The Creekside Park project is the newest park addition to Bentonville, Arkansas’ interconnected park system. By coordinating with the City of Bentonville Parks Department, EDG designed a uniquely fun and functional park while creating a beautiful new space for the community. The city also hired Ecological Design Group (EDG) to perform civil engineering and design services to create an arterial connection for walkers, cyclists, and drivers that serves as the gateway to the new park.
The two projects were designed concurrently and through interdepartmental collaboration with the City of Bentonville Streets and Parks Departments; SW Bright Road goes above and beyond the City of Bentonville’s initial needs and code requirements while meeting them creatively and efficiently so that the street functions as an extension of the park itself.
Creekside Park began as a previously undisturbed greenspace area in the center of Bentonville. Through the design process, a plan that included the first regulation-sized cricket field in Northwest Arkansas, pickleball courts, a splash pad, a dog park, a playground, a pavilion, restrooms, and trail systems evolved.
A strategic green stormwater and floodway design was incorporated throughout the park and the streetscape. Much of the park land lies with the floodway of an adjacent stream. This posed a unique challenge for the design team and rendered much of the park’s land area seemingly unusable. Instead of forfeiting this park land, the design team created a trail built to withstand the anticipated flooding. Creating this trail within the floodway added over a mile of community tail and connects Creekside Park’s tails to other parks in Bentonville’s interconnected park system.
Similarly, SW Bright Road's design showcases the benefits of the interface between landscape and engineered designs. Rather than sending stormwater along hard surfaces to drain straight into a pipe, the street does so through beautifully landscaped bioswales and strategic curb cuts designed to collect and treat stormwater within the center of the road. This concept allows stormwater to have significantly more time to infiltrate the soil, thus reducing the amount of water sent downstream and saving valuable space in downstream pipes.
The park was also designed to support the road's stormwater needs through the permeable paver plaza area and a series of dry detention ponds that are strategically placed in the heart of the park.
We hope that this project's success sets a precedent for similar projects in the future. The stormwater strategy used here is not often seen in municipal projects. However, because of the unique nature of the project and the work being done on Creekside Park, we had the opportunity to demonstrate how beneficial utilizing ecologically mindful stormwater design can be, even on the smallest part of a project.
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