The demolition of the Urt Tsagaan trade and service center in 2024, ordered under former Mayor Kh.Nyambaatar, was sold to residents of Ulaanbaatar as the first step toward creating a long-overdue green space in the city center. What materialized instead was a 44 billion MNT expanse of rubber-paved ground, seven trees and iron sprinkler bars that do not spray water, a project that has left residents equal parts baffled and furious. This spring, a handful of additional trees were planted and the site declared complete. But it is not, not in any meaningful sense. There is no canopy to shield pedestrians from the summer sun. No fountain to cool the air. No bench positioned in actual shade. The sprinkler installations, which city officials tout as a humidity feature, stand idle and dry. On a sweltering July afternoon, the site is effectively unwalkable. Now, compounding the outrage, city authorities have begun constructing an underground parking lot beneath the same site, a revenue-generating venture built on land that was supposed to become public green space. Last month, after a single rainfall, the facility flooded.
Ulaanbaatar has seen this story before, many times, in many forms. Every change of city administration brings a new wave of park announcements. Pledges to expand green space, to build fountains and walking paths, to give residents places to breathe in one of Asia’s most densely settled capitals, have become a fixture of election campaigns as reliable as the candidates themselves. The language is consistent: a new park here, improved recreational zones there, greener neighborhoods for every district and khoroo, even in the ger district on the city’s periphery. What follows, years later, is almost equally consistent: a few pieces of metal play equipment, a single slide, a shed and a plastic chair, the whole arrangement designated a “children’s playground” and cited in official city reports as a completed park.
The Ulaanbaatar City Hall website lists numerous parks established across the capital. Many of them, on inspection, amount to a small concrete area with several saplings and an occasional bench. To call these micro-parks would be generous. To present them in official reporting as genuine public green space is, as many residents have put it, an insult dressed up in press-release language. Part of the problem, observers argue, is definitional. The concept of a park has been so thoroughly diluted in Ulaanbaatar’s administrative vocabulary that cementing over an open lot and planting a row of shrubs along its edge now qualifies for the designation. A park, in the original and internationally understood sense of the term, implies canopy coverage, permeable ground, biodiversity, seating in shade and spaces designed for human rest and recreation across seasons. By those measures, much of what the capital has built simply does not qualify.
In particular, the Urt Tsagaan site has undergone multiple redesigns since demolition. Each iteration moved further from the original vision of a central green refuge and closer to what now exists: a paved surface with ornamental gestures toward nature. The project’s shape-shifting over time has only reinforced suspicions that the stated goal, a genuine park, was never the primary motivation. What was, then? The patterns suggest land value played a central role. Prime real estate in central Ulaanbaatar does not remain idle for long, and the gap between the announcement of a park and its indefinite non-delivery has historically provided cover for other uses of strategically located urban land. In the case of Urt Tsagaan, that other use has revealed itself in the form of an underground parking facility charging citizens for access to the very ground beneath the “garden” they were promised.
On a practical level, Ulaanbaatarians, residents of a city that faces acute air pollution and a shortage of urban green space, are no better served by the Urt Tsagaan site than they were before its predecessor was demolished. They have lost a functioning commercial center and gained a cement plaza with broken sprinklers and no shade, at a cost of 44 billion MNT in public funds. The broader cost is harder to quantify but no less real: the erosion of trust that comes when the same promises are made and broken across successive administrations, each one arriving with a new park plan and leaving with a new set of press releases. Citizens who once held out hope that the next announcement would be different have largely stopped expecting it to be. Until Ulaanbaatar’s city authorities treat green space as infrastructure rather than campaign material, and until park projects are held to verifiable minimum standards before they are declared complete, the capital’s residents will continue to find themselves standing in the sun, looking for shade that was promised but never came.
3-district park that existed only on paper
The roots of this pattern stretch back further than the Urt Tsagaan controversy. In 2001, the Government issued Decree No. 215, approving the establishment of a nature park in front of the Central Stadium. The project had official backing and a budget to match. Today, no trace of that park exists. Beyond some afforestation in the National Park carried out with public funds, nothing came of it. In 2019, a decision was made to establish parks and sports complexes at five locations across the city. Around the same period, citizens were assured that park development in each district was proceeding in stages. Architectural planning tasks were approved for the first 34 sites, and 51 locations were selected and designated as micro-parks. Those announcements were duly covered in the press, timestamped with dates and headlines, and have not been heard of since.
Among the projects that did advance, at least on paper, was a proposed recreation area built around an artificial lake on 5.5 hectares of land near Nogoon Nuur in Sukhbaatar District. Disputes over land acquisition and housing relocation have stalled it indefinitely. The artificial lake has not been touched. In Bayangol District, a plan to clear land east of Gandantegchinlen Monastery and build a park has similarly remained at the discussion stage for years. More recently, the city council approved a resolution to develop the monastery’s surrounding area into what officials are billing as the largest park in the capital, with 700 to 800 land plots to be cleared from roughly 55 hectares around Gandan. Public opposition has been sharp. Residents fear that the city’s most expensive residential zone will be subjected to the same treatment as Urt Tsagaan, with citizens displaced under the cover of a development project that ultimately serves other interests.
A proposed eco-park spanning 300 hectares in Bayanzurkh’s 23rd and 28th khoroos was also initiated, as were a series of micro-park decisions in Bagakhangai, Baganuur, Chingeltei and Songinokhairkhan. The most ambitious announcement of all came during the tenure of former Mayor D.Sumiyabazar, who declared with considerable fanfare that a sweeping park network covering more than 600 hectares across Songinokhairkhan, Bayangol, and Khan-Uul districts would be built. The following year, the plan was quietly shelved. A handful of micro-parks in ger areas were all that remained. The record, taken together, is not one of ambition outpacing capacity. It is one of announcements functioning as ends in themselves, of decrees and resolutions and architectural planning tasks that generate press coverage and political credit without generating parks.
Green space was never the point
The examples above make one thing plain. In Ulaanbaatar, parks have repeatedly been treated as an afterthought, a cosmetic addition to projects driven by other priorities, rather than as an end in themselves. What residents have been left with, year after year, is a paved surface without trees, grass, shade, water, or soil and the label of a park attached to it regardless. The gap between what has been announced and what has been built is not a matter of bad luck or limited capacity. It is a matter of priorities, and the priorities have not been with the people.
This matters enormously, because urban planning science does not treat parks as decoration. Parks are ecological infrastructure, as fundamental to a functioning city as roads, drainage systems, or power grids. Their primary functions are to maintain the balance of urban green space, purify the air, reduce noise pollution, absorb rainwater into the soil, and provide residents with meaningful, restorative contact with nature. The World Health Organization classifies urban green spaces not merely as recreational amenities but as a pillar of public health, essential for filtering airborne particles, releasing oxygen, preventing urban overheating, relieving psychological stress, and encouraging physical activity. Study after study has demonstrated that access to green space reduces rates of cardiovascular disease, mental illness and heat-related mortality. Increasingly, cities around the world treat parks the way they treat hospitals and water systems: as health infrastructure that a population cannot do without, and that a government is obligated to provide.
By that standard, Ulaanbaatar is failing its residents in ways that are measurable and serious. The WHO’s recommended benchmark for urban green space is 50 square meters per capita. The Mongolian capital does not reach 10. Official development plans have set a far more modest internal target of 15 to 30 square meters per person, an already reduced ambition, yet even that figure remains out of reach. In parts of the city, the amount of green space per resident falls between 0.12 and five square meters, a number so low it is difficult to call it green space at all. What little does exist is disproportionately concentrated in the city center, leaving residents of outer districts, many of them in ger areas already contending with severe air pollution and limited public services, with virtually no green space within reasonable reach.
The consequences of this deficit are not abstract. Ulaanbaatar already ranks among the most polluted capitals in the world during winter months. Its urban heat is intensifying as hard surfaces absorb and radiate warmth with nothing to counterbalance them. Its residents, particularly children and the elderly, have no shaded, quiet, living environment in which to spend time outdoors. The city is growing. Its population density is increasing. And the window for correcting its green space deficit, before development permanently forecloses the options, is narrowing with each passing year.
Genuine parks, by any internationally accepted definition, require canopy coverage, permeable ground, biodiversity, ecological services and a predominance of woody plants over hard surfaces. Micro-parks, the smaller-scale solution adopted by dense cities that have exhausted space for large-scale development, are defined as spaces of up to 10,000 square meters, accessible within a five to ten minute walk from any residence, and dominated by living green cover. Their value lies not in their size but in their availability: the ability to give residents daily, unplanned, unhurried contact with nature without requiring a journey across the city to find it. By either definition, what Ulaanbaatar has been building does not qualify. Concrete predominates over greenery. Metal structures outnumber trees. Rubber paving replaces soil. And sprinkler bars that do not spray water stand in for fountains that were never installed.
Children’s playgrounds, fitness equipment, shaded seating for the elderly and sports facilities are all genuine urban needs, and no one disputes their value. But they are not parks, and substituting one category for another is not a planning solution. It is a semantic maneuver, one made to satisfy reporting requirements, populate official websites with completed projects and provide politicians with something to point to at election time, while the underlying deficit goes unaddressed and in many cases grows wider.
There is also a question of accountability that has gone unanswered for too long. Billions of MNT in public funds have been allocated to park projects over more than two decades. Decrees have been signed, tenders announced, architectural plans approved and press releases distributed. In almost every case, the paper trail is rich and the physical result is thin. No official has been required to explain the distance between the two. No project has been publicly evaluated against the promises made when it was announced. The announcements themselves have become the product, detached from any obligation to deliver what they describe.
Ulaanbaatar’s residents deserve better than that, and they know it. They are not asking for the impossible. They are asking for trees that provide shade, soil that absorbs rain, air that is cleaner for the greenery around it, and somewhere in their own neighborhood to sit outside without being baked on a rubber surface under an open sky. These are not luxuries. In a city of this size, with this level of pollution and density, they are necessities. They are what parks are for.
