Orange County’s Great Park

The Economist reports that Orange County, the Southern Californian suburbia best known for its luxury shopping malls and “real housewives,” will soon be home to the largest municipal park to be built in more than a century. The OC’s Great Park turns a former military airport into a grass and tree-covered canyon spanning 1,350 acres – more than one-and-a-half times the size of New York’s Central Park. The park will depend on recycled water to fill its lake, and certain sections of the land will be reserved for farming and composting. Great Park is one of several projects cropping up across the nation that mark the revival of the urban park as a respite from city (or suburban) life. From New York to Denver to Detroit, “natural” landscapes are taking the place of out-of-use runways and landfills, while retaining a bit of the original space’s history with it:

… The Great Park will convert a hangar into a museum and retain the outline of a runway. A river diverted underground by the marines will be restored to its former course. The preservation lobby is stronger these days. And besides, says Yehudi Gaffen, a partner in the Great Park project, “Southern California has so little history that we should try to keep some of it.”

Natural terrain dug up to make way for manmade developments, now razed to a recreate expanses of bucolic escape  – an interesting circle we’ve made…

[via The Economist]