Contemporary attitudes toward urban parks fall into three levels of sophistication. The first, the most naive assumption, is that parks are just plots of land preserved in their original state. If asked to discuss the...

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a practical knowledge of the construction of small lakes was part of the equipment of most countrymen. Many of the holes they dug and dams they built still hold...

Born of antimodern sentiment, the summer camp was ultimately a modern phenomenon, a “therapeutic space” as much dependent on the city, the factory, and “progress” to define its parameters as on that intangible but much...