Buffalo Bayou, a slow-moving waterway that runs through the center of Houston, is widely considered the city’s most significant natural resource. Over the past decade, the Bayou’s sector west of downtown has experienced renewed vibrancy as a result of placemaking interventions that created the 160-acre Buffalo Bayou Park, which features trails, play areas, a dog park, pavilions, and gathering spaces for residents to build community. However, the neighborhoods along the waterway’s eastern sector have not seen the same level of investment. These historically disinvested, majority-Black and Latino or Hispanic neighborhoods—the Greater East End and Fifth Ward—have long been physically separated both from the Bayou and each other by large industrial sites, poor street linkages, and limited connections across the waterway.

It’s really quite a lovely park, with features that check all the standard boxes: a playground, a gazebo with a big table, a soccer field, restrooms and water fountains, a paved trail that winds through the property, and lots of plain old green space. On a recent weekday afternoon, though, a visit to Tony Marron Park on Houston’s East End revealed a few glitches. The water fountains worked fine, but the restrooms were locked up tight. It took me a while to find a spot that offered a view of Buffalo Bayou, just north of the park. And on the nicest day in Houston since long-ago spring, the only visitors besides me were a dozen or so staff and volunteers with the Texas Organizing Project, clustered in the shade of the gazebo as they prepared for an afternoon of block-walking.

An ambitious plan to expand Buffalo Bayou Park eastward to East End and Fifth Ward neighborhoods will launch officially Monday with the announcement of a $100 million catalyst gift from the Kinder Foundation. Both the City Council and Harris County Commissioners Court are expected to sign off on final documents this week.

Washington has a consensus: American infrastructure is overdue for capital improvements and maintenance. The most fervent debates on this topic have focused on how much funding should be allocated. But the most important discussion, even when it comes to hard infrastructure (e.g., rail, bridges, roads, and sidewalks), should be about how funding should be spent.

Recent “Inspiring Design” sessions—a partnership between the Rudy Bruner Award and Northeastern University—explored the roles of memory and cultural resources in advancing equitable development.

On sunny days this time of year, the charms of Tony Marron Park are many: Plentiful green space and trees, a playground, a path along the bayou with a view toward downtown. With or without a pandemic, neighborhood havens like this are important to the health and well-being of those who live nearby, maybe within walking or biking distance.

Metropolis catches up with the High Line Network, a consortium of North American reuse projects that has been sharing notes and best practices through the pandemic.

I’ve heard the same refrain from both friends and strangers, over and over, ever since the pandemic hit: “COVID has upended life as I know it. But I’ve found peace along the Detroit Riverfront.”

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.

During the past 15 years, the Buffalo Bayou Partnership has invested or leveraged more than $144 million to compile a 70-acre patchwork of public spaces along the eastern waterfront.