In the past humans had a symbiotic relationship with the prairie; the people shaped the land, and the land shaped the people and their culture. As western agriculture and architecture began to replace indigenous practices, the relationship with soil shifted to an extractive model, exhausting and building over the soil had in a few hundred years.
This is the past of the Blackland Prairie.
Soil Origins
Present Day Soil Makers
At the end of the prairie to farm to suburb pipeline, the land was vacated after a disastrous flood and resulting buy out from the City of Austin in 2013. Largely unmaintained by the city, the land had entered a new relationship with the native vegetation and creative trail users in the surrounding neighborhoods. Without city intervention the parks soil makers were able to craft a chaotic, but beneficial relationship with the soil. Disturbance loving ruderal species had filled the niches left by past land use, and park visitors began shaping the trails to meet their needs.
Park Entrance/Forest Edge
Post-Suburban Savannah
Post-Agricultural Mesquite Scrub
Hackberry Bottomlands
The Dancing Trails
Four Trail-Paddock systems, alternate seasonally between recreational and agricultural uses to choreograph a delicate dance between visitors, livestock, and local vegetation.
Park staff set the dance in motion by rotating the grazing paddocks and pruning the trail canopy to support the programmatic needs of each phase. Trails weave though seasonal resources, allowing the silvocultural paddocks to take full advantage of forage the site provides. In the process of moving through the paddocks, the livestock clear the rested land of weedy overgrowth in preparation for the following pedestrian and bike phases.
Architectural flourishes are limited to managed play clearings at trail intersections to let parents sit back and let their kids explore. Bent trail marker trees at trail intersections provide wayfinding and filters pedestrian/bike foot traffic throughout the site. Compostables collected at the farmer’s market are processed by park staff to support soil restoration during the following resting phase. Leftover compost is then sold along with other agricultural goods at following markets to fund park operations.
Over time this cyclical relationship will leave a positive legacy above and below ground for generations to come.
Playscape Clearing
Playscape Greenway
