The site for the 1968 World’s Fair in San Antonio, Texas, called HemisFair, was planned for a 100-acre historically Hispanic neighborhood that was substantially erased by the Fair’s development. Once the Fair completed its 6-month run, the site was left as an essentially empty quarter, bordered by the downtown and the city’s renowned Riverwalk, left for the ensuing decades to be carved opportunistically into a disparate array of low-intensity uses. The master planning effort, sponsored by the City of San Antonio and the HemisFair Park Area Redevelopment Corporation, a non-profit agency created by the City, came to be about history, memory, reparation, and deference to the visions still alive in the many families whose ancestors had been displaced.

Planning for the site’s future fifty years later was very much an open workshop process involving many of the descendants of those who had lived there. The resulting plan included both market-rate and affordable residential units recalling the mix that had existed before the Fair. Citizens sought to restore the historic road system to reconnect to surrounding streets while dividing the large aggregated Fair site into smaller scale neighborhood blocks. The plan recommended that the Convention Center be removed to allow for the development of a large city-owned Central Park; a site for new Convention facilities for Riverwalk visitors is provided a short distance away. Since elected officials participated in the public workshops from the beginning, there was less than fifteen minutes of discussion before a unanimous Council vote approved the plan.