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| Urban Parks |
June 8th, 2003.
By Professor Fabio Cupul
University of Guadalajara Puerto Vallarta Campus
|
 The
physiognomy of a city can be the ambiguous symbol of
the degree of technological, economic and social development
or underdevelopment of a human group. One thing is for
sure: it has allowed the expansion of a successful species
(the human one) and altered the distribution of others,
directly or indirectly, through the destruction of habitats,
agricultural practices and the domestication of plants
and animals.
As a result, many species have found
themselves to be underprivileged and reduced, while
others have adapted to the change and have even increased
in size, occupying sites within the cities, such as
cemeteries, garbage dumps, buildings and residences
among others, uncommon within their lifecycles.
Far from thinking that cities are
nothing more than steel and concrete, human beings have
managed to integrate part of their tree-dwelling subconscious
into them, to endow them with vegetation along avenues,
parks and gardens, thus contributing to the modeling
of the urban climate as these regulate temperature,
raise the relative humidity, release oxygen, reduce
noise levels and atmospheric pollutants.
Also, city parks provide sites where
man can commute and relax with nature. Numerous species,
especially birds, have taken advantage of this human
feeling and adapted to urban life, most often by colonizing
public parks as these offer food, shelter and breeding
sites. This process on the part of the birds to invade
and adapt to the urban medium is called urbanization.
It has been noted that the existence
of changes in the wealth of bird species is closely
related to the presence of green spaces within the city.
Moreover, this increases where there is greater similarity
between the vegetation make-up and that of the natural
environment that surrounds the urban spread, considering
that the modification of any habitat involves adjustments
in the community that it shelters. The replacement of
natural habitats with urban and suburban areas considerably
alters the composition of species and their total density.
Various studies in this country have
managed to establish the presence of some fifty species
of bird species in public parks, endemic (that only
exist in this place and nowhere else) to Meso-America,
endangered and protected; among which the following
stand out: the Rock Dove, the House Sparrow and the
Great-tailed Grackle, urban birds by excellence. Urban
parks, regardless whether they are small or large artificial
green spaces, can maintain a considerable bird population,
mainly because of its biological diversity, about which
we can learn the mechanisms that make it function and
through which we may understand nature itself.
The preceding enables us to visualize
important aspects of environmental protection such as
the care and vigilance in a protected area that can
be implemented by society itself in parks for its future
extrapolation in wild areas. That way, conservationist
habits can be created within our urban confines, thus
reducing the generation of impacts on protected environments
due to the lack of biological culture.
Given those characteristics, urban
parks can provide sources of tourist activities such
as bird watching and photo opportunities of the different
species that live there, activities that favor an economic
revenue -from the equipment or materials to be used-
besides contributing to the structuring of the urban
physiognomy, so important to the health and well-being
of man.
It could be very interesting to explain
to the authorities responsible for the urbanization
processes in cities that instead of holding on to the
general tendency to create artificial green spaces using
exotic plants once the urban development has occurred,
they should consider the idea of including the existing
green spaces in the architectural design, something
that would accomplish a double purpose: aside from offering
visual relaxation, recreation and a source of oxygen
as any green area would, it would also serve to show
off part of the native flora and associated biotypes.
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