Outdoor Amenities Resource: 25+ Guides to Designing Better Outdoor Amenities

When you think about the “outdoors,” you’re likely visualizing vistas of undisturbed nature or beautiful city parks—products of careful stewardship or rigorous design processes. But amenity spaces—outdoor work areas, small plazas, gardens, pocket parks, and open-air cafes—are the underappreciated gems of the urban outdoors. In New York alone, more than 3.8 million square feet of public space is privately owned and attached to commercial buildings as vital amenities, with many more millions of square feet of outdoor space reserved for private use. These spaces deserve the same care and attention lavished on large civic projects because they are just as critical to thriving communities and cities.  

Outdoor Amenities Encourage Healing and Propel Change

The biggest value of small outdoor amenities is access—giving people the space to interact with nature where they already are, providing critical moments of rejuvenation, relaxation, socialization, or healing. They also extend the use of buildings, providing a return on investment to owners and developers and amplifying opportunities for communities: “People are designing these spaces as outdoor rooms, and are spending more money on them,” says David Schutte, president of Tuuci. 

Like all landscapes, outdoor amenity spaces can also contribute to broader planetary goals—address climate change by sequestering carbon, manage and replenish our water systems, build and support biodiversity, and reconnect humans to nature through biophilia. “It’s an incredible opportunity,” says Eustacia Brossart, research director, Climate Positive Design. “Can we design plazas smarter for both carbon emissions and biodiversity?” 

How Designers and Architects can Push for Better Outdoor Amenities 

To help you leverage all these benefits when you design amenity spaces, we’ve gathered a host of existing tools, guides, manuals, and certifications in five sections. Each section contains a brief introduction, links to resources, and suggested reading from METROPOLIS’s past coverage. 

The Origins of the METROPOLIS Outdoor Amenities Resource

The Outdoor Amenities Resource was created through a virtual hackathon, with the inputs of many landscape architecture, architecture, interior design, sustainability, and manufacturing leaders who are striving to leverage the benefits of nature in spaces of all sizes and typologies. A full list of acknowledgements is at the bottom of this article. 

The Outdoor Amenities Hackathon was organized in partnership with Expormim, KFI Studio, Landscape Forms, and Tuuci, who not only produce materials, furnishings, and fixtures, but also provide deep expertise on the application, performance, maintenance, and benefits of their offerings. Learn more about them below. 

The resource descriptions were written by Timothy Schuler, with introductions to each section by METROPOLIS editors Jaxson Stone and Lauren Volker. The Outdoor Amenities Resource was designed by design director Travis Ward and designer Robert Pracek. The hackathon sessions were organized by VP of marketing and events Tina Brennan and events manager Kelly Kriwko. 

This is a living resource, and will be updated with additional tools and manuals as they become available. We hope you will find it a useful source of support as you bring harmony to the built environment with the natural environment. —Avinash Rajagopal, editor in chief 

---

---

---

---

Outdoor Amenities Hackathon Participants

---

Outdoor Amenities Hackathon Partners

---

All Resources

---

Would you like to comment on this article? Send your thoughts to: [email protected]

• Resources

• Architecture
• Diversity
• Equity
• Interior Design

You might be interested in METROPOLIS’s other resources: