The first landscape built atop Los Angeles’s channelized riverways, Milton Street Park is now celebrated as a major bikeway in a city legendary for its automobile traffic. This landmark development also demonstrates how infrastructural barriers that have compromised surrounding neighborhoods can be redeveloped as an open space asset, directly addressing issues of social justice.

Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park is an early implementation project of the city’s ambitious Greenways Initiative to connect Harris County’s ten major waterways with a multitude of economic, environmental, physical and mental health benefits. A degraded, trash-strewn stretch of waterway beneath a tangle of highways has been transformed into Buffalo Bayou Park with trails, native plantings, open space, and public art, while still fulfilling its primary function as natural flood management “infrastructure.”

The Houston Bridges installation brightened nine key locations along downtown Houston’s I-59/69 interstate corridor, introducing bold mosaic banners derived from photos taken by school children. These large-scale structures, once considered eyesores, now celebrate a diverse city’s character.

China’s Ningbo Eco-Corridor transforms historic and polluted industrial canals into a 3.3-kilometer-long wetland park at the center of a major mixed-use development. Intended to rekindle synergy between humans and wildlife, the corridor is carefully graded to create a terrain of hills and valleys, with the hills providing habitat for wildlife and vistas for visitors, and the valley waterways designed to remove pollutants through settlement, aeration, and bio-processing.

A collaboration between SWA / Balsley, Weiss/Manfredi, and Arup, Hunters Point South Waterfront Park (in Queens, New York) is a model for waterfront resiliency, where infrastructure, landscape, architecture and art are fused for public purpose. The park’s newly-opened second phase deepens its contribution to urban resilience, introducing the city’s newest “island,” tidal marshes and trails, award-winning art and a dramatic cantilevered overlook with dramatic views to Manhattan. Adjacent to an emerging affordable housing development, the park provides needed open space to communities that are often underserved.