Short description:

Neighbourhood open space ranks highly as a key component in suburban liveability assessments. This book uniquely connects the past, present and future of planning for small open spaces.

Long description:

Neighbourhood open space ranks highly as a key component in suburban liveability assessments, originating from the development of urban planning as a profession and the proliferation of the garden suburb. Community Green uniquely connects the past, present and future of planning for small open spaces around the narrative of internal reserves.

The distinctive planned spaces are typically enclosed on every side, hidden within residential blocks, serving as local pocket parks and reflecting the evolving values of community life from the garden city movement to contemporary new urbanism. This book resuscitates the enclosed, almost secretive reserve from history as a distinctive form of local open space whose problems and potentialities are relevant to many other green community spaces. In so doing, it opens up even wider connections between localism and globalism, the past and the future, and for connecting community initiatives to broader global challenges of cohesion, health, food, and climate change. This fully illustrated book charts the outcomes and implications of this evolution across several continents, injecting human stories of civic initiatives, struggles and triumphs along the way.

Community Green will be of interest to a wide readership interested in studying, managing and improving the quality of all small open spaces in the urban landscape.

"We commend this work as offering present day planning practitioners insights to the legacies and traditions of this form of urbanism but also an opportunity to raise questions about that legacy and the scope for its continuity. The potential of lessons from historical urban forms should not be lost and this text demonstrates extensive historical research and a thread of argument and narrative that should be a strong interest to those planning Australia's current cities."

Planning Institute of Australia, 2024 Commendation Award for Excellence in Planning Research

Table of Contents:

Introduction  1. Making the ?superblock? 1890-1915  2. Essential elements? The 1920s  3. Diffusion, diffraction, debate, decline and discovery: 1930-1960  4. The in-between realm: the 1960s and 70s  5. New Urbanism and new ways forward: 1980 to today  6. Remake, remodel, reimagine