HONOR AWARD
Analysis & Planning Category
Salt Lake City Green Loop
“The ability of this design team to rethink mundane transportation corridors and reinvent them by bringing in nature, responding to environmental concerns, and addressing social concerns, definitely advances the overall profession of Landscape Architecture”
PROJECT STATEMENT
Salt Lake City is one of the fastest growing urban populations in the country. Amidst this growth and a changing climate, residents and city officials identified the need to improve quality of life via public space, connectivity, and park areas. Currently, less than 2% of downtown is green space and land acquisition for parks is infeasible.
The Green Loop project blueprints a more vibrant, healthy, and family-friendly downtown by repurposing five miles of the city’s notoriously oversized and underutilized streets to create connected, linear green space with premiere pedestrian paths and bikeways through the heart of downtown. The proposed system links to existing trails and public transit, and knits together a string of key downtown destinations. These improvements to urban mobility combine with new plazas, parklets, and green space to become the “front yard” to the city.
The Green Loop is a circuit of linear green space that will overhaul downtown transit, mitigate the heat island effect, improve air quality, increase habitat for pollinators, and provide critical ecosystem services such as stormwater management.