The Westwood Via Verde is a three-mile neighborhood greenway project that will connect existing and future community amenities and green spaces, such as neighborhood bikeways, green streets, parks, and enhanced alleys. Project partners include The Trust for Public Land, the City and County of Denver, Westwood Unidos, BuCu West, D3 Arts, Groundwork Denver, Denver Streets Partnership, and many others dedicated to achieving a safer, healthier, and more connected Westwood.
In 2016, City Council adopted a new neighborhood plan for the Westwood community after an extensive public process that included stakeholder meetings, community listening sessions, visioning workshops, and youth engagement. The final plan included ideas for six transformative projects that would help the neighborhood achieve the vision of becoming a connected, celebrated, resilient and healthy part of Denver. One of these ideas was to create a network of green spaces through the neighborhood that would better connect existing open spaces to each other and to neighborhood destinations.
Building on this greenway idea, The Trust for Public Land partnered with the City and the Westwood community to work on a master plan and implementation plan for the greenway. The Westwood Via Verde is the vision of the community and represents a transformational neighborhood scale project that will result in a vibrant and connected system of multi-benefit green infrastructure to improve water quality, increase tree canopy, and support community empowerment and job creation. WalkDenver, and subsequently the Denver Streets Partnership, was invited to be a part of the Via Verde planning process. We participated in stakeholder meetings and walking workshops, listened to neighbors, highlighted our findings from our walk audits of Westwood schools, and shared our perspective and expertise as advocates for safe, people-centric transportation.
Denver Streets Partnership continues to work with The Trust for Public Land and the Westwood community on projects such as the Via Verde Wayfinding Plan and the Tennessee Avenue Greenway Park (also in partnership with the Athmar Park neighborhood). To learn more about this project, check out the resources below!
About Westwood Via Verde – updated Dec 2020 (PDF)
View Map (PDF) See Wayfinding Elements (PDF) Watch Trust for Public Land Video