Renderings courtesy of Superbloom and Snohetta.

A Plan to Transform a Downtown Denver Corridor Into a Bustling Center of Public and Ecological Life 

• The study offers a new perspective on how to redesign infrastructure in the future.
• Calls for the realignment of Speer Boulevard to prioritize people over cars.
• Restores Cherry Creek biodiversity creating a healthier environment in the heart of the city.
• Reveals new development opportunity to support infill housing and other economic development. 

Cherry Creek and Speer Boulevard are two parallel but disconnected systems that define a vital corridor in downtown Denver. Speer is a vehicle-centric boulevard that carries more than 50,000 cars every day. Cherry Creek, channelized and surrounded by concrete, plays a key role in managing the area’s watershed and mitigating flood risk for the city.

Denver’s Department of Community Planning and Development, Department of Transportation and Infrastructure, and Denver Parks and Recreation sought to develop a new vision for the corridor. HDR created an interdisciplinary team of transportation, architecture and water professionals to complete the Speer Boulevard Vision and Feasibility Study on behalf of the city departments. Additional subconsultants, including Snohetta, Superbloom, Communication Infrastructure Group (CIG), Y2K Engineering and Aschermann Consulting supported the project. 

Throughout the United States, channelized streams and overbuilt roadways have separated communities, degraded environmental quality and reduced the experience of interacting with natural waterways. The year-long study, completed in 2024, offers a new perspective on how to redesign infrastructure in the future and reimagines the corridor as a center of public and ecological life.

The study focused on a 1.25-mile stretch along the southern edge of downtown Denver. It proposes consolidating and realigning Speer Boulevard, subsequently opening opportunities to diversify transportation options and improve pedestrian and bicycle connections. The plan would also restore creek biodiversity, creating a healthier environment in the heart of the city. The project team engaged the public to identify opportunities for unique, playful and educational moments along the corridor for people to engage with the city, the park spaces and the waterway.

The reimagined corridor would be a multiuse ribbon of green infrastructure in the city, elevating Denver’s status as a leader in ecological and climate resiliency. 

Restoring Cherry Creek Biodiversity and Resilience

Cherry Creek is a 48-mile-long tributary to the South Platte River, which itself spans 439 miles and performs a central role in the city’s watershed system. While the channelization of Cherry Creek helps protect the city from flooding, it was an ecologically damaging decision that altered natural flow and sediment transport, disrupted the natural riparian ecosystem and diminished the waterways overall resilience. 

To revitalize ecology, our environmental professionals proposed techniques to restore a meandering creek channel. By increasing the distance the water travels, velocity is decreased, reducing the water’s tendency to erode the stream banks. This also increases the availability of habitat for fish and wildlife, reduces downstream flooding, and is more visually appealing. The proposed vision maintains the flood-carrying capacity of the creek.

As an urban waterway, Cherry Creek provides downtown residents and visitors a connection to nature. That connection would grow with the reduction or removal of flood walls.

The project offers Denver an opportunity to showcase equity, not only from an accessibility and land-use perspective, but through economic sustainability, flood control and management.

Prioritizing People Over Cars on Speer Boulevard 

The reimagined Speer Boulevard would become a thoroughfare that prioritizes people while still accommodating vehicles. Recommendations include consolidating northbound and southbound traffic to the southernmost right of way and introducing multimodal transit.

New urban development west of Speer will reposition the boulevard from an arterial at the city’s edge, to a street within the city’s center. Growing trends are moving away from personal vehicle travel to encourage shared, on-demand transportation services like car-sharing, ride hailing, bikes and scooters. Based on ridership within comparable Denver corridors, robust use of public transit is also expected with additional transit options possible in the future. 

The roadway realignment also could spur development, potentially up to 20,000 new residences and 40,000 new jobs along the corridor through dynamic, mixed-use neighborhoods over the next 25 years.

Our study calls for unlocking inaccessible land and provides a vision to prioritize a robust, diverse and vibrant public realm that will guide future development.