The New Republic offers a look and review of some of the nation's best new urban parks.
In looking at the High Line in New York City, Millennium Park in Chicago and Citygarden in St. Louis, architecture critic Sarah Williams Goldhagen also reviews the role and history of parks in dense urban areas.
"The urban park is not one type but many: the neighborhood playground or soccer field, the pastoral retreat from metropolitan smog and frenzied ways, the vest-pocket slip of a lunch spot, the community garden, the unbuildable swamp redefined as treasured wetlands. Those are not the types of park I wish to discuss here. I prefer to dwell on the centrally located park that is accessible and appealing to many classes of people from different walks of life-the great urban park. It must not be so large that inside it one loses a sense of the city. This type of park is typically important enough (and expensive enough) that municipalities work hard to weave it into the overall identity of the city. Over the course of a given year, many different activities and events happen there-concerts, rallies, festivals, fairs."
Read the full story: Park Here
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Harvard University Graduate School of Design
KFH Group Inc.
Greater Baltimore Committee
The Architects Foundation
University of Cincinnati Online
The Pocatello Development Authority
The Urban Renewal Agency of the City of Pocatello