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World National Park
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In Federal systems, many parks are managed by the local levels of government, rather than by the central government. In the United States these include state parks and in Canada provincial or territorial parks, except in Quebec where they are known as National Parks.
• Urban parks
A park is an area of open space provided for recreational use, usually owned and maintained by a local government. Parks commonly resemble savannas or open woodlands, the types of landscape that human beings find most relaxing. Grass is typically kept short to discourage insect pests and to allow for the enjoyment of picnics and sporting activities. Trees are chosen for their beauty and to provide shade.
The world's first public park is claimed to be la Alameda de Hércules, in Seville. It is a promenaded public mall, urban garden and park built in 1574, within the historic center of Seville. It is located between the river Guadalquivir and the Macarena neighborhood. Other early parks include the City Park, in Budapest, Hungary, which was property of the Batthyány family. In 1808 an Imperial law converted it to the English style. Some years later the Count Batthyány ordered that it should be established as a public park. The earliest purpose built public park, although financed privately, was Princes Park in the Liverpool suburb of Toxteth. This was laid out to the designs of Joseph Paxton from 1842 and opened in 1843. The land on which the park was built was purchased by Richard Vaughan Yates, an iron merchant and philanthropist, in 1841 for £50,000. The creation of Princes Park showed great foresight and introduced a number of highly influential ideas. First and foremost was the provision of open space for the benefit of townspeople and local residents within an area that was being rapidly built up. Secondly it took the concept of the designed landscape as a setting for the suburban domicile, an idea pioneered by John Nash at Regent’s Park, and re-fashioned it for the provincial town in a most original way. Nash’s remodelling of St James’s Park from 1827 and the sequence of processional routes he created to link The Mall with Regent’s Park completely transformed the appearance of London’s West End. With the establishment of Princes Park in 1842, Joseph Paxton did something similar for the benefit of a provincial town, albeit one of international stature by virtue of its flourishing mercantile contingent. Liverpool had a burgeoning presence on the scene of global maritime trade before 1800 and during the Victorian era its wealth rivalled that of London itself.
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