Public Parks: The Key to Livable Communities

by Alexander Garvin

Everything that landscape architects, architects, planners, civic officials, and citizen activists need to know about the critical urban role of public parks. Everything that anybody (whether they are citizen activists, or public officials, or professional landscape architects, architects, and planners) needs to know about the critical role public parks play in creating livable communities. Millions of dollars are being spent on restoring parks and creating new ones. Planner Alexander Garvin explains the rationales for their existence, the forms they take, their value, ways to pay for and govern them, and the ingredients that make successful parks, providing the first single definitive source of wisdom about them. 250 color photographs and plans

224 pages, Hardcover

First published November 29, 2010

About the author

New Yorker Alexander Garvin combines a career in urban planning and real estate with teaching and public service.

Reviews

[Kathryn Paton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Garvin establishes the premise of his book as the argument that public parks create livable communities by improving public health, incubating a civil society, sustaining a livable environment, and providing a framework for public development. Except, he never explains why, asserting confidently that parks automatically increase surrounding land value because of their inherent value as Parks (as More Open Space, really). In the first part of this book especially, lacking sufficient studies, he reverts so often to ‘obviously’ and intuition and centuries of tradition that it is infuriating. The examples he does draw or increased park value imply relationships of simplicity versus understanding the problem of organized complexity that a city is. He furthermore conflates cities and suburbs and small and large parks and their possibilities. I was thoroughly disappointed by the beginning— especially having recently read Jane Jacobs’s thorough and incisive work the Death and Life of Great American Cities— however, in the latter part of the book concerning park management, Garvin seems much more in his element and I found the book much more engaging. This is an author, a man who loves parks and is an expert on them, but his work fails to show parks in their fully dynamic city settings.

[Heather Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

Public Parks by Alexander Garvin has a lot of great information about the history of parks, from the earliest parks in Europe to the rebuilding of American parks after they suffered years or decades of neglect due to budget cuts. The best parts of the book are Garvin's sections on Stewardship, Finance and Governance, and The Role of the Public. These sections had great ideas about how to keep parks growing and relevant now and in the future.
The book is a bit long and wordy and the photos in the book all somehow look like they were taken in the 1970's, but the info at the end is very useful.

[C. Christopher Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

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