From People's Park Annex to Ohlone Park: The Wandering Body and Accessible Park Space

This paper focuses on disability access in urban greenspace through the case study of Ohlone Park in Berkeley, California. Initially built as People’s Park Annex in the 1960s, Ohlone Park was used as an alternative space for political activism after the first closing of People’s Park. This paper argues that the development pattern of Ohlone Park as a controlled public space away from its radical past suggests an anticipation of an idealized type of user that occupies the park as a temporary recreational area, which perpetuates the exclusion of disabled and unhoused bodies in the park. This idealization extends to the questions of bodies and space as well as perpetuates the hypervisibility of crip movement. The combination of lawn and lane in the park suggests that the dichotomy of nature and culture in landscape design is inter-perpetual with the imagination of an able-bodied walker. This paper explores how the question of body underlies themes including elements of nature in the built environment, history of the Free Speech Movement, and different forms of moving through greenspaces. This paper ends with the proposal of wandering as a methodology that counters the walker’s imagination and recognizes the multiplicity of spatialities formed moving through the park.