+STL GREAT RIVERS GREENWAY MASTERPLAN

in collaboration with TLS

This project consists of a master plan and strategic development proposal completed for a high-profile international urban design competition. Asked to resolve ecological, social, and economic issues with a strategic landscape intervention in the heart of St. Louis, our master plan proposal envisioned a rebuttal of the typical resource-concentrating big landscape interventions. Our team was assembled on a principle of multidisciplinary and on community/professional partnerships. Committed to a horizontal design and decision making process, the resulting master plan focused on providing tactical measures to address specific problems related to equity, public health, and mobility in the city.  We focused on three strategies in particular:
1) stimulating existing economic assets by planning linked investments,
2) “maximin” regeneration of disconnected ecological patches and corridors as a self-maintaining urban wilderness, and
3) an implementation sequence that would expand and ensure equity among the various communities affected by urban regeneration.

Our proposal reconnected a multimodal network at the city’s urban core in ways that brought incremental investment back to the communities and ecologies currently faltering, or forgotten, that surround the project corridor. The design drew on research on landscape systems in developing countries as a model for low-capital investment projects in the developed world. Working with hydrological engineers and ecologists, we defined series of prairie and wetland interventions with positive long-term cost-benefit returns. We ultimately articulated the project as a “counter-proposal” in critique of international competition practice. The project was publicly disseminated in public presentations and exhibitions. The original competition entry was evaluate by a jury of top academics and practitioners in architecture and urban design. The project has been awarded three prizes by top awards in the landscape and architecture disciplines. 

type

Masterplan, Greenway, and Public Park

Size

80 linear km / 50 linear mi

Location

St. Louis City, Missouri, USA

YEAR

2019

Client

Great Rivers Greenway

Status

Competition Finalist