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City Park Plan Overview

The previous City Park Master Plan (City Park 2018) was approved in March 2005 and has guided the improvements of the Park over the last decade and a half. The prior plan largely focused on improvements to the south side of the Park.

Now, City Park Conservancy is embarking on a plan that will foster an innovative and thoughtful long-term proposal for City Park grounded in serving the greater good, addressing community needs, preserving historical and cultural context, enhancing environmental resiliency, and fostering a welcoming sense of place.

In February 2023, CPC published a Request for Proposal for master planning, which garnered submissions from firms around the world. After conducting in-person interviews with the top firms, CPC and City Park Improvement Association (CPIA) boards voted unanimously in the hiring of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc. (MVVA). MVVA is one of the most-highly regarded landscape-architecture firms in the world, having rejuvenated, designed, and built hundreds of public spaces in the United States and abroad since its founding in 1982.

MVVA is leading CPC’s planning process, which will steward the Park throughout the next century. MVVA will rely on its own design experts, with the help of local consultants and community members to develop a community centered City Park Plan that everyone can be proud of.

In August 2024, through a public RFP process, Concordia was selected to join the City Park Planning team as the lead Community Engagement consultant to help strengthen a continued community engagement process. Concordia is a New Orleans based firm with over 40 years of experience in architecture, planning, and community engagement.

This plan is made possible through a lead gift from the Greg Keller Foundation.

City Park Plan Structure:

The framework for public engagement and planning over the next year will be iterative and built on community feedback, research, and planning work completed since the current planning process began in July 2023. The collaborative work to date has revealed two layers of planning that structure the City Park Master Plan design process: Foundational Planning and Placemaking Planning.

The following months of engagement and planning intends to build on these two layers of planning, grounded in a process-based metaphor that all New Orleans residents know and love — Making Gumbo:

• Making Groceries: Continue to bring unheard voices (including youth and marginalized communities) up to speed, inviting them to review and add to the input already received — the “list of ingredients and seasoning” that will inform the City Park Plan
• Stirring the Roux: Together, using previous community input, review and confirm the base created from shared intentions that will hold the City Park planning process together. This is Foundational Planning.
• Prepping the Ingredients: With the base made, imagine ways to preserve and enhance spaces that people are passionate about, identifying potential opportunities that will diversify visitor experiences. This is Placemaking Planning.
• Mixing the Gumbo: Add the ingredients in, while bringing Foundational and Placemaking Planning concepts together to visualize how new opportunities can be realized within the City Park Plan.
• Taste-Testing the Gumbo: Review the proposed City Park Plan to confirm it represents everyone’s interests and ensures the best outcome for City Park’s future. Further feedback will be incorporated in the following phases of design.

Visit the Community Input page to learn more about the engagement process so far and how you can participate!