Designing Small Parks: A Manual for Addressing Social and Ecological Concerns

This book seems to be interesting for me. Let's see part of the review:

" With small parks often deemed the least important of municipal and regional open-space system, Design Small Parks is a important contribution to the potential of engaging social and ecological issues through the thoughtful design to small parks.

By Ann Forsyth and Laura R. Musacchio (Wiley, 2005)

Reviewed by Erick Villagomez, re:place Magazine

Small parks play a pivotal role in North American cities by being the main open space for most neighbourhoods. As such they often are arguably the most significant social space within the urban landscape, over and above providing a soft, natural terrain for people to interact with on a daily basis.

Yet, despite their intimate importance to the lives of everyday citizen, their limited size - and often fragmented distribution - puts small parks at the bottom of the open space priority list, behind larger regional parks and conservation areas whose ecological and social merits are clearly understood and respected. This bias is based on the assumption that the tight boundaries of small parks don’t allow for a variety of activities or allow them to be truly integrated into a more meaningful ecological strategy. At the end of the day, nothing could be further from the truth and this is clearly demonstrated in Ann Forsyth and Laura Musacchio’s Designing Small Parks: A Manual for Addressing Social and Ecological Concerns.

This a book that continues Wiley’s well-known tradition of providing practitioners and students with a solid, practical guide to the built environment. The book is clearly organized into four large sections - Overview of Park Planning and Design Concerns, Design Examples, Design Development Guidelines and Design Development Issue in Brief - each of which is broken up into subsections. Also worth mentioning is the overall design of the book, that uses smart graphic conventions - such as the repetitive header that clearly highlights the sub-section one is reading - to facilitate referencing the topics discussed. This particularly important for those who quickly want refer to back to an topic while reading the book or after one is done with it."
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