Park Aesthetics Between Wilderness Representations and Everyday Affordances.

The article critically examines the influence of aestheticism—the treatment of parks as autonomous artworks separate from everyday life—on park and garden design, arguing that this aestheticism, rather than aesthetics itself, underlies the privileging of visual beauty over social and ecological concerns. It traces the historical roots of this approach to the eighteenth-century English Landscape Garden and the picturesque aesthetic, which framed nature as a romanticized, pristine wilderness to be admired from a distance, a concept that shaped iconic urban parks like New York’s Central Park and U.S. national parks. The article highlights how such designs often exclude practical human uses and marginalize indigenous and lower-income communities, as seen in contexts like Bangalore, India, where aesthetic priorities displace traditional livelihood practices. Drawing on thinkers like John Dewey and Yuriko Saito, the author advocates for a democratic, multi-aspective understanding of aesthetics that integrates everyday human and non-human interactions with nature, promoting urban green spaces as shared, inhabitable environments rather than untouchable spectacles.