Suchergebnisse

Living memorials are landscaped spaces created by people to memorialize individuals, places, and events. Hundreds of stewardship groups across the United States of America created living memorials in response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. This study sought to understand how stewards value, use, and talk about their living, community-based memorials. Stewards were asked to describe the intention, use, and meanings of the memorials. Qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis were used to analyze 117 semi-structured interviews. Sacredness of space varied by a memorial's site type and uses. This and other findings supported the notion of sacred space as contested space. Sacred space can be produced from acts of "setting aside" that ascribe meaning to a memorial site.

Urban parkland is a quintessential form of public space. Various actors—from government managers, to civic groups, to individual visitors—actively negotiate and co-create the governance, use, and meaning of parks. One form of negotiation occurs through signage and writing. Here, we focus on 42 parks in New York City and the multiple narratives within them. Through coding the messages, material qualities, and meanings in 784 signs, qualitative analysis of graffiti in parks, triangulated with ethnographic field notes, we identify and discuss what sort of urban park subjectivities are being constructed. These include not only an "ideal park subject," but also alternative subjectivities such as the neighbor or steward, the graffiti writer, and "free agents" who use wilderness as refuge. We seek to inform new ways of thinking about parks as social–ecological resources that are co-created by users and managers as places that allow multiple subjectivities to be expressed.

Once considered the antithesis of a verdant and vibrant ecosystem, cities are now being hailed as highly efficient and complex social ecological systems. Emerging from the streets of the post-industrial city are well-tended community gardens, rooftop farms and other viable habitats capable of supporting native flora and fauna. At the forefront of this transformation are the citizens living in the cities themselves. As people around the world increasingly relocate to urban areas, this book discusses how they engage in urban stewardship and what civic participation in the environment means for d.