I think the commentary on triangulation is exactly right. In general, people will not go to a space in order to do one thing. They like to serially multi-task in their leisure time. In the Jardin de Luxembourg, one can keep an eye on the kids, admire the plantings, chat with others, snack, and watch the world go by.

One park you didn’t mention is the Quai St. Bernard (I don’t know the park’s proper name) on the Left Bank, which attracts young people by the hundreds at night for dancing and socializing. As someone who takes students to Paris each year, I can tell you it has become a Mecca for the young who enjoy the music and a chance to meet others without spending 5 Euros on a Coca. Who knows when this began, but it is a major event every night all summer.

Another park that is used extensively at night is the Champs de Mars. Entire extended families as well as the young spread out blankets until it is like Jones Beach on the Fourth of July. They bring guitars, dinner, wine, candles, babies, grandma, books, music, and anything else needed for the evening. It is where all of Paris goes to be outdoors on a hot night.

Elizabeth Theiss Smith
Vermilion, South Dakota

My 18 year old daughter is graduating from high school and had three weeks to do a senior project of her own creation. Building from a month-long study experience in Paris two summers ago she wanted to return and create a “teen” or “student” guide to paris. She and a friend headed over and spent a brief 12 days exploring their favorite neighborhoods and writing about them. They created a wonderful guide which I am encouraging them to take further.

What amazed me was their approach and seeming intuitive understanding of “place” and what makes a place special. And I promise you I did not give any lectures on the subject. Whatever they did or did not do was of their own creation. The neighborhoods they singled out were small and intimate like Le Marais and when they thought they knew it they tried to get lost and discovered the most amazing hidden gardens and squares. They photographed the way a cafe owner would place plants in pots and a bird bath on the small tree strip outside the shop to create a “place.” Truly I was amazed at what seemed so intuitive to them.

I’m thinking there is an untapped resource in our youth.

Linda Cody, MLA
Ann Arbor, Michigan

This is a surprisingly good park considering its location next to one of the more inhospitable parts of Barcelona…Estacio de Sants, Place Paisos Catalans, and Pavello de l’Espanya Industrial. This park and lagoon is quite striking with a generous water lagoon, a large plaza for events, a café, play areas, grass and a wonderful sculpture where we found a woman and her dog gently nestled. The day we were there it was full of people walking, playing, eating comfortably in the park, and the large plaza was full of people doing the Sardona dance to alternating bands from four communities. It was a thrill to be there and was thriving despite its surroundings. It is close to being a Great Public Spaces. It is an important community space and with a little understanding of how it works on other days it could be a Great Public Space.

Parc del Laberint d’Horta

This botanical garden is a lightly used gem that is fun, educational, and full of surprises. Gardens of all kinds are laid out in an adventurous path that leads you up one side of a ravine with a series of rooms, stairs, and vistas, amid different varieties of plants. As you come down through the ravine, there’s a whole different experience with large trees and spectacular undergrowth. Not just unusual, but wholly original, this park that leaves you with many memories.

Avinguda Josep Tarradellas

This Ramblas is quite new and it is further proof that Barcelona keeps trying to improve it streets and neighborhoods by creating new public spaces using existing streets. Though it is new, one has a sense that the design is too formulaic and could actually belong in the “Worse than Average” category.

Ramblas de Catalunya

This is almost a truly great street, except for the setbacks at each corner that are full of vehicles and other obstacles that impede the circulation of pedestrians along the sidewalks. The center Ramblas is quite pleasant, if also rather stark, with little of the comfortable feeling of the Avinguida de Gaudi. It would be so easy to improve this street by extending the sidewalks at each intersection to accommodate cafes, kiosks, public art, seating and other amenities. These types of extended sidewalks already exist all along the Passeig de Gracia, one block away — a perfectly good model.

Jardins Vil-la Amelia

This small neighborhood park is one of two that face each other across a street. Jardins Amelia offers terrific variety, with a bar, children’s games, and fountains, while its neighbor, Jardins Vil-la Sicilia, is just the opposite, with high bushes, cul-de-sacs, and few activities.

Borough Hall Plaza is one of the critical public spaces in downtown Brooklyn that could be much better.

In downtown Brooklyn, major streets function mainly as “storage capacity” for traffic feeding into the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges or the Flatbush-4th Avenue-Atlantic Avenue intersection. (That intersection is undeniably the worst in Brooklyn, unfriendly to vehicles and a true nightmare for pedestrians.) The central business district, bounded by Atlantic Avenue, Flatbush Avenue, Court Street, and Tillary Street, is nearly bereft of quality streets and public space. In addition, the extensive waterfront near downtown has been lying fallow for decades, poorly connected to adjoining neighborhoods and the central business area. The principal connections to the waterfront–such as Atlantic Avenue–are designed for vehicle traffic and very unfriendly to pedestrians.

Two major projects in the works–Brooklyn Bridge Park and the Atlantic Yards development–now present a once-in-a-lifetime chance to re-shape Brooklyn’s inner core around a truly vibrant public realm. As currently envisioned, both of these projects will be tragic missed opportunities, because they are not designed as compelling places that people will enjoy using. With a thorough re-evaluation and re-design of these proposals, however, we can do what’s best for Brooklyn.

Brooklyn Bridge Park

The downtown Brooklyn waterfront could become a world-class public space serving people from throughout the five boroughs. Instead it is on track to become a suburban-style park catering mainly to residents of an ill-conceived high-rise residential development. The current plan simply does not match up to other world class waterfronts, nor does it display a sound grasp of the principles of good waterfronts.

The park’s site promises an unprecedented opportunity to create a great new public space that will be Brooklyn’s face to the world. Unfortunately, the current plan by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates calls for little more than a passive recreational park dominated by luxury housing. The concept for the park has been radically degraded from the ideas that emerged from a successful community-based process in 2001, during which an extensive and much admired series of public hearings yielded a master plan laid out by Ken Greenberg Associates. What remains now is basically a huge developer-driven residential real estate project tacked on to a series of isolated one-dimensional uses — either large-scale recreation or passive parks and walkways — that will effectively prevent Brooklyn residents from getting the most out of their prime waterfront.

To start with, the plan’s many rigid features will preclude the park from supporting a range of activities and responding to user demands. Narrow piers and pathways throughout the park offer great views but a limited sense of amenity, intrigue or destination. Without real attractions to draw people, many of the piers will quickly become magnets for negative activity. Another deadly touch, the large berms in the middle of the plan, will suffer a similar fate. Meant to act as sound attenuating devices, the berms hide secluded pathways, void of any reason for human use, that will not only be extremely dull but also unsafe.

Then there are the residential towers, sold as bringing a built-in constituency to the park, which will inevitably house a small, well-heeled population intent on keeping any other constituencies out of the surrounding public spaces. The towers themselves and the large open spaces that surround them will also go a long way towards enforcing exclusionary goals. The fact that the buildings are placed at the entrances to the park and are surrounded by highly-trafficked roads, car-dominated entrances and large swaths of passive green space ensures that these crucial areas will clearly belong to the high-rise residents and not the people of Brooklyn. (The marriage of luxury high-rises and elaborate design has played out just as predictably in other parks, including Barcelona’s Diagonal Mar development, Toronto’s new highrise waterfront, and Battery Park City’s Teardrop Park, also designed by Van Valkenburgh.)

No matter what you think of the Brooklyn Bridge Park design, it will be very expensive. This is completely unjustifiable. Many great waterfronts have been created with much lower budgets, using compatible and publicly beneficial revenue streams to support the public goals of the project. In Düsseldorf, for instance, a tightening budget proved to be a blessing in disguise because it forced planners to focus on lower-cost design and inexpensive programming. The result has been a simple yet astoundingly successful public space. Vancouver’s Granville Island breaks even and serves as the city’s number one destination for both locals and tourists. It has achieved success by constantly evolving and finding ways to attract and maintain new user groups, despite being even more isolated and inaccessible than Brooklyn Bridge Park.

All the needless expense complicates the Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation’s dubious mandate to operate a financially self-sustaining park, and the consequences are proving to be disastrous. The inclusion of luxury housing, for instance, is basically a crutch to prop up the park’s revenue stream. The irony here is that the proposed design and management approach makes it nearly impossible for the park to sustain itself. The park is literally designed to prevent the kind of use, ownership and participation that would make it both revenue generating and valued by the larger Brooklyn community.