While Houston does have significant park spaces and trails, the city of no zoning has historically been unable to create enough designated open spaces and the necessary connectivity between them. The key to increasing the open space network lies within the region’s floodplains. Relatively flat terrain, intense rain events, and urbanized watersheds create broad jurisdictional floodplains. With developmental restrictions and regulatory controls, vast land areas are left as unused green space or vacant lands. The Bayou Greenway plan recommends leveraging these underutilized spaces to create trail corridors, new parks, and flood mitigation facilities that will be within 1.5 miles of 6 out of 10 Houstonians. The resulting network will stretch over 300 miles and include 4,000 acres of new land connected to existing neighborhoods, schools, churches, and other community assets. The acquisition areas will allow access where physical or jurisdictional obstacles now occur, increase flood mitigation opportunities, and help reconnect currently fragmented ecologies. Resultant facilities within the greenway corridor will perform as functioning recreation space throughout the year, with just a 1% chance of experiencing a significant flood event during that time. Bayou Greenways addresses numerous health, safety, and welfare issues inherent in the daily lives of citizens in the nation’s fourth largest city. Rated as one of the unhealthiest, park-deficient, most economically divided, ethnically diverse, sprawling, and fastest-growing cities in the country, Houston faces enormous social challenges. Already five times the area of most North American cities, Houston is expected to double in population by the year 2035. The Bayou Greenways are now shaping the development fabric of the city by creating healthy connections that are in close proximity to the outdoor world and between highly diverse populations. As a comparison, Portland represents the next-largest green network in the nation, at half of Bayou Greenways’ distance, with 150 miles of multi-use trails. This is a very popular effort: in 2012, receiving the highest approval of all measures on the city ballot, Houston voters approved $100 million in public funding for the project, with a private match of $105 million.
Guangming OCT Trail
With its grand landscape views, Guangming Trail is both a green, healthy “slow circulation” system in an urban area, and an exemplar of innovation and sustainability. The trail’s topography changes as it progresses through mountains, valleys, hills, and farms. By considering vegetation, habitats, hydrology, and topography, sites with high value and potential w...
Park 101
The ambitious Park 101 aims to cover part of downtown Los Angeles’ 101 Freeway with a multi-purpose park that will include playgrounds, seating, festival areas, and a plaza. The approximately four-block cap park will reconnect the two sections of Downtown that have long been separated by the freeway, greatly enhancing the currently noisy, with much-needed shad...
Homecrest Playground
Part of the larger Shore Parkway, an 816.1-acre collection of parks that stretches across Brooklyn and Queens, Homecrest Playground originally opened in 1942 with a baseball field, basketball courts, handball courts, and benches for community use. This park redesign focuses on providing different playground and recreation amenities for surrounding residents. The Rosemont Bridge and connecting trails layer pedestrian infrastructure onto the Buffalo Bayou corridor in Houston, Texas and is a significant step in realizing the larger vision of a more accessible Houston. Running through downtown Houston, Buffalo Bayou is one of the significant natural bayou corridors in the City, but is cut off from adjacent neighborhoo...Rosemont Pedestrian Bridge and Trails