How Socioeconomic Performance Driven Park Designs Can Be A Strategic Tool For Enhancing Local Economies And Communities

Park designs can benefit the livability, vibrancy, resilience, and economy of communities, while minimizing municipal, business, and resident costs

- Giancarlo Mangone

Innovative socioeconomic performance-driven parks are a key strategic development tool for maximizing the socioeconomic performance and vibrancy of communities. When designed well, these performance-driven park types can effectively address key UAE city performance objectives, including maximizing the livability, desirability, and economic productivity and resilience of new and existing developments, reducing community construction, expansion, and operating costs, tenant turnover rates, and urban heat islands and air pollution, creating vibrant and thermally comfortable pedestrian-oriented communities, lifestyles, parks, and mobility corridors in existing high-density pedestrian-unfriendly communities, developing resilient local circular economies, and developing parks that maximize their potential positive impact on residents’ well-being and child development.

Achieving these socioeconomic objectives requires the development of park designs that synthesize existing research on sustainable urban design, design for well-being, and urban economics. The following sections present several design strategies and solutions that achieve these ambitions, in order to provoke further explorations and development by municipalities, developers, and design teams.

Safe and immersive wild nature