Rethinking urban parks from geographical perspective

Urban parks, as semi-permanent natural entities within urban spaces, are crucial to urbanizationa, acting as vital mediators in the dense fabric of modern cities. Past research mostly addresses history, accessibility, sustainability, ecosystem services, and health. Yet such work tends to remain park-centered, overlooking broader human-nature connections and often treating parks as isolated islands rather than integral parts of the socio-spatial fabric. This paper uses a dialectical perspective on humans and nature, underlining time and space to propose that urban parks serve both as tangible sites and as a geographical method for examining ties among human, nature, and society. To deconstruct these complexities, we analyze 3 theoretical views: anthropocentrism, naive harmony between human and nature, and the more-than-human perspective. Anthropocentrism sees parks mainly for human benefit, while naive harmony presumes seamless nature-urban integration. In contrast,more-than-human frameworks highlight nonhuman agency and socioecological processes that shape and are shaped by parks, revealing hidden tensions within communities and between humans and nature. Further, the paper endorses using urban parks as lens, echoing calls for relational thinking in Human Geography. Rooted in the Chinese context, this lens unveils social transformation, spatial governance, and everyday life, revealing shifting cultural practices and power structures that inform urban change. Parks thus become tangible arenas for studying social and ecological interplay. Finally, this approach reengages Marx’s dialectical stance on human-nature relations while resonating with China’s contemporary vision of ecological civilization. It underscores integrating historical materialism with socioecological imperatives, emphasizing environmental stewardship alongside social justice. By recasting urban parks as a lens, this research enriches urban nature studies and provides ways toward resilient, inclusive, and ecologically aligned urban futures. Ultimately, this reorientation fosters more holistic views of urban ecosystems, guiding integrative and equitable policy-making for long-term sustainability and inclusive development.