Parks are now, as they have been for centuries, a mirror of our societies. They occupy a special place in our culture and are a record of the beliefs and mores of the time of their conception. This is an era 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, land protection, 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.

What will our parks tell future generations about who we are and what we believe is important? Parks deserve the informed scrutiny of critics and scholars, and - even more importantly - the informed attention and judgment of the public. With less land and fewer resources, an increasingly integrated population, and myriad threats to the global environment, parks and open space will take on a progressively more significant role in public life. This will be true whether one lives in a small, intimate neighborhood or a sprawling metropolis. This, in turn, will place an ever greater demand on park stewards and professionals to design parks of extremely high community value.

Future park planners and designers must think broadly about how they intervene to create public space. The Designing the Parks dialogue and the principles that emerged challenge today’s designers to go beyond the creative process behind new objects, artifacts, or arrangements to also consider planning, preservation, interpretation, social structures, and even management of a park’s cultural and natural processes and systems – all activities that shape environments and their experiences. This includes making, modifying, conserving, developing, interpreting, and managing. These aspects of design are divergent in ways, but they share some important attributes: they directly affect the materiality of parks; they directly shape visitors’ experiences of parks; and they are critical to addressing the complex challenges we are facing in this century.

As a way to catalyze this effort and continue this rich dialogue, the National Park Service’s Denver Service Center has launched the Designing the Parks Annual Awards Program. This will be a high visibility program to elevate the prominence of parks by recognizing and publicizing park design that best exemplifies the Designing the Parks principles. By creating this awards program – the first of its kind dedicated only to public parks - Designing the Parks will continue to foster quality discourse on the role and significance of public parks in community life and the importance of innovative, responsive, high quality planning and design. In turn, we hope to encourage a generation of highly informed, sophisticated and discerning park stewards, planners, designers, and park users in every country. In this way, the public will become more aware and thus more responsible and active advocates for park design excellence. Public officials will see the importance and wisdom of innovative, inclusive park planning and design, and park professionals will have a recognized threshold of excellence to which they can aspire.

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