Designing Small Parks: A Manual for Addressing Social and Ecological Concerns provides guidelines for building better parks by integrating design criteria with current social and natural science research. Small parks are too often relegated to being the step-child of municipal and metropolitan open space systems because of assumptions that their small size and isolation limits their recreational capacity and makes them ecologically less valuable than large city and county parks. This manual is arranged around twelve topics that represent key questions, contradictions, or tensions in the design of small parks. Topics cover fundamental issues for urban parks, natural systems, and human aspects. Also included are useful case studies with alternative design solutions using three different approaches for integrating research findings into small urban park design.

ANN FORSYTH, PhD, MPIA, is Dayton Hudson Chair of Urban Design and Director of the Metropolitan Design Center at the University of Minnesota. Her publications include Constructing Suburbs: Competing Voices in a Debate Over Urban Growth and Reforming Suburbia: The Planned Communities of Irvine, Columbia, and The Woodlands.

LAURA R. MUSACCHIO, PhD, ASLA, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and is on the research faculty in the Metropolitan Design Center at the University of Minnesota. She is also a research scientist in urban ecology with the Central Arizona–Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research project.