Neighborhood parks in Valencia

In the urban imagination, large parks tend to attract attention: the Turia Gardens, Viveros and the Paseo Marítimo are part of Valencia's recognisable narrative. However, this book proposes shifting our gaze to a much quieter and more everyday network: neighbourhood parks. These are small-scale spaces scattered throughout the city, which form a genuine local infrastructure for urban life.

The publication is based on an important observation: there are more than 200 neighbourhood parks in Valencia, covering nearly one million square metres and distributed mainly in the city's modern expansion areas. This constellation of small green spaces does not follow a homogeneous logic, but is deeply conditioned by the urban morphology of each neighbourhood, making them a particularly rich field of study.

One of the main values of the book is its multidisciplinary approach. Throughout its chapters, diverse perspectives are incorporated—urban planning, sociology, botany, engineering, landscape, and lighting—which allow neighbourhood parks to be approached not only as a design project, but as a complex system involving environmental, social, and technical factors.

From a methodological point of view, the book stands out for its desire for systematisation. The identification, mapping and cataloguing of the parks—visible, for example, in the exhaustive plans and lists included in the publication—is not solely for descriptive purposes, but also responds to the need to generate tools that allow their quality to be assessed and guide future interventions. In this sense, the work proposes moving towards objective indicators that facilitate the improvement of these spaces and their adaptation to contemporary needs.

Ultimately, Parques de barrio en Valencia raises a fundamental question: how to recognise, value and plan those spaces which, without being protagonists, sustain the daily life of the city. In contrast to the spectacularisation of public space, the book defends the importance of the familiar, the accessible and the ordinary as the basis for a more liveable city.