FROM STAPLETON TO CENTRAL PARK: Airport Afterlives, Redevelopment, and Urban Memory

2017 Research Scholarship, Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

2026 Revisited

Project Location: Denver, CO, USA

A fieldwork-based study of how Denver’s former Stapleton Airport, now Central Park, was transformed into a New Urbanist district of housing, open space, streets, and neighborhood identity.

This project examines the transformation of Denver’s former Stapleton Airport into Central Park, one of the largest post-airport redevelopment projects in the United States. Based on fieldwork and photography from 2017 and revisited in 2026, the study looks at how aviation infrastructure disappears, persists, and is absorbed into a new urban fabric. Rather than treating the site as a park or neighborhood alone, the project reads Central Park as an afterlife of mobility infrastructure: a place where runways, road systems, open space, and development logic continue to shape the city after the airport itself is gone.

The airport did not disappear. It was translated into neighborhood form.

Full case study forthcoming.

Field Notes, September 2017

Walking observations from the former Stapleton Airport redevelopment site, documenting how aviation remnants, new streets, parks, housing, and town-center branding were being assembled into the emerging Central Park district.

Original Research Material, 2017

Selected slides from the original 2017 research presentation, which framed Stapleton through airport obsolescence, decommissioning, and the conversion of aviation land into New Urbanist redevelopment.