Alta is part of a team working to plan and design St. Louis, MO's Chouteau Greenway. The award-winning solution envisions connecting Forest Park to the Gateway Arch and Mississippi River, east and west, as well as stitching St. Louis’s sharply-divided socioeconomic north and south regions. In total, the framework analyzes over twenty miles of potential alignment corridors in a complex urban environment.
Alta played a significant leadership role, within the Stoss team, in winning the Great Rivers Greenway’s (GRG) Chouteau Greenway International Design competition, and remained a key member of the team as a framework was developed for implementation. Alta led the discovery, ideation, and recommendations phases while focusing on greenway alignment, equitable design and practice, and identity and component development.
The project’s complexity and breadth showcase Alta’s more than three decades of greenway experience. Alta led the team through more than fifty analyses to conduct logical corridor evaluations. The conclusions were illustrated in an easy to comprehend format and offer the client legitimate bases for making difficult decisions.
Equity was a major factor in the planning and design process. Alta’s research into greenway projects across the nation produced “best practices” for how equity, inclusion, environmental justice, and equitable development programs and activities could catalyze progress toward breaking down barriers.
Implementation design standards and guidance is the heart of the framework. Alta researched a dozen urban greenway precedents as well as recognized design standards to generate project specific “best practices” for greenways in various environments including commercial setbacks, median alignments, mode separation, bridges, site furnishings and amenities, hydraulic and ecological incorporation, and intersection crossings. Best practices where applied to each alignment corridor which illustrates the project’s opportunities and challenges. Subsequent phases will hone the evaluation and greenway designs in specific alignment segments.
