Market District is poised for transition. For decades, this part of downtown Des Moines has been the city's industrial hub; composed of scrap-metal yards, garages, rail freight corridors and public works storage facilities. As a result, this area is blighted, a 39-acre hole in the city's urban fabric of disconnected streets, impervious asphalt lots, vacant buildings, little residential life, and no outdoor public spaces.

Recently, the property owners and the city have agreed to move the industrial activities elsewhere, creating an opportunity for the Market District to transform and revitalize this last remaining area in downtown Des Moines. The newly envisioned Market District plan is organized around a new urban grid, where new housing units, retail spaces, new jobs, green streets, and an 8-acre riverside park will create a new urban neighborhood for Des Moines.

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Closing the Gap
Because of city leadership and a visionary developer, the Market District is on the verge of becoming an example of a public/private partnership that does good for its community and the environment. The existing infrastructure is fragmented and one-dimensional providing limited transportation choice and creating a gap in existing and future multi-modal transportation systems such as bike trails and rapid transit. The Market District Master Plan lays out an urban framework that reconnects the city grid, providing a mixture of land uses, vertical mixed-use buildings, green infrastructure streets, as a new legacy for downtown.

Greening the District
Fundamental to being able to transform the identify of this industrial area into a new urban neighborhood, the master plan incorporates new bioswales and sub-surface detention within the public street rights-of-way. This infrastructure investment will treat 100% of the stormwater from the streets and detain approximately a 10-year storm rain event that will considerably lessen storage requirements on each of the development blocks which allows developers a chance to spend money on other more visible improvements like building and public space enhancements. The green infrastructure design ensures that the district can avoid future flooding of this area which historically, has seen floods that have inundated a sizable portion of the Market District. Additionally, the master plan calls for adding a significant urban forest to the area, increasing the tree canopy by 85% and will provide nearly 401,000 pounds carbon sequestration which removes 34 cars from the road every year.

The upcoming Stormwater and Erosion Control Issue of Landscape Architect and Specifier News saw many firms submit their projects for feature consideration. This project was not chosen for a Feature in the issue, but we at LandscapeArchitect.com thought the project deserved to be showcased online . . .


List of Contractors, Designers, consultants:
Sherwood Design Engineers
ISG Engineers
Genus Landscape Architects
Design Destill
Ryan Companies

List of Suppliers:
Wausau Tile