Envisioned as a garden oasis strategically situated where city meets desert, Dubai Hills will be a vibrant yet elegant mixed-use community for 21st-century living. The key public realm element of this massive 1,000-hectare development is a 5.6-kilometer urban boulevard lined with shops, residences, and offices along the district’s central spine. SWA/Balsley designed the southern half of the boulevard, three gateways, and seven open spaces, ranging from intimate pedestrian passages to bustling plazas to lush, green neighborhood parks. The landscape character is simple, clean, and bold, with a particular emphasis on subtle and refined paving details, monocultural style planting featuring culturally significant native trees, and accent features in the form of sculptural landforms, follies, shade and shelter elements, and public art.
Golden Gate National Recreation Area
In the early 1970s, the National Park Service began the enormous task of creating a new national recreation area in the midst of an urban center—the San Francisco Bay Area, home to 4.5 million people at the time. Riding the wake of the environmental revolution of the late 1960s, the Park Service would need to find consensus among a wide range of constituents, ...
SIPG Harbor City Parks
This new riverfront development is located on the Yangtze River in the Baoshan District of Shanghai. This area boasts some of the highest shipping activity in the world. However, in recent years this single-function industrial zone has given way, allowing for waterfront parks to develop. Within this historically layered water front the Baoshan Park and Open Sp...
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...
Halperin Park
In the 1950s, I-35E was routed through the South Dallas community of Oak Cliff, demolishing a thriving Black commercial corridor and one of the first Freedmen’s towns established after the Civil War. In the decades that followed, as in so many cities across the U.S., freeway construction severed long-standing social and economic ties and set in motion decades ...