The discipline of landscape architecture encompasses many typologies, from domestic gardens and neighborhood playgrounds to urban desig ns and state parks. Most critical studies of the discipline tend to approach it from a historical or contemporary perspective organized around criteria such as built versus unbuilt, urban versus peripheral, or competition-sponsored versus commission-based. Very few analyses have been undertaken from the seemingly obvious jumping-off point of size. In Large Parks, Julia Czerniak and George Hargreaves present eight essays by leading scholars and practitioners that engage large urban parks in depth as complex cultural spaces, where key issues of landscape discourse, ecological challenges, social history, urban relations, and place-making are writ large.

From historic parks such as New York's Central Park and Paris's Bois de Boulogne to contemporary projects such as Toronto's Downsview Park and Staten Island's Fresh Kills, to newly unveiled and yet-to-be-built projects such as Ken Smith's ambitious plans for the Orange County Great Park, Large Parks highlights the complexities and unique considerations that go into designing these massive and culturally significant works.

Julia Czerniak is founder and principal of the landscape design practice CLEAR. She is an associate professor of architecture at Syracuse University and is the editor of Downsview Park Toronto.

George Hargreaves is a professor of landscape architectureat the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he was chairman of the Department of Landscape Architecture from 1996 to 2003.