The role of gardens and parks in city planning

I’m taking a break from working (so hard) on my curriculum project to post some pictures. My project is on the history of city planning (and the incorporation of parks into city plans) in the US (the predecessors being, of course, European cities). The first US city plan was for Chicago in 1909 and the planner (Burnham) was in love with Paris, specifically how beautiful the city was. He wanted to make Chicago into a mini-Paris, with places to hang out and beautiful boulevards.

From the Chicago Encyclopedia:
Since a productive urban labor force required places to play and rest, the planners also believed it was necessary to consider parks and recreational facilities. Proper design was a vital consideration in more than a narrow functional sense. A proud city, after all, like any self-respecting human being, "has a dignity to be maintained." Besides, "good order is essential to material advancement."

I’ve been taking lots of pictures of gardens, because I want to focus on that aspect of city planning for my project. Here are some of them:

This is from the side of Schonbrunn, the Habsburgs quaint little summer house (!).

In the archway of greenery.

There is an amazing labyrinth in the back.

In back of Schonbrunn.

We went to Salzburg last weekend (birthplace of Mozart and all-around great town). These pictures are from Mirabelle Palace:

The Pegasus fountain from The Sound of Music (in the distance)!

A movement similar to the parks one in US history was the cemetery movement: making burial grounds into peaceful nature preserves where we commune with the dead. Today, after class, we went to a couple of graveyards:

Mozart was buried in a mass grave, but there is now a monument where he was (most likely) buried.

We also went to a huge cemetery on the outskirts of Vienna (it’s bigger than the original city!) where we saw the graves of Beethoven and Schubert.

These cemeteries pale in (cuteness) comparison to the one at St. Peter's church in Salzburg: