Washington's new 11th Street Bridge is designed entirely as a park.
Washington's new 11th Street Bridge is designed entirely as a park.
Washington DC is getting a big new bridge that is also a park, with green spaces, pathways, recreational facilities and an educational centre. A place for locals to enjoy, built on the struts of an old bridge that's been demolished. There are some risks.
The 11th Street Bridge park, scheduledto open in 2025, will link to poor neighbourhoods on the east side of the river. If they do it right, those neighbourhoods will get a terrific new amenity. If they do it wrong, the entire area will be gentrified, local businesses will close and the people living there now will be forced away.
It happened in New York, with the High Line and more recently with Little Island, where high-concept sculptural features have created a new playground for the wealthy in a place that wasn't meant to be like that at all.
The bridge developers in Washington, an outfit called Building Bridges Across the River, want to stop the new from forcing out the old. They're a design company with deep community roots. They know asthma, diabetes and obesity rates are much higher east of the river than elsewhere in the city and they want to address that, not push the issue away to someplace else.
Kayaking and other watersports will be a feature of the new bridge.
Exercise or just hanging out: the bridge is designed as a facility for the people there now, not for wealthier residents of the future.
Since 2013, locals have been helping design the whole facility. A "home buyers club" provides cash grants and forgivable loans for deposits to long-term renters wanting to buy a home. A community trust has a portfolio of 240 units of permanently affordable housing for local residents. Half the money generated by fundraising for the whole project is earmarked specifically for the park's "social mission".
There's also a programme of support for black-owned local businesses, including help with IT and funds for marketing, financial services, help with grant applications and strategic advice. The corporates that provide this support are not there to push locals away, but to help them stay.
That's the theory. Hallie Boyce, a partner at Olin, a landscape company designing elements of the bridge park, says the park is a "new paradigm". Introducing big design-led features to a community while actively trying to stop "residential displacement" isn't always the way things are done. "We have other clients around the country who are trying to learn from this project," she says.
Auckland has its own new recreational bridge: Ngā Hau Māngere, which connects Onehunga with Māngere Bridge and features an eight-metre wide pathway, fishing bays and a beautiful cantilevered white arch.
The bridge is fabulous, but it sits there on its own. We don't have the joined-up approach to planning that would see local residents or businesses involved in realising its potential.
The new Ngā Hau Māngere recreational bridge connects Onehunga with Māngere Bridge township.
Design for Living is a weekly series in Canvas magazine, devoted to bright ideas that make cities better.
