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.
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, ...
Dubai Hills Boulevard and Public Realm
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 de...
Burlingame Town Square
SWA partnered with the City of Burlingame to transform a surface parking lot into “The Grove,” a vibrant 1-acre community gathering space envisioned as downtown Burlingame’s outdoor living room. Blending urban functionality with engaging public amenities, the design features a grid of deciduous trees, a central glass-clad fountain with a cascading waterfall, c...
Honggang Park
Nestled between two hills in Shenzhen’s Luohu District, Honggang Park is a green corridor bringing over 80 acres of open space through the city’s dense fabric. Celebrating the site’s stark topography, SWA’s design carefully threads hiking trails along the slopes to minimize ecological disturbance, with stairs providing shortcuts along switchbacks. Altogether, ...