Design & Build Collaboration

Cost: $1.5 million | Build Time: 18 months | Size: 2 acres

A project by SWA Group demonstrates how infrastructure can be designed to enhance the ecological value of a city and the lives of its inhabitants. The international landscape architect firm led the transformation of a former brownfield site on flood-prone land into an urban park for a community in Conway, Arkansas.

Using local and federal grants awarded to the city, SWA designed and coordinated with Crow Group to build the two-acre urban park named for Martin Luther King Jr. with a central flexible green space, pollinator gardens, a permeable plaza, an amphitheater and a children’s playground, which is connected by a quarter-mile walking path.

In addition to its recreational uses, the park shows how low-impact development and green infrastructure ideas work with nature to manage rainwater using techniques to slow, filter, infiltrate and evaporate runoff in the area. The project made it possible to store 1.5 million gallons of stormwater runoff after rains.

SWA and engineering partner Gavin Smith used a soft approach with permeable hardscapes, vegetated living walls, bioswales and rain gardens to slow stormwater. The technique also improves water quality by utilizing a water treatment train to reduce the pollutants from urban stormwater. The treatment train sends water through the permeable paving into a series of rain gardens ending at the central bioswale, which acts as a daylit creek.

SWA team member and landscape designer Sarah Fitzgerald explains how they worked with the city of Conway and local native plant society, the Arkansas Master Naturalists, in choosing suitable plant materials for the location. An estimated 80 percent of the plants used are native.

“The city of Conway was pretty up front with us when we involved them in the design process early on,” she says. “The thing that hopefully will make this project successful in the long run is that the local native plant society weighed in on the planting palette and is invested in the park’s maintenance success.”

Native plants were selected to enhance the park and provide benefits to pollinators and wildlife, optimize carbon sequestration and work with their aesthetic goals. Keeping in mind that maintenance crews need to understand how to take care of them to make the investment worthwhile, Sarah says her designs are flexible.

The city’s Public Works Department asked SWA to design a training manual for their public works team so they would know how to care for the native plants. The team created detailed manuals with maps of the park, where to find the plants, photos of how each one should look and how to prune them.

“We tried to create beds that mix two or three different plants, so they could fill their ecological niches as they want to,” she says. “I often feel that part of my job as a designer is to create legible frames that communicate intention, but the design is flexible enough that things can change and move.”

The team also developed signage for guests that highlights the native plants and explains the benefits of watershed stewardship and the low-impact designs used throughout the park. What was once unused space in Conway is now a vibrant urban park with a big ecological impact.

-Texas ASLA Merit Award (2021, awarded)

-American Planning Association Arkansas Chapeter

-Achievement in Design Award

-University of Arkansas Alumni Design Awards

-City of Conway "Achievement in Design" Award

Demonstrate low impact development/ green infrastructure techniques in a floodprone, one-block area in downtown Conway. To educate the public about the methods and how they can enhance water quality.

1.5 million gallons of water temporarily stored during rain events. Green infrastructure techniques on display include a reconstructed daylit stream, rain gardens, permeable paving and vegetated walls.

Schizachyrium scoparium–Little Blue Stem

Panicum virgatum–Shenandoah Switchgrass

Echinacea purpurea–Purple Coneflower

Amsonia hubrichtii–Arkansas Blue Star

Liatris spicata–Blazing Star Coreopsis lanceolate–Lanceleaf Coreopsis

Asclepias incarnata–Swamp Milkweed

Chamaecrista fasciculata–Partridge Pea

Lobelia cardinalis–Cardinal Flower

Achillea millefolium–Yarrow

Myrica pusilla–Dwarf Wax Myrtle

Callicarpa americana–American Beautyberry Aesculus pavia–Red Buckeye

SWA Design team:

• Leah Hales–Principal, Lead Designer

• Hank Thomas–Project Manager

• Sarah Fitzgerald–Designer

• Alejandra Hinojosa–Design Research

• General Contractor–Crow Construction Austin Foshee–Project Manager

Sarah Fitzgerald, ASLA

Associate at SWA Group

Phone: (972) 677–2416

www.swagroup.com