PUBLIC PARKS IN THE NORTH: DESIGNED TO LIBERATE OR DISCIPLINE OUR BODIES?

Abstract

While access to the urban environment depends on practical needs and economic power, public parks appear to provide access to all. Replacing practical and economic interests by playgrounds, sport facilities, and fresh greenery, public parks promote not only public health but also social integration. Yet public parks are not neutral; they shape our bodily action and interaction. This shaping may be called social choreographies, and social choreographies are strongly ideological. Thus, recent park designs of the Nordic countries are liberal and inclusive in accord with the Social Democratic and liberal tradition of these countries. Still one may ask whether such liberal inclusiveness is not a political tool to better control the moving body? When skateboarders and parkourists are encouraged to use large-scale facilities constructed in the peripheries of public parks, can this be a way for the authorities to confine highly mobile and anarchic elements to special designated areas?