URBAN OASES

Mid the artificial landscape of the modern city, open spaces such as New York's Central Park (below) stand as civic lifelines to nature. But for centuries of European and Asian history, such havens were restricted to the private grounds of kings and nobles. Commoners might occasionally be allowed into these verdant oases of aristocratic privacy, but on the whole, they took the air wherever they could find it—in once-private orchards rendered ownerless by plague, along the broad ramparts of for

Tified cities, or under the leafy avenues of a monarch's newly designed capital.

As cities expanded and prospered, however, they began to engulf the outlying gardens and hunting grounds of the nobility. By the eighteenth century, it had become impossible to deny the public at least limited access to these spaces. At the same time, the creation of parks became positively prestigious, as landowners sought to imitate the "natural" vistas created in Britain by landscapers such as Humphrey Rep-ton and Lancelot "Capability" Brown. The city of Munich acquired a public Englischer Garten In the 1790s, and In the years to follow, the English Ideal—serpentine lakes, along with carriageways and footpaths curving sinuously through gently sloping, folly-dotted woodland—was re-created throughout the Western world.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the park had become a vital part of urban planning. The moral and physical benefits to be gained from fresh air, exercise, and contact with nature were, in the view of social reformers, as necessary to citizens' health as clean streets and efficient sewers. And If the industrial city's grimy expansion into the surrounding countryside could not be stopped, it could at least be mitigated by the creation of green spaces that provided recreational facilities for all. No longer an outpost of privilege, the park had become part of the civic patrimony.