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  For years, Alexander Garvin, AICP, has been expressing his view that it's the public realm-its boulevards,    civic spaces, and, particularly, its parks-that makes a city great. And with his firm, Alex Garvin & Associates, he practices what he preaches. Since 2004, the firm has produced plans for large parks in Atlanta and Memphis, and is now working on others. Garvin, a former New York City planning and zoning official, is known as well for his civic activities, including his efforts to win the 2012 Olympics. On the day, we called him, he was getting ready to fly to Germany to check out a park in Duisberg, outside of Cologne, which is being used as part of an industrial retention campaign. He thought it might be worthy of inclusion in his latest book-on parks, of course. - Ruth Knack, aicp, Planning

Q Where does the book stand?

A I'm trying to get it finished by February, when it's due at the publisher, Norton.

Q Can you describe the subject for us?

A It's about parks, from their invention in Britain in the 1840s to the present, in America and Western Europe. I've been to all of the places I talk about, and the book will include a lot of my photographs. It highlights parks in the United States, France, Britain, Germany, and Spain.

Q You're talking about public parks, right?

A Yes, although I think there's a great deal of confusion about what a public park is. I try to straighten that out by giving some history. But I also include modern parks like the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle and the Parc de Bercy in Paris. Paris and its public realm are interesting because of Baron Hausssmann and his parks and boulevards, which I believe are much underestimated.

Q Parks are obviously not a new interest. But where and whendid it start?

A Way back. I've been in love with parks ever since I was a toddler. Until I was 14, I lived across the street from Central Park. When I was small, I thought the word "park" meant Central Park. And as I grew older, my interest deepened.

Q And the best thing about Central Park?

A That it has places for everybody. Everybody comes to Central Park. There is no discrimination. Frederick Law Olmsted designed it as a place that would bring people together-people of every age, ethnicity, and income. As a model for social integration, it's about as excellent as you can get.

Q Given that interest, why didn't you become a landscape architect?

A I did think of that before college. But I loved architecture, and at Yale, I started taking planning courses and was hooked. I eventually did a joint graduate degree in architecture and city planning. In the end, I decided to focus on planning, which I still teach there, rather than architecture. What most interests me nowis something called landscape urbanism. It's very close to what I practice in that it focuses on the public realm.

I believe that streets, parks, public places of all kinds are central to good planning, and that that the public realm is the infrastructure around which the city should be built.

It's what everybody owns, what we as a society own. And it amounts to almost half of all the property in this country. It's simple logic that the stewardship of that public realm should be what planners concentrate on. It's not that things like zoning regulations aren't important, but they should not be the main thing.

Q How do you apply that philosophy in your practice?

A An example is our plan for the Atlanta Beltline Emerald Necklace, which is inspired by Olmsted's Emerald Necklace plan for Boston. Another is our project in DeKalb County, just outside Atlanta, where we devised a public realm framework for a 700-acre area whose public realm consisted almost entirely of arterial streets. We address the problems of suburban sprawl there by, among other things, calling for a huge park extension. We have yet to see how much of the plan local officials will implement, but the owner of one quadrant of the area is proceeding with the system of streets, sidewalks, and public parks that we proposed.

One thing that I believe very strongly is that parkland, streets, sidewalks and bicycle paths must all be part of a system. If the public realm is not a complete system that is easy for people to use to get to shopping, to work, to the movies, to school-everywhere-people have no alternative but to drive.