Texas Trees Foundation and Southwestern Medical District are launching an urban streetscape project to increase the presence of green in the Medical District. The area is currently the largest heat island in the city.

The project aims to address the negative ambient heat impact on more than 42,000 Medical District employees and 3.4 million patients and visitors to the district's three hospitals: UT Southwestern Medical Center, Parkland, and Children’s Health.

Results of a Dallas Urban Heat Island Study done in 2017 by Texas Trees Foundation, a catalyst in creating a green legacy for North Texas, revealed that the city must take action to reduce the ambient heat impact in the SMWD area.

According to a release, Field Operations, who are the landscape architects partnering in the project, will upgrade the landscape over Inwood Drive, fronting either side of Harry Hines Boulevard – dubbed the “Green Spine.” A surrounding Green Park will add pedestrian pathways, gathering plazas & spaces, sensory gardens, vantage points, and food trucks. Gotta have the food trucks!

The project will increase the Medical District’s tree canopy from its current rather bleak 7 percent to a much greener 37 percent. It'll make an effort to shift streets in the Medical District from car-centric to people-centric by "greening" two miles of public right-of-way, transforming the concrete clover leaf that is the intersection of Harry Hines and Inwood into a 10-acre park.

A more green version of the clover-leaf intersection of Harry Hines and Inwood Road.Courtesy rendering

SWMD Board of Directors chairman David Biegler sums up the benefits of the project thusly:

"The Southwestern Medical District Board, in partnership with the Texas Trees Foundation and our stakeholders, is transforming the streetscape of Harry Hines into a green, healthy, connected, and safe linear parkway with a central park," Biegler says. "Completion of this project will have an impact on every medical professional, student, patient, and visitor in this critically important Medical District."

The project has already accumulated $28.9 million in funding, made possible via a partnership with the City of Dallas, Dallas County, the North Central Texas Council of Governments, plus foundations and donors.

The multi-year project kicks off in late 2025, starting with the Green Spine from northwest of Butler Street to southeast of Medical District Drive.