Can a new park help weave together divided Dallas? (Planetizen, Jan. 8, 2013)

The following headline and text is from a Jan. 8, 2013 article in Planetizen.

Can a new park help weave together divided Dallas?

Alan G. Brake looks at the ambitions of Dallas’s newly opened Klyde Warren Park. Built atop a trenched highway, the park “attempts to merge sophisticated contemporary design with walkable urbanism” while uniting two downtown neighborhoods.

How far can a new five-acre park go towards reorienting Dallas’s car-centered culture towards a more walkable, seamless, urban environment? Such is the question asked by Brake in his review of the newly opened highway-cap park, which was designed by the Office of James Burnett, a Houston-based landscape architecture firm.

“[B]ordered on one side by the Downtown Dallas Arts District—which includes buildings by Edward Larabee Barnes, Renzo Piano, Foster + Partners, OMA, SOM, I.M. Pei, and Allied Works—and on the other by the tony Uptown neighborhood,” the park attempts to correct “dated urban renewal-era thinking” by weaving together the neighborhoods “that have long been divided by the trenched Woodall Rogers highway.”

[To read the full story, click on the first link in the first sentence of this blog post.]

Impact of school design on grades

Also of interest is this article at Planetizen about the impact of school design on grades.