RIO PHX: Rio Reimagined

At its foundation, RIO PHX is rooted in resilience and ecology. By extending the river beyond its banks and deeper into surrounding neighborhoods and employment districts, the project connects once disparate corridors into a layered system of green infrastructure.

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These landscape strategies are designed to manage sporadic but intense desert storm events, mitigate heat, and introduce ecological systems into underserved communities and industrial areas using landscape as both environmental infrastructure and a civic amenity.

Access and connectivity underpin the spatial strategy. The plan establishes a coherent extension of the existing, but fragmented, urban grid to support a more walkable and bikeable environment and, in doing so, meaningfully improve access to the river.

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Transit integration is fundamental to this framework. RIO PHX aligns existing, planned, and proposed transit infrastructure to connect the surrounding Rio Salado communities to Downtown Phoenix and the greater metropolitan area. In particular, the project builds on Multistudio’s work on the South Central Equitable TOD, leveraging access to the Pioneer/Central Ave Station to ensure high-capacity transit is seamlessly linked to housing, employment, and the river ecology.

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The plan also introduces the concept of “River Drive,” a continuous, identifiable multimodal loop that, through modes and speeds, landscape and river views, creates a distinctive access experience that frames the river as a shared civic destination.

Transit stops, trailheads, and overlooks anchor opportunity sites that, like a “pearl necklace”, are distributed along the riverbanks. In partnership with the city, the team identified four catalyst sites on underutilized land. These sites are areas of new growth and transformation, providing opportunities for cultural, ecological, recreational, productive, and mixed-use TOD. Together, reinforcing the river as an engine for equitable growth.

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At the center of the project was an extensive community engagement effort. Multistudio and the City led a robust outreach process that invited residents and stakeholders to identify and address community-specific challenges and opportunities. Community input directly informed the framework, ensuring it reflected local needs while supporting long-term metropolitan and regional goals.

RIO PHX considers the river bottom, the banks, and the communities beyond the banks as part of a single, interconnected system. By coupling ecological resilience, multimodal access, transit integration, and community-supportive activities, our framework sets the stage for a positive ripple effect that extends the ecological and economic value of the river deeper into surrounding communities and across Phoenix’s evolving urban fabric.