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Related: About this forumHarvey Offers Stark Warning: Dallas Should Build a Trinity River Preserve, Not Park
In the lead-up to the unveiling of the grand plans for a future Trinity River Floodway designed by renowned landscape architect Michael van Valkenburgh, the projects designers and backers werent shy about their inspirations. They traveled around the country, looked at examples around the world, and found that a great model for how to turn a muddy Texas river prone to flooding into a grand urban park lay only a few hundred miles south of Dallas.
Houstons Buffalo Bayou is the most obvious model for the current iteration of a 285-acre park with a $250 million price tag currently planned for a strip of floodway between the downtown bridges. Leading up to the unveiling of the van Valkenburgh plan, the Dallas Morning News architecture critic Mark Lamster practically gushed over what Houston accomplished in its floodway:
If it seems like a bit of nirvana, thats because it is. Dallasites may rightly wonder how their neighbor to the south has managed to achieve so much, so quickly, while plans in their own city have stagnated.
Oh, what a difference a trillion gallons of rain makes. In an article in Houston Press last month, Diana Wray takes stock of what happens to a wonderland of verdant landscapes when the harsh reality of Texas temperamental torrents super-sized by climate change come down hard. The photos look much like the Trinity does after a episode of flooding: massive deposits of silt, debris, trash, and sewage. The parts of the park that echo the natural ecology of the Texas landscape have fared okay, but any designed, architectural, or park-like features have been devastated:
Read more: https://www.dmagazine.com/frontburner/2017/10/harvey-offers-stark-warning-dallas-should-build-a-trinity-preserve-not-park/