MAYA OSAKA

London Parkive V1

Mock up of the original London Parkive I created during my first year of uni. The original London Parkive was an Adobe XD mock up of a website.

The London Parkive V1 was created during my first year final project over a six week period. The idea for the Parkive came about after I visited a park in Lewisham called Charlotte Turner Gardens which at the time was under threat from development. This lead to two questions:

How many parks in London are currently under threat from development?

How many parks are no longer with us and where were they located?

After scouring through the internet I found that there was no clear answer and no consolidated information that would make it easy to answer these questions and so the concept for the London Parkive was born.

Screenshot of the map I made for the original London Parkive. Rather than use an existing base map I decided to illustrate my own using Adobe Illustrator.

At the time I had just found out about prototyping software such as Figma and Adobe XD and was eager to give web prototyping a go. So the project took the form of an Adobe XD web prototype which you can view here! With it being my first time prototyping, I was still a long way off thinking about usability and core principles of UX design BUT I became pretty good at using Adobe XD.

Screenshot from the original London Parkive depicting information on a park that has been clicked on.

Screenshot from the original London Parkive depicting information on a park that no longer exists anymore.

Researching parks and open spaces also took up a large chunk of the project. Like the V2 of the London Parkive, the original project also focused on Southwark and the research involved visiting Southwark archives to find, in particular, old lists of parks and open spaces so I could spot any parks that don’t exist anymore. In this version I also included some examples of infill sites, which are sites, often green spaces found on housing estates that have new houses built on them. This has been controversial within Southwark because on the one hand new social housing is much needed but on the other hand building on these sites can adversely affect the quality of life of those already living there.

Aside from looking at parks and open spaces I was also interested in documenting some examples of infill sites. The yellow areas on the map depict infill sites. When they are clicked on the tab shows details of the site including how many new houses are being built and what stage the development is at.

When the “More Information” button is clicked an overlay pops up depicting comparisons between what the original site looked like and what it will look like after the new development is built.

London Parkive V2

For my final year of uni I have the opportunity to write my own brief and work on that for the whole year! So in November 2023 I embarked on the mission of furthering the London Parkive. The key goals for Parkive V2, in relation to V1 has been to:

• Turn the idea of the London Parkive into an actual functioning website.
• Do more comprehensive research and data collection on parks and open spaces.
• Expand the search radius further to include more areas of London ( I have decided no to pursue this so I can spend more time refining the functionality of the website).

Researching London's Parks and Open Spaces

The research methods for collecting data have been improved a lot since Parkive V1! For Parkive V1 there were two main historic lists of parks that I used, one from the 1980s and one from 2000. For Parkive V2 I have been using five historical lists, ones from 1905, 1924, 1980, 1985 and 1999. This means a much broader scope for finding parks that no longer exist anymore. Especially when you factor in the parks that were made or destroyed as a result of WWII.

Photos of some of the lists I have been using to determine parks that no longer exist anymore. [From Left to Right: ‘The Municipal Parks, Gardens and Open Spaces of London’ (1905), London Parks and Open Spaces (1924), Recreation in Southwark (1980).

I have also been using National Library of Scotland’s (NLS) digitised old maps to work out where parks that no longer exist anymore were located and also to work out if a park has been expanded or shrunk over time.

Screenshot from National Library of Scotland’s website depicting a side by side comparison of Nursery Row Park. The map on the left is an old Ordnance Survey map dating from 1951 while the map on the right is a current map.

The NLS’s APIs (Application Programming Interface) has also made it easy to draw geoJSON (Geographical JavaScript Object Notation) so that these shapes can be easily added to the London Parkive website which has lead to the creation of a ‘Alterations’ view mode on the website that shows the evolution of the shapes and sizes of parks and open spaces within London.

This screenshot depicts Potters Field Park, which since it first opened has been expanded. The green area shows the original park area and the blue shows where the boundaries have been expanded to.

Data Collection and Management

The information of the parks and open spaces I have collected has been added and organised on a Notion Spreadsheet. Information includes the geographical coordinates of the park, when it was opened, if the parks shape has changed overtime, and a brief history of the park. This spreadsheet has been converted to CSV and then to JSON format to add the website.

Screenshot of the master spreadsheet of parks and open spaces on Notion.

I have designed a form on Figma that could help streamline this process by allowing an administrative user to add park information through a form which will store the data directly into JSON format so this is a feature that may be implemented in the future.

A form I have designed using Figma which could help streamline the process of adding park data. If this form was built it could be directly linked to a JSON file.