About Us

National Park Cities are long term grassroots movements for everyone making their city greener, healthier and wilder. The National Park City Charter sets out how we collectively share the ambition, responsibility and power to make our cities places where people and nature are better connected.

Over the past 15 years we have come together as communities in London, Adelaide, Breda, Chattanooga and across the world to activate our quest to become National Park Cities – sharing curiosity, building relationships, exploring ideas and taking action together.

Asking the simple question,“What if our city was a National Park City?” encouraged us to imagine alternative futures for our city and beyond. It also invited us to ask, and keep asking, other “What if?” questions, including:

What if we all had a better relationship with nature? • What if we all had access to high quality green space? • What if our streets were 10 times greener? • What if there was more outdoor learning in schools? • What if we walked more? • What if there was less pollution? • What if there were more birds in our cities?

We continue to ask “What if” today as part of our mantra and culture. At a time of health, climate, ecological and social crises, the National Park City vision provides hope, a way to act together and a positive story we can create for ourselves.

We are excited to share our Journey Book with you and are delighted you are joining our National Park City journey. Just like the established, nominated, and emerging around the world, this journey book is a work in progress. At its heart is an important question and ambition: what if we had a strong, large, collaborative and supportive family of National Park Cities around the world?

To create this journey book, we have drawn from the rich and diverse experience of colleagues from over 50 countries. These people helped shape the Universal Charter for National Park Cities which aims to provide a common purpose and was launched in July 2019.

In 2020, we tested the National Park Cities proposition, the foundation from which this map of the common journey has evolved. In this time, we have had confirmation from across the globe, through the international networks of our partners in World Urban Parks and Salzburg Global, that the National Park City is an idea whose time has come.

Never has the National Park City Family been more important. The pandemic showed us the resonance of the National Park City vision with the basic needs of communities at a time of crisis. It highlighted the innate need to connect with, and restore, the natural world for our health, and the demand for healthy cities. Communities have come together to build campaigns. There is a real eagerness, from across continents, to get moving on the collective National Park City journey. This is a journey of hope for the health of climate, nature and ourselves in the places where we live and work. This world family is in the making, evolving idea by idea, community by community, relationship by relationship.

The journey book illustrates what makes building a National Park City unique and different in how it is conceived, explored and co-created. It’s a journey that invites us to join together to explore, eager to hear ideas and harness the diverse talents and abilities of everyone to respond to challenges. The journey to becoming a National Park City encourages us to embrace opportunities to create better cities for people and nature today and for the future. It’s a journey of hope grounded in collective action.

There is not one way to be a National Park City, but the steps outlined in this journey book provide a common path to our collective hopes for future cities.
By creating an international family of families, we can remain energised, learn, grow and support each other through our diversity. We will bring a kindred spirit of curiosity, exploration and action to our shared purpose of greener, healthier, wilder, fairer and more resilient cities. Our family of National Park Cities has the potential to transform. Its impact is in all our hands.