DESIGN AS COMMON GOOD: Reilly Gardens

2019-2020

In 2019, Alyson Beaton and Kate Catterall wrote a proposal to transform an under-utilized piece of parkland in an area with few public resources. They received a $130,000 St. David’s Foundation Park’s with a Purpose award to purse that goal. The funds permitted them to initiate a participatory public design process and develop a neighborhood garden in North-Central Austin to make the area more environmentally and socially resilient.

North Central Austin has a dearth of publicly accessible green space and Reilly Park is ideally situated to serve two park-deficient neighborhoods, Highland and Skyview, fulfilling a new City of Austin mandate for accessible greenspace within a 10-minute walk of most urban dwellings. Reilly Park, a 7.4-acre site, remains under the shared jurisdiction of Austin Independent School District (AISD) and Austin Parks and Recreation Department (PARD).

It was delimited by a 4-foot-high wire fence, erected by Austin Independent School District (AISD) in 2016 citing school security priorities. The fence gave the appearance of private property and deterred those unaffiliated with the school, including neighboring residents, from accessing or using the park. It was originally intended that Reilly Elementary School had access to a portion of the park, and that the PARD portion of the park is designated for public use, but over the years the park was subsumed into the campus. We worked in partnership with AISD, and a teacher at Reilly Elementary, in order to plan and implement the Reilly Gardens design which aimed to extended an AISD program for social and emotional learning to the entire community.

The Reilly Gardens project would serve both school and neighborhood to foster a broader sense of community in an economically and racially diverse area undergoing rapid gentrification. The park is bounded by Waller Creek, a sensitive watershed area that is closely monitored by The Nature Conservancy Texas. According to their data Reilly has fewer visitors than any other park in Austin despite being situated with proximity to a light rail station, bicycle and bus routes; unprecedented access to mass-transit for Austin, Texas.

The Reilly Gardens project revealed, then sought to remedy, a situation in which a community with a high renter ratio had inadvertently ceded the right of access to their local park, having been largely absent from historical conversations about its future. The design process not only reclaimed their right to use the park, but created a new community space, that unified then amplified the voice of a previously diffuse community around community planning.

Reilly Gardens opened in May 2021. The gardens incorporated an outdoor classroom for the school, created areas for native plantings, and provided workshops on flood mitigation, gardening and land stewardship. The project demonstrated the potential for inhabitants to reclaim their right to a shared place in the city through a focused participatory public design process.

THE TEAM:

Kate Catterall
University of Texas at Austin

Alyson Beaton
Highland Neighborhood Association

Jorge Zapata
University of Texas at Austin

Graphics by: Emma Overholt,
BFA Design Student UT Austin, under the guidance of Alyson Beaton.

Prototypes by: Brandon Buerk,
BFA Design student, guided by Kate Catterall and Alyson Beaton.