Great City Parks

"Great City Parks is a 344-page treasure chest for park professionals and aficionados and catnip for city park enthusiasts. It is a book to which one can return repeatedly and which one can treat both as a great reference book and as a primer for how one might think about designing or restoring the next great park." - Adrian Benepe, The Nature of Cities "Great City Parks [first edition] by Alan Tate, who himself has designed parks from Hong Kong to Disney Paris, is a detailed analysis of twenty parks, their planning, design and the management criteria for their success. The parks chosen are of different size, ages and characteristics. Each was designed for public use, allowed free admission and, to Tate, are significant examples of design. He reviews the sites, the rationale for their choice and the key figures behind their creation and design."— Dr Michael Bounds, Urban Research Centre, University of Western Sydney Comments/reviews/etc for previous edition: "If a ‘wake up call’ were needed, it came with the recent publication of Alan Tate’s seminal work, Great City Parks, for which no Edinburgh park was deemed worthy of inclusion." - Edinburgh Public Parks and Gardens Strategy, 2006 "This work offers inspiration to students and will also be of use to practitioners in describing and justifying specific elements and attributes of new parks and public spaces to potential clients, users and funders... This account offers a taste of the great potential, mostly within cities, of what open space can provide, and in doing so reveals the wealth of places still to consider." - RUDInet (Knowledge sharing and networking for professionals & academics in urban development) "What book are you reading? I'm dipping into Alan Tate's Great City Parks, which is a history of the world's finest. Many were inspired by parks in Britain. As a country we have lost a bit of that vision." - Julia Thrift, maanger of Cabe Space, interviewed in the Guardian "Tate describes and systematically assesses the qualities of 20 of the world's most highly regarded city parks and identifies management and design criteria for success." - New Zealand Ministry for the Environment, public space design advice