Throughout their history, city park designs have responded to shifting societal needs. The evolution of park designs as they relate to changes in social values has been well documented in several noteworthy publications including Cranz (1982), Cranz & Boland (2004), and Hough (2004). Most recently, with the increased societal awareness of the earth's environmental limitations, city parks have increasingly come to be considered as important productive infrastructure in the environmental sustainability and resiliency of cities. This research paper explores this new emergent role of city parks, trends in its realized application, and the priority given to the role by designers in developing real-world parks as evidenced in project publication. This study was carried out through an examination of published park projects and the prevalence of environmentally sustainable strategies utilized as solutions to environmental problems within those projects. An analysis was conducted of parks reviewed or covered in Landscape Architecture Magazine (LAM), a highly influential publication in the landscape architecture profession with more than 60,000 readers. With its reach and popularity, the magazine could be considered reflective of general movements and trends within the overall profession. Content analysis was developed through a review of information contained in the published texts and illustrations found in the periodical. While incorporating environmentally productive functions into landscape design is a frequent and leading topic in landscape architecture literature and education, it does not represent a majority of the park designs reported upon in LAM. From the results of this analysis, the research hypothesizes and explores causations that could be the basis for this seeming discrepancy. Two possible causes that are explored are 1) that designers are not incorporating significant environmentally sustainable strategies in their urban park designs and 2) city park designs that focus on environmentally sustainable strategies are not significantly reported upon by LAM.
