuity. Historic parks contain in distilled forms many of the essential features of cities and constitute identity.

Heritage and conservation have traditionally been understood as preserving. We need new methods in order to understand changing cultural processes and heritage. This paper argues that the Pressure-State-Response (PSR) model originally developed by Canadian statistician Anthony Friend in the 1970’s and further developed for environmental management by OECD (1998) and Hukkinen (2007, 2008) could be adapted in landscape architecture and historic urban park discourse.

The paper focuses to six park conservation projects in Helsinki, Finland, which occurred during the years 1985-2000. The main research materials are policy protocols, statements, plan reports and half structured interviews with main actors in the planning processes. The main question is what kind of cultural indicators of park heritage could be defined in terms of PSR–model in these park conservation and heritage discourses.

 

Keywords: Historic urban green spaces, park policy, heritage, PSR-model, discourse analysis.

 

Download Full Text (PDF)