Park Planning and Design

About

Designing the Parks is a partnership among eight diverse organizations committed to sustaining healthy, vibrant public parks as a core of civic life. Embodied in this vision is a framework for planning and designing public parks that are innovative, responsive, respectful, sustainable and inclusive.

The Designing the Parks partnership: the National Park Service, The Cultural Landscape Foundation, University of Virginia, Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, Institute at the Golden Gate, George Wright Society, National Parks Conservation Association, and the Van Alen Institute.

Background

In May 2008, the National Park Service (Northeast and Pacific West Regions and the Denver Service Center) joined with five other partners to co-sponsor Designing the Parks – a two-part examination of the past, present, and future of park planning and design. Public parks will face unprecedented challenges in this new century. Shifting demographics, climate change, rapidly changing communication technologies, new transportation prototypes, and economic constraints are but a few of the urgent issues confronting today’s park designers, planners, and managers. This initiative comes at an historic moment in particular for the National Park Service and other public agengies and localities as they help carry forward President Obama’s agenda for national economic recovery. This is a time when popular interest in the design of public spaces has never been higher. This renaissance of interest is in a large part stimulated by an intense focus on energy conservation, sustainability and climate change. It is equally responsive to a growing commitment to broader inclusion and engagement of diverse communities and demographic groups who have not been traditional park users. How we plan and design our public parks in response to these changing imperatives will have an enormous impact on how successful we are at creating welcoming, meaningful, healthy, and enduring places that last well into the future.