During Hurricane Harvey, Buffalo Bayou Park was inundated with floodwaters. Mountains of sand and debris littered the park’s western end. Yet within a week, joggers returned to the trails and the restaurant was up and running. The relatively fast reopening signals how urban planning mitigated the damage of one of the costliest floods in U.S. history. And planners say it now holds broader lessons as the growing challenge to plan for the effects of climate change becomes a larger part of commercial development.

On November 7, park managers and community and civic leaders, led by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, broke ground on 14 acres of new national parkland atop highway tunnels with dramatic views of the Golden Gate, the Bay, the Presidio and the San Francisco skyline.

The River LA Board of Directors voted this week to name Ed Reyes the next Executive Director of River LA. As a former Los Angeles Councilmember and long-standing advocate for the revitalization of the LA River, Reyes will bring nearly 20 years of momentum knitting together community members, government, and other non-profits in support of the Los Angeles River.

The development of new parks and green space can often lead to displacement and gentrification. 11th Street Bridge Park is making a conscious effort to keep lifelong residents of Southeast Washington in place through community land trusts. The community land trusts was implemented as part of the development plan to maintain affordable homes in the surrounding area of the park.

Covering three days, the symposium was an intense time of learning and interacting with a wide range of leaders on the local and national level who are developing exciting community focused public spaces.

The park is intended to complete the transformation of the descent from the Main Post and Crissy Field — evoking topography that was altered in the 1930s when the Doyle Drive viaduct was erected to link downtown San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge.

Ambitious plans for construction of the Underline, a 10-mile-long “linear park” for people on foot and on bikes that would run beneath the elevated Metrorail tracks, got a significant lift with the announcement Wednesday of a $22.3 million federal grant for the project.

From October 16 – 18,  the High Line Network convened the largest gathering of North American infrastructure reuse project leaders in our first ever symposium Beyond Economic Impact: Charting the Field of Infrastructure Reuse.

An installation on the High Line shares writing by prisoners in a space that emulates cells. The Writing on the Wall is the second project of the High Line Network Joint Art Initiative and will travel to other sites across the United States.

Earlier this month, Friends of the High Line, the nonprofit that operates and manages the High Line in collaboration with New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, brought together leaders of 60 infrastructure reuse projects from the U.S. and Canada for a symposium titled “Economic Impact and Beyond.” Its goal was to examine if new public spaces, being created out of underutilized infrastructure, were incorporating equity considerations into their plans and explore strategies to ensure that benefits from such projects reach all communities.