Faux Park in Takapuna

This post is about small parks. My focus on them now was partly triggered by being in Beijing and Shanghai which are full of exemplary little parks at street corners throughout the city - and these parks are very well used. It is also triggered by what is threatened for one of Takapuna's reserves - that it be half or all taken up by the National Ocean Water Sports Centre. There are some advocates who genuinely believe it is the best use of that reserve land. My experience of park development is that it takes a long time to get a reserve/park right. You only have to look at how much effort and thought and planning has gone into Takapuna's Hurstmere Green to see how difficult it is. Some improvements work, and others don't. A successful public reserve or pocket park is the result of layered decisions over time. But what you don't do with reserve land - unless you have heaps of it - is allow it to be taken up by any group or building for a narrow set of uses that generally exclude the wider public. And that is what is threatened on Takapuna's Reserve land which is currently used as a camping ground. Enough of an introduction. I look now at a couple of little known Takapuna reserves/parks which are at the start of their lives.... Today I am calling them "faux parks". They are urban mistakes as they stand....

This is one of Takapuna's latest parks. It's at the corner of Lake Road and Esmonde Road. Mitigation for the road widening that occurred there, and which was designed while I was on Council. So I guess I share some responsibility - but there was huge concern at the removal of pohutakawa and the change in feel of the streetscape.

You can see there's a seat in the park...

Here's an aerial of the pocket park. So you can get an idea where it is located...

And here's the view from the park. Four lanes of traffic, with some grass in the foreground.

It's not a park at all. I would be very rare user of the seat.

It's a faux park. Built as mitigation for the road - in fact it provides a green backdrop for drivers. They get more relief from it than pedestrians - who hardly ever use it. Why would they?

It's a Park for Cars and their drivers. A Car Park. It's not a People's Park....

Here's another view of it from the car. Stopped at an intersection. You see how it works as bit of wallpaper for drivers. It fails to tick the boxes as a pocket park.

To be fair, nobody really expected it to be well used. But we need to learn from it. But have we....?

Just along Lake Road is another little park courtesy of the widening of Lake Road. You can see it here across a five lane road. You can see the bus stop, a piece of sculpture - eye candy for drivers - and you can see the houses that surround the park.

Here's an aerial before the landscaping work was done on the latest Takapuna Park.

At the bottom of the circle you can see a few pohutakawa which appear to have been removed.

There are no actual seats in the grassed area of this park. I took this photo looking out from the park standing in a little patch of gravel.

You can see the seagull sculpture, the back of the bus shelter, and traffic in the street, which gets very busy.

Quite nice you might think - despite the lack of seats....

But the park is surrounded very closely by houses. The classic urban design "thou shalt not" is committed here: house back and side yards fenced from the park.

And the same applies at the rear of the park.

Surrounding houses threaten the park and inhibit its use.

I've never seen anyone actually in the park. There's nothing to do, nowhere to sit, and it's off the beaten track. Why would you go there?

Great little street parks have pathways through them, so they are on the way, and there is informal surveillance from passing walkers....

The trees that were removed appear to have made way for this new paved area, with small new trees, and some uplights. The seats allow you to sit and watch the traffic go past.

There is no intimacy in this park. Seating is oriented so you must look at the traffic. Good urban design for small parks requires a sense of separation from traffic, while still providing for informal surveillance.

I'm afraid this is another Faux Park. A design copy of the typology of the Esmonde Road mitigation park.

It mainly serves as visual relief, as eye candy for passing drivers. The sculpture is for their benefit. This space doesn't function as a good community pocket park.

It needs activation, and some foot traffic. It needs access from the rear by means of a pedestrian pathway between houses. Perhaps one of the houses needs to be purchased to make a sensible space...