Great City Parks is a celebration of some of the finest achievements of landscape architecture in the public realm. It is a comparative study of twenty significant public parks in fourteen major cities across Western Europe and North America. Collectively, they give a clear picture of why parks have been created, how they have been designed, how they are managed, and what plans are being made for them at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Based on unique research including extensive site visits and interviews with the managing organisations, this book is illustrated throughout with clear plans and professional photographs for each park. This book reflects a belief that well-planned, well-designed and well-managed parks remain invaluable components of liveable and hospitable cities.

A fast-growing frontier community transformed itself into a beautiful urban model of parks and boulevards. In 1893, East Coast newspapers were calling Kansas City the filthiest in the United States. The drainage of many houses emptied into gullies and cesspools. There was no garbage collection service, and herding livestock through the city was only recently prohibited. Through the diligent efforts of a handful of recently arrived citizens, political, financial, and botanical skills were successfully applied to a nascent parks system. Squirrel pastures, cliffs and bluffs, ugly ravines, and shanties and slums were turned into a gridiron of green, with chains of parks and boulevards extending in all directions. Wherever the system penetrated well-settled localities, the policy was to provide playgrounds, tennis courts, baseball diamonds, pools, and field houses. By the time the city fathers were finished, Kansas City could boast of 90 miles of boulevards and 2,500 acres of urban parks.

Catie Marron’s City Parks captures the spirit and beauty of eighteen of the world’s most-loved city parks. Zadie Smith, Ian Frazier, Candice Bergen, Colm Tóibín, Nicole Krauss, Jan Morris, and a dozen other remarkable contributors reflect on a particular park that holds special meaning for them. Andrew Sean Greer eloquently paints a portrait of first love in the Presidio; André Aciman muses on time’s fleeting nature and the changing face of New York viewed from the High Line; Pico Iyer explores hidden places and privacy in Kyoto; Jonathan Alter takes readers from the 1968 race riots to Obama’s 2008 victory speech in Chicago’s Grant Park; Simon Winchester invites us along on his adventures in the Maidan; and Bill Clinton writes of his affection for Dumbarton Oaks. Oberto Gili’s color and black-and-white photographs unify the writers’ unique and personal voices. Taken around the world over the course of a year, in every season, his pictures capture the inherent mood of each place. Fusing images and text, City Parks is an extraordinary and unique project: through personal reflection and intimate detail it taps into collective memory and our sense of time’s passage.

A visually stunning and beautifully written celebration of park life around the world. Parks are an absolutely essential part of modern life. From the author who brought you Lido, here are 50 of the world's greatest parks – but not just a list of the examples we already know. Yes, we'll tell you about those storied greats such as Central Park in New York and Phoenix Park in Dublin, but we'll also take you to the Philippines, to Australia, to provincial Britain and around the world to show you the most historic and the most interesting, the newest and most cutting-edge that mix the best of nature and architecture. We'll explore what you can find there, who goes there, why they are important, and how parks respond to their environments, including ones over a road, on old rail lines or in Berlin's former airport. Examples include: • Freeway Park, Seattle, USA: a bizarre and brilliant brutalist park over a motorway. • Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo, Brazil: this one contains amazing galleries and theatres. • Holyrood Park, Edinburgh, UK: mountains within a city. • Adelaide's parks, Australia: unique in that the entire city centre is enclosed by parks. and many, many more. Illustrated with glorious photographs throughout, this book is a fascinating record of the world's most interesting and innovative parks, and the people who use them – you'll want to visit them all.

Annotation A study of five major urban parks, including New York's Prospect Park and Philadelphia's Independence National Historical Park, that offers a blueprint for promoting and maintaining cultural diversity in parks around the world.