Urban Forestry & Urban Greening 55 (2020) 126819 Available online 21 August 2020 1618-8667/© 2020 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved. Garden city without parks: an assessment of the availability and conditions of parks in Kumasi Sandra Niine Narh, Stephen Appiah Takyi, Michael Osei Asibey *, Owusu Amponsah Department of Planning, Faculty of Built Environment, College of Art and Built Environment, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana A R T I C L E INFO Handling Editor: D Dexter Locke Keywords: Garden City Kumasi Sustainable city Urban Park Urbanisation ABSTRACT Parks are integral part of the urban environment. They play economic, structural, socio-cultural and ecological roles for the sustenance of urban areas . Unfortunately, the rapid growth of the city of Kumasi, which was historically referred to as ‘the garden city of West Africa’ is threatening the sustainability of tits green spaces . This paper seeks to assess the state of parks in Kumasi and determine the factors that have contributed to the loss of these parks in the city. The paper relied on multiple sources of data such as documents review, feld obser- vations and institutional interviews. The state of the parks in Kumasi was assessed using the following themes, accessibility, attractiveness, maintenance, comfort and safety. The results showed that green spaces in Kumasi are generally being lost because of the city’s rapid and unguarded urbanisation, coupled with the little attention to parks by city authorities .. It was observed that demographic and physical expansion of the city have had adverse impact on the availability, management and to a larger extent the condition of parks. For example, the available park land per 1000 population was 0.25 acres in 2000 and this reduced to 0.04 acres in 2019. Insti- tutional failures in effectively developing, protecting and managing park spaces in the city were the other key reasons for the loss of green spaces in Kumasi. The paper concludes that there can never be a garden city without adequate parks and green spaces; hence, the need for a multi-stakeholder response to the deteriorating park system in Kumasi to ensure the restoration of the city’s garden city status. 1. Introduction Urban parks are important urban infrastructure that profoundly impact the development of sustainable cities. Their multifunctional nature, typifed in of social, health, economic and environmental development enhances the image of the city and improves the quality of urban life of urbanites (Maulin, 2002; Bates et al., 2014; Wei and Ye, 2014). Parks are conceptualised as natural or semi-natural areas set aside for enjoyment and recreation or for the protection of wildlife (Wei and Ye, 2014). Over the years, various researchers have tried to defne the components of urban parks. Byrne and Sipe, 2010 for example identifed the components of urban parks to include grassy areas, rocks, soils and trees, buildings and other artefacts such as monuments, foun- tains or playground structures and sitting areas in cities. Additionally, the defnitions of urban parks are mostly infuenced by the zoning guidelines and planning standards of the city in question (Byrne and Sipe, 2010). For instance, zoning guidelines and planning standards generally defne a park as a land that the public has the right of access to and intended for recreation. Such land is ornamentally laid-out, maintained to enhance its natural beauty and grassed with or without trees. Parks are generally classifed based on age, size and level of maintenance and facilities available and in some cases, based on the reason for their creation (Byrne and Sipe, 2010; Guarnieri and Balmes, 2014). Parks, from the foregoing, are key components of the sustainable city development since they play profound roles in promoting economic, healthy and social lifestyles of cities. However, evidence from the con- ventional literature shows that parks in most African cities are deterio- rating for several reasons, notable among them is urbanisation and its attendant increase in the demand for space for uses other than greenery (Adjei-Mensah, 2014; Quagraine, 2011; Adom-Asamoah & Amoako, 2018). The city of Kumasi is one of the few African cities that adapted the Howard’s (1902) Garden City Model. In 1945, Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew prepared the city’s frst ever development plan based on Howard’s (1902) ‘Garden City Model’ where it featured the creation of green belts around the city. The plan also made proposals for the development of many parks and urban green spaces to defne boundaries against sprawling, provide agricultural lands and serve as sponges of various air * Corresponding author. E-mail address: asibeymichael@yahoo.com (M.O. Asibey). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Urban Forestry & Urban Greening journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ufug https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2020.126819 Received 27 September 2019; Received in revised form 10 August 2020; Accepted 13 August 2020