At the heart of many American cities, shuttered industrial sites riddle the urban fabric, leaving behind contaminated soils. The Kroc Corps Community Center serves as a beacon of how to transform these challenging urban areas with high-quality facilities that are carefully designed to promote the health of people, their community, and their environment. Both programming and facilities were developed with a holistic approach to not just provide services, but to enrich lives and reuse vacant land while also healing it and making it productive. It shows that even neighborhoods with limited resources deserve the best design can offer.

Using a comprehensive, sustainable landscape approach, our design dramatically transformed an abandoned, brownfield site into a dynamic community center set within an expansive, green oasis. The richly programmed landscape creates a hierarchy of activities arrayed around a central green. The landscape captures, filters, and reuses rainwater, restores native habitat, and supports urban agriculture. During construction, our zero-waste approach resulted in nearly all of the site’s existing pavements being recycled and reused on-site. Our work has demonstrated measurable ecosystem benefits that can be used as an example for the design and benchmarking of other urban brownfield redevelopments.