+ BROWNIE NEIGHBORHOOD PARK [Winner, 2020 Texas Society of Architects Studio Prize]
AUSTIN, TEXAS / 2017 - 2019
Brownie Neighborhood Park
Collaboration
Jason Sowell
National Award
Texas Society of Architects Studio Prize, 2020.
Client
Austin Parks and Recreation Department
Read the report
URBAN INFRASTRUCTURE | ENGAGED DESIGN PROCESS | PLAY | PLAZA | LEARNING GARDENS
In many growing cities, governmental struggles to create parkland have made the development of recreational facilities uneven, particularly for poor neighborhoods. Exacerbating the lack of access to parkland are the security challenges of neighborhoods that have been neglected and divested for decades.
Brownie Neighborhood Park in Austin, Texas, was developed based on the results of a one-year community engagement process to reimagine one of the last vacant lots in Austin’s low-income Rundberg neighborhood. The 8-acre park is organized around three primary interventions: a recreational loop of concentric slow and fast activity paths, a strip of diverse game courts, and open nature-play fields.
Together, these amenities offer a living landscape of civic spaces and outdoor learning labs and gardens that support the school at the site’s southern edge. The park’s phased implementation, ongoing community involvement, and ecological management all directly inform how solutions to uneven development can reside in communities that have experienced it.
Design workshop at the Brownie Neighborhood Park
Design Workshop at the Gus Garcia YMCA
Drawing on a two-year collaboration with residents, Austin’s Parks and Recreation Department, and a local community association, the Brownie Neighborhood Park is organized around a recreational loop of concentric slow and fast activity paths and a strip of diverse game courts, that together enclose a landscape of children’s play fields, including outdoor learning labs and gardens to support the school at the site’s southern edge. The phased implementation of these elements, ongoing community involvement, and ecological management directly explore how architecture for urban justice is constructed with communities in practice.
