We construct a method to evaluate the neighbourhood park vitality potential (NPV-potential), inspired by Jane Jacobs’s theory of urban and park vitality. The evaluation model produces an aggregate score of NPV-potential by combining information on the extrinsic factors of vitality, related to the park’s surrounding urban area, with evaluative judgements on the intrinsic factors, related to the park’s internal organisation and design. To showcase and submit the evaluation model to a preliminary test drive, we further present the results of an application on three parks in the city of Cagliari, Italy. The computed NPV-potential and the effective use of the three parks, obtained from direct observation, show a good degree of agreement. While far from a robust validation, which would require more extensive empirical studies with larger and more internally variable samples of parks, the reported agreement between the potential and the observed vitality on the ground is a preliminary indication of the possible usefulness of the proposed evaluation method for urban planning and design.

The purpose of the article is to evaluate territorial hierarchies, internal to an island context, through the theory of central places. To this end, the authors want to demonstrate how some key points of these theories are still relevant all the more if applied to geographically closed contexts, such as an island. Starting from these premises, this paper begins with a literature revision on the most important theories on central places with particular reference to the theories closest to contemporary world. Therefore, the authors study the attraction and aggregation potential of the Sardinian case study, defined by the most suitable localization theories for studying island contexts. This allowed not only to study the analysis of flows through a territorial-hierarchical model, under the theoretical assumptions of the Central Places Theories (CPTs), but also to develop a model and a reticular system on several levels, starting from the population data. This paper shows a first phase of a wider research and provides a bibliographic framework to understand how the theories of central places are still suitable for studying a closed system like an island.

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