Dryland farming comes to the suburbs, thanks to an innovative community park.

By Timothy A. Schuler

When Diane Lipovsky, ASLA, and Stacy Passmore, ASLA, the founding principals of Superbloom, first visited the Windler homestead in Aurora, Colorado, to develop a proposal for a new community park, they knew they didn’t want to treat the buildings like dollhouses. “We tried to think through how it wasn’t just a museum where people go to learn about farming; it was also your community park,” Lipovsky says. “We want this to be a place where we can celebrate the history of dryland agriculture but [also] have a more future-oriented approach to what that means.”

The 15-acre park will serve as the central green space of the Windler development, an 850-acre planned community that broke ground in 2022. Designed by Superbloom and Shape Architecture Studio, the green space is envisioned as a demonstration of alternative food futures for arid lands such as eastern Colorado, with biodiverse permaculture bands of fruiting trees and shrubs that radiate outward into the surrounding neighborhood. The park’s hybrid landscape contains areas for hydroponics, grazing, and no-till agriculture, as well as prairie restoration, historic interpretation, and recreation. Rather than treat food production as an aesthetic process to be observed and appreciated from afar, the designers integrated the productive components with the everyday park experience.

To ensure the success of this integration, Lipovsky and Passmore knew they needed two things: time and expertise. The designers negotiated a six-month research phase into the beginning of the project and enlisted a bevy of collaborators, including farmers, orchardists, soil scientists, and business consultants. Among them was Mark DeRespinis, the founder of Esoterra Culinary Garden, a “dogmatically no-till” farm in Boulder, Colorado. He recalls Lipovsky and Passmore visiting the farm in late fall when most of the crops were covered. “They were like, ‘I don’t think this is gonna fly. It doesn’t look good,’” he remembers. “And I’m like, ‘Well, what looks good is that salad on your plate that you would otherwise [have] to buy from California.’”

The many experts helped disabuse Lipovsky and Passmore of assumptions they had made, particularly about what it takes to raise animals. “Going into this, we [thought], ‘There’s gonna be cows everywhere, and goats, and chickens. There’s going to be animals grazing all over the neighborhood,’” Passmore says. “But as we started talking to people, we realized 15 acres is barely enough space for one cow.”

Superbloom’s final design incorporates that feedback—they opted for goats and chickens over cows, with plans to operate a small-scale, goat-milk dairy on-site—but much of the park’s success will be dependent on how it is operated and programmed, DeRespinis says. The ideas behind the project, however, should be emulated, perhaps even codified, he says. “I think you should not be able to do a residential development of a thousand units if you do not have a farm programmed into that.”