The Southwestern Medical District has succeeded—if your metric is world-renowned healthcare and research—despite how inhospitable the neighborhood can feel to actual people. The home of UT Southwestern Medical Center, Parkland, and Children’s Health is also Dallas’ largest heat island, where miles of concrete soak up the sun. Its wide streets encourage speeding and can make it perilous for pedestrians, a troubling reality considering physicians, nurses, and students split their time between the district’s sprawling campuses. This pocket off of Interstate 35 was formerly an industrial area, and it still feels like it, despite its hospitals treating 3.3 million patients and employing more than 42,000 workers.
For the last seven years, the Texas Trees Foundation has been imagining a new reality for the city’s critical economic and healthcare hub. The Medical District overhaul has turned the humble nonprofit into a project manager of an ambitious bit of urban design, daring to reengineer a neighborhood of more than 1,000 acres where patients can find solace in nature while doctors don’t have to dodge Chargers.
Tonight Texas Trees will announce that the project has reached 30 percent design status, a critical milestone that allows the city to begin planning engineering and for the federally mandated environmental clearance to begin. Too, the feds can now consider the project “shovel ready,” which increases the likelihood of the project getting more federal funding.
It is a practical extension of the organization’s research around curbing urban heat islands while adding to the city’s tree canopy. But the work in the Medical District has a more holistic goal, too. Modern healthcare architecture has responded to a bevy of studies that show patient outcomes improve when design considers their experience. This has led to more spacious rooms, windows, improved lighting, and other ways to make patients more comfortable that had rarely been considered in hospitals. All three of the largest entities in the district have employed tenets of “social design” in their new buildings. But the conditions outside reflect this neighborhood’s history as an industrial center, when trucks rumbled along Motor Avenue (now Medical District Drive).