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Review: Creating Recovery: Values and Approaches in New York after 9/11

management agreements between The Trust for Public Land, New York State Parks, New York University, and the city Parks Department and how various negotiations and planning processes fell apart. This section focuses on the limitations of professional designs that would eventually overwrite the informal aspects of the park and the failure of neighborhood advocacy groups to fully incorporate the entire community in advocacy for the park. Chapter 8 continues with reflections on the governance of the state park and conflicts over large musical events that evolved from informal and spontaneous into large-scale and formalized uses. In the final chapter, Campo laments the latest transformations of BEDT, which has largely lost its countercultural edge. While fragments of the industrial past were incorporated into the park’s new design, Campo mourns a unique ecotone social ecology that has been virtually wiped out. The author points out various ways in which concerns over liability and safety have impinged upon the wildness and relative freedom of the park. He juxtaposes the do-it-yourself, temporary park with formalistic and expensive approaches that overlook incremental, more immediate, and improvised solutions to space for socializing and recreation. He describes “accidental” space in relation to the golden age of adventure playgrounds of the 1960s and 1970s; the canon of early urban design theory, including connections to Jane Jacobs, William Whyte, and Kevin Lynch; as well as the more recent tenets of Everyday (Chase, Crawford, and Kaliski 2008), Tactical (Lyndon 2011), Guerrilla (Hou 2010), and Landscape Urbanisms (Waldheim 2006). Curiously, Campo does not return to the topic of homeless users after chapter 6 and instead seems to focus his conclusions more specifically on leisure space. This seems understandable, as the book is mostly focused on the creation of space through leisure-related activity. Still, this vulnerable population seems left behind in the final analysis. Should campsites be formalized as legitimate uses of the land? Could the design of homeless shelters benefit from informal campsites? Is public and private development forcing homeless people into underfunded institutional settings and out of urban spaces that might currently be, at least partially, meeting their needs? The Accidental Playground prods professionals into thinking about the people most often left out of planning processes; however, its conclusion seems to drop the important questions it raises about homeless residents and their uses of urban space. Some of the most significant contributions of the book are in the questions it poses and leaves largely unanswered. Can an accidental park with informal uses become something that is intentional? How can planners and designers embrace the informal without destroying it? The author does not resolve these issues nor does he propose specific methods for incorporating fire spinners, skaters, or the homeless in parking planning. His intent is to “inspire planners, designers, advocates, scholars, students, and citizens to learn from and not hastily destroy unplanned spaces and the experiences they engender” (246). The reader is left with the task of identifying alternative routes that planners and neighborhood activists could take to protect, preserve, and encourage these spaces. The book offers the reader narratives with detailed observations; however, it does not contain much in the way of prescriptions for how the professional might go about saving the delicate ecology of unparks or fostering their spirit. I eagerly await a second book in which the author proposes pragmatic ways in which professionals can respond to the many needs, desires, and abilities of urbanites to create new social spaces. I recommend this book; I believe that Campo makes significant contributions to the planning literature by describing the constituencies of park space whose voices are too often ignored in planning processes. He advocates for the extension of planners’ concern into the territory of unpark users and the creative and informal uses that most often receive tepid reception, if any treatment, within planning practice. Campo makes a compelling case that insurgent and DIY planning should be considered and could even be used alongside professional planning and design methods. I am a bit concerned that a general professional or scholarly audience may have little patience for reading the triumphs and losses of skateboarders or about the experiences of the practitioners of the fire arts. On the other hand, I have already noticed avid readership among students who would like to explore theories of urban space, place, and informality. I believe we could all benefit from Campo’s challenge to incorporate a broader view of park constituencies and develop a richer appreciation for the connections between place and the breadth of human experience.