Public parks were first established in the UK in the newly industrialised cities of Manchester and Salford, as nineteenth century cultural strategies for public health, regulation and education responding to moral anxieties about the changing conditions of everyday life. This article looks at public parks as vernacular spaces for everyday participation, drawing on empirical research, including ethnographic fieldwork, household interviews and focus groups, and community engagement conducted for the Manchester-Salford ecosystem case study of the ‘Understanding Everyday Participation – Articulating Cultural Value’ (UEP) project. It considers narratives of participation, which reveal how parks are valued and recognised as community assets and spaces for both tolerance and distinction, where different communities can meet, become visible, and perform shared and distinct cultural identities. It draws on the conceptual device of ‘the commons’, defined as a dynamic and collective resource that stands in tension with commodified and privatised space, to explore how parks present opportunities for civic participation through contemporary processes of ‘commoning.' I argue that parks are also subject to contemporary forms of enclosure through social exclusion and physical closure, which impact on the likely success of current policy imperatives for community asset transfer and alternative management models.
Source: Abstract