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.
Dongguan Central Park Area
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Buffalo Bend Park
Houston’s East End is a bifurcated community, with heavy industry brushing up against a vibrant and culturally diverse residential area. Answering residents’ call for more park space, SWA created Buffalo Bayou Bend Nature Park by converting a formerly neglected industrial site into a wetland ecosystem and public green space.
Three interconnected ponds, ...
Evelyn’s Park
In honor of their late matriarch Evelyn, the Rubenstein family donated a historically and geographically prominent five-acre tract on the busy Bellaire Boulevard and created a conservancy to fund a public park with primarily private funds, while engaging the public in its design and development. This park seeks to be reflective and adaptive to the local cultur...
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, ...