Parks and Trees are Public Health Measures

My research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century landscape history and contemporary landscape architecture in the Western World. Early park designers knew that incorporating parks and nature into cities is a public health measure with beneficial psychological and physical effects.

Before the advent of the germ theory in the 1880s, medical explanations for epidemics like cholera and yellow fever centered around the idea that “miasma” (poisonous gasses) led to disease. Physicians believed that vegetation, particularly tree canopies, could keep miasma (and consequently disease) from spreading. Early American park designers, public health officials, and physicians therefore advocated for the creation of parks and the planting of trees as public health measures. Some landscape architects, like Frederick Law Olmsted and Horace William Shaler Cleveland, argued (largely unsuccessfully, unfortunately) that urban parks and trees should be distributed evenly so that everyone would have easy access to nature.

The current pandemic has led many cities to issue shelter-in-place directives that limit activities to essential trips, which include allowances to go outside for exercise and fresh air. As a result, urbanites are flocking to parks and plazas—so much so that social distancing rules have sometimes been hard to maintain. Pressure on public parks has increased. But not everybody is in the lucky position to have a park, or even a tree-lined street, nearby. Even fewer people have access to a private yard, garden, terrace, or balcony—and consider the role that balconies have played in Italy, Spain, and Germany where residents, confined to their homes, have used them to get fresh air, exercise, and chat (at a distance) with neighbors, cheer healthcare workers, and express community solidarity through music and clapping.

Although the nineteenth-century physicians and designers were oblivious to the actual bacterial, parasitic, and virologic causes of cholera, malaria, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and influenza, their plans to build parks and plant trees were prescient in many ways, not least because of their various health benefits. COVID-19 is showing us, again, that urban nature is a vital component of comprehensive response to pandemics and disease. Access to this life-sustaining infrastructure should be provided equally.

Sonja Dümpelmann is Associate Professor, Department of Landscape Architecture, Stuart Weitzman School of Design.

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