The famous map of Rome by Giamnbattista Nolli, ‘Pianta Grande di Roma’ (1748) used a figure-ground representation to demarcate private buildings (in black) from open civic spaces (in white). This indicates that the city is not simply one giant open piazza in the centre – as if Central Park –but hundreds of small public spaces distributed throughout –what I would call a ‘small pieces, loosely joined’ design pattern. We may need to think of the park in a similar way; not as green lungs of Central Park or Hyde Park or Whitworth Park sitting in a body of concrete, brick, steel and glass, but as a distributed condition, distributed throughout the city.
This not only produces more park but offers more diversity. By taking the single large park, with its few edges, and shattering it into thousands of smaller pieces, at the scale of streets, it creates far more surface area, making the form far edgier, as it were.
This pattern still affords the possibility of concentrations of park at certain points, just as streets converge on squares. In streets, communities themselves can largely manage and part-maintain their own parks, or parklets (micro-parks that eat parking spaces).
