Archives: Awards

Within East Baton Rouge Parish sits the neighborhood of North Baton Rouge. This predominantly African American community has long seen less investment than other areas. This fact, along with long-term demographic shifts due to out-migration and loss of area institutions, has left the area under-performing in key socioeconomic indicators compared to the rest of the Parish. In 2018, BREC launched an ambitious master planning process for the largest park in the system, the 660-acre Greenwood Park, that set out to reverse the narrative and provide a community centered catalytic project that would serve as a true neighborhood amenity and a regional destination situated in the heart of North Baton Rouge. Through the largest public engagement campaign in BREC’s history, the design team set forth a vision for a multi-year implementation process that would transform the Park, which includes the Baton Rouge Zoo, into a constellation of cultural and recreation programs weaved into a robust ecological network of bayous, forest, and meadows that, for the first time ever, connected seamlessly into the surrounding context.

Located in the heart of New Orleans’ iconic City Park, Wisner Tract is a 100-acre former golf
course that was completely inundated by Hurricane Katrina. Fifteen years later, with the fairways
abandoned and no major improvements made, the site has become a well-loved urban
wilderness and de facto passive park for neighbors and regional visitors alike.

Wisner Tract’s location provides an opportunity to equitably expand nature access for a large
urban population with few similar options. It also presents a vital opportunity for the park –
through green infrastructure and stormwater management – to absorb urban floodwaters and
prevent neighborhood flooding at the scale seen after Katrina.

By restoring a mosaic of south Louisiana ecosystems, the Wisner Tract Plan will protect the
wildness neighbors have come to love while creating a vibrant new educational and experiential
landscape for all of New Orleans and the region. Its immersive nature-based design leverages
existing ecological assets to promote habitat rehabilitation and ecological education, absorb
floodwaters, increase park visitation, and establish a restorative escape from the urgency of
urban New Orleans.

Beaufort County, SC is home to a complex cultural landscape with a dynamic and complicated past and future. The combined impacts of sea level rise and population growth threaten the significant cultural resources, sustaining ecosystems, working waterfronts and agricultural landscapes that are integral to the county’s cultural lifeways.

The 2020 Beaufort County Greenprint Plan draws on science, local expertise and a community-driven process to promote forward-looking open space conservation practices that will sustain the county’s unique sense of place—balancing future growth, equitable distribution of open space, and anti-displacement strategies—as future climate models predict shifting land uses and land values.

The Greenprint Plan also provides a resiliency and open space protection focus for the county’s comprehensive plan and larger conservation community. The planning team seized this opportunity to blend old methods, such as traditional storytelling, with new digital tools, to allow for robust public engagement during COVID-19. The result is a flexible decision-making tool that embeds the open space values of the community and allows easy updating as new data and science emerge.