I’ve written before that cities are not statistics. In that particular case, I was talking about how we can quantify various aspects of a city or neighborhood, but that those numbers tell us very little about life - the actual experience on the ground, whether people will walk and what kind of economic success it might have. While it frustrates the rational mind, it’s better to start with looking at human behavior, psychology and even sociology. For example, the notion of Walk Appeal. Our collective fascination with numerical analysis extends to park design as well. Standards-making bodies tell us how much park space a city should have, in what configurations, and with what amenities. It’s as if we could simply follow these rules and have successful, well-used parks and public spaces.

Of course, the real world provides no such comfort. Our public spaces vary tremendously in their success – how well they are used, how much they impact adjoining property value, and how much they contribute to people walking or biking.

Parks or plazas of similar sizes show wildly different amounts of usage and success. City officials and residents are often left wondering, why does one park work well when another does not?

Of course, design of the park itself matters. No one has written better about this than William H Whyte, who is discussed in this excellent blog post regarding Brewer Fountain Plaza in Boston. Whyte, like any good researcher, actually studied how people use space, instead of solely relying on design theory. One could say that he excelled at studying humans in their native habitat.

And while Whyte is spot on with those specific criteria for the park/public space, there are a few other bigger-picture criteria from urban design that impact success. For this particular post, I’ll use Savannah, GA as a case study, with its famous Oglethorpe-designed master plan. The primary object of my analysis is Forsyth Park, the largest park in the historic district – not one of the 22 squares that the city is most known for.

For a couple of years now, I’ve not only used Forsyth on a nearly daily basis, but observed how others use it, and how it functions in the community. The park is arguably one of the five or ten best urban parks in America, in my opinion, and a guiding example of how to do it right. While the park certainly nails Whyte’s criteria (water, food, trees, triangulation and much more), it’s how it fits into the larger picture that interests me most. For example:

Location, location, location. So many parks, even ones that have great facilities, are on “left-over” land that was too hard to develop or wasn’t’ in a prime location in the community. In Savannah, Forsyth Park and the squares were integrally-located as part of the neighborhoods, or Wards in this case, as the city developed. So many cities took the opposite approach, as I’ll detail in subsequent posts. This particular land was not an afterthought – it was consciously designed as part of the necessities of living in a city.