Landscapes of public value: A study of public space and public safety in a New York City playground

The West 110th Street playground located at the northwest corner of Central Park, bordering the Harlem neighborhood was the site for this study. The playground and its surrounding landscapes were addressed as a text from which to read parents, perceptions of safety embedded in their discurses and practices. In order to understand this space as relational and not an empty void or container three scales of analysis were developed and studied theoretically and empirically: the playground itself, the area of the park where the playground is located, and the adjacent neighborhood of Harlem. Interviews were conducted with parents who use the West 110th Street playground, parents who do not use the playground but instead use the Dana Center playground (the closest playground to the West 110th Street), and managers and staff of playgrounds in Central Park and in the Harlem neighborhood who work for The Central Park Conservancy and the Department of Parks and Recreation. The relativity of perceptions of safety in the West 110th Street playground was evident when parents perceived it to be less safe when compared to other playgrounds in Central Park, but safer when compared to other playgrounds in the Harlem neighborhood. Even though individual, the strategies deployed by parents helped them negotiate safe journeys through the neighborhood and the area of the park to the playground. Structural forces such as economic restructuring, and public disinvestment were also considered as they affect the socio-spatial organization of the urban environment. The consequent polarization of income and resources largely affected by these structural forces produced an uneven socio-physical geography in New York City: the glitter and development of areas like Times Square vs. the deterioration and lack of development in Harlem. Public safety, its perceptions, and the strategies deployed by urban residents were embedded in: the physical context (the conditions of the neighborhood vs. other neighborhoods in the city), the historical context (of Harlem's 'ghetto'); the institutional context (agencies and institutions that manage services in the city); and the economic context (the global economic restructuring and the simultaneous production of spaces of progress and decay).