Produced in partnership with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, High Performance Landscape Guidelines: 21st Century Parks for NYC is the first document of its kind in the nation: a comprehensive, municipal design primer for sustainable parks and open space. The Guidelines cover every aspect of creating sustainable parks, from design to construction to maintenance, and feature hundreds of best practices for managing soil, water, and vegetation resources, as well as dozens of full-color photos and illustrations.

"Parks are a crucial component of the urban infrastructure that will help our city address the challenges of the twenty-first century...With High Performance Landscape Guidelines, we've created a new blueprint for how parks are designed, built, and maintained." 
- Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, 2011

Part how-to manual and part advocacy tool, High Performance Landscape Guidelines reflects a paradigm shift in thinking about the park system as vital green infrastructure. This 270-page document governs future activity for all 29,000 acres of New York City open space, since the Parks Department has adopted these best practices in construction, maintenance, material selection and resource management as their new agency standards. From planted traffic islands to urban forests, High Performance Landscape Guidelines promotes cleaner air and water, increased biodiversity, lowered heat island effect, reduced energy usage and, of course, expanded opportunities for relaxation, recreation and environmental education for all New Yorkers.

The third in our trilogy of sustainable design manuals, High Performance Landscape Guidelines has been widely embraced by the local design community, earning accolades from the New York Chapter of American Society of Landscape Architects and drawing a record crowd of over 400 people to the publication launch party at the Center for Architecture in January 2011.