The largest urban public park ever built, King Salman Park is a defining element of Saudi Vision 2030—an ambitious effort to transform Riyadh into a more livable, sustainable, and globally competitive city. Envisioned as the “Green Lung of Riyadh,” the 16.6-square-kilometer park spans seven times the size of London’s Hyde Park and five times that of New York’s Central Park. Occupying the former Riyadh Air Base, the park dramatically expands the city’s green space.
Designed by a team including SWA, Gerber, MVVA, Buro Happold, and Setec, King Salman Park integrates environmental restoration, innovative infrastructure, and diverse programming at an unprecedented scale. The park includes over 11 square kilometers of green space and more than seven square kilometers of pedestrian pathways, interwoven with cultural, artistic, leisure, and entertainment destinations. Centrally located within the city, the park connects to seven key roadways, while a pair of tunnels, each spanning over two kilometers, run below ground level.
Through an ambitious program of terraforming, soil enhancement, and microclimate creation, the park will be home to more than one million trees across a range of typologies, supported by forest research facilities and sustainable water systems. Native plantings, autonomous transit, naturalistic water features, and extensive public amenities come together to form a model of ecological urban regeneration. King Salman Park is an urban oasis designed to elevate Riyadh’s quality of life and affirm its position as a leading global city.
The project was recognized as the Future Project winner at the 2025 RIBA Middle East Awards, and the first phase is scheduled to open in 2026.
Lianjiang Park
Located between a mountain and river in rapidly growing Changsha, Lianjiang Park commands a critical juncture between city, nature, and a changing way of life. While the Lianjiang region had always been intimately linked to the water, recent urban development has resulted in a significant loss of wetlands, habitats, and the culture they give rise to.
In...
Portsmouth Square
Portsmouth Square is the heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown: the main civic park for all community festivals and events as well as an important day-to-day outdoor living room for the community. Centered in the densest community in the United States west of the Hudson River, the park plays a critical role in the health and well-being of the local residents, ove...
Halperin Park
Halperin Park (previously known as Southern Gateway Park) caps Highway 35 in South Dallas directly adjacent to the Dallas Zoo and the Oak Cliff neighborhood. The park’s design effectively reconnects the neighborhood, which was cleaved by the highway’s construction many decades ago.
Recognizing the reunification’s significance, the cap park design introd...
Martin Luther King Jr. Square Water Quality Demonstration Park
The City of Conway received local and federal grants to create a water quality demonstration park in a flood-prone, one-block area of its downtown to educate the public about Low Impact Development (LID) and Green Infrastructure (GI) methods and how they can enhance water quality. The project transformed a remediated brownfield site, ...