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, over 40 percent of whom live in single-occupancy units.
Since being established as Yerba Buena’s first public space in 1833, Portsmouth Square has undergone many iterations, culminating with the building of an underground parking garage with an RHAA-designed park on top in the 1970s. SWA led a year-long, community-participatory planning process to envision this park for the next generation structured around five large public workshops, working with approximately 20 community groups and 30 key stakeholders, and coordination with six city agencies. The design takes into account stormwater design, solar power, high albedo surfaces, urban forestry, all over an existing structure.
Jeffrey Open Space Park
The Jeffrey Open Space Park represents approximately 96 acres of park and trails, with an average width of 265 ft. The three-mile long spine is designed for passive uses with a network of trails that connect to residential neighborhoods and active recreation parks.
The design process included a series of community workshops to solicit community’s commen...
The Memorial at Harvey Milk Plaza
Harvey Milk Plaza is located in the heart of San Francisco’s Castro Neighborhood, and hosts one of the city’s busiest transit hubs. The plaza has been the site of countless gatherings and protests, including a candlelight vigil the night of Harvey’s untimely death and the White Night riots, which were sparked by the leniency of the sentence handed down to his ...
Xingfa Quarry Park
Just north of Beijing, between the Great Wall and Yanqi Lake, the Xingfa Cement Plant once fueled China’s construction boom, operating for over two decades before its 2015 closure under the National Air Quality Action Plan. Today, an adjacent quarry that once provided raw materials has been remediated as a 107.5-hectare terraced park that anchors an accompanyi...
King Salman Park
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...