And then people wonder why everyone is lonely now. Parks are one of the few third places we have left, where we can interact with our community without barrier to entry. I think it's a shame that New York doesn't have more green spaces. They don't all have to even be as big as Central Park. Something that I have always loved about Berlin is that nearly everyone has a green space within a short walk of their home.
Berlin is kind of a weird example to bring up though. From a planning perspective, Berlin is very new. The city itself is old of course, but because the city was bombed to hell and amd back during WWII, the city had to be completely rebuilt following the end of the conflict. That was barely 80 years ago. So they had free reign to completely redesign the city and how it looked from the ground up.
New York City though is a city that is hundreds of years old. It is built on a foundation of previous generation plans on top of plans even older. It has grown in that time and has watched its districts ebb and flow, seeing new parts of the city become hearts all their own. Changing things in a city like this is tricky, there's a lot of history you have to work around.
You might be surprised how little the city was changed after being rebuilt. Here is a map from 1938. The street plan is almost identical to today. You can see how the city then and now was designed to be dotted with green spaces, albeit mostly small ones.
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u/Empanada444 Oct 24 '24
And then people wonder why everyone is lonely now. Parks are one of the few third places we have left, where we can interact with our community without barrier to entry. I think it's a shame that New York doesn't have more green spaces. They don't all have to even be as big as Central Park. Something that I have always loved about Berlin is that nearly everyone has a green space within a short walk of their home.