Culture, Participation and Policy in the Municipal Public Park

Drawing on extensive mixed-methods research on everyday participation in diverse local cultural ecosystems in England and Scotland, the book examines the social lives of parks and their users, and the important public values that are generated through their common stewardship and usership. It presents case studies of parks and co-located museums as cultural public spheres, which promote both commoning and commodification. These are contextualized by histories of municipal parkmaking from the nineteenth century to the present and related to the making of local government and toother civic and cultural institutions.