Future Park

Future Park invites Australian policy-makers and built environment professionals to consider the future of parks in our cities. It describes the economic, social and environmental benefits of urban parks, and then outlines the threats and challenges facing cities and communities in an age when more than half the world’s population are urban dwellers. This book introduces the need to embrace new public park thinking to ensure that benefits continue to be realised.

The first public parks were created on urban ‘greenfields’. Once these designated sites had been used, cities looked towards post-industrial sites, and built parks in places that had suffered from environmental degradation, neglect, abandonment and conflict. With finite stocks of urban post-industrial land now also approaching exhaustion, more ways of making parks are required to create inclusive, accessible and resilient urban places. Future Park presents recent proposals and projects that coalesce around four broad themes – linkages, obsolescences, co-locations and installations – responding to contemporary urban paradoxes, and ensuring parks continue to play a vital role in the lives of our cities.