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While navigating through your citizens inCities: Skylines 2, you’ll realize that providing your citizens with more than just essential services is crucial. This is where your role in creating parks comes into play, offering your citizens additional options for leisure.
As you finish establishing your city and progress through milestones, making parks becomes essential. While parks may not be as critical as essential services and utilities, they add leisure options and attractiveness, providing more ways to improve your city. This guide will help you unlock and create parks in your city.

How To Unlock Parks
Unlocking services and features occurs gradually as you progress through the milestones. Fortunately,each milestone provides access to more services and features, giving you time to manage your city with the new services you’ve gained before progressing to the next milestone.
Upon reaching the fourth milestone,“the Grand Village”, you’ll gain access to parks as a new service under the service ofParks and Recreation.

Additionally, you can unlock other features related to parks from the Parks and Recreation development tree.
Tounlock more featuresfrom theParks and Recreation development tree, you must spend development points. The development tree is divided into four tiers of nodes: tier one nodes cost one point, tier two nodes cost two points, tier three nodes cost four points, and tier four nodes cost eight points.

As a first step, it isrecommended to unlock Park Maintenance, which costs one development point as it is a first-tier node. This will ensure that parks receive maintenance, providing the maximum leisure benefit for visitors.
How To Start Making Parks
The main goal when establishing parks is to enhance leisure throughout the entire city.Parks contribute not only to the visual appealbut also play an important role inimproving happiness and overall citizens' well-being.
It’s recommended to start creating parks in your city during the initial stages of development as you get access to them.

As you create parks,it’s crucial to focus on the red areas, as they indicate spots where leisure is lacking. These areas become visible as you click on Parks and Recreation, or you canopen the leisure from info views to identify any deficienciesin park coverage.
Use The Landscape Tool
Once you’ve finished establishing parks throughout the entire city and your city begins to expand, you’re able to start planning how to create large parks using the parks and recreation service. Additionally,utilize the Landscape tool options to shape the land as neededfor these expansive parks.
Decide whether to create central parks or grand parks that encompass multiple structures from parks and recreation. Then,use the landscape tool to shape them with vegetation and terraforming, providing you with the flexibility to draw anddesign parks according to your preferences.

Inspiration From Reality
Once the purpose of parks goes beyond enhancing leisure and aims to distinguish your city, it’s beneficial todraw inspiration from reality. Examine how real parks are constructed to understand the principles of effective park design.
Before planning the design of your park,utilize tools like Google Earth to take a general look at existing parks. This allows you to draw inspiration from real-world examples or even replicate certain features in your own park design.

Integrate Structures
Creating parks doesn’t have to be a separate endeavor from other urban buildings. Instead,some structures can be combined to maximize benefitsand fulfill more than just separate aesthetic views of the city.
Consider integrating parks and recreational spaces with other service buildings, such as educational places. To maximize the utility of space,providing citizens with a multi-faceted experiencecombining leisure, education, or other services.

Parks Maintenance
Once all the parks are established, it’s essential tounlock the maintenance depotfor parksfrom the development tree. Establishing and utilizing the maintenance depot is crucial toeffectively upkeep the parkscreated through the Parks and Recreation service.
While the upkeep cost for park maintenance can be high, reaching up to 40,000 per month, it proves to be a valuable addition to your city. This service includesten maintenance vehicles, crucial formaintaining parks and recreation buildings. If you’re willing to invest an additional 12,500 per month in upkeep, you canexpand the vehicle count by five with the upgradeof the park maintenance depot, which includes an extra garage.

How To Manage Parks
Keep an eye on the leisure stats to address any deficiencies. As your city expands,ensure that new areas remain greento provide your citizens with a high level of well-being. Simultaneously, you canmanage theparks and recreation budget under services in the economysection.
You also have the option tomonitorhappiness, enabling you to identify any deficiencies and ensure your citizens are provided with their needs, including leisure places.