Unit information: A Social History of Public Spaces Since 1800 in 2009/10

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Unit name A Social History of Public Spaces Since 1800
Unit code ARCHM0046
Credit points 10
Level of study M/7
Teaching block(s) Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24)
Unit director Emeritus Professor. Mowl
Open unit status Not open
Pre-requisites

None
Co-requisites

None
School/department Department of Anthropology and Archaeology
Faculty Faculty of Arts

Description including Unit Aims

This is an optional unit offered in Teaching Block 2. This unit will explore the development of public spaces over the last two hundred years and place them within their social and histroical context. The unit will begin by looking at the creation of garden cemeteries and finish with the 2004 CABE brochure, The Value of Public Space. Other areas to be discussed to include the rise in public parks during the Victorian period, the garden city movementt, the use of Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll as designers for the Commonwealth War Grave Commission post-World War I, the change in ideas about land ownership, also as a result of World War I, and the subsequent National Parks movement, the development of countryside parks, new parks such as the Thames Barrier Park, and recent park movements including the restoration of nineteenth-century parks as a result of Heritage Lottery Funding.

Aims:

The aim of this unit is to provide an exploration of the role of public spaces within society, which will be complementary to the emphasis on private gardens taken by the other options offered. In this way it will broaden students understanding of issues relating to the wider landscape.

Intended Learning Outcomes

Students will develop an awareness of the changes in society, which have influenced the development of public spaces. This will also encourage them to think more broadly about the wider social changes that have played a role in garden history.

Teaching Information

Lectures, seminars and fieldtrips.

Assessment Information

An assessed seminar/site presentation from which a short essay (3,500 words) is submitted.

Reading and References

  • Select Committee on Public Walks, 1833
  • Hazel Conway, Peoples Parks: The Design and Development of Victorian Parks in Britain, 1991
  • David Schuyler, The Evolution of the Anglo-American Rural Cemetery: Landscape Architecture as Social and Cultural History in Garden History,
  • Mandy S. Morris, Gardens For Ever England: Landscape, Identity and The First World War British Cemeteries on the Western Front in Ecumene, 1997, 4 (4)

Garden City/National Parks

  • CABE, The Value of Public Space: How High Quality Parks and Public Spaces Create Economic, Social and Environmental Value, 2004

Related links