URBAN PARKS AND FIELD OF LEISURE STUDIES: PROPOSALS FOR A RESEARCH AGENDA

Abstract

Urban parks played an important role in the logic of cities, from the mid-nineteenth century. Leisure activities, inserted in the logic of the city, were also re-configured from a social control in the sanitation urban concepts during the centuries XIX and XX to democratization and citizenship processes observed from the last two decades of the twentieth century. This paper discusses leisure approaches in the city examining the relations with urban parks, as instruments and locus of action for the city and leisure rights. We are presenting, as an intervention proposal in urban parks the concept of the environmental animation, as an unfolding of socio-cultural animation, linking their aspects with environmental interpretation principles, which were designed as leisure renovating in urban parks. We also discuss some of the challenges and trends of this approach, linked to interdisciplinarity and intersectionality, in which the recreation professional must be inserted. We conclude the paper with information relating to a leisure research agenda in urban parks in two scales of analysis: a general of the cities, as urban and environmental public policy in which the parks are inserted and another specifically of the public use actions on urban parks.