Amita Sinha
Tekton
Volume 9, Issue 2, December 2022
pp. 52-61
Amita Sinha is the author of Cultural Landscapes of India: Imagined, Enacted, and Reclaimed (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020) that won the 2022 J.B. Jackson Book Award and Landscapes of India: Forms and Meanings (University Press of Colorado, 2006; reprinted by Gyan Books, 2023). She is the co-editor of Cultural Landscapes of South Asia: Studies in Heritage Conservation and Management (Routledge, 2017) that won the 2018 Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) Award. She was a Senior Fulbright Researcher at the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) in New Delhi in 2009 and was the recipient of Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award Fellowship in 2018-19. She received the National Merit Award, American Society of Landscape Architects for Cultural Heritage Project on Taj Mahal, India, in 2001. A former Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (1989-2018), she has taught in the Department of Architecture and Regional Planning, IIT Kharagpur and in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department at IIT Gandhinagar in India.
amitasinha12@hotmail.com
ABSTRACT
This essay is an overview of parks in Lucknow as landscapes of commemoration and recreation, themes pertinent to current political agendas and ideas regarding functions of public spaces. It reviews the park building in the city since independence and analyses them in two distinct phases; commenting on the changing ideas about their functions as public places as put in place by different political ideologies in power. The large parks of Lucknow, named after political leaders and memorializing them through statuary and biographical plaques, are primarily spaces of representation. While the size and location of these memorial parks ensures high visibility and a place in the ‘must-see’ tourist sites, their role as true civic spaces is questionable as is their sustainability. The essay concludes by discussing the appropriate direction, given the looming perils of climate change, for park building in the future.
KEY WORDS:
Commemoration, Lucknow, Memorialisation, Parks, Climate Change
