Cities are grappling with unprecedented urban growth, climate change, and pressing calls for equity, all while facing the challenges of limited budgets and resources. This is especially true in Texas, which is predicted to have the third-highest growth rate (11.4%) of any state this decade, with its population reaching 32.5 million in 2030. This panel will showcase plans, partnerships and projects in three large Texas cities that are integrating parks and public spaces, closing equity gaps, enhancing resilience, and elevating quality of life.
- Fort Worth’s groundbreaking GREENPrint Fort Worth Parks, Recreation, Open Space, and Public Realm Master Plan aims to transform it into a “City in a Park,” where every resident enjoys equitable access to vibrant public spaces. At its core, the plan envisions interweaving parks, trails, streetscapes, plazas, and natural landscapes into a seamless, citywide green network that supports health, mobility, economic vitality, and environmental resilience. More than 1,600 residents contributed through surveys, workshops, focus groups, and stakeholder sessions, resulting in strategies that reflect authentic community needs and aspirations. This inclusive process identified key priorities, such as expanding parks into historically underserved neighborhoods, enhancing trail connectivity, activating public spaces with dynamic programming, and fostering nature-based solutions to climate challenges.
- In Dallas, the Downtown Dallas Parks Conservancy and Texas Trees Foundation are showing how public private partnerships can unlock funding, innovation, and shared responsibility to design, deliver, and maintain resilient, high-performance parks in high-density employment centers like medical districts and downtowns, where they can serve workforce and community needs. The Downtown Dallas Parks Conservancy will explain how it developed five urban parks by transforming surface parking and underused land in Dallas’s central business district. These parks manage stormwater, lower urban heat, enhance biodiversity, and serve as year-round civic anchors. Texas Trees Foundation will showcase its Southwestern Medical District Streetscape and Park Project, transforming a two-mile arterial into a shaded, stormwater-resilient green corridor anchored by an 8-acre urban park serving 3.5 million patients, staff, and residents.
- In Houston, Memorial Park’s Master Plan is also redefining urban parkland as critical resilient urban infrastructure. Partners will explore how the plan integrates large-scale ecological restoration, habitat connectivity, and climate resilience into the heart of one of America’s largest urban parks. Central to this vision are transformative projects such as the 100-acre Land Bridge and Prairie, which reconnects fragmented ecosystems while managing stormwater and mitigating urban heat, and the Eastern Glades, which reclaims degraded space to support biodiversity, passive recreation, and inclusive public access. Speakers will discuss how strategic partnerships, robust public-private collaboration, and adaptive management practices have made large-scale resilience achievable in a park setting.
The session will offer replicable insights into how cities can plan for climate adaptation and environmental justice simultaneously. Attendees will come away with actionable strategies for aligning capital investment, ecological science, and public trust to realize a resilient future for urban parks.
Support is provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation.
