Park Maintenance Evaluation: Park Types

There are five park types in the system, defined as: 

• Civic Plaza or Square: An area that is typically designed to attract citywide and regional visitors; a tourist destination, often entrenched in local culture and history; a gathering place for civic action, processions, and cultural events; could have a landscaped area, a children’s play area, a decorative fountain, an underground garage, a concession or public art.
• Mini Park: A park typically 0.5 acres or smaller, serving a neighborhood or part of a neighborhood; often a landscaped area with few facilities such as a community garden, a children’s play area, outdoor performance space or a small natural area. 
• Neighborhood Park or Playground: A park typically varying in size from more than 0.5 acres to about 30 acres, serving a neighborhood or several neighborhoods; could be a developed park or playground with a range of facilities such as recreation center, clubhouse or swimming pool, or undeveloped open space.
• Parkway: Typically, a landscaped area developed along a public right of way; may have amenities such as restrooms.
• Regional Park: A park typically greater than 30 acres in size with a variety of park landscapes, facilities and programs for city residents, regional visitors, and tourists, or any park serving as a tourist destination of historical, cultural or architectural significance.   

Exploring scores across these different park types can help us to understand any trends or differences. 

In FY 2025, RPD and CON evaluated a total of 170 parks by the following park types: 

• 120 neighborhood parks
• 31 mini parks
• 9 civic plazas
• 8 regional parks
• 2 parkways. 

In FY 2025, all park types had average scores between 85% and 94%, with no statistically significant difference between the groups. Mini parks were the only group to see a statistically significant difference between FY24 and FY25, increasing from 92% to 94%. This change is not likely to be due to chance. Some Mini Parks, such as Juri Commons Park, received improvements from RPD gardening staff that may have increased the scores.

On this page, we discuss the key takeaways for the most recent fiscal year. To explore prior fiscal year's data, use the drop-down menus on the visualizations. 

Explore other aspects of the park evaluation program.