This innovative streetscape prototype concept was developed by Pland Collaborative and has resulted in the landscaping of more than 70 miles of City of Albuquerque medians in the last 9 years.

When this undertaking was conceived in 2004, the city was struggling to build out its many miles of bare street medians. The very wide and often featureless nature of the roadways, coupled with lack of tree canopy in this high desert environment made a fast and cost-effective approach particularly necessary. The median prototypes project was aimed at quickly and efficiently solving the problem of landscaping these exposed and unfinished arterial streets.  

Pland adopted a modular solution to provide a variety of prototype choices applicable to the majority of Albuquerque’s streets. The widely varying lengths and widths of existing medians can easily be accommodated by the standard unit 'pods' of 60' or 200', which in turn can be made highly variable in their planting palettes and tailored to many different sites. The underlying standardization of the designs allows large numbers of medians to be quickly priced and built by the City’s on-call landscape contractors, while giving the neighborhood residents the opportunity to decide on design choices.