Why are some parks so lively and popular, while some are so lonely and even unsafe? When we think about how to improve our neighborhood, many would say we need more parks and open space. Parks have been perceived as a cure that can uplift a neighborhood, stabilize real estate value, and bring the community together — but that is a false reassurance because park behaviors are actually pretty volatile and extreme.
In the book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, one of the most influential books in the history of American city planning, Jane Jacobs talks about the use of neighborhood parks and the drivers that are critical in the making of a vibrant, well-loved park. She advocates for community-based planning and the importance of preserving diverse, mixed-use neighborhoods.
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At the time, this book was written as a critique of the top-down city planning approach advocated by Robert Moses, the most powerful urban planner in NYC in the mid-20th century, who believed in large-scale urban renewals and modernizing the city at the expense of disrupting existing neighborhoods. Just like human behaviors, parks also have distinct “park behaviors” and layers of complexity, which is a mix of design, urban planning, and psychology.
01 Mixture of Primary Use
The top driver of a park’s success is ensuring a mixture of primary use surrounding it. When you think of a lively park, what matters the most is actually having enough people who enter and leave the park at different times. That required a mix of primary use surrounding the park, including residential, office, and small business, etc. That’s why parks in the financial district tend to be less lively because people all operate on the same daily schedule — they enter the park at once, then leave after work hours. Most of the day and the evening is empty. When an area has a single, dominant use, it imposes a limited schedule, which leads to a vicious circle of an unpopular park.
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02 Diversity of Park Design
Besides schedule and usage diversity, Jane Jacobs additionally introduced 4 essential elements that introduced diversity at different levels for a lively park. First, at the eye level, a vibrant park usually offers sufficient stimulation to different usages and moods, also termed intricacy by Jane Jacobs. When the park is too small or its design is very flat, where you can see the whole park at a glance, that’s not enough stimulation at eye level to keep people around. Changes in the rise of grounds or the presence of various focal points introduce subtle differences at the eye level that keep people stay curious to explore.
For example, San Francisco’s valleys are great examples of this principle, where the ups and downs of the hills introduced intricacy at the eye level. Another great example is the classical gardens in Suzhou, where the location of landscape, rocks, hills and rivers are all strategically located in the garden to introduce subtle eye stimulation from every angle.
The other related elements are centering and enclosure. Just like a good story, a park also has its climax in the hero journey. We can think of a park as a stage, where there is a center where everyone is both a spectator and performer at once. And finally, the sun is also important, otherwise the park feels gloomy and sad, which attracts less people.
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03 Differentiation & Demand Good
The third driver of a lively park is thinking about how it differentiates. There are many parks in a city and sometimes they have similar purposes to each other. Just like building a product, we need to think about what specific, differentiated value a park provides, because there are only so many people in a city and parks essentially are fighting for attention and limited time, just like TikTok and Instagram.
Jane Jacobs encouraged us to think about the “demand good” for a specific park. For example, having a nice landscape itself isn’t a demand good, but having sports fields, swimming pools, or activities like carnivals are. We can also figure out the demand good by observing its natural use. This again resembles product development where we identify product market fit by observing how real needs are met with our offerings. This is the beauty of multi-disciplinary learnings where we see similar patterns of how things operate from seemingly different fields.
Ultimately, the making of a beloved park isn’t just about the design of the park itself, it's about nurturing diversified neighborhoods capable of using and supporting parks. This is a great example where to make the design successful, designing the ecosystem surrounding it and considering its overall context is critical to its long-term popularity.
There is a video version of this post on YouTube if you prefer a visual walkthrough.