Alan Tate

Professor Alan Tate has been designing, investigating, writing about and lecturing on urban parks since the early 1980s. His book Great City Parks was published in 2001 and a Chinese-language edition in 2006. In 2009 Tate wrote the entry on City Parks for the Grove/Oxford University Press Encyclopedia of American Art. The Second Edition of Great City Parks, with Marcella Eaton, was published in March 2015 and received the Landscape Institute Research + Policy Award for that year.

Tate completed his PhD in 2010. His thesis Typology and Built Environment examined the history of typological studies in architecture and urban design, and explores the categorization of urban space types on the basis of their generic or suffix names. Tate and Eaton’s Designed Landscapes, available since Fall 2023, is a case-by-case study of 37 significant, existing works of landscape design worldwide, largely constructed since the Renaissance.  Organized by project type, it is designed as an easy-to-read reference volume for practitioners and students alike, presenting key precedents in landscape architecture using site plans and recent photographs to showcase each project. The book was described by Landscape Architecture magazine (April 2024) as “an ambitious volume” and by Canadian Architect (June 2024) as “a beautiful and fascinating volume, and a pleasure to read”.

The principal area of my research, publication and dissemination over the last twenty-five years has been urban or city parks. This is the one area in which I claim a particular expertise.

Other areas of interest covered by my research and teaching include:

• planning and design of urban parks
• urban morphology and public space
• history of landscape architecture in the western world
• professional practice of landscape architecture