Current Projects

Roanoke's Parks and Recreation Department develops specific park master plans for each neighborhood, community, regional, and linear (greenway) park for the city. Our goal is to work through neighborhoods, constituents, user groups, and our Parks and Recreation Advisory Board to define a balanced approach for addressing existing and future needs of a given space.

Lakewood Park

The Lakewood Park project is a combined effort between the Virginia Tech School of Landscape Architecture, the Raleigh Court Civic League, and the Parks and Greenway Planning Division. In the fall of 2008, the team began developing a Master Site Plan for Lakewood Park based on participatory, public planning, and design processes.

The following elements of the master plan have been completed:

Review of historic documentation
Review of existing and proposed greenways and open spaces influencing the future
use of the park
Neighborhood program and vision statement
Thorough contextual and environmental analysis of the park property
Alternative schematic designs
Documented citizen commentary on the schematic alternatives
Two conceptual design themes have been established
Hydrologic modeling and analysis of the waterbodies has been completed, focused upon the pond, the overall watershed, and the stream.

The next steps in the process will be to incorporate the bio-engineering findings into the previous conceptual design models and thereafter create a final concept site plan for the park in 2010.

The Connection of the Roanoke River and Tinker Creek Greenways

After numerous months of design and engineering, the City is preparing to bid construction on another monumental greenway project. The Roanoke River-Tinker project will provide access from the current trail terminus and parking facility near the Western Virginia Water Authority's wastewater plant, past Golden Park, up and around the upper forests of the wastewater plant and thereafter crossing the Roanoke River to connect to the Tinker Creek Greenway. Our hopes are to award the construction contract in the Fall of 2010 and be ready for an opening twelve to eighteen months thereafter.

Active & Healthy Living

For several years, Parks and Recreation has been investigating the national trends and best management practices with regard to changing the design of community environments such that positive health benefits can occur for citizens. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is the international leader of the "Active Living by Design" movement; a research based organization partnering with the Center for Disease Control and National Parks Service to develop strategies to reduce levels of both adult and childhood obesity levels through design change. The fundamental change element on the national scene is to enhance our neighborhoods by providing for more close-to-home trails and greenways that are safe, attractively landscaped, and have direct connections to the daily and routine destinations that people need and use.

While many neighborhoods in Roanoke match up to the national trends in obesity levels, we thought it would be appropriate to scientifically address whether or not we could justify the positive health correlations with greenway development. In 2008 and 2009, Parks and Recreation partnered with Appalachian State University to undergo an analysis to determine if physical activity levels changed/improved for citizens if a greenway were established. The basis of the study was to survey the demographics of residents that lived close to a proposed greenway area and determine what their physical activity levels were before and after a greenway trail was built. There were two different survey analysis preformed, one occurred before the greenway development while the other took place a number of months after the trail was built; the same citizens were surveyed for both instances. The results were impressive to say the least, of which, the most outstanding piece of information that we received was that 72.4% of those surveyed now meet the Center for Disease Control's recommendation for weekly physical activity.

The findings of Appalachian State's work was that properly designed & developed greenway trails that are close-to-home, do have a positive health impact on nearby citizens.