Smart Growth for Dallas

By /

Dallas is on the cusp of a new era in its history.

With a growing population and booming economy, there is a renewed spirit of optimism in Dallas that is driving us to address some of our city’s most persistent challenges:

  • Is our water supply big enough, and clean enough, to meet our needs?
  • How do we handle escalating health care costs?
  • How can we meet the ever growing mobility demands of our citizens?
  • How do we extend the benefits from recent improvements in our urban core to surrounding neighborhoods?

Parks and open spaces are powerful assets for our city.

With a growing population and booming economy, Dallas has the opportunity to address some of its most persistent challenges: health care, water supply, transportation, heat waves, flood control, and equity.

The Trust for Public Land, in partnership with bcWORKSHOP and the Texas Trees Foundation, is helping Dallas understand how its parks, trails, and green spaces can help address these questions of environmental sustainability, economic inequality, and urban resilience—and thrive in the 21st century.

Smart Growth for Dallas is an initiative to improve the environmental, social, and economic resilience of Dallas by creating close-to-home parks, trails, and green spaces for the entire city. Initiated in 2016, this effort is now in a second phase to expand the analysis completed in the first phase with new data, consider additional issues, and build on partnerships to develop parks, open space and trails that can provide the most benefits and best serve the communities in the City of Dallas.

Smart Growth for Dallas – News Update

The Smart Growth for Dallas Decision Support Tool was created in partnership between The Trust for Public Land, bcWORKSHOP and the Texas Trees Foundation and was officially launched on Tuesday, October 30th, 2018.

This public platform is a multi-disciplinary effort to improve sustainability and resilience of Dallas by creating close-to-home parks, trails, and green spaces for the entire city. At the core of this effort is an online mapping platform that identifies priority locations in Dallas where investments in green assets – such as parks, trees, or green stormwater infrastructure – can address questions of environmental sustainability, social equity, and urban resilience, and help our city thrive in the 21st century.

This mapping platform, called the “Decision Support Tool,” allows for users to make data-driven decisions that are strategic and meet community needs. By using geographic information systems (GIS) technology, the platform can highlight areas where multiple objectives can be accomplished at the same time, such as reducing urban heat and flash flood risk. The Decision-Support Tool is a GIS-powered, web-based resource that incorporates customized data layers into geospatial maps to prioritize parcels throughout the City of Dallas, based on five key planning objectives: cool, connect, absorb/protect, health, and equity. These objectives are stacked to find areas where investment can be best targeted to address the urban heat island, pedestrian connectivity, stormwater management, and public and community health. It also highlights which of these priorities might be a consideration at specific locations.

Scroll to Top