Turning Feral Spaces into Trendy Places: A Coffee House in Every Park?

Dynamic modes of political economic regulation impact provision for the parks system in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Green spaces during Milwaukee's first liberal era consisted mostly of private properties accessible only to the city's elite and/or to those willing to pay a fee to drink in its boisterous bier gartens. Collective open space investment at the turn of the 19th century signaled the beginning of a second, decades-long era of Keynesian state provision for parks. A steady decline in that investment for Milwaukee's parks since the 1980s has provided the context for a set of new, yet seemingly liberalized governance experiments to emerge from the now defunct managerialist system. In this paper I employ regulation and regime theories in conjunction with thirty-six in-depth interviews to argue that these new parks experiments hail the beginning of a third era in parks provision. The new era is marked by an apparently neoliberal shift in regulation for open space on the basis of state actions to market public parks provision to a multiplicity of private actors. It is different from the first liberal era because the state withdraws its fiscal commitment to parks but still employs them to continue its active role in environmental and—by extension—social regulation. A multiplicity of local parks governances are promoted in the name of environmental citizenship but are problematic because they form new and localized geographies of social reproductive discipline in the benevolent rhetoric of responsibility, choice, and empowerment.