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 2: What San Antonio’s Brackenridge Park Can Learn from Other Cities
Douglas Reed, FASLA, RAAR, Principal, Reed Hilderbrand, LLC
The Promise of Brackenridge Park
“The great work of the 21st century will be to reconnect to the natural world as a source of meaning.”
— Richard Louv
We like to think of parks as places that humanize and civilize our cities. In them we see a record of how we have lived on the land, what we have valued, what the land has meant in providing the routines and rituals of daily life. They are part of the making of culture. Brackenridge Park does this for San Antonio. In this one tract of land we find evidence of some ten thousand years of human occupation, organized around the source of the San Antonio River. You feel sanctity here: you sense that water is the reason there is life here. Today it is the people’s park, where citizens come together to reconnect with one another and with the natural world. The park’s story is San Antonio’s story. And there is no place quite like it in our country. We see in Brackenridge Park so much that might serve emerging San Antonio. In celebrating its heritage, we not only protect Brackenridge against irretrievable loss. We engage its wealth and beauty in response to critical needs of contemporary life.
The park’s promise for the future will be explored in three ways:
1. Why look back in order to move forward?
2. Interpreting the story of water
3. Unifying the park; bringing cohesion
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