Urban Oasis - Role in The Community

Role in The Community

Identity is one of the most significant roles of an urban oasis. Great public icons like Rockefeller Center's ice-skating rink, and Central Park’s woodlands, open fields, and fountains are good examples of identifiable places in New York City. Both are well known and visited often, allowing tourists and residents to take advantage of an urban oasis.

Another role of the urban oasis is to provide economic benefit to the community. Land values in a city are considerably affected by parks and surrounding attractions. The highest land values in New York City tend to be around Bryant Park, Central Park, and Riverside Park. The green-market has been a major catalyst in revitalizing the surrounding neighborhoods. The parks revitalize streets for walking, gathering, and shopping and provide economic benefits to a city.

Plaza-like urban oasis features provide settings for cultural activities like farmers' markets, art galleries, and music events. They not only provide for cultural activities, but plazas also provide economic activity to the communities. One good example is the WaterFire night event in Providence, Rhode Island. During the summer and early fall, bonfires are placed just above the surface of the three rivers that pass through the middle of downtown Providence, which give out pleasing smells of aromatic wood. This, combined with live music, creates a public cultural event that brings people into a central urban area after dark while engaging the senses and emotions of those who stroll the paths and bridges of Waterplace Park.

Read more about this topic:  Urban Oasis

Famous quotes containing the words role in the, role and/or community:

    Language makes it possible for a child to incorporate his parents’ verbal prohibitions, to make them part of himself....We don’t speak of a conscience yet in the child who is just acquiring language, but we can see very clearly how language plays an indispensable role in the formation of conscience. In fact, the moral achievement of man, the whole complex of factors that go into the organization of conscience is very largely based upon language.
    Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)

    Where we come from in America no longer signifies—it’s where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we are.
    The irony of the role of women in my business, and in so many other places, too, was that while we began by demanding that we be allowed to mimic the ways of men, we wound up knowing we would have to change those ways. Not only because those ways were not like ours, but because they simply did not work.
    Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)

    He thought that, because the community represents millions of people, therefore it must be millions of times more important than the individual, forgetting that the community is an abstraction from the many, and is not the many themselves.
    —D.H. (David Herbert)