TCLF’s sold-out Leading with Landscape III: Renewing San Antonio’s Brackenridge Park summit, held on March 3, 2017, at The Stable at Pearl, featured nationally prominent practitioners and other leaders who explored options for the park’s future and initiated and inspired broad community-based participation. Convened in concert with the Brackenridge Park Conservancy (BPC) it drew attention to local, regional, and national project work that are exemplars of planning and design, while striking a balance for a landscape’s complex natural, historic, cultural, and ecological systems. To learn more about the conference: http://tclf.org/sites/default/files/microsites/sanantonio2017/index.html
Panelist – Panel 1: What San Antonio’s Brackenridge Park Can Learn from Local Successes
Andres Andujar, CEO, Hemisfair Park Area Redevelopment Corporation
Hemisfair, San Antonio, Texas
The vision for the Hemisfair transformation is to become one of the world’s great public spaces. After nearly 50 years of waiting and five years of planning, efforts to expand the parks at Hemisfair are paying off for the benefit of the San Antonio citizens and visitors. While construction capital to build the parks to a world-class level is challenging, benchmarking with dozens of park systems across the United States also shows long-term difficulties in sustaining funding levels to properly maintain, operate, and activate these public spaces. Efforts at Hemisfair address construction capital; operation, maintenance, and activation funding; and leverage to generate private investment and long-term financial self-sustainability.
At nineteen acres, designated parkland is Hemisfair’s largest land use. Additionally, seventeen acres of land adjacent to the park have been set aside as developable parcels to frame the urban open space. These sites will allow the reinstatement of the neighborhood’s density before the 1968 Fair. This will bring people to live, work, and shop in residential and mixed-use developments, and in turn populate the park. When people live next to a park, we maximize passive security through the effect of “eyes-on-the-park.”
Hemisfair will be our vibrant gathering place for everything from a day with friends to the San Antonio’s biggest celebrations.
source
