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Book Review
| The New Urban Park: Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Civic Environmentalism. By Hal K. Rothman. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. xi + 258 pp. Map, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00.
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| I began reading this administrative history of Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA) with some skepticism, for in its headline the publisher's news release accompanying my review copy exclaimed that the "park serves as perfect model." Perfect model of what? On sabbatical leave in the Bay area, where I was studying conflicts over ecological management of parks in San Francisco, I was finding a situation far from what most would call perfect. With debates raging within the park over off-leash dog use, public area closures for endangered species protection, and native-exotic plant management, some stakeholders I was interviewing for my research would have found "poster child" a more fitting term. |
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Delving further into Rothman's highly readable account of the establishment and evolution of this contemporary urban national park, I found neither perfect model nor poster child. Rather, GGNRA might be considered a harbinger of how large (i.e., federal and state) land management agencies will increasingly need to operate in order to successfully protect large-scale landscapes in today's social and political realities, particularly in urban and urbanizing areas. One key factor that Rothman links to this success is civic environmentalism, where broadly inclusive and participatory approaches to planning, creative administrative partnerships, and negotiated decision making replace traditional top-down authority. In examples that range from negotiating policies for resolving recreational conflicts to establishing a unique administrative framework to work toward the economic self-sustainability of the Presidio, identification and elucidation of this factor is perhaps the book's most significant contribution. A second factor is creativity in assembling a park from discontiguous fragments of existing parcels, military transfers, and new acquisitions that permits widely varying types of use yet achieves coherence as a landscape ecologically, culturally, and perceptually. On this last point, there is a particularly vivid account of how the GGNRA's independent cooperative association worked to develop a singular identifiable and marketable image of the park to the public, including renaming the ambiguous official title of "Golden Gate National Recreation Area" to "the Golden Gate National Parks," and creating a high quality design theme that carries through all signage and promotional materials. |
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A third factor is continued flexibility and responsiveness to change. Born in 1972 in an era of bipartisan cooperation and broad-based public support for federally owned and managed open space, the park has managed to more than double in size from its original 34,000 acres because of its administrative ability to adapt (sometimes willingly, other times grudgingly) to radical changes in its social, economic, and political climates. |
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These and other factors form important subtexts that run throughout the book's formally designated chapters on park establishment, growth, administration, natural and cultural resource management, interpretation, and future. In a few places this multi-layered structure invites redundancy; the park's zoning scheme, for example, is described in three different chapters. For the most part, however, Rothman is both clear and engaging; he imparts detailed knowledge about the various facets of park history through rigorous scholarship while simultaneously bringing the stories of people and places to life. |
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As an environmental history of the recent past, the book fills a unique niche in the literature on park studies, and I suspect it will be of interest not only to other environmental historians but also social scientists, park and natural resource planners, and local stakeholders seeking perspective as they continue to debate the park's future. |
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Paul H. Gobster is a research social scientist with the USDA Forest Service's North Central Research Station in Chicago, where he studies the social dimensions of urban parks, landscape change, and natural areas restoration. |
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